Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  In another serious misfortune, Hugo Johnson had an accident in August, fully disabling the Mercury Coupe. Chester and Hugo searched futilely at the local Ford dealer for parts to repair the vehicle. When they returned home, Jean was missing. After searching by torchlight, they found Jean three miles away from the ranch, stumbling and sobbing in the desert. Chester assumed the worst: that she had been raped. But Jean had not been assaulted; she was distraught after reading the manuscript of Lonely Crusade. Jean believed that she served as the model for Ruth, the wife of the protagonist Lee Gordon, a character who “felt a sense of inferiority because her skin was brown.” In the novel, Chester has Ruth smearing white powder on her face after concluding that her husband is having an affair with a white woman. Ruth’s feet of clay were on much greater display in her depiction as a manipulative social climber, whose appearance called to mind “that beaten, whorish look of so many other Negro women.” Few wives would not have been disturbed by the neurotic, unappealing character resembling themselves physically and written by their husbands. Hugo calmed his sister by reminding her that the next bus out of Susanville, the nearest town, wasn’t for another twelve hours. As before in New York, Jean went home to Chester. But she “hated” the novel. Jean was right to perceive that the depiction of Ruth was a more direct severing of their tie. Chester would only ever go as far as admitting, “I often wondered if I had drawn a true picture of which I was not consciously aware.” Chester would dedicate the book to Hugo.

  Jean’s outcry was a suitable finale to the summer. With the car destroyed, the Himeses had no way to get provisions and had to surrender California. In September Chester sent the manuscript off to Blassingame, who then delivered it to Knopf on October 7, 1946. Chester and Jean took a bus to Reno and then a train to New York. They checked in at the Theresa Hotel, the Harlem crossroads, on October 14.

  Chester and Jean reconciled in the midst of interesting a better publisher for his next book. Again Chester appeared on the verge of significant achievement. As Ebony magazine described him that year, he was “no great shakes as a success story,” yet “a good prospect” to become one. To fulfill that hopeful mandate meant continuing to live in style. By mid-October Chester had secured quarters in Wading River, Long Island, about seventy-five miles from Manhattan. The Himeses lived on the second floor in a small four-room carriage house on a nine-acre beachfront estate owned by Columbia University neurologist Frank Safford. Safford had the estate set up as a writers’ colony during the summer, usually hosting the New Yorker staff. The Saffords’ large wooden home, occupied by a caretaker, sat near the beach, and a wooded hillside was stippled with small cottages. Except for when the Saffords, a family of five, came out for Christmas 1946, Chester and Jean passed the fall by themselves, with the sea and the small upper-crust town of Wading River, where the white residents were “too well-heeled and secure to worry about a black couple in their neighborhood.” He sounded confident in a message to Langston Hughes about their new lodging, where he could put the “finishing touches” on his book.

  The staff at Alfred A. Knopf was impressed by what he had done. Knopf reader Clinton Simpson understood immediately that Himes had written something of an existentialist novel, since it used Marxist material and economic critiques, alongside modern concerns about sexuality and unconscious drives, concluding with hard-fought personal affirmations of liberty and choice. Himes’s protagonist was considered to have “become a free man in a sense that he is finally free of the fear which has oppressed him all his life.” Knopf’s Milton Rugoff noted that the “raw and fiery” book compared favorably with Wright’s Native Son and carried real depth: “sheer intensity of feeling” and “the heartbreaking effect of constant defeat, and fear that can be dissolved only by violence.” Knopf agreed to publish the book and it took an option for an exclusive look at his next. As Simpson had written when he encouraged Knopf to take on the project, “He doesn’t strike me as likely ever to write best sellers, but he might become, if he is not already, one of the finest Negro novelists.” Chester signed the contract on November 6, 1946.

  Boutique-size, patrician Knopf, the firm founded in 1915 by the married business partners Blanche and Alfred A. Knopf, was for Chester a bright improvement over Doubleday. Then in her early fifties, Blanche Knopf typically vetted and edited the fiction list of about one hundred titles per year. Van Vechten and the influential journalist H. L. Mencken were two of her closest friends. She had, through Van Vechten, published Langston Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and she worked with other hard-boiled writers to whom Chester was or would be compared, such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Like her editorial team, Blanche Knopf believed that Chester was writing “one of the most dramatic and striking stories of Negro life.”

