On April 25, 1958, they returned to Paris and found they had lost their cheap room at Hôtel Richou, now overrun by American Beat poets. Chester appealed to Duhamel to get him going, and was surprised again by the confidence of his editor, who, although disappointed that he hadn’t completed another book, was still cheering him on. Meanwhile, Editions Plon took a $300 nibble at Mamie Mason, and after that, as Chester was wont to say, he had room to maneuver. After an accident on May 19, in which a truck driver deprived him of the fender to his Volkswagen, he returned to Duhamel with another concept for a book and a plan to relocate to the Côte d’Azur. On this occasion, Duhamel gave him half of the book advance up front. Duhamel also started building some publicity around Chester: he arranged a photography session at a drugstore book rack on Champs-Elysées, including Regine, and another day at the Haynes soul food restaurant. Duhamel also recommended a new destination in the South of France to complete more books, the town of Vence, between Nice and Antibes.
On the way down to the coast in June, Chester stopped in Provence to see Jean Giono, a heralded dramatist and novelist who was the champion of the French farmer. Giono had sent Duhamel a comment of praise for La Reine des pommes and then extended an invitation to Chester for tea at his home in Manosque. Although Giono had written epics and fables, he had also written Un Roi sans divertissement, something of a detective story, in 1947. The two men, about fifteen years apart in age, got on well enough that Giono invited Chester to his daughter Sylvie’s wedding the next year. After reaching Duhamel’s real estate agent in Vence, Chester and Regine took rooms in the lovely two-story Villa le Lavandou, on the edge of a hill in Quartier St.-Michel, sloping down to the Mediterranean, just under four miles away.
Chester had been writing swiftly in advance of the move, and completed the book Run Man Run, the very day that they got settled. The only one of his Gallimard’s Série Noire books without Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, Run Man Run featured a drunken white cop who accidentally kills a black porter working at a cafeteria, then systematically murders the rest of the black janitors. Only a custodian named Jimmy escapes, and the novel follows the policeman’s attempts to silence this final witness to his crime. The germ of story was of course drawn from Chester’s experience in December 1955.
After only another three months, on October 9, he finished The Big Gold Dream, perhaps the most formulaic of all his detective stories. The plot concerns a riddle of stolen money by a preacher confidence man named Sweet the Prophet, devoted parishioners who’ve hit the numbers, and an assortment of demimonde men who meet their demise. Chester and Regine rewarded themselves with a trip to Switzerland and Bielefeld. From her hometown he continued north to Frankfurt, where he discussed the possibility of a German translation of The Third Generation. When they returned to France, he and Regine stopped in Paris as Duhamel’s guests for dinner. For the first time they saw a bound edition of La Reine des pommes, Chester’s “cheap” story. On a special band there were endorsements from Jean Cocteau of the Académie Française (“a prodigious masterpiece”), Jean Cau, the novelist and secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Giono. Giono had written audaciously, “I give you all of Hemingway, Dos Passos and Steinbeck for this Chester Himes.”
For a postwar French writer to imply that twentieth-century American realists needed to have their characterizations of U.S. life corrected by Chester’s slangy, violent portraits of Harlem was not a far-fetched claim—although when Chester told the story of the praise, he liked to sweeten the pot by replacing John Steinbeck with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chester had helped the French understand themselves as not merely subordinates of the Marshall Plan of culture, not merely existentialists reasoning through Vichy capitulation and defeat by former colonies. He had produced the underbelly of the purportedly equitable, optimistic American society in the raw, without any endearing vision. He presented American blacks forging ahead in urban Harlem, in a narrative unencumbered by arguments about civil rights or the psychological dynamics of racial oppression. Chester enjoyed knowing that his books, filled with blues ditties and vernacular toasts, and featuring violent murders and rough characters, were in essence blues tales, “out of the American black’s secret mind.” Additionally, the French had a concept of style and black entertainment performance that avidly consumed the sharp pepper in his novels. After all, France was the kind of place where people liked to predict the outcome of Sugar Ray Robinson’s fights on the basis of his robe, his trunks, and his hairdo. The French combination of presuming blacks as the acme of chic and being grossly paternalistic angered some white American expatriates, who thought it showed “the super-ignorant sentimentality Europe and England have about the Negro.”
And thus, Chester understood immediately two things: that the fulsome praise would make him a target of ridicule in American literary circles, and that Duhamel had protected him from his rising celebrity for many months and that in the process he had basically written an entire oeuvre, five books for La Série Noire.
Chester had hit a lead-off home run: La Reine des pommes would be published in the United States as A Rage in Harlem in 1959, and be produced as a film in 1991. With the novel he had recaptured the energy of “To What Red Hell” from 1934 and by that June the reviewer for Mystère was claiming the book “the most extraordinary detective story since I started writing this review.” He and Regine had hardly returned to Vence after seeing the book than he was summoned back to Paris in November 1958 to receive Le Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière, an award for best detective fiction in French, for La Reine des pommes. In an instant, Chester had achieved French and European recognition, and on Franco-European terms. The French coronet was considerably more than what he could have expected from the United States. And if it was not the official respect accorded Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man, he had surpassed the notice that James Baldwin had received from the critics for his fiction. It might also be said that in France Chester had surpassed Richard Wright. What’s more, from then on, the reluctant American newspaper critics begrudgingly gave him his due.
