Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Perhaps Himes would have taken to Robert Frost’s “The Fear of God”:

  Beware of coming too much to the surface,

  And using for apparel what was meant

  To be the curtain of the inmost soul.17

  As publication drew near, Knopf’s publicity engines appeared to be pumping away. Interviews, appearances, and signings were arranged for Himes. Lawyers expressed concern at the possibility of libel action, believing that the novel’s aircraft company president (actually patterned on Louis Bromfield) too closely resembled a real industrialist, but eventually cleared the novel. Richard Wright, now in Paris, was approached for a blurb; though he later wrote an introduction for the French edition, he seems to have declined at this time. Agent Lurton Blassingame used the honeymoon period to pry loose a new advance from Blanche Knopf, seemingly for a book, Immortal Mammy, to be based on Chester’s Hollywood experiences.

  In August, Chester and Jean left for a ten-day visit to Vermont. On September 7 Chester’s father arrived from Cleveland to share the great day. Chester’s balloon was up, winds favorable. Days tipping their bright yellow hats.

  Then the crash.

  His several personal reversals and rejections on publication day, Himes wrote, set the pattern for his novel’s reception. They were staying at the time in Jean’s supervisor’s flat on Welfare Island, and Himes got up early that morning to catch a ferry across to Manhattan, where he was to appear at Macy’s at 8:30. The bookstore manager met him at the employee entrance, took him for coffee, and told him that the store had made the decision to stop sponsoring authors’ appearances, believing it rang of favoritism and caused ill will. He was sorry the decision had come now, the manager told him, because he liked the book a great deal, believed that Himes had important things to say.

  I had heard the exact phrases uttered by various editors so many times before that I understood. They had canceled my appearance. I shook hands warmly to show him there were no hard feelings—although if he believed that, he was an idiot—and hastened over to Bloomingdale’s, on Fifty-ninth Street.18

  There the first clerk he encountered didn’t know who he was and had never heard of his book. Again his appearance had been canceled with no notice.

  He had planned to return to the island to pick up Jean and his father before his next booking, on Mary Margaret McBride’s radio show, but now hadn’t sufficient time. When he called Jean to ask her to meet him at the studio, she said she’d tried to reach him by phone at both Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. The studio had called to cancel his interview. Crestfallen, Chester withdrew home (i.e., to their borrowed flat), then to Vermont to await reviews.

  “After the publication of Lonely Crusade,” James Lundquist writes, “Himes found himself in a position that few other American novelists have occupied. He was being assaulted by communists, fascists, white racists, black racists, and practically every reviewer within those extremes.”19

  Attacks from the Communist press were voluble, as expected. Mainstream, the Daily Worker and People’s Voice all ran negative reviews. Perhaps the most outspoken was Lloyd Brown’s in New Masses: “I cannot recall ever having read a worse book on the Negro theme.”20 One ran a cartoon depicting Himes marching, white flag in hand, across the page. Not only had Himes abjured the party line of internal secession holding that blacks within the United States were a separate nation, he had satirized with characterizations drawn directly from life the self-serving attentions of the party toward Negroes, and had called into question the whole notion of a progressive society.

  Other publications closely associated with the labor movement took similar exception. The Jewish magazine Commentary in particular objected to anti-Semitic elements. In The New Leader a young James Baldwin, clumsily comparing Himes’s novel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, held that while the novel was poorly written, it gave an accurate portrayal of how black Americans viewed their lives. Here Baldwin hit upon what, behind all the smoke, remains most important about Lonely Crusade. Like its predecessor, it aired black sentiments largely unspoken in public, any public, at the time.

  Stoyan Christowe in Atlantic Monthly echoed Baldwin’s observation, relating contemporary Negro literature to the previous generation’s novels of immigrants fighting to escape prejudice and establish their place in society. At the same time he acknowledged Himes’s dissection of deeper, more insidious rifts:

  Chester Himes’ new novel is a study of the American Negro, a brave and courageous probing into the Negro psyche. His diagnosis reveals a racial malady for which there is no immediate remedy.21

  Himes will quote brilliantly from Christowe in his impending speech at the University of Chicago, taking the reviewer’s words and making them forever his own.

