Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Instead of “beating that boy” with his now acclaimed friend and plotting further literary success of his own, Chester spent his time with Eddie Himes. His older brother now lived with his wife near Strivers Row. Less ambitious than either Joe Jr. or Chester and a product—“victim” might be a better word—of a thoroughly Jim Crow education, Eddie worked as a maître d’ at a New York restaurant. The brothers ate fried chicken and biscuits and watched professional wrestling on television, which in his brief life among the literati Chester had “always considered the prime pastime of morons.” But in the winter of 1952 the unhurried comfort felt good. It helped being around an older brother who couldn’t reject him, even if he barely knew him. “I’m like an animal,” Chester wrote later, “when I’m hurt and lonely I want to go off alone in my hole and lick my wounds.”

  For Christmas of 1951 Carl Van Vechten had mailed him a “devastatingly penetrating” card, one that oddly mirrored Chester’s own troubles. The Negro, thought Van Vechten, was Harlequin, the acrobatic, black-masked clown of Italian Renaissance improvisational theater. Chester admitted that the assessment, comparing blacks of the western world with entertaining playthings, “hurt a little,” but the “thing to do is be what we must and make it pay whatever way it might.” Alone and putting off the scrounging for menial jobs he knew was inevitable, Chester squirreled away the hardest weeks of the winter at his typewriter. He told himself that the next novel, as deeply autobiographical as the prison manuscript, would make his literary reputation.

  In April Margot Johnson reported the successful sale of the prison manuscript to Coward-McCann, for an advance of $1200. He believed that the book would be published under the title Debt of Time, but ultimately it would be called Cast the First Stone. Chester would finally publish the book he’d worked on for almost fifteen years. In 1998, Chester’s second wife, Lesley, would publish the uncut manuscript that he drafted as Yesterday Will Make You Cry. That three-section book includes a middle part, “Flood of Tears,” charting in detail Chester’s adolescence in St. Louis and Cleveland, discussing his arrests, anxiety concerning his sexual development, and Jean’s first marriage.

  Yesterday Will Make You Cry and Cast the First Stone are quite similar, but Cast the First Stone benefits from the removal of the middle section, which slowed the narrative pace and slackened the development of the main character, Jimmy Monroe, in prison. Yesterday Will Make You Cry is considerably more sentimental and nearly apologetic. If, as Van Vechten told people, Coward-McCann insisted on changes to the manuscript they bought, those edits heightened and focused the dramatic tension and improved its quality. The other key difference is in the ending of the books: there’s a suicide in Cast the First Stone, but Duke Dido survives in Yesterday Will Make You Cry. Meanwhile, Chester used the excised material in the autobiographical novel about his family, The Third Generation. He completed a draft of the new project in that spring of 1952.

  Selling the prison novel revitalized him. Feeling reconciled with his past and confident about his future meant one direction for a black man like Chester. He rekindled his romance with fiery Vandi Haygood. In the 1970s, he downplayed what having been awarded the advance money for Cast the First Stone meant: “the first thing I desired now that I had money was to sleep with a white woman,” he recollected. However, the classy Haygood always meant more to him than easy sex. Chester said as early as April that he would be traveling to Europe “with a friend” and, by the end of the summer, he was fantasizing about a permanent tie. It was difficult to separate Haygood’s value to him both as an individual intimately familiar with his professional life and her status as a white woman. He had described to others his first kiss with Vandi as “penetrating as the moment of conception.” Chester also believed that when their affair had begun, during the war, Haygood had fallen in love. Now that Vandi was divorced and had moved to New York, he had the opportunity to see whether their physical attraction had more depth.

  After the Rosenwald Fund closed in 1948, Haygood had become an executive at the Institute of International Education, a private group with healthy ties to the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. The IIE promoted world peace through education and aided foreign students and scholars seeking access to American universities. Haygood orchestrated the foundation’s relations with governments and funding agencies.

