by James Sallis
Lee’s ultimate alienation, of course, is from himself. Like Ellison’s invisible man, he feels overtaken, co-opted, not so much dispossessed as possessed. “I had the feeling that I had … used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me,”36 Ellison’s protagonist says at one point, sentiments Lee would well understand. With no central sense of self, the world won’t hold together around one; the molecule, the solar-system model, collapses. Even to give oneself, in marriage, in love, in service to mankind, one must first have a self to give. Lee’s failure to embrace the identity of others finally reflects his impotence to become himself, to run the risk of humanity. This time, Lee realizes, “he could not excuse his predicament on grounds of race. This time he alone was to blame—Lee Gordon, a human being, one of the cheap, weak people of the world.”37
As previously suggested, Lee’s sense of being special, even in its coexistence with feelings of inferiority, echoes Himes’s own. An argument might be made that Lee’s quitclaim on self in favor of union with humanity prepares the ground for the demotics of the Harlem novels; in this light The Third Generation could be read as a search for communality with his race, The Primitive as Himes’s dirge for personal exemption, his good-bye to all that.
All too often, young artists strive most urgently to set themselves apart, to make of themselves special cases—such is the nature of introspection, and one result of all this time spent alone—when the real task, the actual charge given us, is to demonstrate how much alike we all are.
* * *
Speaking of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ralph Ellison remarked that “Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face; our task is that of making ourselves individuals.”38
What one carries away from Lonely Crusade and If He Hollers as from Richard Wright’s work, the final residue, is a firm recognition of the manner in which every moment of their black protagonists’ lives is a solitary, violent struggle to attain ideals of American manhood denied them by the very society that defines and continually impels them toward those ideals.
It makes them, shall we say, just a little crazy—a madness Himes will describe with clinical precision in his University of Chicago speech.
Writing of Richard Wright in the summer 1945 issue of The Antioch Review, Ellison discussed the Negro’s options in confronting his American destiny. He may accept social invisibility and the role created for him by white society, with religion as bulwark; in so doing he becomes an accomplice to the white man in oppressing others. Or he can reject the role urged upon him and become a criminal, a revolutionary in continuous battle against the white world. Ellison’s own Invisible Man surveys through its protagonist’s varied roles as teacher, Party member, and cellar-dwelling acolyte, the strategies available between those poles of submission and rebellion. Himes in Lonely Crusade does much the same with his choice of characters and with the ongoing dialogues.
Himes has called the American Negro the most complex human being on this earth. Lester McKinley, upon first meeting Lee, thinks: “Insanity? Of course it was insanity, McKinley told himself, looking at the tired, dull hurt in Lee Gordon’s eyes. This thin, too intense, tightly hurting boy across from him was also insane, but did not know it yet, as were all Negroes, he told himself.”39 Obsessed with hatred for whites and driven to kill them, McKinley has gone to great length—psychoanalysis, marrying a white woman and fathering her child, making himself intellectually superior—to cure himself of that for which, in American society, there is no cure; to recover from centuries of oppression that “had completely destroyed the moral fiber of an entire people, abuses to the innate structure and character and spirit so brutal that their effect was inheritable like syphilis.”40
The novel’s real monster, though, is Luther McGregor, who seems cobbled together out of racial stereotypes, every boogeyman story and irrational fear, the man “who knows how to be a Negro and make it pay.”41 His comments in a final dialogue with Lee, after Lee has seen him cut a man’s throat for no good reason, sound—like much of Himes’s later work—frighteningly contemporary.
