Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Predictably, he was preoccupied with sex. European women were reputed to have thoroughly modern sexual mores and to be fascinated by black men, some of them even possessing an “immoderate curiosity.” Chester was disappointed. “I don’t know exactly what I expected to get in Paris but whatever it was, I didn’t get it.” The well-known fleshpots on Place Pigalle had all the sensuality of a female locker room or public lavatory; the sex shows in Montmartre were gimmicky “tourist traps.” He described it all as “exceedingly dull.”

  As it did to many Americans, classic Paris appealed to him: the Seine, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and the sidewalk cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés, Deux Magots in particular. His favorite person early on was Ruth Phillips, a black woman who worked at the U.S. embassy. She allowed him to purchase duty-free cigarettes and alcohol there and, when he made a pass at her, “could say no and mean it with [such] good humor.” Ruth was involved with another man, but she and Chester flirted eagerly.

  A bustling and confident Richard Wright dominated the American café colony. His helm for loud discussions of creative writing, the race problem in its global dimensions, and communism was the Café Monaco, just down the street from his house. At the café, Chester, who owed Wright money and gratitude for his support, was inevitably tagged as Wright’s ally. But hanging out with him presented a dilemma. Chester was drawn to Wright equally for his success and his intelligent dramatization of the racial conflict and the western condition. However, Wright lacked the charm and savoir faire of a man like Ralph Ellison, even if he managed his success with less haughtiness.

  In Wright, Chester sometimes observed a man who couldn’t quite handle the wheel of an automobile, who overpaid for his clothes and still didn’t look well attired. Chester was a suave dresser and a keen bargainer, as well as a raconteur with flair in the idiom of cotton row or a street-corner crap game. Up close in France, Chester could perceive that his panache was lost on Wright, who regarded his friend’s criminal past as less a problem of circumstance and teenage impetuousness than that of a man committed to a life of “wild and raging fury.” Chester took the assessment to mean that Wright also believed him a man of “adventure without responsibilities.” To top it off, Wright had a fairly crude sense of humor and took pleasure in speculation on the sex lives of others, perhaps especially of Chester’s.

  At times Wright’s friendliness seemed calculated. Chester began to suspect that Wright’s grandiose show of friendship, reeling him into the café every morning, was the tactic of a competitor, preoccupying his time so that Chester would be shut off from the real literary tastemakers. Chester made a few publishers’ parties, one for Henry Miller at Corréa’s office near Place de l’Odéon, and another with the art set on Ile de la Cité. But he had no French and he didn’t apprehend the rhythm of the packed gatherings where people gorged themselves on champagne, canapés, and caviar. Once, when Wright invited him to a literary reception, he abandoned Chester in the crowd; it wasn’t until many days later that he learned that Wright himself had been throwing the party for Simone de Beauvoir. Sadly, Chester always questioned Wright’s basic motives, even when Wright jockeyed on his behalf.

  Nevertheless, Chester followed Wright to the “gossipy little” Café Monaco. While everyone proclaimed the wonders of the cafés, the pleasures of being acknowledged as writers, and the freedom to sleep with white women and have no thought of gangs beating them up, Chester initially considered the black retinue surrounding Wright “a lost and unhappy lot” with whom communication was strained. Of course Chester perceived something slightly infuriating about being the author of two well-received novels, with a brand-new book out, and another on the way, while getting lumped with the other black scribblers, some without any talent at all, and some entirely unproved. Chester disliked the softness of this new generation of blacks abroad, quite different from the soldiers, artists, and entertainers who had preceded them in the 1920s. The new group, “bragging about their scars, their poor upbringing, and their unhappy childhood” embarrassed him; he thought of their antics as new form of Uncle Tomming, exploiting deprivation for sympathy.

  Of course a few of the men withstood his scrutiny. Ollie Harrington, in the process of making a tactical retreat that would take him eventually to live behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin, embodied charm, storytelling prowess, success in romantic affairs, and a determination to live up to his leftist convictions. Chester liked a young black painter from Baltimore named Walter Coleman, who seemed, in his love life, to be living out the pages of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Between Coleman and a group of blacks who had worked at the Liberian embassy, Chester was well supplied with scotch and bourbon during his first weeks.