  Notwithstanding the IIE’s prestigious connections, there was an aura of scandal and political intrigue at the foundation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, liberal efforts toward racial amity and peaceful international relations faced cruel scrutiny and accusation as part of a supposed international Communist conspiracy. In 1948 IIE president Laurence Duggan was denounced as a Communist courier by the professional anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers. A short time later, Duggan was found dead on the sidewalk, apparently having fallen from his office window. Some prominent government officials believed he had been murdered.

  In spite of its hazards, the world inhabited by Haygood was one of comfortable, upper-middle-class white privilege. In 1952, when Chester began seeing her regularly, Haygood’s office had just moved to the fifty-room Gould-Whitney-Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue, with solid-marble sinks and gold plumbing. Her home life was like work. Haygood’s fashionable apartment on E. Twenty-Second Street included the key to Gramercy Park, an exclusive gated garden.

  Bucklin Moon came over to Vandi’s apartment during the summer and, after a legendary evening at the bottle, he confirmed Chester’s Doubleday nightmare by narrating the behind-the-scene circumstances hindering the publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go. He insisted to Chester, as the writer reported to Bill Targ, that “he did all he could for me, but there was little he could do.” In the process of divorcing his wife that year, and having been unceremoniously fired by Doubleday a few months earlier, Moon was battling for his own career and falling into severe depression. The threat of being denounced as a Communist hung over his head too. In the spring of 1953 he was fired from his next job, at Collier’s, after the magazine received threats from an advertising pressure group that charged Moon with being “subversive,” one of the Red Scare words for Communist. If Moon faced this kind of pressure, Chester’s portion might well be double.

  Soon enough, the façade of settled life with Vandi Haygood began to mottle and blister. Haygood was brash and unpredictable and, according to Mollie Moon’s friend Polly Johnson, a “nymphomaniac.” To Chester, her keeping a black man meant an opportunity for a libidinal earthiness, to get vulgar without fear of losing her desirability or her standing. When the booze wore off and the allure of sex with a white society woman waned, he realized that Haygood was suspicious of his leaning on her financially and was “impatient for the money to start pouring in.” He also acquired one of her vices, the over-the-counter stimulant Dexamyl, which Vandi took faithfully to increase her productivity.

  In desperation, during the summer Chester returned to the New Prospect Hotel in Sullivan County to serve as a bellhop and switchboard substitute. While there, he received a telegram from William Targ, who was now working at World Publishers. For $2000, that Cleveland-based press was acquiring the hulking manuscript Chester was calling The Cord; it would be published as The Third Generation. The book presented two formal problems: the crisis of patriarchal authority in an African American family at the bottom of a caste system, and the dilemma of sexual desire in a male child growing up in such a family. The Cord reproduced his life in consummate detail, smoothly moving from the birth of Chester’s character, Charles Taylor, in Lincoln, Missouri, to his childhood in Mississippi, fleshed out by sections featuring Pine Bluff and St. Louis and his brother’s blinding. The last third concluded with Charles Taylor’s young adulthood in Cleveland. However, the character based on Chester does not wind up in prison; instead, Charles Taylor’s family rescues him from downfall. Chester explained the disaster of the fictionalized marriage by imagining his parents’ wedding night and portraying Lillian, Estelle’s surrogate, as the victim of ma
rital rape. After that, her color complex sets in. He emphasized the conjunction between traumatic moments of violence, death, and horror on the one hand and young Charles’s sensual growth away from his mother toward other sources of libidinal fulfillment. The novel shows the boy securing his erotic passion to substitutes for Lillian, light-skinned women who symbolically join violence, sexual attraction, and death. None of the mounting tragedies that occur in the narrative are connected to white oppression or economic deprivation. Chester resolved the drama by solemnly reuniting the nuclear family at the deathbed of the father and severing the “cord” between mother and son.

  When he got World’s telegram, he packed his bags and returned from upstate to New York City, ready to commit to Haygood as a breadwinner even as he also prepared to sail to France. He had written his Cleveland buddy Dan Levin, who was living in Paris on the GI Bill, for pointers on hotels and travel details. Chester also sent letters to Jean Chastel at his French publisher, Corréa, alerting him to his likely arrival in Paris and his hope to sell at least two new manuscripts.