“Look, man, goddamn, for all your education, they’s a lot of things that you don’t seem to know. In this goddamn world they’s all kind of wars always going on and people is getting kilt in all of them. They’s the races fighting ’gainst each other. And they’s the classes cutting each other’s throats. And they’s every mother’s son fighting for hisself, just to keep on living. And they’s the nigger at the bottom of it all, being fit by everybody and kilt by everybody. And they’s me down there at the bottom of the bottom. I gotta fight everybody—the white folks and the black folks, the capitalists and the Communists, too. And now I even gotta fight you. ’Cause everybody’s looking out for theyself. Trying to get what they want. And cutting everybody else’s throat. So I cuts me some throat, too.”42
It’s this specific indictment of the psychotic Negro, and by extension Himes’s vision of black America as pathological, that Lonely Crusade brings into focus. He’ll define this concept at length in his address the following summer at the University of Chicago. And it will hereafter prove a constant theme.
Much as with the failure of Lonely Crusade, he abandoned expectations of earning a place in American letters, Himes also gave up pretense of combining the two worlds, black and white, in any sort of motley. Henceforth the two worlds would be sharply divided. With that change, another change occurred: his brief as a naturalist writer relaxed to embrace elements progressively less mimetic, more mannered, more fantastic. His city becomes a stark, lightning-struck place of dark folds where anything might happen, where violence is as common and meaningless as trash cans or hunger, where children are fed from troughs, deadly nuns roam the streets, and a black Christ hangs with a sign on his neck saying They Lynched Me. In this fabulist, surrealist manner Himes has found his way, unknowingly, toward the Harlem cycle.
Remarkable also for its depiction of sex and love as weapons in a race war pitched between blacks as much as between blacks and whites (thus looking ahead to Pinktoes), Lonely Crusade is an altogether grim portrait of the city as a primal stage upon which Communists, unions and employers alike fight to bind the souls of men they nonetheless go on insisting are free.
Lonely Crusade has not done much better in ensuing years than at time of publication. It is Himes’s least popular work, mined by critics for its ideas and attitudes while its fictional values remain largely ignored. The novel is as well written, however, as any of its time, and though mostly of historical interest now, Himes’s discussions of Communism, unionism, and other social issues are balanced, informed, and well thought out, giving his novel a firm intellectual substructure. As often with Himes, one must draw a distinction between European and American reception: Yves Malartic’s translation of La Croisade de Lee Gordon helped firmly establish Himes’s reputation as a serious novelist in France.
Milliken perceives in the clash between too-good, iconic characters like Smitty, Joe, or Rosie and naturalist characters like Luther, Jackie, or Lee himself, a fundamental structural schism, fault lines spreading out from contradictory inclinations. He regards this as a conflict between naturalism and traditional storytelling values, while others read it as indicative of Himes’s pull between realistic despair and headstrong optimism, or between mimetic and more figurative writing. All perceive the disjuncture, whatever name they give it, and all locate within it strength and weakness alike. Elsewhere Milliken remarks that
The label “naturalistic” is a particularly attractive one, suggesting as it does the extraordinary fidelity of Himes’s fiction to his actual experience, but this label too needs to be challenged. Himes is preeminently a writer who is fully aware of the gap that separates art from life, of the permanent incapacity of art to capture fully the complexity of life itself. His style can veer sharply from
soberly conventional naturalism to the most radical extremes of surrealism. He is forever seeking the form that will fit, and he never denies to his characters the full range of contradictions that he finds in himself.43
So the disparity does indeed put a strain on the system, but it’s a strain producing at least as much energy and momentum as it consumes; it is also, as suggested, a misalignment whose contradictions Himes subsequently will tap into and exploit.
One writes expecting change; if not in mankind (if one’s ego is not quite that oversize) then at least in one’s immediate environment, next month’s rent taken care of, a trip paid for; change, perhaps, in oneself.
When Gertrude Stein said that in America every new generation is a new people, she was addressing the covetous lie of perfectibility so close to the heart of our nation. Tolstoy is said to have scratched out on the sheets of his deathbed: Keep … striving. And so we do, our task forever the same task undertaken here by Lee Gordon: generation after generation, against all odds, adversity and distraction, constantly and continuously to relearn what it is that makes us human.
9
“I Don’t Have That Much Imagination”
Where is Chester Himes in all this?