  The New York Times Book Review’s Nash K. Burger spoke well of Himes’s abilities as a serious writer in both his novels. Lonely Crusade is a novel of fear, he wrote, of the fear ever present in the mind of a Negro living in a white man’s America, yet because of the novel’s complexity and Himes’s skill,

  Lee Gordon’s lonely crusade to put down his feeling of fear and isolation becomes only an exaggeration of every man’s struggle to find himself and his place in the world.

  While also noting its anti-Semitism, Burger warned that the novel, like its protagonist’s life, might be too tough for some readers, its incidents “presented as bluntly as they happened.”22

  Arthur Burke’s review for The Crisis lauded Himes’s gift for characterization with favorable comparisons to Dickens and his talent for psychological analysis with mention of George Eliot, and perceived his theme as essentially a pathology of race.

  The New Yorker wrote that “Mr. Himes considers this problem intelligently and convincingly; regrettably, though, he seems to think that an ugly narrative is necessarily a powerful one.”23

  The New Republic’s John Farrelly found the story “much too extended and repetitious” and its protagonist “not so much … an individual as a catalogue of the Negro’s emotional distortions.”24

  Eric L. McKitrick in Saturday Review of Literature, while generally praising the novel, identified its chief weakness as a lack of focus resulting from the novel’s attempt, in its analysis of the racial question from every conceivable angle, to be too many things at once. He also felt the protagonist’s instability and lack of mooring made him unsympathetic.25

  Fellow novelist Arna Bontemps reviewed the novel for the New York Herald Tribune, stating that Himes had produced “an even more provocative book this time.” He celebrated Himes’s engagement with depicting “the struggles of individuals who find themselves occupying newly won ground and trying to make the personal adjustments the task requires,” but took exception, in true socially progressive, proletariat fashion, to Himes’s emphasis on pathology.

  Certainly this is not exactly the mood in which to work for any kind of progress, and those who look to Lonely Crusade for a chart are likely to turn away sour.26

  Earlier we’ve seen Langston Hughes’s similar charge in a letter to Blanche Knopf declining to provide a blurb:

  Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly, which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them.27

  In short, many of the criticisms were familiar ones—Himes’s reliance on melodrama and violence, for instance, or his failure to provide any proper racial model—and some of them new, such as censure of the book’s confused thematic structure and extended philosophical dialogues, or complaints that the author’s outlook was, on the one hand, too limited, and on the other, too encompassing.

  Just as he overstated the unfavorableness of reviews (some in fact were quite good), Himes ever afterward simplified these criticisms, rendering the whole experience down to a conspiracy marshaled by Communists and complicity supported, in a kind of collaborationist Vichy of the mind, by Negro peers and the literary establishment. Thirty years later he’d still be arguing with reviewers.
>
  His “improbable” characters were drawn from life, he said: Luther based on a criminal he had known in prison, the monstrous industrialist Foster on Louis Bromfield, party members on those he’d known in California.

  I think that many of the critics on the big weekly reviews disliked most the characterization of the industrialist Foster, who in my book called President Roosevelt “a cripple bastard, with a cripple bastard’s sense of spite.” I had heard those words spoken in a Cleveland, Ohio, country club. Maybe the critics had heard them too—maybe that was what they most disliked, my audacity in repeating them … I think that what the great body of Americans most disliked was the fact I came too close to the truth. Reactionaries hate the truth and the world’s rulers fear it; but it embarrasses the liberals, perhaps because they can’t do anything about it.28

  Or as Marlon Brando shortly (1954) will respond in The Wild One to the question What are you rebelling against: “What have you got?”