  Most pleased to meet Chester was young William Gardner Smith, who had lavishly praised Chester’s writing in the black academic journal Phylon. Since they both lived on the same street as the Café Tournon, Chester got to know Smith, who had landed a job translating French into English at a news agency. Dashing, chipper, and a bit full of himself, Smith maintained himself at the café, a hangout for Jewish refugees, with an interracial circle of admirers, a “smaller, less wide-eyed” group than the loungers at Wright’s Monaco, but which, Chester had noticed, was “perhaps better informed.” Smith had just had his second novel, Anger at Innocence, a book with a white cast, selected by a French book club; his third novel, South Street, would be out before the end of 1954. He spoke French well, and he relaxed in the evenings over drinks at the Tournon.

  Probably reflecting on some of Smith’s misadventures later in the decade, Chester wanted it known that he judged Smith a man whose “most outstanding characteristic” was “youth and a naïveté.” But in their circle of black writers, Smith was known for his appreciation of the blues. He was also temperamentally a bit like Chester, a survivor of South Philadelphia’s deadly street-gang battles who then turned in the direction of radical protest against racial discrimination. Presuming Chester to have money, that April Smith successfully persuaded Chester to spring for an evening’s entertainment at the Roundhouse to see sultry Eartha Kitt, a protégée of the dancer Katherine Dunham, who would have a hit French record “C’est si Bon” that year. Smith, who had served in the occupation army in Germany, and Ollie Harrington were always on the lookout for girls. They were welcomed by northern Europeans and other Americans; the French girls typically shunned them—a palpable attitude of dissatisfaction with Americans.

  Chester had barely settled in when Vandi Haygood arrived at the first-rate Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Happy to turn the tables, she telegraphed him, COME QUICKLY: FOR YOU KNOW WHAT . . . If Chester had wanted a white woman as an obvious sign of his wealth and literary success, then Haygood was equally keen to announce herself abroad as a libertine by showily consuming a black lover. In the City of Light they cavorted like young lovers, “more affectionate than we had been at any time.” One evening Himes and Haygood were very nearly thrown out of Hôtel de Scandinavie for playing blues records and “being as discreet as customary in bed.” The episode became a minor legend in the quarter. When they weren’t in bed, they toured the city in a manner he would never duplicate. They had expensive dinners at La Tour d’Argent, La Méditerranée, Maxim’s, and Chope Danton, to the envy of the black regulars at the dingy cafés.

  After two weeks in Paris, Chester was invited to a Sunday afternoon reception hosted by Marion Putnam, and asked to bring his friend Richard Wright. Chester spent the morning at Wright’s apartment, hanging out and listening to blues records, until Wright got a knock at the door. In came a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduate working for the State Department and the FBI named G. David Schine. Schine assisted Roy Cohn, the chief leg man and interrogator for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, since January the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations and Red Scare architect. Schine and Cohn were harassing America’s European embassies that spring, blacklisting writers and books in embassy libraries that critiqued any aspect of the American way of li
fe, which was for them de facto evidence of a Communist conspiracy. Schine had pressured Marion Putnam to locate Wright.

  Schine demanded from Wright a statement about a State Department employee, whom Schine was trying to expose as a former member of the Chicago Communist John Reed Club. Wright spurned the request peremptorily, going as far as denying his own membership in the club, which was already public knowledge. The young inquisitor was nonplussed; in spite of Chester’s presence, he bragged that he could wrench and humiliate Wright, in the manner that the committee had succeeded in forcing Langston Hughes to recant his pro-socialist work just a few weeks before. But Richard Wright scoffed at Schine and ordered him out, telling Chester, “That stupid son of a bitch thinks he can threaten me.”

  After Schine left the apartment, the telephone rang. It was the twenty-eight-year-old literary critic and Harlem writer James Baldwin asking for a loan. Although Wright had a reputation for frugality, he agreed and at 5:00 P.M. he and Himes went to the Deux Magots terrace, to a table spilling onto the sidewalk.

