by James Sallis
Himes seems to have set out to grip the reader in a vise of despair by cumulative incident and detail. His searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists. But the impact is weakened by the introduction, in several cases, of chance misfortune unrelated to the characters or their ancestry, and the whole seems at times to lack a certain necessary measure of animal fun and human hope.15
That phrase animal fun Himes will appropriate for the satirical discussion between Jesse Robinson and his editor in The End of a Primitive, just as he scooped up phrases from a review of Lonely Crusade to fine effect in his Chicago speech.
“But surely you realize that that was satire—Rabelais was satirizing the humanist Renaissance—and certainly some of the best satire ever written … This—” tapping the manuscript neatly wrapped in brown paper on his desk—“is protest. It’s vivid enough, but it’s humorless. And there is too much bitterness and not enough just plain animal fun—”
“I wasn’t writing about animals—”16
In his Chicago speech Himes insisted that the American black lives always and inexorably with two forms of hate: he hates his oppressor and, living in constant fear of that hate being discovered, he “hates himself because of this fear.”17 It’s a point that John A. Williams emphasizes as a cornerstone of The Third Generation in his introduction to the 1989 Thunder’s Mouth edition, calling the novel “a chilling study of racism absorbed from whites and utilized by its black victims to victimize others of their own race.” In this powerful, painful to read novel, he says, Himes “pulls aside the curtain—rips it down, in fact—on the class warfare within the black community.”18
Still, despite the novel’s considerable power, despite favorable reviews in important publications, and despite sale of paperback rights for an advance of $10,000 to NAL, who obviously believed The Third Generation capable of tapping into some ready market, sales were poor. By this time few expectations or illusions remained to Himes; he was aswim in quite different waters, thankful for whatever driftwood or flotsam he might grab hold of.
One forever wonders what might have happened had Himes’s books been published with proper timeliness, The Third Generation, for instance, a decade later, in the midst of the civil rights movement; or The Primitive not in oblivious 1956 but in, say, 1986, when an audience, one responding to work by such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, existed. But Chester was always there at the station too early, taking the train alone.
The Third Generation is, as the title might suggest, an historical novel rather in the manner that If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade are historical novels: exacting portraits of a lost time. Ostensibly it deals with the disintegration of one family, a disintegration deriving as much as anything from that internal racism indicated by Williams. As Edward Margolies notes in Native Sons,
On the surface, rank bigotry seldom intrudes as the direct cause of their sufferings; they appear to be defeated by their own incapacities, weaknesses, blindness, and obsessions. But Himes makes clear that in order to understand them, one must understand the generations that preceded them, black and white: they are doomed not simply by their own psychic drives but by the history that created them and forced them into self-destructive channels. They are as much the victims of a value system they implicitly accept (and which indeed flows in their bloodstreams) as are men like Bigger Thomas who rebel against the social order.19
Joe Himes insisted that this racial aspect of his brother’s novel was overplayed, blown out of proportion like the story of his, Joe’s, blinding, because of the fascination it had for readers. Admitting that reading Chester “disturbs me too much,” Joe recalled the family dynamics in more directly economic terms.
I don’t think there was any degree of love, passion and devotion between them … They were married in the sense that there was a certain religious obligation about it. There were children. There was respectability. All this made for stability in the family.20
That stability disappears, in the novel as in life, with the father’s loss of his professorship. Once he has stopped teaching, Fess’s life becomes a long, sure glide downward. Mother Lillian’s decline is little less catastrophic, the hysteria forever hovering about her blooming, with her husband’s failure, into insanity.
Stephen Milliken suggests that The Third Generation be read as prequel to Cast the First Stone (Yesterday Will Make You Cry), this novel in one sense completing the latter, presenting formative years that explain the protagonist’s presence in prison. The Third Generation, Milliken writes, is Himes’s least contrived, most fluid work, developing organically from characters who move “towards fates that they must both invent and discover.”21 He also elicits the parallel to Sons and Lovers in the manner in which its central conflict between plebeian father and aristocratic mother becomes displaced to a struggle between mother and son.