  His old colleagues learned of his good news. Bucklin Moon was admitting now, in the pages of New Republic, that “southern liberals” and “a great many white readers in the North” hadn’t been ready for Chester’s first book. Convinced that Himes was at least a budding star, Moon considered it a milestone to have worked with Chester, the new master of the “psychological lynching.”

  Despite signing the new contract, money remained a problem. After Doubleday had been repaid to release him from his contract, he had only a few hundred dollars up front, and a monthly allotment from Knopf of perhaps one hundred dollars to last through the winter. Chester hatched a new plan. He returned to the Julius Rosenwald Fund, hoping to follow Wright out of the United States. Chester knew that having a contract with Knopf would help, but his project was dreamy and lacking strong purpose. He wanted to “travel abroad for a year—England, France, Russia, India, and China—to broaden my knowledge of the cultures of the world, and thereby add depth and objectivity to my potential contribution towards a better world.” As he had since his experience on the Cleveland Writers’ Project, Chester sought reprieve from “the immediate influence of American racial oppression.” During Christmas he hoped to pitch the travel idea to William Haygood, Vandi’s husband, who had returned home from the Army to resume his work at the Rosenwald Fund.

  At Thanksgiving weekend, a recently wedded Fanny and Ralph Ellison shared the carriage house, delighting in “the good food, the marvelous talk, the long walk on the beach and in the woods.” Chester was pleased to spend time with Ellison, who had become more opinionated since Wright left the United States. Before the couple arrived, Chester wrote to Ellison asking to borrow “Lenin’s Principles of Marxism or any of Lenin’s discussions on dialectical materialism in pamphlet or booklet form.” Ellison almost certainly shared the materials, which then made their way into Chester’s novel, in the form of speeches and lectures between principal characters. Ellison also brought Bucklin Moon’s New Republic article touting the strength of If He Hollers Let Him Go.

  Chester and Ellison hunted and drank and, by and large, the outing was pleasant and affectionate. Ellison had spent a good portion of the previous spring and summer camped out in a cabin in Quogue, southeast of Wading River, and he was working on a new topic, different from the bitter novel of a downed black airman that he had shared with Chester in the fall of 1944. However, their more intense discussions now had an increasingly competitive edge. Thirty-seven-year-old Chester and the thirty-three-year-old Ellison tussled over who was most politically astute, who best understood the nature of black life in America, which literary techniques and literary masters were the most important, and who was capable of surpassing the achievement of Richard Wright.

  By 1946, Ellison was becoming a sought-after cultural analyst of growing importance. He had reached his largest national audience in Saturday Review that summer, and that fall he was drafting an essay for Survey Graphic, slated to appear side by side with Chester’s older academic friends E. Franklin Frazier and Sterling Brown. Ellison believed that the tradition of white American writing, from Herman Melville to Ernest Hemingway, created empty shadows of black people and this practice had hallowed out t
he country’s democratic ideals. Taking the view that black people were completely healthy when properly recognized, Ellison was distancing himself from his black friends who were fully committed to the idea that racism had damaged and made black people—men in particular—fearful. Speaking more like a college professor—he had given lectures at Bennington that fall—Ellison now sharply critiqued Horace Cayton’s pet idea of a “fear-hate-fear” complex operating in the mind of black men. During a meeting that summer, he pointed out to Cayton that while he had accurately determined “certain general aspects of Negro personality,” he “underplay[ed] the subjective element,” which was completely necessary to understand individual black people as well as a work of art.

  Instead of the problem of fear, Ellison valued “the blues,” for him an artistic kit that solved a variety of life’s dilemmas, in a manner similar to the way that Albert Camus was pushing for “the absurd” in his Myth of Sisyphus, “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation.” Ellison thought that the musical art form emanating from the Mississippi Delta had the capacity to “transcend” the “jagged grain” of experience “not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” And while Richard Wright himself had been suspicious of Ellison’s concept of “the blues” as an explanatory device to unpack Wright’s memoir Black Boy, Ellison in turn rejected the Earl Conrad creation of the “blues school,” which Cayton had echoed in a column.

  In the discussion with Chester, Ellison, who had been raised, for the most part, by a single mother, insisted that the black family had a matriarchal cast. Although this was one of E. Franklin Frazier’s points, Chester was disgusted that his erudite friend would so easily concede what was then considered an admission of the immorality of black women or the uncivilized nature of black people. Chester accurately reproduced Ellison’s arguments in Lonely Crusade. The point was to show Ellison’s arrogance and embarrass him, the hector who “for three hours” propounded “learnedly and vehemently that the Negro family unit was matriarchal.” Chester wrote in the novel, “It was like tearing the heart out of reason to learn of the Negro scholar who not only was convinced, himself, of his own inferiority, but went to great scholastic lengths to prove why it was so.” To Chester, black matriarchy and black women’s white-collar financial success were prime evidence of general African American dishonor under segregation. If winning a place among white elites meant admitting base facts about black people, Chester would remain the outsider.

  Although the diverging styles of the two writers, the composer and the counterpuncher, did not ruin the weekend—one that the Ellisons pleasurably recalled as “one of our best times”—Ralph and Fanny could also be prickly, such as when a book they had lent that week wasn’t returned promptly. Jean, gracious and glamorous in dealings with Fanny, yet another black professional woman with an advanced degree from a white university, tried to smooth it over, sending a note: “Hope it didn’t cause any troubles or apologies.” Not long after the encounter with Ellison, Chester lost interest in discussing his work with anyone during composition. “I am intolerant of all opinions but my own and do not want to hear any others and am greatly disturbed and distracted by them,” he decided.

  For Chester, the period from Thanksgiving to well after Christmas was an occasion for toil, “long and steadily without a day’s letup,” to correct his manuscript. There were also a couple of occasions of pathos. On December 21, Chester’s first cousin Gerald Wiggins walked up to his girlfriend, Mattie Muldrew, while she waited for a Cleveland streetcar and gunned her down. He then fled a short distance to a parked car and turned the weapon on himself. Gerald died and Mattie survived. Somehow Joseph Senior’s hospital bill from his emergency surgery wound up with Chester, a whopping $977. The basic rationale of his Rosenwald application, “I want to go to Europe so I can see America better,” did not appropriately distinguish him. One dramatic difference between his applications of 1943 and 1946 was in his support team, now all white: UCLA sociologist Leonard Bloom, English novelist Jack Aistrop, Carl Van Vechten, Carey McWilliams, and Blanche Knopf. Though considerable, the support could lift up the underwhelming project only so far. “I wish that I could have been more convincing,” lamented Chester to William Haygood.

  Chester resubmitted the revised manuscript to Knopf in sections, beginning with a 425-page batch on January 13, 1947, and delivering all the pages not long after. The final report on Lonely Crusade came back to him on February 10. Knopf’s in-house reviewers applauded his efforts. “Himes has done everything we could expect,” they decided, “in smoothing out and tightening this manuscript.” Now, after having yielded to the process of writing and revising for two years, Chester was face-to-face with himself. He awaited the galley proofs “experiencing a sense of letdown, tired and broke and wish to hell I was out in California with a coupla thousand bucks.” Chester recognized by then how badly he desired respectability, but he also realized that “the circle of restraint” weakened him as a writer. As for what he had accomplished, he was hopeful but circumspect. The novel had run to 540 manuscript pages, and Chester knew it was an opus at least; perhaps it was a masterpiece, a life’s work.

  Once the manuscript was off, Chester and Jean returned from Wading River and again billeted at the twelve-story Theresa Hotel, the “Waldorf of Harlem.” Despite its nickname, the costly hotel was drab, run-down, and gloomy inside, a crumbling edifice of segregation that exploited black Americans who had no first-class options. At the Theresa he comported himself as a sport and started putting himself in a deep financial hole. Combined with the flashy intemperance he’d acquired as a Cleveland dandy, Chester also succumbed to bouts of heavy drinking to bridge the gaps between major projects. Soon strapped for cash, Chester had started to tinker with his prison novel, hoping that Knopf might also take that book. Then he drew on his “secret understanding” with Richard Wright, who had returned from France that month. Wright picked up the telephone and Chester got $500 in a few hours from the Authors League. On February 1, the Himeses settled into better rooms at 421 W. 147th Street, in the artsy Hamilton Heights neighborhood, between Convent and St. Nicholas Avenues.

  To address more directly their economic predicament, Jean took a job as recreational director for Girls Camp, a residential facility on Welfare Island, off Manhattan, where delinquent girls were detained before trial in the youth court, and, if necessary, treated with psychiatric therapy. The teenage Billie Holiday had been confined there in the late 1920s. Jean was the consummate professional in this demanding job and, again, she impressed her colleagues and supervisors and made friends. Feeling pinched and his ego bruised, Chester started casting about for more money. Rashly, he asked Lurton Blassingame, his agent, to pursue a book contract for the prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry with Knopf. When Van Vechten found out, he scolded Chester for behaving like an amateur. “No publisher is likely to be interested in two books at once,” he counseled. Besides, the topic of that novel hadn’t changed from when it had been rejected years earlier. To be published at all, reminded a loyal Van Vechten, it needed “some preparation and explanation in the right quarters before it is read.” Shifting gears, Chester pressed his agent to return to Knopf with a new proposal, Immortal Mammy, a novel about a black woman raised in a white neighborhood as the exceptional black child.

  Chester worked hard drafting the outline for this next project and staying abreast of new material on race relations, for instance through the winter issue of Survey Graphic. When edited by Alain Locke twenty-three years earlier, Survey had inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance. Now, Thomas Sancton, a provocative young crusading journalist from New Orleans, was continuing the special-issue tradition. Chester was tickled by the “artistic flow of language” and logic in Sancton’s essay, and by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s “blunt attack.” He also learned that the article Ellison had been working hard on for that issue, later published as “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of
Humanity,” had been rejected.

  Chester, on the other hand, was feeling quite well liked across racial lines. His friend William Haygood told him to drop by the New Yorker Hotel on March 13 to talk about art and fellowships; a few days later, Van Vechten had a group to his home for a small photography exhibit, as well as a piano recital by black critic George Schuyler’s talented daughter Phillipa.

  Then Blanche Knopf offered a contract for Immortal Mammy. Blassingame requested a $2000 advance, with $350 on signing and the rest paid out in monthly installments. This was an improvement beyond the $500 advance that Chester seems to have received for Lonely Crusade. Chester thought the terms of the contract could be improved and he debated whether or not he ought to sign it, not knowing how well Lonely Crusade might do and after the bad experience of indebtedness with Doubleday. He rushed off a letter to Haygood, trying to sniff out his chances for the Rosenwald fellowship, which would not be announced until May. Haygood wired him to accept the Knopf contract.

  He did. On April 30 Knopf sent out the paperwork and he returned it to them on May 5. If Lonely Crusade did well, perhaps he could go into hibernation again and spend the demanding twelve-hour days writing another strong work. But Chester’s exceptional work habits in 1946 would be battered by the difficulties of his life. After finishing proofs of the galleys, which had arrived in late May, he found himself needing to get away from New York as well as from the burden of the image of himself he had concocted, the hard-drinking, candid black cynic. “We simply must get away from here,” he confessed to Van Vechten, “both for morale and health.”

  Chester and Jean escaped Manhattan in early June, taking off for several days to Westford, Vermont, to the home of his friends from Los Angeles Helen and Bill Smith. Agreeing with Chester’s assessment of the corrosive dimension of race relations in Los Angeles, the Smiths had moved to Vermont in October. Eight months later the Smiths weren’t quite sure that they had not made a tragic mistake; initially they had considered relocating to Haiti. Vermont had won out because of the access to Boston and New York, its legendary history as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the easy route to Canada. Bill Smith was “riding out another recurrence of doubt and depression” about his abode and his career when Chester and Jean arrived. He had submitted the manuscript of a book called God Is for White Folks to publishers under the pseudonym Will Thomas and been told, in essence, that he belonged to a lesser breed of humanity. One editor had replied, “I do not see a very promising future for a writer who would probably continue to base his writings upon Negro more than human situations and problems.” In Smith’s kitchen, he and Chester consoled each other over pipes filled with marijuana.