Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  As a yardstick for Negro intellectual capacity, he served two purposes: (1) To restrict the evaluations of college-educated culturally reared Negro intellectuals within the confines of his own mental limitations; (2) To create a Negro success story of such singular aspect as to withstand duplication, yet at the same time demonstrate it can happen. Once these ideas had been sufficiently compounded into the national race consciousness, there was no further need to be concerned about the intellectual aspirations of Negroes. . . .

  On the other hand he had been used by the French, first to illustrate their freedom from racial bias and preconceptions and, secondly, to focus public attention on America’s brutal persecution of its Negro minority. The French, with their vast colonial empire in Africa, sat back and laughed sly at America’s discomfiture.

  Consequently, his American supporters turned on Roger and denied him. This rendered him useless to the French, so they dropped him. In the United States, less talented writers were acclaimed as his superiors for the sole purpose of debasing him.

  Part of the portrait plainly showed the difficulty of colliding so regularly with Wright and his reputation in the fishbowl of black Paris. As for what Wright thought of him, in the synopsis Chester created that summer, he knew that he was considered Jean Genet to Wright’s Jean-Paul Sartre, “more or less a type of pimp.” Ellison would go on, in the same year, to describe Chester in precisely the same language to Horace Cayton.

  A few days after the September conference, Regine went to visit her family in Bielefeld, Germany. Chester loaded her with books and coached her about his most valuable work like Lonely Crusade; he hoped to have Regine prod her book-dealer father into helping him with German publishers. While living with her family, she tried to work hard at being his girlfriend: “I will try to be as you wish me when I am back.”

  But Regine returned to chaos. Their financial situation by October was of the “I don’t know which way to turn” sort. Once again, Chester had a manuscript that he could not sell. Silberman rejected Mamie Mason for Dial on October 2 (the same week the press issued James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room). “I don’t think Mamie Mason would have any great success in the trade, and would only make all of us unhappy,” he wrote to Chester. Silberman partly based the rejection on New American Library’s unwillingness to offer a paperback deal, frustratingly linking the hardcover edition to the possibility of a paperback reprint sale. Victor Weybright at NAL had held Chester off until he received word about the hardcover edition. Now Weybright was calling Mamie Mason “brilliant social satire,” but “a little too sophisticated for the ordinary reader.” It was an excruciating contradiction in the space of two years, to be told he was brainlessly vulgar and scatological, with The End of a Primitive, and now, that his new novel was beyond the capacity of the American public. As for the seventy-page synopsis of A Case of Rape, Silberman promised to read it quickly.

  But in effect Chester had reached a genuine nadir. At the true peak of his writing ability—having been published at all levels of the American press and been well received, with his strong talent for originality, character description, and his courageousness in examining the complexity of the social world and his instincts for politics—Chester would be spurned by the literary market and unable to secure other kinds of work for the necessities of life. As with the original work on Immortal Mammy for Knopf, his best impulses were thwarted in a marketplace that was disinterested or incredulous. He needed another path, and one that wouldn’t turn him into an Uncle Tom for the French.

  By the time Chester received his royalty statement from NAL that October, he could smell the stench of defeat, despite the huge paperback print run. He had believed that 225,000 copies of The Primitive had been distributed, but the statement indicated that only 170,000 were printed, lowering his possible royalty roughly by a quarter. “Please do not consider this a beef,” he implored in his correspondence with New American Library, as he requested clarification on the terms. He was told that the print order had been reduced because the book was unacceptable for chain stores, Army bases, and the apartheid South African market. He raced to court Gallimard, but the French publisher was not interested in bringing out the satirical commentaries of a black American set in the United States. “I wish I could get away from these themes of interracial violence,” he wrote to Walter Freeman, “but somehow it seems to be my destiny.”

