Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Surely it requires a certain acrobatics of both expectation and thought to envision finding a place in foreign society when unable to possess or forge such a place in one’s own. Initially Wright trusted that his work and presence would create, ex nihilo, such a place. Otherwise his approach was adaptive; he went native, became, in effect, a Frenchman, moving easily through every level of intellectual and daily life. Himes’s approach by contrast, as in so much else, was headlong, combative. He always came to the ring expecting cheers, cheers he rightfully should have gotten, and when he didn’t get them, began snarling and snapping contumaciously at the audience.

  Then, suddenly, Willa was there. They had been writing one another daily throughout the three weeks spent apart, but somehow she’d not been real, not been truly remembered by Chester, until he spoke with her two days before her arrival, at which time he felt himself resoundingly in love with her. He sought and found somewhat better rooms, one for each of them, in a hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens. Wright, who had decided that Willa had to be little more than a tramp and made no effort to conceal his contempt, came along with Chester to meet her train. When eventually the couple got away from Wright, they went directly to bed.

  What mattered to her was she had lost herself in the darkness of my race. She had hid from all her hurts and humiliations. In a strange and curious way, by becoming my mistress, the mistress of a man who’d never been entirely free, she had freed herself. That is a curious thing about race relations. We can free the white man’s women, and they can find freedom in us, but we cannot free ourselves.37

  Unlike Wright, the Malartics took instantly to Willa, offering the use of their getaway villa in Arcachon. Himes gratefully accepted, receiving from Yves and Yvonne three pages of instructions, a petite encyclopédie Arcachon covering everything from keys and electric meters to where and when to put out trash, the best butcher shop, who might be loaned books from the villa’s library. Lugging as always his oversize trunk (for which he routinely had to pay extra: “more for carrying that trunk around with me on European trains than I paid for house rent during my first two years abroad”38), Himes struck out one early morning by third-class carriage with Willa beside him. They arrived just after seven that evening. Chester was much relieved to be away from the contestations and boulevarderie of Paris. Here, he wrote, it was “peaceful and warm and friendly—the way one hopes the world would be.”39

  Arcachon is in southwest France, on the coast just west of Bordeaux in the Bay of Biscay. Originally a modest stucco building with bedroom, combination living-dining room and multifunction shedlike structure out back, the villa itself had been built up and onto until it now resembled “a typical summer camp in Sullivan County, New Jersey, except that the living room contained a roll top desk and several worn leather armchairs and the walls were lined with books in several languages.”40 Willa and Himes quickly and easily settled in. They swam, ate oysters and seafood, and drank quantities of the local wine, lounged in cafés and restaurants, painted the Malartic’s boat, watched fishermen plod up and down the dirt streets, and tended the flea-ridden, pregnant cat Mrs. Moon, who came with the house, as well as her mate, a battle-scarred, scabby tom with missing teeth known as M. Berdoulas.

  “When it was learned that I was a writer in addition to being a black American,” Chester wrote, “I was treated with the awed deference accorded a zombie.”41 Children came to stare when he and Willa sat together on the beach, blushing and giggling when Willa spoke to them in her perfect French. Townspeople never spoke directly to Chester, addressing their remarks (Does Monsieur like seafood? Does Monsieur have money?) instead to Willa. They also vied for the couple’s business. In one instance, to prove that her catch was the fresher, one of two competing fish merchants let loose an eel which bounded across the road, through the fence, and away.

  Himes is often at his best when describing such Innisfrees: the desert ranchhouse he and Jean shared in California, the Newton, New Jersey, lakefront resort and Stamford, Connecticut, farm where he worked as caretaker. In such idylls words to the effect of “best [or happiest] time of my life” are likely to appear, and he writes movingly of the people, animals, the pace of life, seasons, nature itself. Fully nineteen pages of The Quality of Hurt are given over to Arcachon where, essentially, nothing happened.

  All in all, our two months there had been exquisitely happy and satisfying, and for a short time I had become completely free of my soul brothers’ envy and jealousy and intrigues, and my fellow countrymen’s obsession with the “Negro problem.”42

  While there, Chester received galleys for The Third Generation from Bill Targ and, at Targ’s suggestion, trying to buck up dramatic impact, rewrote the final chapter. He and Willa began working together on her autobiographical novel The Silver Altar. (Himes also referred to the book as The Silver Chalice and The Golden Chalice.43) In early June Himes forwarded a portion of this novel to Targ, identifying Willa only as a writer staying temporarily in Arcachon; a larger portion followed, from London, that September. Willa and Himes, believing it to be very commercial, had high expectations for the book. They planned to publish under Willa’s name, taking full advantage of that and of her social status, with every expectation of tapping the women’s market and perhaps even selling movie rights. When Targ disliked the book and promptly returned it, they were shaken. Nevertheless, there in the secluded seaside villa, exposed continually to Willa’s kind, adaptable manner, Chester conceived new respect and admiration for her.

  On the first of July, they left Arcachon, initially intending to go to Daniel Guérin’s writers’ colony at La Ciotat, where the Wrights had sponsored Chester’s stay for the months of July and August, considering for a time Majorca, where Vandi’s ex-husband William Hay-good then lived, at length deciding instead to resettle in London and turn their full attention to Willa’s novel.