He was a man who always defined himself as a writer, a man who sifted the materials of his life, working and squeezing away at them, mining them, assaying them, in his writing. Alter ego Jesse Robinson in The Primitive finds solace even in the detritus of his trade.
Inside the cabinet, behind the closed doors, were his stacks of unpublished manuscripts, carbon copies, old papers and letters which he always kept nearby, carting them from place to place, hanging on to them year after year, to remind himself that—no matter what he did for a living—he was a writer by profession.1
Those stacks of paper are Jesse’s history, are in quite an actual sense his life. They’re what remains of the best part of him, of Jesse’s talent and aspirations; for Jesse has become a ghost, a roomer in his own life. Himes, however, is that version of Jesse who went on to write The Primitive and in doing so saved himself. His connection to their trade is a more vital one.
No matter what I did, or where I was, or how I lived, I had considered myself a writer ever since I’d published my first story in Esquire when I was still in prison in 1934. Foremost a writer. Above all else a writer. It was my salvation, and is. The world can deny me all other employment, and stone me as an ex-convict, as a nigger, as a disagreeable and unpleasant person. But as long as I write, whether it is published or not, I’m a writer, and no one can take that away.2
Without that work, then, largely unable to write, what does he become? What is he? Antonin Artaud said that very little is needed to destroy a man; one has only to convince him that his work is useless. So it often must have seemed to Himes in this bleak period: that his work was useless, and he himself careening toward destruction.
For the next five years I couldn’t write. I reworked my prison novel, Black Sheep, cutting it down to half its original size, and I tried to write a stage play from If He Hollers Let Him Go, but these were just reflex motions. Jean got a job as recreational director for the Federal Housing Projects for New York City, which necessitated her visiting all the various boroughs, and I worked at anything I could get—dishwasher, janitor’s helper, snow shoveler …3
So complete was his sense of rejection, Himes said—assailed as he was by Communists, scorned by reactionaries, spurned by white and black alike, abandoned by the literary community—that he felt like a man without a country. “It was then that I decided to leave the United States forever if I got the chance.”4
The chance would present itself at the end of those five despairing years. Meanwhile, in February 1948 Himes applied to the artists’ colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs and was offered residence for May and June of that year. There were also in attendance two other writers, two artists, and a composer. Himes had a room in the West House just across the hall from Patricia Highsmith, whose Strangers on a Train, when filmed by Hitchcock in 1951, would bring her fame, and whose unique creation of the amoral character Ripley later set her apart from other mystery writers of the time and, one suspects, many readers. It was that first novel upon which Highsmith, age twenty, was working while at the colony; when she died in 1998, she left her $3 million estate to Yaddo.
Himes had little idea what he might work on while at Yaddo. He had proposed a novel titled Immortal Mammy, which at one time he described as being about an exceptional Negro woman living in the white world, though this well may have been the Hollywood novel he’d been talking up for some time. Eventually he settled to work on “Stool Pigeon,” the story of a prisoner who informs on others planning an escape. As a result they are thwarted, but only after a diversionary fire destroys much of the prison, and in anger over the damage done his standing as much as that done the prison, the warden divulges the informer’s name. Himes wavered between making his characters black or white. He must have been going through the same self-interrogation in his revisions of Black Sheep, which codified his own prison experience through the guise of a white man; may have been paralyzed to some degree by criticisms of his depiction of the racial divide in Lonely Crusade; and, as previously suggested, from this time began to reject what he’d come to believe an optimistic, unrealistic representation of racial commingling in favor of black and white America as discrete, parallel worlds.
“Stool Pigeon” had become a novel-in-progress (he claims to have written fifty pages of it at Yaddo) when Himes applied for a Guggenheim that fall and was passed over. The Rosenwald Foundation, to which he had also applied, shut down that year.
