by James Sallis
When the dominoes fell, they fell askew.
It could just as easily, mind you, have gone well. That book might have been first stop on a line, might have become foundation for the very thing Himes was never to achieve: a career. Again and again circumstances in Himes’s life seemed to line up for a major strike, only to founder. And when the spills came, Chester was quick to see, not coincidence, not the common vagaries of publishing or of the marketplace, but all manner of machinations; conspiracies to censor and silence him as black, as writer and as individual.
The first blow came with the resignation of his editor, Bucklin Moon, who left to concentrate on his own novels, orphaning Himes at Doubleday.
Next Himes heard that the publisher planned to cut thirty pages from the manuscript. This comprised a scene between Bob Jones and white temptress Madge in a hotel room, mild indeed by today’s standards and little less so by contemporary ones, but firmly transgressive of racial barriers. Rushing back to New York from a California visit, Himes objected so strenuously that the proposed cuts were restored. But he was growing ever more restive.
Then he learned that the George Washington Carver Memorial Award was going not to him but to a white woman, Fanny Cook, for a novel titled Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. Chester held, moreover, that the ads for this book, referring to another Doubleday book on the black problem as a “series of epithets punctuated by spit,” referred in fact to If He Hollers, and that Doubleday had gone about methodically undercutting his novel’s success. He told John A. Williams:
What actually happened to If He Hollers was that this woman editor—Doubleday was printing their own books in Garden City—had telephoned to their printing department in Garden City and ordered them to stop the printing. So they just arbitrarily stopped the printing of If He Hollers for a couple of weeks or so during the time when it would have been a solid best-seller.14
From a strong start, sales rapidly fell off. Friends wrote complaining to Himes that they’d been unable to purchase or to order copies of If He Hollers at bookstores.
Himes’s disappointment deepened with the book’s critical reception, generally favorable though lacking the hoped-for encomiums. Reviewers largely echoed what Himes believed to be Doubleday’s attitude, approaching the novel in aliterary fashion and dwelling on its social implications as a manifesto of racial anger—treating it as a kind of cultural artifact—with little notice of the author’s literary ambitions and accomplishments, overlooking completely the many pleasures of the book’s rich wit and humor.
Other factors tempered Himes’s disappointment. Meeting at Estelle’s funeral, Chester and Joe had reestablished their relationship after years apart and were getting on beautifully; that holiday season, Joe and wife (also named Estelle) came for a visit. With time, Joe’s vision had improved considerably. This may have mitigated somewhat Chester’s old feelings of guilt. That year and the next, further stories were published in Esquire and in The Crisis; five appeared in a new publication, Negro Story. Most importantly, whatever his novel’s ultimate reception, its publication did much, after what must have seemed a long, broken-field run, finally to validate Chester as an artist. It also brought two thousand dollars in royalties, which along with another two thousand as advance for a second novel, did much to repair, at least temporarily, Chester’s financial situation. More than anything else, the friendships he was forging with Carl Van Vechten, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright at this time, their interest in and encouragement of his work, sustained Himes.
Van Vechten he met late in 1945 upon accompanying Richard Wright to a photo session at Van Vechten’s studio, a session in which Wright behaved so pompously, Chester said, that he collapsed in laughter. Aside from his work as critic and as novelist (notably Nigger Heaven), Van Vechten was a great champion of emergent Negro art; his photos of jazzmen, writers, artists, and other Harlem denizens form an invaluable document of the period. Soon Himes sat for his own portrait in that studio, and soon the two began seeing one another, and corresponding, regularly. Chester’s first letter is dated March 22, 1946. Another written three months later from California refers to photos Van Vechten has sent.
