Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Before the money ran out, he telegrammed Regine Fischer to rejoin him in Paris. Her letters acknowledged the power of his writing and her deepening commitment; now she was reading The Primitive, of which she wrote, it “just makes me feel so goddamn bad.” And also she had begun applying pressure. “Darling I am not coming back to you unless I can be your wife.” Chester’s entreaty for her return apparently signaled his willingness to do more than hear her out about matrimony. The stenography course didn’t end until Easter, but in February she arrived at the hotel, having fled her parents and her confinement. Although Chester remained married to Jean, around this time he and Regine would begin telling people, including the press, that Regine was Mrs. Himes and that they had married in December 1956. She would sign letters “Regine Himes.”

  With his Série Noire money Chester bought her new clothes, to be worn at an evening affair at Walter Coleman’s. On their way to the party, Regine went into Café Tournon and, according to Chester’s version of events, asked for Ollie Harrington. Chester, in “a blind insensate fury,” drew blood, beating her on a crowded street. After cleaning the blood off her clothes, Regine went with Chester to the party. He stomped through, daring his buddies to defy his open malice toward Regine. Later he apologized to her, calling himself a “dirty nigger.” She remained loyal, but she was unconfused about Chester’s violence. She left a message for the man who had become a mean drunk, begging him to deal with himself: “No human being can live with a man who becomes an animal as soon as he gets any acool [sic] to drink. . . . I can’t continue living in the fear of getting killed one day. You are a human being so why don’t you act like it. Your excuse that you are a ‘dirty nigger-beast’ is no excuse for me.” Still, she wanted to keep him: “I love you as you generally are. . . .”

  Chester took up his fists for really only one cause: the prerogative of patriarchy. In his two memoirs, The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity, he would record several confrontations and many violent, sometimes deadly situations, but he never described an instance where he fought another man. Instead, in his autobiographies he showed two key episodes of violence against white women who he believed had been unfaithful: Vandi in 1953 and Regine in 1957. In a third example, an early draft of the second volume of his memoir, using pseudonyms and written at the end of the 1950s and which originally was to have been the story of his affairs with Willa Thompson, Regine Fischer, and Lesley Packard, Chester’s narrator Templeton beats up Willa’s character, Wilda, for infidelity. “I couldn’t stop slapping her,” he wrote, having already described the beating of Vandi Haygood’s character in an earlier chapter. Templeton doesn’t end the punishment until “I hurt her bad enough.” This passage of physical abuse also ends in his orgasm and the beating ultimately ruins the relationship between Templeton and Wilda. The rages directed against women from the top caste had some of their origins in the scenes on Everton Avenue in Cleveland, and the fury of emotions that could never keep his family together. Alcohol always made it worse. He understood at least the precipice he was on. In the weeks following the episode with Regine at Coleman’s, he declared to some of his friends that his “blood pressure” was high and that while he wasn’t eliminating booze, “I’ve cut down on the doses.”

  As a contrite gesture, he let Regine persuade him to enroll for classes at the Alliance Française on Boulevard Raspail, close to the southwest end of the Luxembourg Garden. “Now that you’ve broke into the French scene, you ought to learn the language,” she insisted. Chester signed on for a beginner’s course and attended the morning lectures for a couple of weeks. “I didn’t learn much French,” he admitted, but with his clothes out from the pawnshop, he felt purposeful and dignified, talented and desirable. He grew out his mustache, which had some gray in it, accepted the distinction of age, and tried moving on from the Tournon. In the afternoons, he claimed a table with Regine at Café Select on Boulevard du Montparnasse, where he would often run into Walter and stylish Torun. Chester continued there, despite his conviction that the waiters and patrons at the Select showed their racism plainly. But he was gratified to renew his acquaintanceship with a Danish aristocrat and jazz aficionado named Timme Rosenkrantz. An intimate of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, the “Jazz Baron” Rosenkrantz was married to the internationally famous black performer Inez Cavanaugh. Rosenkrantz also worked as a jazz critic and journalist and he recalled having met Chester at the Moons’ festive apartment in 1944.