  Chester claimed never to have met him before, the “small, intense young man of great excitability,” whom he had probably already crossed paths with at Connie’s restaurant in 1945. Often destitute, Baldwin was a sharply intelligent ragamuffin who enjoyed significant prestige in New York’s literary circles, only rivaled by Ralph Ellison. Baldwin understood Wright as nearly an institution, beyond the pale of criticism, and an abundant resource. Wright was used to fielding Baldwin’s requests, even as Wright was surprised by the tenacity of Baldwin’s scalding criticisms. Once, in December 1951, at a meeting of the black activist group Franco-American Fellowship, Wright had reprimanded Baldwin for having an “Uncle Tom attitude,” and a shouting match had erupted. Now Baldwin excitedly told Wright that he was expecting any day the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, after eight years of work. The novel reveals a tormented relationship between a black father and his son, a book that Baldwin believed exceeded Wright’s artistic achievement.

  For the most part, Baldwin found it “embarrassing” to be considered Wright’s friend, and he understood Wright’s work as Manichean, monochromatic, and wooden. He looked for avenues to assert his difference from Wright, and almost certainly because most French and American whites presumed that the men and their writings were so similar. However, none of this stood in the way of Baldwin’s asking Wright for money. As he told people in the United States about his on-and-off contretemps with Wright, “We’re perfectly pleasant to each other.”

  Over drinks they began to argue. Probably because Chester was present, Wright demanded an account for the criticisms of Native Son that Baldwin had published in Partisan Review, and would soon republish in his own book of essays. Chester, unaware of the backstory behind their feud, soon recognized the intense psychic energy each man invested in the dispute, which for Wright’s part was almost certainly an acknowledgment of how genuinely gifted he believed Baldwin was. “As I listened to them talk,” Chester remembered, he was surprised to discern “an exciting kind of relationship.” Wright enjoyed needling Baldwin (as he had once needled Ralph Ellison), but as the conversation reached deep water, Himes had every reason to understand, however slowly, that he was not just a witness to the conflict, but Wright’s codefendant, another writer whose work had been dismissed by Baldwin. Baldwin’s “Many Thousands Gone” claims that the “presupposition” of If He Hollers Let Him Go was exactly the same as second-rate “problem” literature: “black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.” Part of the difficulty Chester would encounter in having his forthcoming novel The Third Generation translated and issued by Parisian publishers was because of the influence of Baldwin’s critique of “protest” writing about American racial conditions, shared widely by elite American writers and critics.

  As the debate wore on, Chester was embarrassed to see Marion Putnam and her clique of artists approaching them. The newcomers sided with Baldwin, who was persuasive, a native New Yorker like Putnam, and seemed the underdog. When the argument proved to have a gravitas imperceptible to the others at first, Putnam and her associates left. As Wright and Baldwin hammered away at each other, Chester grasped the real underlying tension when Baldwin stammered “the sons must slay the fathers.” Baldwin would use the same term to describe Wright when he died: “my ally, my witness, and, alas!, my father.” The debate had traveled from cultural politics—even their own livelihoods—onto a more intimate ground. Wright and Baldwin had each figuratively slain their fathers, in their books Black Boy and Go Tell It on the Mountain, respectively; now Baldwin was taking aim at a living man. Chester, who had lost his own father three months earlier, was unique in not having the triumph over a father or father figure as a core component of his fiction. While he was in fact inserting the father-son complex in The Third Generation, he did not attribute much explanatory power to it. As a boy and as a man, Chester had witnessed his father in weakness and strength, as a real person struggling, loving, and sometimes succeeding, in a manner that his black literary peers simply had not experienced. Wright had not had an adult relationship with his father; Baldwin, Ellison, and William Gardner Smith had each been the outside child in a second marriage, never knowing their biological fathers. When Baldwin delivered his cry, a slightly drunken Chester Himes thought he had “taken leave of his senses.”