Thanks for your letter and the photographs which were very fine indeed. However, there is a smoothness in the facial lines which I do not quite like. I would like for all the blemishes, marks, scars and lines of the face to show, even at the risk of appearing like a thug.15
Chester called Van Vechten Carlo, borrowed money from him, wrote to him about current projects, sent work-in-progress for advice and appraisal. It was Van Vechten who interceded when Chester, furious over what he believed Doubleday’s bad faith, made the decision to leave. After protracted negotiations, Van Vechten’s own publisher, Blanche Knopf, bought out Doubleday’s interest, Himes’s agent Lurton Blassingame appending to the contract an advance of two thousand dollars for his next novel. Over the years at Van Vechten’s request Chester would donate manuscripts and assorted papers to Yale’s James Weldon Johnson Collection.
Ralph Ellison at the time lived in a basement apartment that would serve as model for one in Invisible Man, much of the substance of that novel, its ideas and themes, gestating in his conversation and in what he was then writing, much of that in turn the basis of conversation between him and Himes. Ellison and wife Fanny periodically had Chester and Jean for dinner; the two men saw one another, casually, more often. Like many of Himes’s friendships theirs became a curiously on-again-off-again one that eventually faded away entirely; again like many, a curious mixture of admiration, self- and common interest, envy, disregard. They shared the apartness of the outsider who, having apartness thrust upon him, makes that apartness his choice.
Quite a fine book might be written around Himes’s relationship with Richard Wright alone. The two met in July 1945 at a party given for W. E. B. Du Bois by Langston Hughes. From the first, as never between Wright and the more reserved Ellison, who had known him already for seven years, the connection between Wright and Himes was intense. Of that first meeting, witnessing self as much as other, Chester wrote:
Du Bois was reigning in the place of honor in the middle of the settee, surrounded by admirers, when Dick arrived with an African writer. By then Dick had published both Native Son and Black Boy. But he was practically ignored by that gathering of intellectuals and middle class matrons, and he was antagonistic and resentful.16
Later Wright wrote the first major review of If He Hollers; he also provided an introduction for the French edition of Lonely Crusade. And when in 1953, the same year Wright published The Outsider, Himes moved to Paris, they became again close friends. As John A. Williams in The Most Native of Sons recalls:
Richard and Chester Himes would come together and talk about their work, the problems back in America, and their future … Himes was far, far more bitter than Richard about the racial situation, not only in America, but around the world, but Himes, when most of Richard’s friends began to slip away for one reason or another, remained his chief ally and confidant, his friend and brother.17
The three writers were a fascinating study in like and contrast. Formally educated, Ellison came of a “talented-tenth” middle-class mentality and lived ensconced among books and ideas in the self-exile of his basement apartment. Wright in turn was a self-educated Southerner, raised by the bootstraps of his talent from hardscrabble Mississippi life to a life of the mind. As with most autodidacts, his learning was ragged, shot through with potholes, lacunae: on certain subjects he might have the most obscure facts at hand while otherwise remaining totally ignorant of whole areas of knowledge. Lack of sophistication flashed forth, too, sometimes in his comportment. He could be awkward in social situations, ungainly in intellectual ones. He could be pedantic, even (as Chester pointed out) pompous.
Himes hovered somewhere between. His middle-class upbringing and mother’s influence drew him to Ellison’s patrician ways, his own self-education, prison, and street life to Wright’s ruder, egalitarian manner. Whatever their diff
erences, both Himes and Ellison looked to Wright as spiritual father, someone who had given them moral permission to be writers, who in fact had cleared a space in American culture to make that possible. Other links quickly suggest themselves. Wright’s extensive work with and for the Communist Party, Ellison’s investigation in Invisible Man of the American left and of black participation, Himes’s own survey of labor movements in If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade—they’re all remarkably of a piece.
The arc of Wright’s career and Himes’s in many ways, save the former’s success, paralleled one another. If He Hollers might be read as a response or reaction, a counterbalance, to Native Son. Of The Outsider Wright wrote: “I well know that the attitude of mind evinced in The Outsider is one that will incite frustrated Communists to brand me a Fascist and will prod many hysterical Americans to pin on me the label of a crypto-Communist.”18 This was much the same reception Himes’s own Lonely Crusade received, impelling him to flee America.