The novel is structured about a series of traumatic scenes much as Himes patterned Lonely Crusade around an aggregate of dialogues and If He Hollers around Bob Jones’s nightly dreams. Here, though, the structure is much looser—disjunctive and associative rather than programmatic, in this respect prefiguring the vivid though often but marginally connected chains of imagery and incident that take the place of traditional narrative in the Harlem novels. Most of the novel’s traumatic scenes result in one way or another from the elemental struggle at the novel’s heart, that between the mother for domination and her son for freedom and personal identity. In the mother abstraction takes place, an arbitrary handful of traits gradually supplanting all others and calcifying into madness. Though greatly drawn to his mother’s dreamy, unnatural way, her flights of fancy, her denials of reality, her escapes, the son does in the end avoid them and achieve a qualified redemption.
The elementality of that struggle translates to a kind of aggrandizement, so that for all their specificity, and for all the innate smallness of their lives, the characters take on a certain grandness, becoming as Milliken says “creatures of epic, of romance, of allegory.”22 Contributing to this is the very real presence in the novel of Lillian’s righteous, chastising god, as well as a cosmic malevolence that “seems to stalk the Taylor family, inflicting crippling accidents upon them, blinding them to every possibility of tenderness, turning their loves to bitterness and hate.”23 Father Fess Taylor with his bitter pride also is presented in mythic aspect, as a man once afire, a man once illuminated from within. Hephaestus, limping after the fall.
But unlike many proud men, who carry their pride in silence, he was boastful … Deep in his heart he wanted to be a rebel … But his wife and the circumstances of his life had put out much of the fire.24
Mr. Taylor has learned well the “Machiavellian cunning”25 that lets him survive—survive both in the world and in his own self-estimations. He dissembles and postures with such accuracy, we are told, that no one can surmise anything of his innermost thoughts or feelings. This Mrs. Taylor despises as much as she does his dark skin, believing it manifest of his slave inheritance—and despises it ever more completely when she finds her son dragging behind him the selfsame sack and baggage. As for the son, as though the mix of his mother’s irreality and brittle inflexibility in his blood were not acid-and-water enough, Charles must strive to reconcile there also his mother’s absolutism with his father’s utter temporizing. Nevertheless Charles, like Lonely Crusade’s Lee Gordon, by story’s end does move toward acceptance of responsibility for his own actions and fate.
Surely in that Machiavellian cunning, as in Milliken’s description of the character of Charles as “a study in excessive sensitivity and the harsh defiance that cloaks it” and of Charles’s personality as “a deliberate construct of his will,”26 we may be allowed to catch in passing the profile of Chester Himes, this man who could write so much of himself while leaving us with so many false impressions and so little knowledge of who he was.
In The Third Generation, Muller insi
sts, we sense just how close Himes came to self-destruction.27 He goes on to quote this passage regarding the family’s time in St. Louis, one strongly prefiguring later disjunctures in Himes’s life and work:
A curious phenomenon took place within his mind that winter. Whole periods of his past became lost to recollection. There was no pattern, no continuity, no rational deletions, as the editing of a text. Fragments of days, whole months, a chain of afternoons were drawn at random, a word would be missing from a sentence which he recalled with startling clarity, the intended meaning now gone … It was as if a madman had snatched pages from a treasured book, the story stopping eerily in the middle of a sentence, a gaping hole left in the lives of all the characters, the senses groping futilely to fill the missing parts, gone now, senselessly gone, now the meaning all distorted as if coming suddenly and unexpectedly into a street of funny mirrors.28
As early reviewers, chief among them Riley Hughes, rightfully noted, a principal problem with the novel lies with its relentless application of Freudianism. Not only does this at length prove distracting, even suffocating, to the reader, it creates an undertow constantly working at odds with the narrative, tending to reduce complex motive and action to mere schematic. Others such as Edmund Fuller have argued that the novel’s overall structure fails to meet the challenge of its writing; that the novel’s linearity, like its Freudian element, pulls it toward the programmatic. For some, the novel’s unrelieved atmosphere of fear and anger have a similar deleterious effect. Further cavils have to do with the asymmetry of Himes’s shift to foregrounding Charles in the novel’s second half; with the false emphasis on racism as source of the mother’s problems; and with the overdramatic ending, apparently worked up by Himes at the suggestion of Targ and of Van Vechten. Milliken summarizes the failure of this ending.
Lillian’s bizarre racism, her morbid rejection of reality, somehow become part of the fabric of [Charles’s] being. It is as though her spirit had invaded his, absorbed it completely. The paralyzing patterns of her neurosis gradually come to dominate his own thoughts. This sinister process is delineated with ruthless clarity in the last sections of the novel, as Charles’s fatal weakness of will is demonstrated in incident after incident, then abruptly negated in the novel’s bloody denouement. A tragic pattern is laboriously established then arbitrarily dissolved, a process that is all too frequent in life, but introduces an unfortunate note of confusion and indecision into a novel’s structure.29
The third generation out of slavery, then. Yet now we know what came after this novel’s ascensive conclusion: Charles Taylor wakes to find himself Jimmy Monroe, in prison. We should all fear those big words that make us so unhappy, freedom perhaps the biggest of them. And while of course we can never be truly free, free of heritage, fault, family, failings or self, we must always, as Tolstoy is said to have scrawled out with his finger on the sheets of his deathbed, Keep … striving. That’s the measure of grace given us.
Did Himes achieve, with The Third Generation, as has been argued, some measure of freedom from what he perceived as a crippling past and, through new understanding of them, from his own self-destructive impulses? Does art truly work this way—or in claiming such, do we turn the conventions of fiction back on the life it issues from, pretending that life shapes itself in similar, conventional manner?
In “The Middle Years” Henry James has his dying novelist admit: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”30
The patterns we discern as both reader and writer, in life as well as in fiction, may be those we bring with us to the task. We experience our lives forward while attempting to understand them backward; this is no less true of the lives of others toward which we turn attention, whether as novelist, as friend or family member, as biographer. We do change, we do find (like Charles Taylor) qualified redemptions, but quite probably never in any linear, quantifiable fashion.
Perhaps no one speaks better for personal and artistic change than did James Baldwin in “Nothing Personal.”
It is perfectly possible to … walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what material will one build a self again? The lives of men—and, therefore, of nations—to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind.31
Whether willfully or unwittingly, Chester Himes had begun a reconstruction of self. The “excessive sensitivity and the harsh defiance that cloaks it” were being reassembled, the personality that was “a deliberate construct of his will”32 was being resewn of new rag, old bone. That the question Baldwin raised lived vividly in Himes’s mind—out of what material will one build a self again—The End of a Primitive bears witness.
13
Doubt, Passion, the Madness of Art
In London, in the bed-sitting-room where often he was visited by the beautiful East Indian woman living downstairs and where his landlord’s wife regarded him with “a look of infinite pity in her eyes,”1 Himes sat reading Willa’s letters and weeping.
She wrote to him of her family, of how much she missed him, of seeing The Third Generation alongside Wright’s book occasioned by his trip to Ghana, Black Power, and William Gardner Smith’s South Street on tables in New York bookstores. Persisting in her attempts to market their novel, soon she had obtained a job in a Boston dentist’s office. For a time she lived with her aunt and uncle, whose conformist, unquestioning middle-class attitudes Himes perceived as a direct threat. He had said, to himself and to Willa, that he was sending her away only so that she could sell their book. He had said to himself, with sadness, that whatever life they had created together was over; to her, in consolation, that soon enough they would be together again. Now strong emotion swept in to fill her absence: he felt strongly his need for her, and at the same time the inevitability of ending things, of letting go. He knew, he said, that America would kill their love. Filled “with all manner of suspicions, doubts, antagonisms and resentments because she had returned into her white world,” shortly before leaving for New York on December 14 he wrote to her:
On re-reading your letters I see again the terrifying destructiveness of American life. Everything seems to go—integrity, self-confidence, honor, trust, gratitude, all human values—with awesome swiftness in the struggle for the dollar. And once gone what have you?2
What had he, for that matter? Sitting there in the cloister of his room with the smell of breakfast’s streaky bacon and a half-drunk cup of tea strong enough to float an egg, with letters arriving for “Señor Chester Himes y Señora” or “Bien chères Amis” from friends in Majorca, with the yellow buzz of Dexamyl in his veins, down and out and at the end of his every rope, “sick and tired of all the shit that went along with a black man writing.”3
Sometimes the sounds that broke from him were like those of his defeated novelist in “Da-Da-Dee,” neither speech nor pain but something forever lost on the road between, a series of animal-like sounds; howls and moans; barely human. These sounds brought fellow tenants awake and upright in the dead of night. Once, as Himes sang over and over, compulsively, “I’ll Get By,” it grew so bad that the landlord was forced to call the police. Then as other times Himes’s Indian friend Simi interceded, speaking with the police and with the landlord, calming Himes. Repeatedly, he says, he tried to “seduce” her (“Our landlord and his family could hear us scuffling in the kitchen below”)4 but, too strong physically, she rebuffed him—seduce chiming peculiarly against that scuffling and too strong physically, giving, one suspects, quite an accurate image of his desperation. “I suppose she felt sorry for me because I was unsuccessful and black and sick. I suppose all women had felt that way toward me for many years.”5
Himes’s predeparture letter to Willa was dismissive, cruel beneath a skim of kindness. He thought
that she had regained some measure of confidence and faith in her time with him, he wrote, that she had moved toward more honest evaluations of life. But now he sees this to have been delusion; she has fallen back all too easily and naturally into a life of self-indulgence and the “cheap shabby sacrilegious forces of a greedy and intemperate society.”6 He feels, he says, as though he has opened the wrong door.
And now, of course, he must ease it shut.
Thus began a correspondence monstrous in every sense, a mutual battery not unlike the one between Himes and Vandi, that continued long after Himes had resettled in New York, at his accustomed Albert Hotel.
In this overflow of high-voltage words my mind was encompassed in a nightmare of fused impressions and blurred perceptions and days running wildly together, here and there a lightning flash of clarity, a starkly glaring misunderstanding. We riddled each other with words, tore each other apart … We wrote things to each other which might normally have been spoken in the passion of anger, jealousy, suspicion … All this correspondence running into thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words, which if all put together would certainly have equaled six volumes of our five-hundred-page manuscript of The Golden Chalice.7
Everything lashed the couple’s sense of pain and betrayal. America’s strong currents and Willa’s family bore her irresistibly away from him. Her weekend visits withered to bitter accusations and mechanical lovemaking. Chester’s single visit to Boston guttered out in petty hostilities. He became impotent. Willa grew enraged when she learned that wife Jean had visited Chester at his hotel. And when he spoke of wanting to retrieve items left with Vandi, a scrapbook of press clippings for his first two books, a portion of his mother’s silver, Willa became certain that he had resumed his relationship with her.
Himes had called Vandi about the items and been told to call back the following week, when her husband would be away. It would never occur to her, Himes wrote, that, given a chance to sleep with her, a man might choose not to. Monday he went round to collect his things from the maid and was handed only the silver and some blankets; Vandi, he decided, was holding the scrapbooks hostage. On Wednesday he called her office, met with a curious reaction from the switchboard operator and, passed along to Vandi’s secretary, was told that Vandi had died the evening before while cleaning house. Dexamyl may have been a major factor; she had taken the drug, known to weaken the heart, regularly for years. Chester, who had picked up the habit from her, claims never to have used the drug again after that day.