Himes was quite taken by Yaddo’s gorgeously landscaped grounds, rose gardens, and buildings, but his experience there was otherwise wholly negative. The way your life is ruined here in this one small corner of the world, poet Constantine Cavafy wrote, is the way it’s ruined everywhere.5 Chester carried his own climate with him, nestled among shirts, neckties, toiletries, and undernourished manuscripts in his luggage. Alone in his room he sat poring over such assured mood elevators as Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Louise Varèse’s translation had appeared in 1945 from New Directions) and Faulkner’s Light in August, which pivots on the racial ambiguity of its central character, Joe Christmas. Isolation, meant to give him time to work undistracted, served only to send Himes crashing further into himself, intensifying his fear and self-doubt, underscoring his sense of failure and throwing into sharp relief his alienation. Like his doppelgänger in the story “Da-Da-Dee,” Himes held himself apart from others, did little or no work, and spent much of his time drinking, sinking ever more deeply into despair and self-despite, becoming “something a little inhuman.”6 All is gravity, pulling him relentlessly down, back to the earth:
His face was twisted to one side and down-pulled with weariness. His skin was greasy; his eyes deep-sunk and haggard. There were harsh, deep lines pulling down the edges of his mouth.7
Meanwhile, the song at which he hums on his drunken way back from town bars to the colony Skidoo—for the song, like so much in his life, eludes him—never becomes the liberation through art that he hopes for, but remains only a loud wail of pain, filling his head with melancholy: “He felt as if nothing would ever matter again one way or another.”8
Perhaps he was already sick when he went there, Himes wrote, and Yaddo just brought it out; he didn’t know. “But I do know I was sick when I left.”9 The sickness, or perhaps some lucidity wrought from it (“with an ice-cold clarity derived from two Benzedrine tablets and a half bottle of champagne”10), found voice that summer in the speech Himes delivered at the University of Chicago. He came at the invitation of the Chicago South Side Community Center, where his old friend Horace Cayton was director, and must have felt himself uniquely qualified to speak on “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the United States.” His speech met with dead silence from the largely white audience. Himes was thirty-nine, again a failure.
When I finished reading th
at paper nobody moved, nobody applauded, nobody ever said anything else to me. I was shocked. I stayed in Chicago a few days drinking, and then I was half-drunk all the rest of the time I was in Yaddo. That was the time I started getting blackouts, I was drinking so much. I would get up in the morning and go into town, which you weren’t supposed to do, and by eleven o’clock, I was dead drunk.11
That this speech manages to be at once masterful self-analysis, uncompromising manifesto, and cry of despair is full measure of its strength.
The writer, Himes said there in Chicago, seeks an interpretation of the meaning of life from the sum of his experiences. That is what urges him, and allows him, to go on. When, as with the American Negro, his experiences have been brutal and relentlessly oppressive, he cannot avoid bitterness, fear and hatred. His inclination will be to draw dwarfish, misshapen characters in a life without apparent form or purpose. But he must not accept that.
Rejecting it, immediately he will be set upon by a host of personal, social and professional conflicts.
First he must struggle with himself, because telling the truth about his degradation will open old wounds and bring new agonies.
And when he manages against all odds to win through and tell the truth, his reward will be to be reviled by whites and blacks alike. There will be great temptation to submit to patterns set by centuries of oppression: to retrench, equivocate, compromise. He will be driven to rationalize that he must shed his racial consciousness and become merely a man among other men. But his instinct for truth will finally determine that he cannot free himself of racial consciousness simply because he cannot free himself of race.
This conflict resolved, he will next discover the many factors working in concert to stay his pen. The American public does not want to know: truthful novels by honest Negro writers aren’t good business. And if by some chance this writer does find a publisher, he’ll find also new swarms of preconception and prejudice. White liberals, who have mingled exclusively with financially successful, materially secure, educated blacks (these darker versions of white), are likely to regard anything outside the pale of their limited personal experience and comforting illusions as aberrant, deranged, even psychotic.
