Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Toward the end of May Chester got a note from Daniel Guérin, who had received The Primitive and would welcome him in June at his writers’ colony La Ciotat in the South of France. Regine Fischer accompanied Chester to the train station, after spending the weekend with him, having meticulously kept track of the number of times they had “fucked,” her preferred term. As she learned more about Himes, his success in America, and the reputation that he had among the French, her sexual curiosity and her ploy to make another lover jealous were replaced by admiration. Chester lodged as Guérin’s personal guest in his mansion, apart from the other writers in surrounding cottages, and worked hard hours in solitude in a massive and elegantly furnished library with a commanding view of the sea. William Gardner Smith had been there in December, until he and Guérin, a regular contributor to Présence Africain on African American and Caribbean matters, had several sharp disagreements.

  Chester, however, wrote rapidly at La Ciotat and sent Silberman a completed, revised draft of Mamie Mason by the middle of June, complete with a chart to understand the still fuzzy plot and characters. Chester was lonely at the writers’ colony, and he kept a portrait of Regine on his desk; he also wrote a long letter to Willa, asking about Silver Altar, admitting how intensely he disliked Ellen Wright, and then accusing Willa of lesbian affairs. In a similar maneuver to the one with Vandi, he’d left some of his cooking utensils with her, giving him an excuse to see her again. However, tired of his indecisiveness and opportunism in the relationship, Willa retorted that “there’s no point in our writing.” She was through with him.

  When Chester returned to Paris on June 19, Regine Fischer awaited him on the platform at Gare de Lyon. They took rooms together at 76 Rue Mazarine, near Pont Neuf. Because the hotel owner disliked having a black man in her building, after a contentious week they moved to a front room at Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc on Rue Buci, overlooking a bustling market, where he and Willa had stayed in the fall of 1954. At the Tournon, his buddies were smirking about a scuffle that had taken place between Ollie Harrington and Richard Gibson.

  Chester had spent several drunken evenings with Gibson and they enjoyed each other’s company. The awardee of numerous fellowships, including Yaddo, and the favorite of white American critics, the bright Gibson was an anomaly even in the black Tournon circle. An Army veteran living in Paris because he loved French writing and culture, he seemed likely to be a success in America. At sixteen he had met and impressed James Baldwin’s other mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney, who also moved to Paris. By the time Gibson was nineteen, he was backed by established American critics and writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Lionel Trilling, and Eleanor Clark. Gibson had written articles for Merlin, the British literary magazine, and worked as a translator at Agence France-Presse; he was now drafting a novel called A Mirror for Magistrates, which would be published in 1958 in London. Considering Gibson’s subject matter in his novel—racism and homosexuality at a boys’ prep school—there was a great deal for him to discuss with Chester, as Gibson would certainly have been interested in a book like Cast the First Stone. And, as Gibson matured from tyro to novelist, his criticisms moved beyond critiquing black writers to faulting American writing by and large. After several years abroad, he had little good to say about U.S. novelists, who were “dedicated to the cults of sensibility without significance, style without aim” and manufacturing “escapes” and “trivialities.” When Richard Wright met Gibson, who had targeted him in a dig called “A No to Nothing,” Wright had said, “So you’re the boy who wrote them nasty things about me,” and then bought him a coffee, a rare gesture of respect.

  The popular Gibson had been living in Paris for a year and a half, and after sharing a flat with Smith on Rue Tournon, he had taken over an efficiency apartment at 31 rue de Seine used by Ollie Harrington. Raymond Duncan, the eccentric, toga-wearing brother of modernist dancer Isadora Duncan, owned the apartment. Gibson and Harrington had argued about back rent and disputed belongings that spring and when Harrington returned in June, their disagreement turned unpleasant. A violent altercation would take place on the terrace of the Café Tournon itself later that summer. At that point, Harrington accused Gibson of stealing his furniture while Gibson hotly insisted that Harrington “tell the truth.” Before the crowd of onlookers, Harrington thrashed the youthful Gibson, inexperienced when it came to fisticuffs. Although Chester and Harrington were sliding in different directions relative to Marxism, Ollie toward and Chester more belligerent to leftist whites of goodwill, he sided with Harrington after the fight.