  In addition to its airing of social identity (“issues and attitudes that hitherto had been left to smolder unrecognized by the public at large,” as Fabre and Margolies have it29) and its introduction of the theme of black anti-Semitism so much with us today, Lonely Crusade’s importance lies in its limning of Negro resentment over their exploitation by Communist “champions,” and in its insistence on black America as pathological.

  This theme of psychopathology, implicit in If He Hollers, central to The Primitive, ontological in the Harlem cycle, will be picked up most explicitly in Himes’s address at Chicago that summer. An important aspect emerges in Lonely Crusade with Lee Gordon’s argument that, kept down so long (one recalls Jack London’s vision of fascism as a boot heel stamping on a human face—forever), the Negro is unable to envision anything else, unable to take advantage of what opportunities do exist for him—and so must be given, at the outset, special consideration. This principle, which in recent years we’ve come to call affirmative action (and which as this book is written has begun disappearing), is another form of Himes’s complaint that slaves were “given their freedom” without also being given the means to support themselves. Ideally an affront to democracy, in reality it’s bent all too facilely to justification for continuance of mechanisms of oppression—and it flew in the face of the Negro elite’s principles of self-elevation.

  Himes returned to this point in his 1970 interview with John Williams:

  But I know why the black people disliked the book—because they’re doing the same thing now that I said at that time was necessary. I had the black protagonist, Lee Gordon, a CIO organizer, say that the black man in America needed more than just a superficial state of equality; he needed special consideration because he was so far behind. That you can’t just throw him out there and say, “Give Negroes rights,” because it wouldn’t work that way. And so this is what most of the black writers had against it; in saying that, of course, by pleading for special privileges for the black people I was calling them inferior.30

  Beneath the bluster, though, predictably, typically, Himes was wounded. His pain is ever the egotist’s pain: all or nothing. And so a verbal formula we come to know well clicks into place in his discussion in The Quality of Hurt of his second novel’s reception.

  Of all the hurts which I had suffered before—my brother’s accident, my own accident, being kicked out of college, my parents’ divorce, my term in prison, and my racial hell on the West Coast—and which I have suffered since, the rejection of Lonely Crusade hurt me most.31

  From this rejection arises another familiar lamentation as well, hinging on a single word. He had poured his heart and mind into this book, Himes said—

  I had attempted to be completely fair. I had written what I thought was a story of the fear that inhabits the minds of all blacks who live in America, and the various impacts on this fear precipitated by communism, industrialism, unionism, the war, white women, and marriage within the race.32

  —but people did not want to know the truth. Truth becomes a rosary he fingers while speaking. Often in professionally difficult times (and Chester had few other) he took refuge in asserting that, whatever his failings as a writer, he was engaged in something more substantial than mere storytelling, these games of literature; he perceived himself to be in the purest sense witnessing, to be setting down truth, gospel, word.

  Certainly Himes exaggerated both reviewers’ hostility to his second novel and his own response to their criticisms. Finally, though, he wasn’t far off the mark. The book sold poorly, perhaps four thousand copies. “For the next five years I couldn’t write,” he’d later announce.33Again hyperbole: he’d continue to work on his prison novel, and would write The Third Generation. But he was drifting ever further from any mainstream of literary activity. Never again would he be able to envision for himself, as he had done heretofore, any authentic position in American letters: the breakthrough book, recognition, induction by acclaim. Henceforth he’d remain ever the outsider, half proud of his alienation, half galled at it.

  8

  Going Too Far and Too Far Gone

  At midpoint in Lonely Crusade, union organizer Lee Gordon sits with the newspaper on the bus to work, reading of growing racial tensions within the city.

  A Negro had cut a white worker’s throat in a dice game at another of the aircraft companies and was being held without bail; and a white woman in a shipyard had accused a Negro worker of raping her.1

  Not only does this directly echo Bob Jones’s predicament in If He Hollers, it’s also a deliberate recapitulation of Chapter 9 of this book in which Lee sits on a bus reading the transcript of a rape case, one of a number of parallels laid into the book, brick on brick. The transcript in turn prefigures A Case of Rape. Even the strain of racial murders initially meant to be central to If He Hollers and there abandoned reemerges here in Lester McKinley’s scheming to kill exploitative capitalist Foster, and in Luther McGregor’s murder of a corrupt deputy sheriff. Throughout his career Chester would go back again and again to the same wells, carrying different buckets.