  The three switched venues, moving down Boulevard St.-Germain to the bluesy Rhumière Martinique. Baldwin tried then to persuade Wright to accept his famous highbrow critiques, since he had “written my book and you haven’t allowed any other black writer anything to write about.” Himes drank and Baldwin continued to argue that to advance the artistry of black writers, Wright’s achievement had to be torn down. Chester left them at one in the morning, the dispute showing no sign of easing. Chester made a joke out of the encounter. Since Baldwin had tied him and Wright together in “Many Thousands Gone,” for many weeks afterward, Chester teased Wright about “our boy” and “your son.” Since Baldwin bit the black hand that literally fed him, Chester wickedly renamed his book Go Shit on the Mountain.

  More fun for Chester than the art-versus-politics debate was to resume friendship with E. Franklin Frazier, the esteemed academic, and his wife, Marie. Living in Paris as the “chief of the Tensions Project” at the Applied Social Science division of UNESCO, Frazier was working on The Black Bourgeoisie, a scorching critique of the black middle class that would enlarge his reputation. His wife, Marie, was a fan of Chester; coincidentally, she had just finished Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and concluded “it lacks force.” After he gave Marie a draft of The Third Generation, she was ecstatic. “Wonderful to see you again and more wonderful to know you are still hitting the ball hard! Keep it up.”

  Ben Zevin, the president of World Publishers, and his wife checked in at Hôtel Meurice later in April, and asked Chester to introduce them to Richard Wright. They all went out to dinner at La Méditerranée, where the staff lined the pavement in two columns between Wright’s car and the entrance in greeting. Zevin reminded Wright of their acquaintance (he had printed Black Boy during the war after Harper and Brothers had reached its paper-rationing quota) and didn’t want to be humbled by the revered black writer. Himes found himself having to run interference, after Zevin and Wright began to disagree over the responsibility of the black artist and the white liberal. But the meeting with Zevin in Paris boded well in terms of what the company might do for Chester’s new book. “The Cord is a hell of a book, our best novel,” Chester would hear from his publisher, still using the working title, in the next weeks. “We shall promote it accordingly,” Zevin promised again at Leroy Haynes’s soul food restaurant in Pigalle. After Ellen Wright, who worked as a literary agent, sold Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Zevin, Chester engaged her to arrange the French publishing of his two recent novels, as well as a short story collection. He learned from Richard Wright, though, that he was unlikely to make a living off French publis
hers. “Get all you can for an advance,” Wright prophetically told him, on the way to a black-market money changer one afternoon. “That’s all you’ll ever get.”

  After three weeks and a batch of correspondence, Willa Thompson arrived from Luxembourg, looking almost sexy to Chester, murmuring that she loved him and, quite penniless, that she needed him too. While her vulnerability inspired strong feelings of devotion, there were early mishaps connected to his complicated and intense feelings for Vandi Haygood, who had just left. Chester’s pals, especially Wright, didn’t know how to treat the new woman: an interlude? girlfriend? financial prop? Willa’s formal bearing, her ill-fitting clothes, and plain looks didn’t help matters. During the course of the weeks they were together she learned of—but kept to herself—the amorous nature of Haygood’s visit. Two years later she would describe that tidbit of information as “soul shattering,” but she did not permit it to affect her developing feelings for Chester.

  Boisterous and prying, Richard Wright entertained the two of them, from the initial, uncomfortable pickup at the train station to an uncomfortable dinner at the apartment with Ellen at the beginning of May. Chester believed that Wright was self-conscious—“inferior and ill at ease”—around well-bred Americans and “furious with himself” for feeling small. The response was a kind of ricochet-shot viciousness. Chester’s apparent ease at attracting the devoted attention of white women from elite American colleges who were not merely flaunting sexual taboo was intimidating to Wright. Ellen Wright, the Jewish daughter of working-class immigrants, who was probably as insecure as her husband, was rude. “Dick would have been ok if we’d met him alone on a café terrace,” thought Chester’s new girlfriend, but “his wife is rather evil.”