It was Himes who encouraged Wright in what many, including wife Ellen, thought recidivist work, his novel The Long Dream. Richard had become too important a writer now to go back to all that, Ellen felt. Others believed that, too long away from America, Wright had fallen out of touch with urgent changes in relationships between blacks and whites and, more importantly, in the lives of blacks themselves; that his concerns in the novel had become irrelevant to today’s world. Himes championed his friend’s return to literary origins, though, and in this book, in Tyree’s entreaty to the son who has just discovered his father to be crime czar of the black community, Himesian logic rings out. This easily could be one of Grave Digger’s speeches to Lieutenant Anderson.
“And don’t call me corrupt when I live the only way I can live. Sure, I did wrong. But my kind of wrong is right; when you have to do wrong to live, wrong is right.”19
Himes was on vacation in the south of France in November 1960 when an innkeeper asked if he knew the black American writer Richard Wright. Himes said he did, and was told of Wright’s death. He jumped into his car and drove all night, back to Paris, where in turn Tyree’s son Fishbelly, Wright, and Himes himself had all fled.
Fishbelly surfaced again as Wright’s counterpart in his last work, the 1958 story “Island of Hallucinations” with its satirical use of figures from Richard’s actual life on the Left Bank, among them William Gardner Smith, James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, and Himes. Himes’s own roman à clef, A Case of Rape (1963), same cast of characters, same setting, may have been, at least in part, a response. Wright biographer Margaret Walker deems the novella “a retort or angry answer”20 to Richard’s story, adding that Wright was outraged upon hearing of Chester’s book.
Rarely willing to accept criticism as other than personal assault, in February 1946 Himes reacted to frustration at his novel’s reception in a contribution to the Saturday Review of Literature, “The Author Talks Back.” This was one of two great explosions, the other being his address at the University of Chicago two years later.
Himes wrote this piece, he said, to flay “the carping white critics,” but it is, like the Chicago speech, a jeremiad to America whole. He responds briefly to those objecting to his novel’s forthrightness and language: they remind him of the prostitute who after passing the night at every sort of oily trade complains of the fly in her rice. He then takes exception to the generally aliterary reception of his book, to all those who would insist upon his novel not as art, presenting a situation in all its reality and resonance, but instead as some sort of social tract that should sum up what had to be done. It is not a part of his manifesto to solve the world’s problems, only to re-create as fully as he can his particular vision of that world.
And to those who complained that I had offered no solution for the problem my book presented, I wrote that I belonged to a nation which, coming from a severe depression, had had its fleet sunk at Pearl Harbor and had been caught in a war totally unprepared, without army or weaponry, but which had mustered its will and its energy and its ability and in five short years had amassed the greatest Navy and the greatest Army in the history of the world and had learned to split the atom as a weapon more powerful than could then be conceived by the average intelligence, and to ask me, an incidental black writer with a limited education and no status whatsoever, to solve its internal racial problem, was preposterous.21
He ends his polemic “Let the white people solve it their own goddamn selves”—pure Himes.
Stations rush by, as though we’ve somehow gotten aboard the wrong train. Every station we come to is the wrong one. So the wrong stops go on, year after year: choices, work, homes, countries, women. And still we cannot bring ourselves to turn, to invest what we have of self into another life, to plow it under, break the crust of our solitude, the pull of the past, the gravity of our pride: to risk that. Only in art, only in the stories we tell ourselves and others, can we reinvent ourselves. Never in life.
6
“I’m Still Here”
It’s not by coincidence that the American detective novel developed in the late thirties, at the very point this country changed virtually overnight from a rural to urban, agricultural to industrial, society. After the Industrial Revolution, Robert Bly writes, all things happen at once. And now of a sudden there were these cities, these towered, sprawling climes into which we were all tossed, where the old rules, and the old values, no longer applied.