  Distancing himself from the café crowd, Chester plowed into the next installment for Gallimard’s Série Noire, If Trouble Was Money, which would be published in English as The Real Cool Killers, a title chosen by the publisher without consulting him. He had ditched his French lessons and had reread Sanctuary, his bible of absurdity, for the second time in about three months and faithfully reproduced Faulkner’s scenes at the Memphis brothel with the madam. Finished by May 1957, even before For Love of Imabelle was published, The Real Cool Killers introduced black Islamic gangsters in Harlem, the new fashion: its villain was a tall, light-colored Muslim who despised whites. Chester liked to dissemble and call the book a “cesspool of buffoonery” or “some strange shit,” but The Real Cool Killers—with the daughter of Coffin Ed Johnson as a member of the gang, and with sadism and pederasty as the fountainheads of desire of the “important white man”—was, for the 1950s, a pithy and exacting account of America’s cultural malaise.

  Perhaps Chester’s key struggle with the composition of the books was to show enough care for the black people of Harlem so that the series wouldn’t be labeled as racist exploitation—indistinguishable from an entertainment of crude sensationalism. With only minor distractions, he fashioned the new book of violence and murder with his two detectives, and he obtained his $800 advance from Gallimard. The new book was soon announced in the French publisher’s catalog. Meanwhile, in the United States, Duke, a mildly erotic glossy pitched to black men, published the episode of Charles Taylor’s clumsy sexual initiation from The Third Generation, under the title “Night of Manhood.” In another layout in the same issue, the magazine offered “The Primitives,” a photo-interpretation of Chester’s novel, using a series of photographs simulating the sex play of a dark-skinned male dancer and a light-skinned female dancer. Duke promoted The Primitive’s “frenzied boudoir adventures” of “outright debauchery and sheer sin” as without peer.

  On May 21 Editions Plon held an evening panel celebrating its Feux Croisés series, and Chester accepted praise for The Third Generation in a group that included unbowed feminist novelist and journalist Rebecca West, author of the thousand-page Balkan study Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and Nikos Kazantzakis, best known for Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation, both later turned into successful films. The festivities had begun the night before, with a cocktail party at the elegant apartment Maurice Bourdel, the firm’s director general, maintained inside the glass-domed publishing house. Regine, whom Chester dutifully introduced now as Mrs. Himes, made a “splendid appearance.” Then the group of writers and spouses gathered at the home of a multimillionaire on Avenue Foch. After ascending in a private elevator to the fourth floor, Chester found himself in an enormous hall adorned with museum-quality paintings. He couldn’t get his bearings and, feeling “suffocated” by the wealth, he and Regine retreated to a table at the Café Select.

  The next evening at the formal ceremony, Chester concluded the program, speaking rapidly in softly spoken English his message “eulogizing Bourdel and Plon” for their work translating foreign writers. No other American had had his novels translated into the series before, which published the work of such well-known Europeans as Aldous Huxley, Erich Maria Remarque, and Somerset Maugham. In the program, the editors of Feux Croisés explained the unique merit of The Third Generation on account of “its insight, its violence, its structure and its style.” They had chosen Chester’s book because “this powerful work goes far beyond the banality of ‘the Negro problem’ in the USA.” After very ste
ady effort for five years, Chester had excellent reason to consider himself “free of thinking about what Americans thought about me.”

  Although Plon seemed quite eager to launch him and to recognize his serious accomplishment, the toll that the drinking and the hand-to-mouth existence of the last year had taken was visible. Nearly forty-eight, Chester had sharp lines around his mouth, deep circles under his eyes, and though he was still fit, the skin sagged in places on his face. He claimed that he was now getting the handle on the joke of his life, but the obvious question was how much time would he get to use the punch line.

  He and Regine ducked out without being interviewed by the press, a habit Chester maintained in France, which led the newspapers to ignore him the following day, with a couple of exceptions, including the left-wing Les Lettres Françaises. A week later, reporter J. Claude Deven of the Tribune de Lausaune caught up with them, asking such questions as whether African memories or racial mixture had helped explain the rapid advance of blacks after slavery in The Third Generation.