  With his manuscripts rejected by friendly presses, Chester sent a note on October 16 to Marcel Duhamel, who had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go for Gallimard, and offered to return to the crime story he had been asked to produce for the Série Noire list back in 1954. He included a synopsis of what he proposed, warming to the project. “I like the idea. I can handle it,” he wrote. Feeling pinched, he agreed to “follow your suggestions in all aspects.” Chester went to work “immediately” on a book he was thinking of calling Trouble Wears a Skirt and assumed that he would save himself embarrassment by publishing the book under a pseudonym.

  When the two of them finally met, Duhamel proclaimed Dashiell Hammett “the greatest writer who ever lived” and pushed Chester to make the story into one of action without any narration. “Make pictures,” Duhamel told him, “like motion pictures.” The advice wasn’t an endorsement of saccharine or safe entertainment, but came from an intellectual position that located philosophical value in popular arts, especially genres relying upon representations of violence. Focusing on American film, Duhamel had written in 1955 that “the idea of death” was “eminently sane and suitable for engendering skepticism, and thus humor, and thus a certain optimism.” Duhamel had been an early collaborator with André Breton, the father of surrealism in France and, as early as 1945, Duhamel had been bringing out hard-boiled crime fiction at Gallimard—mostly translations of Americans like Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It was in the spirit of American crime fiction that he had translated If He Hollers. Duhamel wanted Chester to open up to a new landscape of death and death-defying action in Harlem. Chester recalled Duhamel’s commandment, “We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what—only what they’re doing.” And Duhamel said he would pay $1000 for this work, beginning with a $200 advance.

  Chester was trying to pry money loose from Berkley’s editor in chief, Charles Byrnes, whose company he had threatened to sue a year earlier, for relief from his “intolerable situation.” Chester wanted to be at work on A Case of Rape, “a condemnation of the French racial attitude,” which Yves Malartic was showing around to highly “infuriated” French editors and attorneys. Chester had the misfortune to be shopping this manuscript during the “Suez fiasco,” when, to anchor their influence in the Mediterranean and oppose African nationalism, France joined with Great Britain and Israel to invade Egypt and seize the Suez Canal. The Eisenhower administration forced them out, bringing U.S.-French relations to their lowest point. French gas stations were refusing petrol to American tourists. Chester, however, was reminded of his own Egypt-like vulnerability when the U.S. embassy had him interrogated at a police station to verify his sources of income. The colonial condition was becoming difficult to ignore.

  After the fallout at Café Tournon between Harrington and Gibson and the Paris black writers’ conference, Chester hung out with Walter Coleman, the versatile painter who did everything from book covers to cubist abstraction. A sport who wore the “chin-strap” beard “of the cult devoted to freedom of love in the Quartier Latin,” Coleman was living with the mother of his young child, a Swedish jewelry designer named Torun Bülow-Hübe. Chester liked visiting their Fifteenth Arrondissement home because they had central heating—the weather was cold that fall—but he was undeniably drawn to pretty Torun. Chester would sit with the couple in their bedroom until Walter fell asleep and began to snore, while Chester, imitating the younger black men at the Tournon he scoffed at, confessed the most painful experiences of his life to Torun. She listened “spellbound, silently, almost breathlessly, never taking her gaze from me.” Chester won her affection, but t
heir relationship remained platonic.

  When he wasn’t flirting by pathos with Torun, Chester learned something valuable from Walter, a street hustler in his own right. Walter recounted the story of the “Blow,” a confidence-man scheme that he claimed he had used to steal $25,000. Chester shaped the tale into the plotline for his crime novel, which he would call The Five Cornered Square, meaning a square so square it has an added dimension of squareness. The novel revolved around the hapless Jackson, an undertaker’s assistant, and a “banana-skin” vixen named Imabelle. Jackson’s brother Goldy, a transvestite and heroin addict, was the other key character. Chester needed only 220 pages of action sequences to fulfill his contract, but the novel progressed slowly.

  Then, in the middle of November, Regine failed an examination at the theater. Her examiners had been friends, some of them even former lovers, and not long afterward she and Chester stumbled into Harrington at a restaurant. She responded to the painful encounters by downing a bottle of Nembutal sleeping tablets. Chester rushed her to the American Hospital for emergency treatment. She recovered and was prescribed a diet of six “calming pills” per day. On November 25, Chester accompanied Regine to Bielefeld, which was still showing the impact of targeted Allied bombing during the war. In the odd stopover, Regine’s father asked Chester his intentions with his daughter and was horrified to learn his age; a Wehrmacht veteran, Otto Fischer and Chester were born in the same year. Chester left her in Bielefeld in the care of her parents and where she would take a stenography course as a back-up career, planning to return to Paris in three months. Herr Fischer hoped that a separation would give his daughter time to reconsider. Chester took the train back to Paris on December 3; as he left, he pressed on Regine his well-traveled copy of The Sheltering Sky.

  With twenty-five-cent paperbacks of The Third Generation and The Primitive lining shelves, Chester felt famous but destitute, a paradox no one could believe. That reality depressed him and he felt that his career seemed over. “I am pretty nearly beat on this wheel,” he admitted, after a week back in Paris, in a letter to Walter Freeman. Futilely, Chester wrote Esquire, imploring Gingrich to publish “The Snake,” the story bought eighteen months ago, to give him leverage with book publishers. He complained that he was reduced to writing “cheap” detective stories.

  He found relief in Fischer, who had begun to idolize him and his work. “I am not intelligent, I am stupid,” she wrote to him self-deprecatingly. “I understand perfectly how impossible it must be for you to live with some kind of animal which learned how to talk,” she continued, referring to herself, and acknowledged that she could “understand too how this was making you very irritable.” Lonely without him, “(even if we quarrel),” Regine plugged away in stilted English, lifting him out of his doldrums over the detective novel:

  It is no great book; but it is not cheap. Why would it be cheap? Just because you have great social ambitions? Jackson certainly takes his Imabelle for as important as Lee Gordon his place in the world. In one of your letters you said that you would cut throats, eat shit and live in sewers for the one you love. Make it the same for Jackson in his possibilities, he does so. He can still be strange and funny to the reader by the fact that the kind of “all or nothing” people exists so seldom in our days.

  Perhaps—because as a German she symbolized the ruin of a particular of European righteousness—she stabilized him.

  Chester waged war to keep Regine, proclaiming to her father: “I am the only person who has ever needed her,” which he could maintain at least half truthfully since she was translating for him. “She feels my love for her through my need for her. And I sincerely believe, before God, that her only chance for happiness in life is with me.” Otto Fischer begged Chester to leave his daughter alone, especially because Chester could be cruel to her. Tearfully inconsolable one afternoon, Regine had shown some of Chester’s letters to her family, particularly ones where he had accused her of being promiscuous.

  But winning the battle for impracticable Regine did not guarantee much of a future. He had heard from another American publisher before Christmas. In turning down both Mamie Mason and A Case of Rape, the editor at Crown was direct and candid: “I see no possibility of our taking either effort. A Case of Rape, which I much preferred, is an ingeniously devised idea which, unfortunately never really succeeds in rising above its basic design: a polemic against white supremacy.” To American publishers, polemics against white supremacy were passé.

  Chester had anticipated a sharp reaction by publishers against A Case of Rape because of the characterization of blue-blooded Mrs. Hancock, the white female victim modeled so faithfully on Willa Thompson. So, not having paid his rent in eleven weeks, he turned fully to the place where there was traction and where there were no white people and, thus, putatively, no race problem at all. He put the “Blow” story together—with its victim, Jackson, and streetwise fiancée, Imabelle, and skin-popping transvestite brother, Goldy—and showed eighty pages to Duhamel, who advanced him a couple of hundred dollars more.

  In doing so, Duhamel reminded him, “You can’t have a policier without police.” After rereading his thumbed-through copy of Sanctuary, Faulkner’s novel of backwoods bootleggers, unmanned attorneys, psychopathic gunmen, country whores, brothel madams, and debauched debutantes, Chester recalled his Los Angeles friend Jess Kimbrough, the Communist writer and policeman, and his tough-as-nails partner, Charles Broady. They became the “tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored” Harlem detectives called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who were the bedrock of Chester’s writing for the next dozen years, the key to his international renown. Grave Digger was something of a blue-collar philosopher, while Ed served as his lethal heavy, ever-ready to apply the deadly force of his long-barreled, nickel-plated .38 caliber revolver. “It was said in Harlem,” Chester wrote, “that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it.”

  The plain-speaking, deadly, soul-food-eating duo evoked the difficult position between black urban poverty and the white world of the middle class. But the model that Chester invented of the two Harlem detectives solving crimes enabled him to depict black urban life, with its rural slave and blues roots, with a kind of opulence and intrigue that was difficult in books with more obvious political meaning. Ishmael Reed, the ace novelist of the next generation’s black avant-garde, would state Chester’s influence on his own 1972 masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo by admitting that “[Papa] LaBas and [Black] Herman were based upon Coffin and Gravedigger.”

  Feeling potent with some money in his pocket, Chester found comfort with a hanger-on at the Café Tournon who occupied his bed as he wrote the book in the last week of December 1956. He was drinking two bottles of wine a day and in the home stretch pouring St. James rum on top of that. The Five Cornered Square, later published under the titles For Love of Imabelle and A Rage in Harlem, depicts a madcap week when Jackson is scammed by rough vagabonds from Mississippi who are trolling through Harlem for gumps to inflict the “Blow” swindle. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, the experts on uptown crime, use their underworld connections to trap the criminals, eventually killing all of the grifters. It was “a wild, incredible story” for a French audience “that would believe anything about Americans, black or white, if it was bad enough.”

  Chester always maintained that the European interest in his crime novels came about because he had dropped his concern with protesting against racial oppression or writing in a realistic style. But really what he had done was to create sizzling exaggerations that amplified and telescoped his concerns. He described Harlem in the 1950s as home to “the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish.” When Goldy, Jackson’s brother, screams as his throat is cut, Chester gained the distance he had been aching for from the narrow politics of reform controlled by the stodgy middle class.

  Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the
entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy fetuses of unwed girls. Shaking plaster from the ceilings, mortar from the bricks of the building walls. Shaking the rats between the walls, cockroaches crawling over kitchen sinks and leftover food; shaking the sleeping flies hibernating in lumps like bees behind the casing of the windows. Shaking the fat, blood-filled bedbugs crawling over black skin. Shaking the fleas, making them hop. Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets, the sleeping cats, the clogged toilets, loosening the filth.

  In 1969 the black radical poet Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubiti) would publish Don’t Cry, Scream, a collection resonant with the inadequacy of sentiment in favor of horror in the face of an American corporate and carceral reaction to a nonviolent protest movement that emphasized love. The miserable, expiring cry of Chester’s outrageous character Goldy, paired with the deft hyperboles of Harlem tenement life, reproduced the horror of the gruesome and absurd world and excluded the love and social justice that Chester was suspicious of. But by shaking out the pain and tragedy, Chester had given a reader like Marcel Duhamel the groundwork for another direction: optimism.

  On January 22, 1957, Chester submitted the completed draft of a taut The Five Cornered Square to Gallimard and received his final $400. In twelve months the firm would print 40,000 copies of the book, titled La Reine des pommes in French (The Queen of Apples) and translated by Minnie Danzas. Although at first the books he wrote for this series would be ignored when issued in English, now he was a French writer and had turned a corner. He was making a living, if he could not extricate himself from a familiar publishing relationship to Gallimard and Plon, which he summarized in the 1970s as “cheap, shabby and racist.”