  12

  Story-Shaped Life

  It is very difficult to say what Himes was looking for or what he hoped to find with his move to Europe. Certainly to some extent he believed that he might be fleeing racism and, like Baldwin, his frightening reactions to the same. Probably he believed that he could live more cheaply there. He may also have thought that, with Wright and his circle in place, he stood a chance of becoming part of a community of artists, something from which he seemed forever excluded in the States. There was, too, the possibility, if not of status, then at least of official validation for his work. Early interest in his novels suggested such a possibility; as with many other American writers abroad, it wasn’t so much that Himes expected to be taken to be important as that he was gratified just to be noticed. Perhaps, finally, the move to Europe was Himes reverting to his gambling days: a simple roll of the dice. For years, whenever things became intolerable, his solution was to withdraw, to strike camp and move along. Italo Svevo has character Zeno say, “I honestly believe that I have always needed to be in the middle of an adventure, or of some complication that gives the illusion of one.”1 So it was, one suspects, with Himes. He seems to have needed adventure, craved complication; his solutions often worked only to create new and further difficulties. Was the move to Europe but the grandest of many self-deceptions? As Maugham wrote in The Summing Up, disparities between appearance and reality are the fount of all art; they become addictive, wonderfully diverting habits, those disparities, and one is apt when he cannot easily find them to create them.

  Himes and Willa arrived in London on July 7, spending the first night in a hotel near the train station, where Willa was chased down the hall by an apparent madman, after losing their passports. The next day, seeking rooms, they made rounds of rental agencies (from the number of vacancies listed, Himes said, it seemed as though half of London were uninhabited) and were sent to interview with Mrs. Mather, “a tall, thin, impressively bony woman with hair and face of such indistinguishable whiteness as to create the effect of some nocturnal cereus blooming in the black-dark chair.”2

  The interview took place i
n an ice-cold, pitch-dark, musty-smelling parlor, securely curtained against the corrosive effects of the gray daylight and hermetically sealed against poisonous outside air, which the true Londoner breathes only when sleeping.3

  Nonetheless, they took the four-room basement flat, even after Mrs. Mather stacked deposits, cleaning, laundry, and telephone fees atop the quoted rental. Presently they discovered her practice of tiptoeing down the stairs to close windows whenever, trying for a bit of breathable air, they opened them. She would descend “soundlessly, her garments billowing as though from an updraft, emerging from the perpetual gloom of the staircase like the last of the Shakespearean ghosts,”4 and close windows to keep out the damp when it rained, to keep out cats in fair weather, and on bright days to keep out sunshine. While about it, she’d read their mail.

  By the end of the first week Mrs. Mather, perhaps acting upon complaints from other tenants, had taken to trying to evict Himes and Willa, first with an appeal concerning relatives who required the rooms then with threats of legal action, but they held her to the contract she herself had insisted upon their signing. The couple left only after she capitulated and agreed to return deposits. Next they found lodging in a home owned by two ancient Polish sisters in Glenmore Road in Hampstead, a flat of two rooms with a separate attic kitchen, where they settled to work on the tale of Willa’s love affair and nervous breakdown in Switzerland. Willa would turn out page after page in the sitting room of the flat proper while Chester reworked it into chapters in the little attic kitchen above, adding material on her background and sexual awakening with the apparent intent of transforming it from personal memoir to psychosexual history. Both still believed that the book had solid best-seller potential. For relaxation they walked to Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill, Swiss Cottage, Jack Straw’s Castle. They often visited the Regent’s Park Zoo, took cards at the local library on Finchley Road, sampled Soho nightlife and the occasional show in the West End, took in classic movies at Everyman’s Theatre. Afterward, Willa remembered their time there in what Chester called “this big ugly and dismal city”5 fondly.

  They finished the book, 520 pages of manuscript, in mid-December, and though pleased at their accomplishment and happy to have it done with, were also completely out of money. Chester pawned his typewriter, Willa her wedding ring. She had assumed Chester from his outward style and manner to have plenty of money while he, characteristically, never broached the subject. They had both put their faith, though perhaps to different ends, in Willa’s book. Rejected by Targ, the manuscript went next to an editor at Macmillan; it was finally published years later by Beacon Press, retitled Garden Without Flowers, in a shorter version with, apparently, all Himes’s emendations excised.6

  Increasingly desperate, striking out at every frustration, false exit, and blind alley, Himes resigned his membership in PEN when the organization declined to extend him an emergency loan, and withdrew cliency from New York agent Margot Johnson when she replied to his request for an advance with the observation that they were agents, not bankers. When in January Bill Targ wired $500, Himes and Willa promptly left for Majorca, bouncing restlessly from Palma, to Puerto de Pollensa a bit further along the coast, to Terreno in the southwest, Himes working all the while on The End of a Primitive.

