Annie Brierre lifted him up a few days later with a New Year’s Eve invitation to her house at Square du Roule for a party of elderly, “fantastically dull bitter-enders” that included a drunken female English author and an editor from Le Monde. Brierre also helped him again make the rounds of publishers. He successfully negotiated up the Plon offer; on January 24 he signed an agreement with Maurice Bourdel, the firm’s director general, for the translation of the book for $300. Gallimard scheduled La Fin d’un primitif for April; Jean-Paul Sartre requested chapters to consider for publication in the magazine Les Temps Modernes. Chester hammered out a short preface: “What does one expect from a culture as chaotic as ours?” he asked. His book named a new social constellation—the white sexually liberated, female executive, and the black male who “plays the role of catalyst which gives him extraordinary power.”
In the End of a Primitive, I take a prototype of that new kind of woman—a prototype perhaps somewhat a little exaggerated—and I show her desperately seeking from the primitives some affection and understanding that the unique position she occupies in our modern culture deprives her from receiving. Her error consists in this. She imagines that any dark-skin man is a primitive. But the black American male is a handful of psychotic entanglements such as has never before existed. He’s a kind of social bastard, crushed by the vulgarity and immorality produced by our time. And there you have it, what the woman takes for a primitive.
When Gallimard’s edition appeared, Chester thought Malartic’s translation “excellent” and that the minimalist cover design in the postwar French style, featuring only his name and the book title in red lettering on a white background, bespoke “dignity.” He dedicated the book to Willa, since she was now almost completely out of his life.
After a couple of nights at the Café Tournon he spotted William Gardner Smith, who now knew everybody on the Left Bank and directed Chester to a hotel at 14 Rue Royer-Collard, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Chester remained through the spring.
In 1953 and 1954 he had only dabbled in Paris; now he lolled at the cafés and on the boulevards as an habitué. For the first time, Chester relied upon the languorous rhythms of the cafés to complete his work. He set up a routine of taking his morning coffee and croissant and writing at the Café au Depart, or sometimes the Monaco, working through the day and trying to pick up women. To begin with, the cafés were warm, and hotel rooms were not. And, day or night, Latin Quarter cafés hummed with a palpable intellectual and artistic energy, it being ordinary to stumble across well-known existentialist writers or internationally famous modernist painters. At the end of a strong day of writing, a pile of different-size saucers would cover Chester’s table, indicating to the waiter what he had consumed and owed. Freeing himself from the flurried commerce, casual racism, and opportunism of New York, he had now begun the saga of “Maud,” the minor character based on Mollie Moon whom Millen Brand, an editor at Crown, had liked in The Primitive. But Chester did not feel fully satisfied with the material he was drafting.
In his first month back in Paris, he wrote to the literary agent Oliver Swan, who had shopped portions of Silver Altar to Harper’s Bazaar, asking him to turn over all of the sections of Silver Altar to Willa. She had begun using her married name, Trierweiler, and Chester claimed that he had “sold my rights back to Mrs. Trierweiler and I have no further interest, now and in the future, of any nature whatsoever, in the manuscript.” By mid-March he reneged on those terms and settled an agreement with Willa through an attorney, splitting the possible proceeds of their book, now called Garden Without Flowers. Willa had the right to sell the volume under her own name and to conduct all negotiations. Then Chester promptly dodged the attorney’s fee.
If he was stalled on new projects and brittle over the possibility of any reward from the book with Willa, he felt draped in the sexual electricity and creative brilliance of a jazz musician when NAL shipped him fifty finished copies of The Primitive. He passed the books out and accepted tribute from the black expatriate contingent firmly anchored around the red-copper counter of Café Tournon. The circle had grown since he had left the year before, now including several painters like Bertel from Gary, Indiana, and Walter Coleman from Baltimore, along with students at the Sorbonne he admired such as Joshua Leslie, “with soft beautiful features and black velvet skin”; news correspondent Frank Van Bracken; Walter Bryant, who acted in the film version of Satre’s The Respectful Prostitute and was also a nightclub manager; various piano players; Eddie Meyers, a schoolmate of Ralph Bunche now hustling newspapers on the Champs-Elysées; Ishmael Kelley, a camel-hair-coat-wearing seducer of great repute who became the subject of two novels by Richard Wright; and the ambitious writer Richard Gibson, a Philadelphian friend of William Gardner Smith. Ollie Harrington, Smith, and cynical Slim Sunday were already fixtures at the café.
Bertel, an expert artist of erotica rarely seen without his signature pedigreed dog, and who was influential in this male circle because he was understood to be conducting relations with both a mother and her daughter, theatrically declared The Primitive the finest book he had ever read. Even the more traditional aesthete Richard Gibson considered The Primitive “excellent,” as would Henry Miller. The change in attitude evidenced by the acclaim from the twenty-four-year-old Gibson—who had critiqued Chester’s naturalistic fiction in Kenyon Review in 1951, in much the same manner that James Baldwin had critiqued Richard Wright’s—indicated not just Chester’s new approach but also a new mood of impatience among the expatriates and their countrymen at home. As more nominal, legal freedom was gained in the United States, black Americans signaled that even more freedom was owed them. The expats’ nostalgia for their birthplace was mainly reflected in jive patter, their favorite the departing salutation “Take it easy greasy, we’ve all got a long way to slide.”
The position of the hip black artist in Paris became more conflicted during the months that the edifice of segregation cracked in the United States. In February 1956, Authurine Lucy enrolled as the first black student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and a week of rioting gave way to lawsuits. French papers like Le Monde, Libération, and L’Humanité gave front-page coverage to Lucy’s ouster, and they considered her heroism akin to that of Rosa Parks, who had refused in December 1955 to move from a Montgomery bus seat reserved for whites. A new battlefront had erupted at home and it was becoming less sporting to flitter abroad.
Chester sometimes believed that French papers liked giving space to the American troubles to blot out the raging war in Algeria, as the French colonial past and present threatened to topple the very tables and chairs of the cafés themselves that winter. On February 21, on Boulevard St.-Michel between the Luxembourg Garden and the university classrooms, Chester witnessed thousands of students and agitators in a counterdemonstration opposing a march led by veterans of Algeria and Vietnam. In the Algerian capital city of Algiers, French paratroopers had been called to put down the insurgency. Chester disliked the students and their “Hollywood type mob scene” on the street, which to him seemed artificially contrived and pointless. He paid closer attention to the strong response of the French government, which deployed gendarmes and black paddy wagons in numbers equal to the protesters. Frequently mistaken by the police as an upstart Algerian, Dick Gibson was one of the black Americans who identified with the Algerians, the protesters, and other victims of French colonialism. At first, the protests and police response didn’t bother Chester.
The best-known crowd of Americans living on the Left Bank in 1956 was uninvolved in the Paris skirmishes around race and colonial independence. Harvard and Yale blue bloods, like the Paris Review founders George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, also enjoyed a few seasons at Café Tournon. But Chester did not share their world of “refreshing” Paris and nighttime parties wearing capes and tails, even if they did have on staff Vilma Howard, a black female writer who had interviewed Ralph Ellison shortly after his National Book Award. The Paris Review founders
had edited Harvard’s Lampoon, and Paris Review would have been a logical venue for Chester’s ribald Harlem satire that spring, an entrée to elite circles that he could have used. But although they shared pinball machines and chased the same young women from Radcliffe, none of the angry blacks at the Tournon in the “Wright” circle were considered for the Paris Review club.
At the tables of the Tournon or Au Depart, a maudlin and thoroughly soused Chester railed against the United States, French women who declined to share his bed, and Harlem snobs, of whom he had decided his cousins now represented the pinnacle. “He could never finish deriding the bourgeois pretensions of his relatives, the Moons,” Gibson noted. Chester “detested Mollie Moon,” thought Gibson, and he was expanding his “Maud” material into a novel called Mamie Mason; when published years later as Pinktoes, Gibson considered it “an act of revenge and exorcism.” Of course, Chester longed for acceptance by the same cigar-chomping, white-women-crazy, Cadillac-driving crew. When Sidney Williams of the Cleveland Urban League showed up with his comfortable Midwestern black backers on their way to Ghana and invited Chester over to the hotel for drinks, Chester felt pangs of sadness: “I was the only black from their class and background and almost of the same generation who was not a financial success.” In prison he had wondered whether he would ever be able to publish his book and become known as a writer; by middle age he was painfully aware of the power of the almighty dollar. The contradictions, envy, sadness, and venom toward bourgeois striving went into the new book.
Chester constructed Mamie Mason around a series of ramshackle joking conversations, chiefly between himself and Ollie Harrington. The two acquaintances were becoming chummier, and they shared an irreverent ritual minstrel-show greeting. A Bronx native three years younger than Chester, son of a black father and a Hungarian mother, Harrington had completed an undergraduate degree in fine arts at Yale, played Negro League baseball in Harlem, and then worked on Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s newspaper The People’s Voice. As a correspondent during World War II, the stalwart Harrington had zoomed around with the black fighter pilots called the Red Tails, dodged bullets with the Ninety-Second Infantry in Italy, and landed in a glider when the South of France was taken.
Unlike the younger men grouped at the tables and bragging about their improved sex lives, Harrington had fled the United States with the government in hot pursuit. After serving as campaign manager for Ben Davis, Harlem’s Communist city councilman, he had induced Orson Welles to popularize the infamous case of Isaac Woodard, a decorated war veteran blinded by police in South Carolina for resisting Jim Crow. In the course of dueling with white supremacy and as a publicist for the NAACP, Harrington had shouted down Attorney General Tom Clark, and thus exposed himself to the wrath of the congressional investigating committees. Smoking a pipe and still drawing his darkly humorous cartoon Bootsie, which brought out the grim detail and fierce determination behind ordinary black life in the United States, or writing about the Senegalese troops fighting for France at Dien Bien Phu, the forty-four-year-old Harrington was a favorite raconteur for good reason.
Chester concluded that the black men grouped around the Tournon table were absurd—“unique individuals, funny but not clowns, solemn but not serious, hurt but not suffering, sexualists but not whores.” But Harrington, the most successful of the regulars, even owning a car, was in his own category: “Ollie was funny.” His humor was prankish and puckish. Harrington invited his friends over for his specialty hare, then he stuffed the rabbit with hashish. Harrington, who married an attractive Englishwoman in 1956, had a talent for easy adaptation and winning admiration. He also had a secret weapon: “great charm.”
Unbidden, Chester and Ollie Harrington could perform together. “In front of that vast white audience I could not restrain myself any more than he could,” Chester remembered. Their patter was ritualistic and satiric, sometimes piffling conversations about sex across the color line, easily working the joke back to the black man’s sexual equipment of legend and the black woman’s strong conjugal appetite. The jokes were made more “entertaining” when they hilariously overturned the myths. In several books Chester enjoyed a line that countered the below-the-belt jest about giant black men: “ ‘Everybody’s ain’t that big.’ ”
Because the pair had been introduced at the Moon apartment back in 1944, the escapades of the recently deceased NAACP secretary Walter White and his high-powered coterie were a natural topic for ridicule. Chester put White’s affair with Poppy Cannon, the cross-racial libidinal appetites of the civil rights crowd, and Mollie’s overenjoyment of people and food at the heart of Mamie Mason. One sentence, involving Mollie Moon and Walter White’s first wife (here called Juanita), summed up the book’s scope. “Mamie’s one ambition was to get even with Juanita by proving to everybody it wasn’t disdain that kept Juanita from her parties but shame because she had used so much alum to shrink her privacy it had dried up.” While writing, Chester tried out sections of the book as he went along. One night he had the black sporting crowd up to his rooms, regaling them with the hilarity of the play on words and the language games designed to outmaneuver censorship. For some, the sexual set pieces had the potential to make the book uproariously funny. For other audiences, the jokes were stale and hard to catch, repetitive without being illuminating. Chester admitted he was “finding it difficult to keep Mamie Mason funny.” Around the middle of spring he found himself in sight of the ending, a sadomasochistic bacchanal topped off by a costume pageant.
By the end of April 1956, Chester had mailed off the opening fifty pages of Mamie Mason to the Dial Press’s James Silberman. He’d first met a teenage Silberman with his father, Noel, in the Moon apartment in the 1940s. Chester also might have known that Dial was gambling on James Baldwin’s brilliant and tautly controlled Giovanni’s Room, scheduled for October publication, about an American’s homosexual affair in Paris. In his first pass at Chester’s book, Silberman applauded the “wonderful subject” that dripped with a “good deal of the frantic flavor.” He then exposed the weakness of the new style Himes was building on: “we never get a sense of where the novel is headed or even who, beyond Mamie, are the central characters.” Silberman cautioned, “It seems possible that you have put too much burden on comic situation and done too little with plot and structure.” Silberman’s concerns made sense. Chester, nearing forty-seven, had quit Dexamyl since Vandi’s death and was shucking out one-liners to titillate the hangers-on at the Tournon, now “the most notorious interracial café in Europe.” He was not concentrating on a “straight narrative,” and, like the new jazz musicians, he was more interested in brilliant virtuoso soloing than swinging a melody involving multiple complex parts. He was disinclined to back off from the delights of a new kind of impressionistic style, which left him feeling liberated and afforded the sense that he was hipper than his American backers. “White Americans are reading The Search for Bridey Murphy, searching, it seems, for another new and complete life because the present life is so dissatisfying, and Negro Americans are searching, it seems, for a present life they would not want if they had,” he noted. His writing was for a new world, a new tempo, a new circumstance.
Despite not liking Silberman’s editorial advice, Chester promised Silberman “a very flexible version, subject to major revisions or even a completely new approach if necessary.” As always at the beginning of the dance with an editor or publisher, Chester promised to deliver whatever was asked. “Please don’t feel that I am ever closed to editorial advice and suggestions. My trouble has been that when I have needed advice and suggestions, there were none forthcoming.” He had often been given advice but was flattering Silberman in another difficult series of literary negotiations. Mamie Mason would take five years to appear, in spite of the fact that Chester had little company in the 1950s constructing satires of African American political life during the civil rights movement.
In the late spring at the Tournon Chester made a drunken date to take a German named Reg
ine Fischer to a party at Bertel’s. Thin, with pimples and a prominent nose cast in a small face, Fischer was twenty and studying acting in Paris. Having learned her American expressions from rowdy GIs, she had a dirty mouth and, at that time, she was the periodic lover of Ollie Harrington. When Chester arrived at Bertel’s flat with Fischer, he was understood to be in colossally poor taste, not simply because he was escorting the lover of a friend, but because most of the black men were showing off the rich, chic, older European women who treated them in style. Among the black sports in the Latin Quarter, Himes had a reputation to uphold: he was a working black writer, reviewed and admired and who often enough took sex as his topic. His peers hoped to meet social-register-caliber Willa, whom they only knew about through William Gardner Smith and Wright and a few sightings. Chester would also have been in good stead if he had brought silver-haired Annie Brierre or Marion Putnam. Instead, he ambled to the party alongside a young waif selected at random. She would be the center of his turbulent domestic life for the next four years.
Chester believed that the national experience of defeat combined with the sinister implication of being connected to the Nazis produced in Regine a flowering of early-nineteenth-century German romantic mythological strength. “German women have extraordinary courage where their men are concerned,” he wrote. “It is a courage that stems directly from their sex; when they give a man their body, their soul goes with it automatically. If they like to be loved by a man, they will die for him.” Perhaps. But when he launched into this affair with a girl half his age who had been in love with Harrington, Chester was suiting up for a repeat performance of the messy love triangles that he had known with Jean, Vandi, and Willa. If the real emotional crisis in Chester’s life had taken place when his brother was blinded, and he lost in the struggle for his mother Estelle’s affectionate guidance and care, he seemed doomed to pursue emotional bonds and habitual sex with women whose loyalties were divided, whose estimates were adoringly generous but often enough analytically suspicious. He was compelled to win their allegiance with the tools he had at hand—sex, money, and celebrity when they were available, and promises of marriage when they were not. Then Chester would accuse his lovers of betrayal, become ashamed of his own disingenuousness, and drive them away.
Chester B. Himes Page 38