Our frontier myth of the loner, the good man who stands apart (deriving as much from European romances as from the frontier itself), easily became that of the private eye. He, later she, would traverse the city from high to low, wealthy suburb to shabby bar, giving up everything in his search for truth and justice. He would be our eyes and ears, the very voice, the soul, of the city itself.
From this initial impulse, from the attempt to make sense of the urban environment, to forge new maps and codes of conduct, stems our ongoing identification of detective and city: Matt Scudder with New York, Spenser with Boston, Marlowe inextricably with L.A. The impulse abides, and crime fiction remains today the urban fiction.
Not so surprisingly in light of his short stories and what eventually became Cast the First Stone, the original design of Himes’s first published novel had it a mystery in which whites were being killed apparently at random all about L.A. Transformed to airier stuff, something of that original intent lives on in Bob Jones’s pervasive fear, in his near-murderous rages, and in his railings against “peckerwood” white workers holding him back, the self-satisfied black bourgeoisie endlessly rationalizing its own caste system, and dronelike ghetto dwellers.
Then I turned over and dreamed on the other side.
I was working in a war plant where a white fellow named Frankie Childs had been killed and the police were there trying to find out who did it.
The police lieutenant said, “We got to find a big tall man with strong arms, big hands, and a crippled leg.”
So they started calling in the colored fellows.1
Soon enough Bob Jones wakes from his dreams, where events seem at least to have meaning, to a reality where they have none. Leaderman at a shipyard, owner of a shiny fast car he adores, engaged to a beautiful, professional, light-skinned woman, Bob Jones has a life most others might envy. In elemental ways he remains a simple, ordinary man, wanting nothing more than to be resolutely that: to go about his life unnoticed, to be left alone.
Anyone who wanted to could be nigger-rich, nigger-important, have their Jim Crow religion, and go to nigger heaven.
I’d settle for a leaderman job at Atlas Shipyard—if I could be a man, defined by Webster as a male human being. That’s all I’d ever wanted—just to be accepted as a man—without ambition, without distinction, either of race, creed, or color; just a simple Joe walking down an American street, going my simple way, without any other identifying characteristic but weight, height and gender.2
Such simplicity will not be allowed him, however. Fear has inhabited him like a parasite and slowly
devours him. And before his story ends, his nightmares of impotence and injury will become real.
The alarm went off again; I knew that it had been the alarm that had awakened me. I groped for it blindly, shut it off; I kept my eyes shut tight. But I began feeling scared in spite of hiding from the day. It came along with consciousness. It came into my head first, somewhere back of my closed eyes, moved slowly underneath my skull to the base of my brain, cold and hollow. It seeped down my spine, into my arms, spread through my groin with an almost sexual torture, settled in my stomach like butterfly wings. For a moment I felt torn all loose inside, shrivelled, paralysed, as if after a while I’d have to get up and die.3
For critic Edward Margolies If He Hollers is a kind of halfway house, fusing the protest and hard-boiled genres, focusing on characters in states of constant threat. Graham Hodges in an introduction to the Thunder’s Mouth reissue of If He Hollers agrees, emphasizing not only Himes’s stylistic indebtedness, the muscular prose and pervasive violence, but also that air of existential despair so much at the heart of hard-boiled writing. Further, Hodges remarks, the novel affords a capsule history of black workers during an important transitional period. Escalating demand for labor in a war economy having opened new doors to employment for Afro-Americans, they migrated by the hundreds to Los Angeles and San Diego, to the munitions factories and shipyards there. It’s a little-known chapter in American history, one to which Himes’s novel uniquely bears witness: “Through Jones’ eyes, we are given a street tour of L.A.’s bars, restaurants, fast-food joints, and party scenes in nearly photographic detail. The novel is a Baedeker of high and low, white and black Angeleno life during the 1940’s.”4