  I would get up at five, and by the time I had made coffee the first rays of the rising sun would strike our garden. I used the kitchen table for a desk and by the time the first peasants passed along the walk several feet below the embankment of our garden, humming the rising crescendo of the death song of the bullring, I would be typing happily … I wrote slowly, savoring each word, sometimes taking an hour to fashion one sentence to my liking. Sometimes leaning back in my seat and laughing hysterically at the sentence I had fashioned, getting as much satisfaction from the creation of this book as from an exquisite act of love. That was the first time in my life I enjoyed writing; before I had always written from compulsion … for once I was almost doing what I wanted to with a story, without being influenced by the imagined reactions of editors, publishers, critics, readers, or anyone. By then I had reduced myself to the fundamental writer, and nothing else mattered. I wonder if I could have written like that if I had been a successful writer, or even living in a more pleasant house.7

  Reading this, one might well recall E. M. Forster’s description of Greek poet Cavafy as “standing absolutely motionless at a slight right angle to the universe,” or Cavafy’s own lines:

  But we who serve Art,

  sometimes with the mind’s intensity,

  can create—but of course only for a short time—

  pleasure that seems almost physical.8

  In the early stages of writing The End of a Primitive Himes often strayed afield. He had reached a kind of abandon, lost in the emotional charge of his situation and language, an aura and a smell of sensuality emanating from him “like a miasma.”9 It was always Willa who brought him around, urging him to gear down, pull back—especially in those passages verging on the pornographic. While the essence of any relationship between a black man and a white woman in the United States was sex, Himes felt, to describe which—the blackness of his skin and shanks, the thickness of his lips, the texture of his hair alongside pink nipples, white thighs, silky pubic hair—tends necessarily toward the pornographic, this was not the point of his book. For, heir to all the vices, sophistries, and shams of their white enslavers, American blacks, far from being primitives, were, as he had said before in his Chicago speech,

  the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed, anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world. The American black is a new race of man; the only new race of man to come into being in modern time.10

  The financial crisis continued. World contracted for a book of stories to be titled Black Boogie Woogie, paying an $800 advance, but Himes grew disgusted with the stories when he read them and withdrew the book; grandly, he reported throwing the manuscript into the sea. Brother Eddie back in New York responded to his frantic appeal with $50 and a stern sermon on the necessity of Chester’s becoming responsible. Backed, he felt, into a corner, Himes wrote a bad check for passage money. He and Willa made their way to the supposed refuge of Arcachon only to find that the Malartics had sold the villa, then settled into a cheap hotel in Paris on rue de Buci. There Chester lived off small sums borrowed from friends and made rounds of publishers, Corêa, Gallimard, Albin Michel, trying to stir up fresh interest in his books.

  Willa seems at this point to have fallen to nervous prostration, barely functional and host to a variety of ills. For days she would lie abed weeping. Increasingly Himes felt her a burden, and felt that he could not help her in any significant way; she was wholly unsuited, he decided, by background and temperament, to the temporizing life he led. The rejection of their book, atop extended sieges of poverty and ongoing uncertainty, these last everyday facts of black life, had proved shattering to a woman of her class, background and race. Unable to sustain any longer her desperation, Himes made use of the $1,000 advance for The End of a Primitive from New American Library to pack Willa off to America. Following a brief return to London, by February 1955 Himes himself was back in New York, lodged again at the Albert Hotel, his and Willa’s affair dissolving in a slurry of melodramatic letters, mutual mistrust and accusations, abortive meetings. It is in Paris, with Himes saying farewell to Willa, that the first volume of the autobiography ends; with him booking passage to New York that the second volume begins.

  Meanwhile, on December 13, at about the time Himes and Willa were finishing their novel, just before they departed for Majorca, The Third Generation appeared from World.

  One of the earliest reviews, from Edmund Fuller in the Chicago Tribune Review of Books, declared The Third Generation a strong addition to Himes’s work, citing the novel for its tragic power while pointing out (an observation James Lundquist will echo twenty-two years later) that the book’s structure and conception fail to bear up in strength to
the general fine quality of its writing.11 Both the New York Herald Tribune Review of Books and the Library Journal agreed. Frederic Morton in the first spoke of the novel as having “a strong if incoherent impact of its own,” Milton S. Byam in the latter admired the quality of writing while remarking that, close upon a strong beginning, the novel degenerated into little more than a series of crises.12

  The Saturday Review of Literature in the person of Martin Levin took to task the novel’s excesses but held it to be nonetheless of great interest, as did an anonymous reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle who spoke of the novel, despite its “dismal theme,” as “sincere” and affecting, with “much food for thought.”13

  Like Edmund Fuller, Riley Hughes found the surety of Himes’s writing unmatched by his sense of structure. In Catholic World Hughes fixed on the novel’s major flaw.

  Through typing his story to a Freudian mother complex formula, ruthlessly applied, Mr. Himes removes his characters as far from the reader’s sympathy as they are from convincing reality.14

  One might, while admiring the verity of that adjectival ruthlessly applied, exempt only the final phrase. Or perhaps not. Himes’s remark that The Third Generation was his most dishonest book could be taken, and has been, to call into question the novel’s ultimate realism. (On the other hand, he may have been referring to the utilization of autobiographical over fictional material.) There is something breathless and melodramatic, something of the brandished cloak, about the relentless crises confronting the Taylor family.

  In the New York Times, John Brooks wrote: