Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Milliken points up the novel’s dramatic structure, arguing quite convincingly that its structure in fact mirrors that of a play in three acts with four scenes to each act. Like the text itself, with which Himes plunges the reader into the bleak and bleary physicality of his characters’ lives, this structure gives the novel an immediacy of effect, a sense of lives being lived or directly witnessed, while at the same time underlining its affinity to classic tragedy: tragedy here, though, of a demotic, diminished, denatured sort.

  In Chapter 1, in her downtown apartment on Twenty-first Street near Gramercy Park, Kriss wakes to an empty bed, the alarm of her gold-plated Swiss clock “curdling the silence.”18 She is terrified, as she is each morning, at finding herself again alone. Thirty-seven years old, married for years to a homosexual (one of many efforts to bridge that aloneness), she has slept, by latest count, with 187 men.

  In her apartment, situated as it was on the first floor rear, entombed by the concrete cliffs of other buildings, as remote from the sounds of voices and traffic on the street as the crown of Everest, a veritable dungeon where the light of day penetrated only for a few brief hours in the late afternoon when she was seldom there, this sense of being alone was almost complete; not only shut off from people, from others of the species, but shut off from time, from seasons, from distance, from life—all life, dog life, cat life, cockroach life—shut off from eternity. It was like waking in a grave.19

  Or in a cave, in which, following her daily ritual of Dexamyl, barbiturates, and alcohol, she sits allowing the TV’s flickering firelight to fill the empty spaces, watching a talk show featuring a host named Gloucester and a chimpanzee who predicts the news. Cassandra, Greek chorus, Lear’s Fool, newscaster, comic sidekick, image of the primitive within us all, the chimpanzee predicts, along with Jesse’s murder of Kriss, such news as Eisenhower’s 1952 election as president (“thereby giving Senator McCarthy a mandate to rid the nation of its mentality”), Nixon’s 1952 speech justifying the source of his campaign contributions, and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision for desegregation.20

  In Chapter 2, Jesse Robinson wakes, like Bob Jones of If He Hollers, from dreams that provide a nightmarish mirror image of his waking life: he was falling through the ice while skating, none of those around him taking notice. Jesse is separated from his wife, rapidly running through the $500 a publisher has advanced as option on his novel I Was Looking for a Street. Jesse drinks a water glass full of gin and goes back to sleep. New dreams suggest the degree of his isolation and a plenty from which he is excluded (he is sitting at a banquet table between two empty spaces), violence (on the parking lot outside the banquet hall two men are beating one another horribly), lost youth and love (he is seventeen years old and kissing for the first time).

  Jesse lives on the borderland between the real and unreal, life and the imagined, the civilized and savage. This failed writer is a portrait, Milliken says,

  not so much of Himes himself, the man he believed he had really been, but rather of the man he believed he might easily have become had the sequence of misfortunes that overwhelmed him been just a little bit worse, if the screws had been tightened, ever so slightly, just a few notches more.21

  * * *

  Many details of Jesse’s background, his stints as caretaker and arrest for sideswiping a white lady’s car, his apartment on Convent Avenue, his separation from wife Becky, are taken directly from Himes’s own life; several of these recountings reappear almost verbatim in the memoirs.

  Jesse is a man who wants, more than anything else, and desperately, to understand, a man who is coming to believe that he never will, that those principles of and around which he has formed his life—reason, independence, self-realization, the arts, faith in social progress—are but illusions. He will never see or know Vanzetti’s “serene white light of a reasonable world.”

  No matter how much he drank, whatever he did to deaden his thoughts, there was this part of his mind that never became numb, never relaxed. It was always tense, hypersensitive, uncertain, probing—there must he some goddamned reason for this, for that. It had started with the publication of his second book, five years before … Some goddamned reason for all the hate, the animosity, the gratuitous ill will—for all the processed American idiocy, ripened artificially like canned cheese.

  ….

  “Jesse Robinson,” he said in a voice of utter futility. “Jesse Robinson. There must be some simple thing in this goddamn life that you don’t know. Some little thing. Something every other bastard born knows but you.” After a moment, without being aware that he had moved, he found himself in the window looking down across the flats of Harlem … like sharp-angled waves of dirt water in the early sun, moving just enough to form a blurred distortion. “Every other nigger in this whole town but you.”22

  As Chapter 2 ends, Jesse, having had several drinks, steps outdoors and, not knowing where to go once there, with no particular destination or purpose in mind or in life, heads for the cheap movie houses on Forty-second Street. Chapter 3 picks up Kriss at work, in Chapter 4 Jesse calls for the date that makes up Chapter 5, and in Chapter 6 (its opening sentence the same as the first of the book: “The gold-plated Swiss clock on the nightstand whirred softly, curdling the silence of the small dark room”)23 Jesse and Kriss wake together in her bed.

  Both are at the end of a chain of personal defeats, turned out of their dreams, their faith, their trust in others and in society, “both now ostracized from the only exciting life they had ever known, both starved for sexual fulfillment, lost and lonely, outcasts drifting together long after the passion had passed.”24 They become, in fact, mirrors for one another. Answering the door, Kriss sees:

  This man before her, in the old trench coat she recognized immediately, was dead; hurt had settled so deep inside of him it had become a part of his metabolism. Not that he had changed so greatly in outward appearance … It was inside of him the light had gone out.25

  Jesse sees in turn “no hint of the daredevil girl”26 he once knew but a woman grown dull, humorless, and respectable, illusions and youthful vigor long gone. It is their very despair, the sight of their own emptiness in the other’s face, that draws them inexorably together. That first night they drink until they pass out. Much of the rest of the novel will be a stagger from binge to blackout to eruptions of violence.

  Mirrors figure prominently. In the novel’s early pages Jesse, after waking, surveys in the mirror his “trim, muscular body, the color of Manila paper, with the broad-shouldered proportions of a pugilist”27; near book’s end he attacks Kriss as much from rage at his own image and hers in mirrors as from any other incentive. Kriss can hardly pass a mirror without looking into it, as though to reassure herself of her existence. In one key passage Jesse dreams of being lost in a house of mirrors from which he escapes in horror only to find that the outside world’s supposed normalcy appears to him even more grotesque and distorted.28

  Kriss’s self-destructive impulses spring out everywhere: in her abuse of alcohol and drugs, her promiscuity and continual playing off of people against one another, her verbal attacks on Jesse, her provocations of dangerous incidents. At one point she actually attempts suicide by swallowing sleeping pills but is too drunk to succeed or even to remember the attempt afterward.29

  Jesse, of course, has his own self-destructive drive; and when the two of them meet again, it is as though each recognizes in the other, instantly, the instrument of his destruction. Night after night, Jesse lashes out in his sleep, shouting “I’ll kill you!” At one point it comes to him in a flash: “This bitch wants me to kill her.”

  Jesse and Kriss in a sense are social leftovers, ghosts who have lived past periods of idealism and hope into a world of everyday realities to which they can’t accommodate themselves. Himes’s many references to grand old days at Maud’s emphasize this aspect, as does his inclusion of portraits of threadbare civil-rights leaders like Kriss’s old lover Harold and magazine editor Walter Martin, loosely
modeled on Horace Cayton and Ralph Ellison. His depictions of Harlem here, too—as a place full to bursting with life and all kinds of pleasures, some to be had cheaply, others at great price—are penned with a new, almost romantic wistfulness.

  The Harlem of The Primitive, evoked with bittersweet nostalgia and a marvelous, completely original, laughter-filled lyricism, was to be Himes’s major subject throughout the European phase of his writing career, carried through the long series of detective novels and on into Pinktoes. In his enchanted garden in Majorca Himes found within himself the gifts of a great humorous prose poet, whose destined and unique subject was to be Harlem, the great, crowded black metropolis, more a continuing explosion of human energy than a city. He was soon to win a whole new circle of readers, as the chronicler, the poet, of Harlem, Harlem seen as only Chester Himes could describe it.30

  In her apartment far from that Harlem, Kriss sits watching the chimpanzee on the morning news show and Zoo Parade as Jesse dreams of a farm where pigs have the secret of producing sausage without being slaughtered but one pig rebels, refuses, and is led away, all the others shouting Traitor! behind him. At the breakfast table one morning, his publisher having turned down his latest for being just another protest novel and for its lack of “just plain animal fun,” Kriss having said when he first called her that she hoped this book was “nothing like the last thing you wrote … I’m tired of listening to you Negroes whining,” Jesse makes an announcement.31

  “That’s what I’ll do!” Jesse said. “I’ll write a book about chimpanzees.” Then hastened to ask, “There isn’t any chimpanzee problem, is there?”

  “Not that I know of,” Kriss said. “All of those I’ve seen—most at the zoo—seem well satisfied.”

  “I guess you’re right at that,” Jesse said. “I’ve never heard of a chimpanzee being lynched for raping a white woman and so far none have been cited as communists.”32

  In a pivotal scene, suave uptown editor Walter Martin at the end of a long course of drinking and dispute over “the Negro problem” pulls a knife on Jesse after telling him that he has to join the human race. Jesse’s response is that he’s been an ape too long.33

  Any synopsis or other reductive discourse, turned on a book as complex and multilayered as The Primitive, can but hint, finally, at the novel’s richness of character and reference, its essential textures, its suspensions of argument, metaphor, and image—in short, its rewards for the casual and the careful reader. Pointing out that each, according to personal taste and predilection, might just as easily be construed as strength, Milliken runs down what he believes to be the novel’s weaknesses: its constant shifts in tone, its cloying density, that the narrator intrudes, often gratuitously, with philosophizing, that the structure is too worked over, too symmetrical, stylized to the point of obtrusive artificiality. Yet Himes, Milliken believes, here succeeds, as he failed to do with Charles Taylor in The Third Generation or Jimmy Monroe in Cast the First Stone, in transforming Jesse Robinson from self-reflection to novelistic creation. This, the least dependent of the early novels on external, autobiographical interest, nonetheless has been forged into an effective vehicle for Himes’s deepest, most personal insights into the human condition.

  The Primitive is, finally, a novel of great humor, of comedy both high and low and of considerable horror, strands of comedy and horror so interwoven as often to be indistinguishable one from another, and thereby profoundly unsettling. Here is Jesse chasing the tiny dog that has terrorized him from the novel’s early pages.

  He pursued, and got in another good lick before he slipped again and knocked over the white marble statue of a nude, that blocked the passage. He made a desperate lunge and caught the statue before it hit the floor, breaking its fall, then fell on top of it. He got up bruised and shaken and restored it to the table. “Good thing you’re not in Georgia, son,” he told himself. “Open and shut case of rape.”34

  From which slapstick, Himes can veer in a breath to such as the novel’s concluding death scene.

  He dreamed horribly of running naked across endless glaciers and awakened seven minutes later, deathly chilled, without being aware he had dreamed. “Damn, Kriss, aren’t you cold, baby?” he asked. She didn’t reply. He got up and slammed the window shut with a bang, then sat on the edge of the bed and poured a glass of wine. His teeth chattered against the rim of the glass … “You know, Kriss baby, you can be a very unpleasant bitch,” he said angrily, and as his rage began to ride added, “You’re going to get yourself good and fucked up someday.” Then, prodded by her continued silence, he turned on her furiously, saying, “And whether you like it or not I’m—” His voice stopped short when he clutched her naked white shoulders. Her ice-cold flesh burned his hands.

  His next action of which he was aware occurred two and a half minutes later. He was kneeling on the bed, astride her naked body, trying to make her breathe by means of artificial respiration; and seeing his tears dripping on the purple-lipped knife wound over her heart, thought she was beginning to bleed again. He felt such a fury of frustration he began beating her senselessly about the face and shoulders, cursing in a sobbing voice, “Breathe, Goddamit, breathe!”35

  It is only in the relationships we manage that we exist at all. Excluded from many common human relationships, self-exiled from others, Jesse and Kriss form a relationship that both know instinctively is the only relationship that remains possible to them, a relationship that leaves one dead and the other just as effectively destroyed, but a relationship—an existence, however desperate, however brief—nonetheless.

  15

  A Serious Savage

  In Paris anew, lugging his old self heavily along on his back like that oversize trunk, wearing it like his “second skin” of brown and black tweed jacket and charcoal brown slacks, Himes continued his underground life, “weird, grotesque, a drunken Walpurgisnacht.”1 Barrels of drink went down him. Obsessively he picked up any woman he could find who would consent to go along with him, students, prostitutes; it was only necessary that they come within earshot, sit at the next table, meet his eyes. His temper flared at the slightest provocation or none at all: at some imagined slight or mere glance. In isolation he grew paranoid, certain that others intended him physical harm, and took to carrying both a knife and a crescent wrench wrapped with machinist’s tape everywhere he went. He was purging America from his mind, he said, but destroying himself in the bargain.

  I needed women desperately, not just for sex but safety, to help me control my temper. And I needed women to help restore my ego, which had taken such a beating in New York. I needed women to comfort me, to wait on me, to cook for me, to keep house for me, to talk to me, to assure me that I was not alone. And I needed English-speaking women to translate for me as much as to make love to me for I couldn’t speak the language.2

  Need so acute and all-embracing, of course, might better be called by some other name.

  He was staying at the Hotel Royer-Collard in the Latin Quarter. At first Willa, infrequently, visited, but both had come to realize soon upon Himes’s return that the bond once so strong between them had dissolved. Only passion, their sexual craving for one another, trailed on. And over time, as Himes began making bitter accusations, Willa withdrew, further underscoring his isolation. Here, as in so many aspects of Himes’s life, the biographer, sorting his notecards, attributing motive and design in retrospect, proceeds at peril. Just why did Himes commit this great mistake of returning to the States? Much as, looking back, one educes a line of development from the protest and autobiographical novels through the farce of Pinktoes to the freewheeling parodic comedy of the Harlem novels, as though the author at some level had thought all this through, one imposes patterns a posteriori on the eventual materials of life. Surely the sole reason Himes had for returning was to discover what had become of the bond between Willa and himself, to salvage what he could of the relationship or else put it to rest. Yet one knows that for Himes decisions were often impulsive, made in a
cquiescence to influences buffeting him along in some particular direction, or taken in sudden, existential leaps. Fighter pilots are taught when caught up in complex, potentially paralyzing situations just to do something, anything, that might trigger a new chain of events. It’s a tactic Himes understood.

  Still, all was hardly unadulterated blight and despair. Ollie Harrington’s Café Tournon circle had supplanted Wright’s at the Monaco as expatriate central. Locals and tourists alike flocked to watch Ollie, looking “like Spencer Tracy in Cannery Row, painted brown,”3 reign over his pickup band of social comics, storytellers, and hardscrabble intellectuals, men without countries all. These included the painters Herb Gentry, Berthel and Larry Potter, journalist Frank Van Bracken, who was Paris correspondent for Ebony, mathematician Josh Leslie, Ish Kelley (model for Fishbelly in Wright’s The Long Dream), and William Gardner Smith’s old friend and fellow Philadelphian novelist/newsman Richard Gibson. Wright often dropped by after lunch to play pinball. Himes quickly became with Bill Smith and Walter Coleman a central figure. After spending mornings writing in the Café au Dé part or one of many others along Boulevard Saint-Michel, Chester would have lunch in his room—sharing both lunch and bed with a woman, if one could be found—then settle in for afternoons at the Tournon, he and Bill Smith and Ollie swapping eights and casting off dirty dozens as they vied to outdo one another in improvisations that straggled on long into the evening.