  If there had been a moment of easy fraternity among the expatriates at the Tournon, the combination of the racism in France spurred by the Algerian War, the successes and setbacks of the civil rights movement in the United States, and the increasingly articulate pan-African militancy of many of them was tearing it apart. Distrust and suspicion climbed seriously during the summer. French police were monitoring the conversations of colonial West African writers like Bernard Dadié, making the rounds of the cafés in July 1956, and there is every reason to believe that American and British intelligence services were keeping tabs on Americans abroad. Chester liked to say, “I’ve got my life almost down to fundamentals, and it’s pleasant,” which meant, among other things, disregard for practical political stands. “I don’t even think about the ‘Algerian problem,’ ” he decreed; that was the pastime of “true Frenchmen” like Gibson.

  Chester would sidestep the problems that ensnared his friends that summer, venturing more deeply into the relationship with Regine Fischer and doing a little sly castigation of the moderate civil rights movement, while continuing work on Mamie Mason. Settling in with Regine inevitably meant reckoning with his past. He wrote Jean in New York, asking for a divorce, suggesting the benefits: “Why don’t you marry somebody with some money and make your life easy?” he penned, basically repeating the advice he’d given in 1928. But to divorce Jean he’d need more than $1000, making it unfeasible. He had by then fallen out completely with Willa over Silver Altar and was sending her the same sad and angry letters he sent to his publishers, demanding the whereabouts of the manuscript and reversing himself on earlier agreements. By November, when Willa had received a contract for the book from Beacon Press, Chester threatened, “If it appears in print without my written consent, I am going to sue.” Chester’s reputation as a sharpie and one of the few black American novelists seems to have preceded him at Beacon. Willa’s editor admitted an animus toward Chester that spilled over: “I hate him. He spoils my feelings for all negroes for some reason.” The book was published by Thompson alone in 1957, under the title Garden Without Flowers.

  A lingering fondness for Willa was not curtailed by Chester’s new girlfriend. Regine had dyed her hair blond, perhaps to offset the fact that her teeth were bad and sometimes she stood in her brassiere while she combed her hair on their Rue Buci terrace, to the catcalls of the men working in the market on the street below. Regine had given up Harrington, who ignored her when he bumped into the two of them on the street, and she turned to Chester as her lifeline in Paris. He felt “tremendous” exhaustion from sexually satisfying a twenty-year-old, and he was also burdened as her paternal figure. In a manner that reminded him of Jean, Regine began to speckle her conversation with “Chet thinks.” She attended acting classes four nights a week at the ultracompetitive Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which admitted few foreigners and fewer Germans. Short on money, they were tossed from their hotel on Rue Buci and moved a couple of blocks away, to “a front room in an old hotel on a narrow street,” a road morose, dingy, and unpleasantly aromatic. Run by a devoted, unflappable couple from the country who believed in the arts and tolerated the idiosyncrasies of artists, Hôtel Richou at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur would serve as their on-and-off home for more than a year. After they had left, Americans from New York and San Francisco would pour through the hotel, among them Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, making this seedy joint fashionable among the Beat Generation. Bu
t for Chester there was little charm in the artist’s poverty and suffering. After he pawned his typewriter and Regine sold her specially bound editions of books mailed by her father, a bookseller in Germany, the couple was reduced to eating dog meat and having sex as their sole diversion, though more frequently now Regine “had troubles” during intercourse. “Living on the goodwill of friends,” Chester was at least happy that he was in Paris, where such ambassadorships of penury could be conducted “with a saving grace.”

  The summer of 1956 involved multiple fraught rendezvous. Chester believed Richard Wright was avoiding him, and when they did sit down at the Tournon, Wright made offhand, contemptuous remarks about Regine. Wright had seen her traipsing through the café since May 1955 and never considered her more than a hussy. Then, on August 24, L’Express, a French newsmagazine, reviewed Chester’s La Fin d’un Primitif. In Chester’s preface he had written a three-sentence synopsis of the book identifying a sexually frustrated white woman and a racially frustrated black man drenched in alcohol and sealed in an apartment for a weekend: “This results in extravagance, buffoonery, idiocy, and tragedy.” The single-column review included his picture; after identifying him, the caption read, “Exercise in Buffoonery,” turning Chester’s words against him. To make matters worse, L’Express decided, “We must reread Richard Wright to understand the difference between a great black novelist and a plain lampoonist.” Chester remained in Wright’s shadow whether he liked it or not.

  In July Ralph Ellison visited from Rome, where he was a fellow at the American Academy. He was aloof but pleasant, and Wright entertained the Ellisons and Chester at his house for dinner. By himself Chester escorted Ellison to the soul food restaurant run by massive Leroy Haynes, an overture to their conviviality from an earlier time. But ever more after the fight in Vandi’s kitchen—indeed prior to that occasion—Ellison had locked Chester into a slot. For him, Chester remained “as tortured as ever,” a black man “so in love with a vision of absolute hell that he can’t believe . . . in the fact that the world has changed in twenty years.” And the critique was personal: “Chester seems to hold me responsible,” thought Ellison, considering the bitter undercurrents of any discussion between the two of them that July, “because life in the U.S. has changed in relation to his conception of it.” Ellison seemed in another orbit, looking for posts at white colleges, and palling around with literary critic Alfred Kazin in Paris. When a magazine that fall published Chester’s picture alongside Richard Wright’s as the two exemplars of black American writers, some of the Tournon regulars grumbled that it should have been Ellison instead of Chester. Chester would continue to feel cut by Ellison’s commanding stature.

  One Saturday morning in August Chester was collecting his mail from the American Express office when he saw none other than his brother Joe, accompanied by his wife, Estelle, a French professor who had been taking a summer course at the Sorbonne. Chester hadn’t known that they were visiting Europe; probably Joe, who maintained that he never read any of Chester’s books, was still reeling from what he had heard of the psychological portrait of his family in The Third Generation and hadn’t cared to be in touch. Doubling Chester’s embarrassment, he had no money to play host. He told them he would meet them later in the day and, after he was unable to secure any money, accepted their hospitality at dinner, leaving Regine at home. On Sunday he was able to persuade Yves Malartic to invite his brother and sister-in-law to dinner. Chester felt alone in the world, in spite of the fraternal meeting. “I wonder vaguely what will happen to my body when I die,” he groused in a letter to Jean. “Not that I give a damn.” By September when he tallied it all up, he owed about $500 to friends in Paris alone.

  Needing whatever the French publisher would offer, Chester delivered the manuscript of Mamie Mason on September 3 to Gallimard. Two weeks later he could have a vision of a weighty audience for what he was doing, perhaps one that hadn’t existed when If He Hollers Let Him Go had been written. On September 19 a large conference of international black writers convened at the Sorbonne. The best of the black world’s Francophone writers hit Paris, and not a few of the Anglophones as well, like Chester’s drinking buddy George Lamming. Chester met with the American delegation, including James Ivy, the literary editor of The Crisis, the Howard University French professor Mercer Cook, and the political scientist John Davis, who had broken the color barrier and taught full-time at New York University. Wright and Baldwin also had official invitations to the conference, and Chester was mildly insulted to have been overlooked. “I didn’t take any active part; in fact I wasn’t invited to,” he complained to Carl Van Vechten, although some participants remember him padding around the seminars, “grave” and taciturn.

  Although he was the most recently published black novelist in France, Chester was done a small favor by being left off the official American delegation. He wrongly presumed that Richard Wright was responsible for his omission, but in fact Wright, a conference organizer, had hoped to have Chester represent the United States, alongside Langston Hughes, William Gardner Smith, Melvin B. Tolson, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Ellison. However, many forces converged to produce an American delegation of professional academics, mostly white-looking in appearance, and some of them soon to go on the dole of the Central Intelligence Agency. None other than W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been stripped of his passport and right to travel, declared himself a “socialist” who believed in “socialism for Africa.” He angrily telegrammed the assembly: ANY NEGRO-AMERICAN WHO TRAVELS ABROAD TODAY MUST EITHER NOT DISCUSS RACE CONDITIONS IN THE UNITED STATES OR SAY THE SORT OF THING WHICH OUR STATE DEPARTMENT WISHES THE WORLD TO BELIEVE. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison ignored his invitation to the Paris conference, instead attending an anti-Communist intellectual conclave in Mexico City sponsored by the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Ellison doubted Chester’s ability to keep up with the conversation. When he had been in France, Ellison had observed that he could “communicate only slightly with either Chester or Dick, although Dick is so much more intelligent.”

  The material in Chester’s novels was actually regarded well by at least a handful of those present. A thirty-three-year-old Senegalese dockworker from the rough side of Marseilles named Ousmane Sembène was in Paris attending the conference and self-publishing his first novel, Black Docker, which had grown specifically from Wright’s Native Son but also sharply captured key dynamics in the recently published French version of Chester’s The Primitive. Like Wright, Sembène had joined the Communist Party and become a writer. His Black Docker rendered the demise of a working-class African novelist who murders an upper-class Parisian woman who has purloined his work. Eventually a noted filmmaker, Sembène’s most formidable novel, God’s Bits of Wood, would detail the 1948 railway strike in Senegal, a book personalizing the unions, the black peasantry, organizational politics, and French colonial forces, strongly reminiscent of Himes’s work about Lee Gordon and the California aircraft industry.

  More polished than the rough-and-tumble Sembène was the young Cameroonian Mongo Beti, a Sorbonne student who had begun his studies in Aix-en-Provence in 1951. A young activist who made his home in Rouen, Beti had written an article in 1955 called “Romancing Africa”; it decried the fact that “not one quality literary work inspired by Black Africa and written in French” yet existed. Beti was disgusted by the folkloric clichés he saw abounding in the black novels, “the whole gamut of the two-bit picturesque” at the expense of “all that might get him [the novelist] in trouble and particularly the colonial reality.” For Beti, terms like “colonial administration” and “atrocity” belonged beside each other. He would publish that year The Poor Christ of Bomba, followed rapidly by Mission to Kala, and then a remarkable satire in 1958, King Lazarus.

  A heroic figure to both Sembène and Beti was Frantz Fanon, the French-trained Martinique psychiatrist fond of If He Hollers, which he had cited in his remarkable 1952 work Black Skins, White Masks. (A copy of the French edition of The Third Generation would m
ake its way into Fanon’s library.) Fanon, of course, issued a searing lecture to the crowd. When he found supporters, Chester tended to be regarded by those on the militant, radical, or anarchic cutting edge.

  Chester’s active participation in the conference would have been timely and beneficial for the work he had under way that summer: character portraits of the black intellectuals then living in Paris. Chester had completed his last “intellectual” novel, set among the Tournon crowd, and prominently featuring Wright, William Gardner Smith, Bertel, Harrington, and himself. Calling it A Case of Rape, Himes never found a publisher willing to stake him on this unflinching exposé of the demise of his relationship with Willa Thompson and the awe with which he and Harrington regarded upper-class white women. The novel also contained an appraisal of the international dimensions of Wright’s literary reputation, especially the weird enmity that Wright seemed to have generated following The Outsider. Chester wrote character sketches of everyone, mixing legend, fact, and fiction to generate the rough arc of the story, which made it a kind of intellectual detective work.

  His treatments of his comrades, Harrington and Wright, were the most condescending. He described Harrington’s character, Sheldon Russell, as a “dilettante Uncle Tom,” who “did it for free, to have the good will and personal liking of cultured and intelligent white people.” Himes’s depiction of Wright’s character, Roger Garrison, was similarly pitiless. He appraised Wright’s fame and success in the United States and in France, and also its precipitous decline.