  These echoes of If He Hollers point up the diptych nature of the novels. Though Lonely Crusade is twice the length of If He Hollers, the novels in many respects are alike in purpose and scope, both exploring the social milieu of wartime Los Angeles. Twins, we’re told, often complete sentences for one another. If He Hollers gives voice to one twin’s bald, unreasoning fear and fury; Crusade is the other twin’s struggle to argue their case calmly, logically.

  Lonely Crusade was published on October 8, 1947, twenty-three months after publication of If He Hollers. Set in the spring of 1943 in wartime Los Angeles and spanning fifty days, it is Himes’s most ambitious and outward-directed novel, judged by Fabre and Margolies a “rich, complex, yet ultimately unsuccessful book.”2 Gilbert Muller thinks it “one of the most radical novels about the structures of American domination and about California life as a symptom of the corrupt power of both capitalism and communism.”3 Stephen Milliken has this estimation:

  The prose style of Lonely Crusade is, in many passages, much more brilliant, containing some of Himes’s most successful efforts at “fine writing,” and in its ultimate effects this long novel is a much more deeply disturbing book, but in immediate impact it is distinctly less powerful than If He Hollers Let Him Go. It is, of all of Himes’s books, the one that comes closest to failure, due to the sheer abundance of things packed into it … But it is also Himes’s supreme effort as novelist, thinker, propagandist, and crusader[.]4

  Milliken’s final catalog of nouns speaks strongly to the novel’s fundamental problems. For not only is it a programmed work, malleable fiction patted into shape about rigid forms of discourse, it’s also, in all-things-to-all-men manner, heroically inclusive. Swept into its purview are unionism and labor relations, the Communist Party, a panoply of wartime sentiments, black rage and impotence, the sprawl of the new urban landscape, black-white sexuality, the social role of media, the nature and abuse of political power, black anti-Semi
tism, and much else. Milliken underscores the burden of information carried by the novel in noting its resemblance to historical fiction, passages in which Himes, though writing what is ostensibly a contemporary novel, takes advantage of set pieces to unload baskets of background data. Abandoning the limited scope and classically tragic structure of If He Hollers with its choruslike dreams, Himes forsakes as well that novel’s simple power and intensity. The new novel is a sprawl—a sprawl as problem-ridden as those new, burgeoning cities, and just as filled with energy and fascination.

  The primary problem lies with the novel’s schematic, contrived structure, one providing (Milliken again) “a platform for extensive editorializing, none of it entirely gratuitous, though much is seemingly contradictory.”5 Throughout we hear machinery grinding and occasionally groaning backstage as Himes bends the story toward scenes and confrontations having more to do with exigencies of his various arguments than with considerations of similitude or internal consistency. Feet hitting marks blocked by the play’s director, characters are drained of life. They become flat; simple counters of meaning, signifiers, allegorical, costumes too long at arm and leg, too stiff, inappropriate to their station or role, colors poorly matched.

  Nor does Lee Gordon himself, as protagonist, escape such manipulation. Passive throughout—so passive, in fact, that he comes perilously close to losing the reader’s sympathy—Lee undergoes in the book’s final pages what is effectively a metempsychosis and emerges as savior, communal soul, carrier of the universal banner. For all Himes’s push-and-pull, the reader is hard put to accept this miraculous transformation. Eminently convincing as failed lover and as victim, Milliken remarks, Lee Gordon proves an unsatisfactory crusader; we never latch on to any core of faith that might sustain him, and little foundation is laid for character traits counter to his prevailing negativism.6 Bernard W. Bell in The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition agrees: