Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Deep underground rivers connect the pools of fiction and autobiography. The writer uses what he can retrieve from the physical world around him, bits of string and cloth, twigs, straw, plastic, to build his nest. As capital he has his own life, what he has read and thought, the people he has known—and whatever accrues from his investments of same. The rub comes with how this contiguity is to be interpreted and according to what bias, whether, indeed, it should be of serious critical interest at all. There’s little doubt, however, that at some level this opportunity to re-create oneself and one’s world proves a major drive toward creative work. And one major attraction for the thematically minded reader may be those glimpses he catches of the author peeking out from behind the pillars and lean-to porches of his work.

  Himes’s work invites, insists upon, such speculation, even if, as Michel Fabre said of A Case of Rape, the reader attempting to construe what he reads as autobiographical repeatedly gets shunted back from actual events into the world of fiction.2 But this is what the artist always does: with select strokes taken from life, a figure, light on broken glass, the sounds of a street, he builds a facsimile of one small corner of life, a facsimile which is clearly not a model of, but modeled from; an abstraction, a recombining and reclothing, a representation.

  David Lodge stands among those believing that just such transformation and investiture are at the heart of being a novelist.

  Faced with two versions of the same story, one historical and one fictional, most people in our culture will tend to regard the former as more “real,” hence more meaningful; but the novelist is someone who believes the opposite—otherwise he wouldn’t go to the trouble of writing fiction. These fictions, however, have the superficial appearance of the historical, and the novelist works his effect partly by concealing the seams that join what he has experienced to what he has researched or invented.3

  Thinking of the early novels and most especially of The Primitive, a novel he greatly admires, John A. Williams with some justification calls Chester Himes our single greatest naturalist writer. Few others approach the acuity of structure and focus he reaches in If He Hollers and The Primitive. And Himes continues well into the Harlem cycle, even as his tales become increasingly fabulist, to shadow actualities of the world alongside co-opted elements of his own biography on the screen. Yet he is from the first an artist forever trying for, reaching for, grappling his way toward more, a writer beating at whatever walls would contain him—if not upon every occasion to satisfyingly aesthetic ends, then always to interesting ones.

  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.4

  Seeking the form that will fit. Fit the historical facts of his life and the realer “fictional” ones, fit his ever-stronger vision of the American Negro’s absurd life, a life in which horror and comedy blend so completely it becomes difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. The American Negro is something that has not existed before, a new man, Himes insisted, and the old forms to express his life would no longer do—these must be new as well. So by sheer force of will and intuition Himes pushes forward into unmapped territory, grapples his way hand over hand from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, toward those new forms. For the journey he has set himself there are no guides, no trails, no markers. And for this very reason, Milliken holds, for the very boldness of his ambition, this variety, this wildness, few writers resist classification as persistently as Himes:

  Chester Himes has always been above all else a man who does not take advice. His work is totally innocent of the smooth, professional polish of the writer who has been told ad nauseum, to the point of final belief … that you simply cannot do everything at once, that art involves choice, that final solutions have been found to many writing problems, that models that work do exist, and that in the end every writer must submit himself to the exigencies and expectancies of the typical cultivated reader. Chester Himes never even entertained the notion that his writing could be more effective if it were motivated by anything other than pure Himesian impulse and instinct. His work is ferociously idiosyncratic.5

  In the most engaged and forceful contemporary writing, Maurice Blanchot perceives a shift from the genre dominating the European novel, that of the novel of formation or Bildungsroman, to the récit. Sequential, autobiographical, moored in time, this historical genre has as its concern verisimilitude and “the world of the usual sort of truth.” The récit by contrast is unmindful of verisimilitude, antigeneric, ahistorical. It is not, Blanchot maintains, the narration of an event but the event itself, ever changing, ever in the process of becoming—the process of thought rather than thought’s reiteration—marked by the violence of its own internal transformations and, because it takes place at borderlines, as a voice for all that is excluded from the static worlds to either side where papers are always in order, forever contestatory in stance.6

  Such a reading follows close upon George Lukács’s definition of the genre of the traditional novel as one of accommodation in which, by accumulation of experience, exposure to received wisdom and a generalized process of acculturation, the problematic individual becomes reconciled to society at large.7

  Or as Himes puts it in The Primitive:

  No more worrying about what’s right and what’s wrong. Just what’s expedient. You’re human now. Went in the back door of the Alchemy Company of America a primitive, filled with things called principles, integrity, honor, conscience, faith, love, hope, charity and such, and came out the front door a human being, completely purged. End of a primitive; beginning of a human. Good title for a book but won’t sell in America.8

  This genre of the traditional novel as described by Blanchot and Lukács, of course, presupposes commonalities of belief and lifestyle that may no longer apply. And the movement of modern literature itself, in its break with or extension of tradition, has been away from an assumption that the world is transparent and thus available to lucid thought and language, to assuming that the world is opaque.

  Himes’s development is consonant with all this. The Primitive begins in earnest Himes’s abandonment of the logical, sequential world that culminates in the Harlem cycle with what H. Bruce Franklin has described as an unraveling of the mystery genre. Classic genre figurations, along with its basis in accepted social forms and the application of reason, progressively give way to portraits of nightmarish characters and strings of incidents related more by resonance and rude poetics than causally, concluding on an image of absurdist impotence as Himes’s detectives stand helplessly by in the midst of a citywide riot shooting rats.

  Structuralists like Tzvetan Todorov would insist that any story is adumbrated in its first sentences, exfoliating from some central impulse; and that the mystery, a species of grail quest narrative, unlike adventure tales that proceed horizontally along lines of plot, action, and sequence, proceeds vertically through repeated events, echoes, aspects. Each fictive motion encompasses also the attempt to penetrate to the material’s secret, its hidden truth, so that finally the story that is being told and the story that is telling become images of one another.

  Just so is Himes’s development as a writer adumbrated in his earliest work, in the dream sequences that structure If He Hollers, in the rage and murderous madness of Lonely Crusade’s Luther McGregor and Lester McKinley, and so does it continue exfoliating in A Case of Rape’s relativism, in the gravitational pull of history therein, in the farce and fantasy (no longer earthbound) of Pinktoes, in the city as stage for violence and transformation emerging through the early detective novels. The Primitive, this neglected masterpiece, one of American literature’s great novels, is where the road forks.

 
The Primitive is, as Lundquist notes, the novel in which Himes pushes to the limit two obsessive themes: his rage at being rejected as a writer, and the black man’s fascination with white women. Lundquist perceives the novel, in fact, as a culmination or stopping point, an end to the confessional period; more generally, as a summa after which Himes was done with settling old scores and with which he exhausted his autobiographical impulse.

  Certainly interracial themes pervade Himes’s work, as does his identification of black men with women in regard to the disempowerment and lasting psychological damage reserved for them jointly by society. In jacket copy written for The Quality of Hurt Himes described himself as “a black man who pitied white women.” In A Case of Rape and in his collaboration with Willa on what is after all a quintessential woman’s story, he gave that sympathy form. Very early on in The Primitive, struggling to formulate her father’s defeat, Kriss also finds its image in self-identification: “Not defeated like a man in battle, but like a woman who is defeated by her sex, by the outraged indignity of childbearing, menstrual periods, long hair and skirts.”9

  There’s little doubt that The Primitive was landmark work for Himes, or that he recognized it as such at the time. In The Quality of Hurt he describes writing the novel while living with Willa in Majorca:

  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, writing The End of a Primitive. I still had a good supply of Dexamyl. In fact, my tranquilizers sealed me inside of my thoughts so that I was almost completely unaware of the peasants and the flies and the movement in the distant street and could only experience the sweet, sensual, almost overwhelming scent of the lemon blossoms and the nearly unbearable beauty of the blossoming day far in the back of my mind. 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. But I enjoyed writing The End of a Primitive … 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.10

  This is something of a new Himes for us, a man who seems at times, despite living in rank poverty and dejection, almost on the verge of weightlessness. Such was his concentration while writing that “Neither the pink mountains nor the swarms of flies in the dusty city could possibly be real, I thought. Only my book was real.”11 Distanced from America if not from the lands and grooves it had left on his soul, delivered by failure from further pretense of success in his writing, past the recall of censors internal or external, Himes wrote just what and as he wished, producing out of the bounds of this freedom the most carefully structured, closely controlled novel he would write. Milliken also avers to this transformation within Himes: “In his racist homeland he had been a borderline alcoholic, compulsively embracing the degradation of menial jobs to eke out a precarious living; abroad, he was a completely functional, generally dead broke, moderately happy, working writer.”12 In an introduction for the novel’s reissue written not long before his death, Himes again emphasized the novel’s liberating qualities.

  I was cleansed of envy and hate by writing about white Americans with satire and scorn … Writing this book not only purged me but made me strong. Forever afterwards, I have been shocked by the absurdity of racism. How more absurd could two people be than me and my white woman? My mind became free and highly creative and in the following eight years I wrote twelve books on the absurdity of racism and its effects on both black and white people … the only thing that stopped me from writing more about the innumerable instances of racism was a series of strokes.13

  Naming The Primitive his favorite book, Himes told John Williams that he’d been able to achieve what he did with it only because in Majorca there were no distractions, physical, financial or otherwise, not even the distraction of expectations. He had written the book, he said, out of a completely free state of mind from beginning to end.14Jesse Robinson, too, was his favorite character. To Michel Fabre in 1983 Himes admitted: “I put a lot of myself into him. I probably said everything I wanted to say in that novel,”15 and much of what he said was about the repressive influences of his time, about moral conceptions that fail to fit the actual circumstances of lives, about national (and often willful) blindnesses.

  In The Primitive I put a sexually-frustrated American woman and a racially-frustrated black American male together for a weekend in a New York apartment, and allowed them to soak in American bourbon. I got the result I was looking for: a nightmare of drunkenness, unbridled sexuality, and in the end, tragedy.

  What I wanted to show is that American society has produced two radically new human types. One is the black American male.16

  And the other was the white American woman, who, Himes held, has more freedom, better education, and far greater financial wherewithal than at any time in the past, yet is desperately unhappy, shunted aside in society’s relentless pursuit of its goals, incomplete sexually, unloved and uncared for. Often she turns to the black man, who will care for her, without realizing that he too has been fatally wounded by society—that he is in fact dangerous, both to himself and others.

  The Primitive comes out of a particular time. Those visions of equality that drove American blacks in the forties, which Himes mirrored in If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade (and which he would pillage again for the satire of Pinktoes), had passed, with little enough if any true gain; the civil-rights era had yet to begin. America’s sense of omnipotence, of its manifest destiny and diehard rightness, had attained plaguelike proportions. Having single-handedly delivered the world from ruin, America could now go on about its simple, wholesome life as that world’s curator, wizard, and watchdog. Anything that failed to fit the template of rightness was to be shoved under the rug, into the far corner of the closet, onto back lots. Hey, everyone lived like Ozzie and Harriet, right? America’s full-time job became trying to live up to the misbegotten image it had of itself. Like Aristophanes’ Socrates, America walked along so lost in its thoughts that it stumbled on every pothole. Because America was its ultimate product, that which all history had gathered toward, there was no longer any need for the past. And what else could the future be but a string of perfect, democratic, simple days like this one—here at home in America?

  It was, in short, the beginning of the time we would live, as we do now, without allusion, without depth or history, paddling about on the surface of our lives and desires like water spiders, marooned in an eternal present.

  Irving Howe characterized this rearrangement of the social furniture in “Mass Society and Post-modern Fiction”:

  By mass society we mean a relatively comfortable, half welfare and half garrison society in which the population grows passive, indifferent, and atomized; in which traditional loyalties, ties, and associations become lax and dissolve entirely; in which coherent publics based on definitive interests and opinions gradually fall apart; and in which man becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the products, diversions, and values that he absorbs.17

  As often as not, that eternal present came to us, as did “the products, diversions and values” of our society, by way of the TVs that had so suddenly become a part of our families. These were windows from our furnished cells onto the public reality, windows through which we perceived those lives we did not, could not, have; and in their endless chatter, li
ke babbling old aunts desperate to keep our attention, increasingly they would say anything, just anything, wearing down the line between the actual and presumed, the real and imagined, news and entertainment.

  “The Life of Riley” premiered in 1949, “Ozzie and Harriet” in 1952. Both offered up the day-to-day small crises and triumphs of families clearly intended to be just like ours. Our own life was being re-created, recast, reformed, on that screen—and somehow validated.

  The life, that is, of a new white middle class whose father went off to work regularly, whose mother in starched dresses cooked hams and baked cookies, whose children dreamed of acceptance by peers, high-school dances, and having their own cars.

  TV was the ultimate funhouse mirror. In it, the ordinary could become huge, overwhelming, monstrous. The misshapen dwarf, looking in, saw himself become tall and straight.

  So does TV become an integral part of The Primitive, character, chorus and oracle all in one, underlining the characters’ loneliness and utter isolation. The TV Jesse and Kriss watch obsessively (it is always on) is their window to the world. Its stream of comedy, chatter and “current events” comprises their knowledge of what takes place in the world beyond their tightly circumscribed lives, this room, the absurd tragedy whose downward spiral they are riding out. When Jesse’s trial and conviction for the murder of Kriss is announced on TV, before it takes place, by the morning news show host’s sidekick chimpanzee, this not only perfectly complements the novel’s structure, in which perception and delirium have interpenetrated to such extent that one can no longer be picked out from the other, it brilliantly illuminates the novel’s themes of isolation and divestment.

  “Saw it start to, saw it had to, saw it happen,” Archibald MacLeish wrote in JB of the witness of a traffic accident standing helplessly by. The reader of The Primitive has much the same experience. Starting off with the daily waking of Kristina Cummings, then of Jesse Robinson, the novel initially moves back and forth between them, its tempo increasing as they approach one another, come together and together begin circling ever closer, downward, towards their fate. As Kriss and Jesse submerge themselves in nonstop drinking and desperate, increasingly violent sex, barriers between the internal and external, the real and imagined, give way. They grow more and more confused as to the sequence of events, what they have dreamed or remembered and what has actually occurred, whether it is day or night, how much time has passed. Himes’s careful writing bears the reader directly and fully into that confusion, culminating in a blackout for the reader much like Jesse’s own. We are deeply confused as to what has gone on, what is real. Like Jesse we come into the clearing of the novel’s final pages unable to remember, unaware almost until that final phone call what has happened.