  The most important contact he renewed was with Richard Wright. In early October Chester broke the self-imposed silence, which he had thought necessary because of the career mishaps after Lonely Crusade was published. Chester thanked Wright for delivering the preface for the French edition of Lonely Crusade, which had praised the novel in grand language as “written with the most impeccable care” and creating “an indubitably genuine picture.” Chester explained the new U.S. nadir as the House and Senate committees investigating un-American activities unleashed their force, slicing away free speech and cracking down on labor unions and alternative political forums. A “vital center” wave of conformity swept the nation. As “the only one over whom they could exert no control,” and with “access to the public,” Chester thought that Wright’s intellectual leadership heaved “literary criticism and the liberal group” in the direction of justice. As for his own part in the public debate, Chester let Wright know that he was publishing the candid prison novel. “Maybe the boys can stand the truth about life in a state prison,” Himes sounded out, referring to his critics, “better than they can stand the truth about life in the prison of being Negro in America.” Wright encouraged him to try living overseas.

  “Working hard” and “never happier,” Chester spent the fall of 1952 revising The Cord and preparing for the publication of Cast the First Stone. Initially scheduled for release in October, Cast the First Stone was pushed back to January 1953; The Cord would have to be delayed as well. But with one book nearly published and the other in production, these were minor hurdles. In November Chester noted rosily to Van Vechten that he and Haygood would “probably be married sometime next year.” He was seduced by a vision of long-lasting prosperity. None of his peers had pulled off what he was now assured to do: publish, within months of each other, two hefty novels of daring social critique—one ripping the cover off prison life in America and the other an unsparing portrait of intraracial and Oedipal conflict in a black family. Who would be able to deny that he was a marvelously successful novelist? Even sweeter, he was involved with an educated white woman living off Gramercy Park whose money he could accept without qualm—both because he wasn’t financially desperate and because she was a career woman in a socially esteemed profession. Notwithstanding the dip in quality of his publishers, which he could tell himself was due to the hard-hitting subject matter, he was as ambitious as he had ever been.

  Proudly, he escorted Haygood to Van Vechten’s Central Park West home to see Carl’s photographs and original American paintings. Chester now confided to friends that he should have divorced Jean “a long time ago, right after Lonely Crusade was published.” Clingy, needy, and self-conscious, Jean had been unsuited to him: “Jean couldn’t bear the things I wrote nor the processes of my thoughts which caused me to write them.” She was appalled by Chester’s willingness to mine details from the most acute tragedies of their lives, the typical practice of even the most original of writers. In contrast, Haygood seemed like a veteran of literary and cultural combat who could stand all assaults. By the time The Cord was submitted to World at the end of November, Chester was writing fast again, back to The End of a Primitive, the novel he had begun after Yaddo that would reveal the sexual intimacies of an interracial couple. He was convinced that his finger was on the pulse and he could appeal to American tastes.

  But at Christmas, always an important symbolic holiday for Chester because of his pleasant childhood memories, something began to teeter. Domestic tranquility had never been his strong suit, and Haygood was rambunctious and fractious. Chester always maintained that she was also having affairs. Whether or not that was true, his lurking suspicion was a blow to his ego. “I think Vandi hurt you dreadfully,” one of his closest confidantes later told him. So Chester left the apartment and on Christmas night, with the help of a bottle of King’s Ransom scotch, he drank himself under the table with Jean, who had returned from a stint in California, and was lodged a few blocks away on the West Side. Before he blacked out, he tussled with the police and his wife’s female roommate.

  What ensued was a bad rift with Haygood. Within two days he telephoned Van Vechten asking to be hosted again, this time for cocktails, an attempt at an olive branch to Vandi. Van Vechten obliged them with a toast of mulled wine for New Year’s 1953. Chester and Haygood “really ‘went’ for” the rarefied treatment. Nevertheless, Chester’s personal life continued to unravel.

  On the Sunday after the new year, he and Haygood threw a giddy celebratory party and invited Fanny and Ralph Ellison, now literary New York’s most sought-after black couple. Having secured on December 31 an advance of $500 from World for a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Black Boogie Woogie, Chester felt prosperous enough to socialize with Ellison. It had been five years.

  The men’s mutual friend Horace Cayton was the other guest. Cayton’s life in New York was a cautionary tale. He had been sexually intimate with Vandi Haygood in Chicago, but had been living hand to mouth in Manhattan since 1949. Cayton’s world consisted of occasionally lecturing at City College, donating blood to buy cheap wine, writing a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, and checking himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. An alcoholic art collector, Cayton liked to store valuable works of art for safekeeping with friends like Vandi Haygood and Ralph Ellison. His friends were using terms like “magnificent ruin” and “tragic” to describe him. Doubt, regret, and despair were hallmarks of any conversation with him; nonetheless, regardless of his inner trial, he always retained his outer dignity. Chester identified quite strongly with Cayton, whose high-achieving parents had come out of Mississippi, who was about Eddie’s age, and who was inclined to deal with life’s anguish by quoting black minstrel Bert Williams.

  By contrast Ralph Ellison was fond of quoting Aristotle, his personality and point of view on life in the United States now occasionally regal. By early 1953, Ellison had ended his radical days as New Masses editor and left-wing critic of American commercialism and racism. To Chester, after nearly ten years of acquaintance, Ellison was now something of a mirror opposite of his earlier image: hubristically youthful (to the point of even moving his birth year forward), invincible, and full of himself.

  After the miracle year of reviews, Ellison was that week hearing rumblings that he would win the National Book Award for fiction. Even Life seemed to bow down and scrape, when in 1952 it had, through the energetic orchestration of Gordon Parks, featured Ellison’s novel photo-dramatized by Parks as “A Man Becomes Invisible.” Chester, fearing “atomalypse,” took this as a sign of Ellison’s complete identification with right-wing power or, at the very least, his willingness to be used by it. As he wrote to William Targ a year later, he understood the buildup of Ellison in the Luce press as less an endorsement of Invisible Man than a repudiation of Richard Wright. In March, Life’s sister magazine Time would in fact pit Ellison, whom they termed “an abler U.S. Negro novelist,”
against Wright.

  To Vandi Haygood, Ellison was a former needy Rosenwald applicant whom she had helped launch and who now had experienced great fortune with her nurturing and approval. She endorsed the new attitude that seemed to find unlimited possibility from American resources, and that did not dwell on racial conflict. She was also stimulated by famous, powerful men.

  The small party of intimates was an awkward one, and it eventually caused Chester embarrassment. Ellison apparently bragged that he had been interviewed by Luce’s deputies at Time-Life prior to the Parks story. Cayton and Himes joked about his covenant with the kingmakers and took sly digs at Ellison for a public comment he had made that amounted to the claim that professional success had ended his personal experience with racial discrimination. “I have joined the human race,” Ellison reportedly said, referring to all that had been made possible on account of the accolades given his work. As Chester got further into his cups, he became morose and bombastic. He drunkenly bragged to Ellison that The Cord would be “great like Shakespeare,” and Ellison mocked him, repeating, “Great. Great.” Drunken or not, Chester believed by early 1953 that The Cord was “the best of all” his novels and would have been deeply offended by Ellison’s ridicule. Their new year’s discord set the stage for yet another portrait of Ellison in the novel Chester was working on, The Primitive. The rivalries climaxed when, after more rounds of drunken heckling, Chester shoved or threatened Haygood, depending upon the witness. Ellison maintained that Himes picked up a butcher’s cleaver and menaced Haygood, only subsiding when Ellison manhandled him. Himes and Ellison then verged on coming to blows, and Ellison liked to recall that Chester was “too chicken” to turn the weapon “on a man.” Cayton remembered that Chester “was mad and acting off his nut.”