  But the prestigious event had asserted that his achievement in France—first the translations of his major works If He Hollers, Lonely Crusade, and Third Generation, and then the Série Noire—was consequential. Chester didn’t even have problems that spring at the U.S. embassy renewing his passport. Chester had also seen, finally, the multiplying effects of his efforts. If writing serious literature kept him impecunious, the Noire series paid enough to live. Shortly after Chester was paid his second advance, Duhamel sold The Five Cornered Square to Fawcett, an American paperback publisher. That firm published their version under the title For Love of Imabelle later that year, preceding the French edition, and netting Chester another few thousand dollars. Overnight he had become affluent enough to buy a car, so he picked out a convertible Volkswagen, and prepared to begin touring Europe. “I had a German girl, a German car; I was making my living from French publishers, and I had no reason whatsoever to put foot in America,” he thought.

  In early June 1957 Chester worked on registering and repairing the Volkswagen and getting his driver’s license. He also checked Regine into the American Hospital for four days in the middle of the month, including examinations for venereal disease. On July 1, they drove to Stuttgart, with mishaps aplenty, from wheels flying off to an engine that threatened to both melt and explode. Chester’s investment was a money pit. In Stuttgart they saw an executive at a German publishers, and mainly Chester could feel well about dropping off copies of the book for consideration. Then they headed for Hamburg, stopping over at Bielefeld to see Regine’s family, and her father asked pointedly about their uneven romance. Regine, however, was delighted mainly to be seen in a car.

  Deciding that Copenhagen would be a fine place to summer, they looked up Timme Rosencrantz, finding him at home playing blues singers from his high-fidelity audio set. Chester and Regine secured a town house in Hoersholm, a village of lakes and woods midway between Copenhagen and Helsingør, about two miles inland from the Øresund Strait. Rosenkrantz, an aristocrat, entertained them along with his upper-class friends at fine parties. Chester found the rainy forty-eight-degree summer weather awful, which may have helped him to write ten pages a day on a new novel, A Jealous Man Can’t Win, building the opening off of one of Harrington’s anecdotes about a man falling out of a three-story window into a container of fresh bread. The crowd at Bunch Boy’s casino in Cleveland furnished the remaining characters. The third novel in the series, he made this murder mystery a love story in disguise, centered around a tough-guy Harlem gambler and his wayward young wife. Chester achieved a working balance, spurred on by his “desire to succeed without America,” coupled with his “antagonism toward all white people who I thought treated me as an inferior.” That summer of 1957, he claimed that he “could write like a bird sings.” Swigging brandy while he hit the typewriter keys, he had carved out an angry nook of his own.

  They returned to their hotel on Rue Gît-le-Coeur in Paris in mid-September. With the confidence of the car, a girlfriend, steady work, and a bit of savings, Chester hunted up Wright, Harrington, and Coleman. From his seat at the Café Tournon, Ollie had been condemning the nationalist revolt in Algeria as petit bourgeois, the basic French Communist line. It was thus perhaps a bit odd to see in the October pages of Life magazine his letter to the editor about France’s insincere negotiations in the Algerian conflict: “Any American who thinks that France . . . will grant Algeria, if not independence, at least some liberal status . . . is mad.” But Harrington had written no letter. Within a few days it became apparent that Richard Gibson was the author, at which point the French police got involved and questioned him. Harrington certainly presumed that Gibson had done it to retaliate for the beating and have him deported. To anyone who cared to ask, Gibson claimed it was a pro-Algerian prank hatched by William Gardner Smith and Jean Chandleri at Agence France-Presse, where they all worked.

  Perhaps even more odd to the men at Tournon, most casting about for money and needing approval from the U.S. embassy every six months to keep their visas in good standing and every several years to have their passports renewed, was Gibson’s bourgeois prosperity during the time of the scandal. Despite the cost of raising an infant daughter, he had purchased a pavilion in Rosny-sous-Bois outside of Paris. His novel A Mirror for Magistrates was published in early 1958, and shortly thereafter he left Paris for the United States. All of his moves, bundled together, seemed unusual.

  Black writers and intellectuals who knew Wright believed that a postcard with Gibson’s signature was sent to Wright saying, “I am sorry about what I did to O. Harrington. I am back in the USA and the FBI has promised me a job but I don’t have it yet.” The postcard reputedly appeared two years after the 1956 inauguration of an FBI “counterintelligence” program called COINTELPRO, designed to “disrupt, disorganize, and neutralize” subversives. COINTELPRO was ideologically similar to the work of the congressional committees investigating un-American activities, except that it operated clandestinely, concealed its punitive dimensions, and was the creation of one man, J. Edgar Hoover, an opponent of the civil rights movement. FBI director Hoover conducted infamous investigations of the Communist Party USA and the NAACP in the 1950s, but he retained special opprobrium for “racial intermarriage,” wherever it might be found, and which always meant sex relations between black men and white women. Key tactics used by agents included planting stories in newspapers and magazines, sending anonymous or forged letters with derogatory information, and neutralizing a foe by creating the impression that the person was actually a paid informant of the FBI. Suspicion darted back and forth that either Gibson or his friend William Gardner Smith was a paid government informant or a spy. Chester strongly suspected Gibson.

  Wary of being targeted by government forces, Chester and Richard Wright hashed out their positions on the feud and writing in France over drinks at the Rhumiére Martinique, where Chester grasped that Wright was jealous of his recent good fortune at Gallimard. The Wrights, perhaps mainly Ellen, had dismissed Chester’s detective fiction even before it was released, carping that Duhamel had reported back to Chester. When they saw each other, Wright combined his awkward blend of pomp and candor, blurting out, “I’ve spent too much time writing political books which don’t pay,” implying that Chester was cashing in on lowbrow material. “I should write about a southern black man who is not poor and despised,” Wright told him. He was considering a novel about one of their Tournon friends, Ishmael Kelley, and his struggle to survive small-town Marks, Mississippi, and escape to France. Wright would publish The Long Dream, based on Kelley’s exploits, in 1958.

  Once Chester submitted A Jealous Man Can’t Win, in October 1957, to his great curiosity he found that everyone at the Gallimard office treated him oddly—including translator Minnie Danzas, who acted “as though she had a secret to hide.” Young white women at the Tournon told him mysteriously that they had heard about his unpublished book, but he couldn’t be sure which one. Duhamel adv
anced him money for yet another project, encouraged him to stick with the Harlem locale, and then offered to take him to the restaurant of his choice. The editor mentioned as an aside that La Reine des pommes had received high praise, but he was vague about what he meant. Chester brought Regine, Walter Coleman, and Ollie Harrington to this dinner at Haynes’s soul food restaurant, where they were entertained by the white jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, a heroin addict and a buddy of Duhamel, who had published a book written in “jive.” Ollie of course entertained the table with hilarious stories of Harlem. But the hero of that evening was Walter, the streetwise, hustling rogue, who explained silk-screening to Duhamel and, after a meeting a few days later, became an artist at Gallimard. The next time Chester saw Walter at Café Select, he was ordering an Italian sports car. Stung that he had somehow missed the money pot and clutching a copy of the anthology Negro Caravan and some of Faulkner’s novels, Chester left Paris with Regine for Mallorca, reaching Spain on October 25.

  The trip to Puerto Pollensa, which he could now drive on his own as far as Barcelona, covered the same ground he’d traced with Willa in 1954. Regine had gone French, with short, dyed-blond hair. Chester talked again with Roche Minué, the painter, and rented the top floor of a house with a grand terrace overlooking the Bay of Pollensa. Once again, the weather was miserably cold, and the first of Chester’s money went for wood. By the middle of December, the wind blew so forcefully that even a fire was impossible in the house. He kept warm by burning a bowl of powdered charcoal covered with ashes underneath his writing table while draping himself in blankets. With an Irish red setter named The Mike, they drove to Bielefeld for Christmas, and then back to Mallorca for New Year’s. Reduced to requesting advances from Duhamel shortly after 1958 began, Chester took planes, trains, and automobiles to reach the French border to pick up a few hundred dollars of wired money. Even though he believed he could surreptitiously “lift scenes straight out of Faulkner and put them down in Harlem” to quicken his writing, he had to admit that after six months “I had accomplished nothing; I had written nothing.” Living as a tourist made writing hard and haunting the locale he had shared with Willa made him relive the failed bid for literary stardom between 1953 and 1956. By the end of 1957, he was convinced that New American Library—and the paperback rider that seemed connected to his every contract in the United States—had blighted him and reduced him to being a grubber for Duhamel’s pulps.