His personal life immediately tipped after the boon. In Paris, he stopped being seen with Regine as he made the rounds of interviews. Paris-Match caught up with him and Jean Giono together in a book-filled room at Chez Boleniou, and Chester took a room at 23 Boulevard Brune in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. When Chester appeared at Café Tournon now, accompanied everywhere by his big dog, he “caused a sensation.” Partly the sensation was due to his manner of rounding corners on two wheels in the pale-blue Volkswagen before sauntering over with The Mike.
In the winter of 1959 Chester spotted William Gardner Smith at a table, accompanied by an attractive young British journalist from the Herald-Tribune. Lesley Packard introduced herself saying, “Congratulations, I hear you have won the prize.” An assistant editor at the paper, she had seen Chester’s picture and story come across her desk the day before. The three of them went out for drinks, dinner, and jazz clubs. “Beautiful and chic,” smartly employed, and fashionably attired, Lesley Packard contrasted strongly with the neurotic Regine Fischer. Lesley seemed like the sort of grown-up woman appropriate to Chester as he saw himself now, a sexy, globally recognized literary man-about-town. She even knew the Tournon crowd—but not intimately like Regine. Richard Wright enjoyed noticing Lesley by teasing her, calling her “that dangerous Packard woman,” a line from a novel he had enjoyed as a youth.
From then on, whenever Chester turned up in Paris and could free himself from Regine, he looked up Lesley Packard; in turn she “took a personal interest” in his welfare. In reality she had looked out for his welfare before she had even known him. The Herald Tribune editor was “a little bit of a racist” and Lesley had to push aggressively to include the story about Chester’s prize in the English-language news. Born in 1927, Lesley had grown up on a farm in Suffolk, England, and attended boarding schools. She had settled in France after the war, working as a secretary for the U.S. Army in Orléans, an experience that also in
troduced her to jazz and the jitterbug. Although several of his friends believed that she was racist, by July 1959 Chester was sleeping with Lesley and scribbling to Regine perfunctory notes to keep her content in Vence.
Chester’s growing fame seems to have been the impetus for an article the previous fall in Time explaining black expatriates, titled “Amid the Alien Corn.” Using a quote from Jean Giono that called his work “extraordinary,” Time flattered Chester as having done “impressively well” abroad. The magazine interviewed him as happy to live in a climate where he was accepted not merely as a black man, but as an artist. “In America you have this personal problem, of course. But that’s not what I mean about France. I like France, and can work here because everybody, and I mean everybody—the concierge as well as the intellectual—respects creative work. They understand writers and help them.” The article also quoted William Gardner Smith, Ollie Harrington, Richard Gibson, and Richard Wright. (Except that Wright had not actually been interviewed, although Time refused to admit it, even after receiving a letter from Wright’s attorney.) Gibson’s position in the article as the clean-up batter, disgusted with the narrow possibilities in the United States, was also odd: when it appeared, he had already moved back to America, was working as a news correspondent for CBS, and he soon would become an organizer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Chester was living mostly in the South of France now; he had new value becoming “a person in Vence not to be thrown away.” After a mild new year’s accident Chester was without a car and stranded in Vence, despite the hopes of Parisian reporters at L’Express and Paris-Match for interviews. He stayed there revising The Big Gold Dream, while the biggest bookstore in the capital devoted an exclusive section of the window display to his work. In the early spring, Regine’s mother arrived to spend some time with them; probably she hoped to accomplish, at least, his engagement to her daughter. Instead, after an argument at dinner, Chester encouraged Regine to return to Germany and complete a diploma in translation studies. A likely drunken Chester then attempted to get a switch from a tree to tame their dog and injured his eye. Conflicted about his relationship with Regine, Chester had hoped to see his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend stand up to her mother. But when she did not, he was also of a mind to put as much distance between the two of them as possible, possibly forever. After seeing her mother aboard the train back to Bielefeld, Regine drove with him to La Ciotat, where he would recover from the eye injury. The following morning, she took a train to Germany. He stuffed francs into her hand through the window as the train pulled off, promising his support, part of him wishing for her to stay at home.
After Chester recuperated at La Ciotat, he went to Paris, where the proprietors, waiters, young French girls, and even the gendarmes accorded him recognition and respect. He ran into Harrington and, after a revealing conversation, Chester realized, “I was a real celebrity.” Feeling confident, he went to Lesley Packard’s house at 5 Rue Grégoire-de-Tours, anxious to get off a nighttime street where he might be mistaken for a North African, fair game during the Algerian war tensions. Their affair was not exclusive and Chester courted her with sophistication and persistence. Harrington had to go to Moscow for work, so Chester agreed to take over his apartment on Rue de Seine. He met with Duhamel and negotiated an advance of 5000 francs (a bit more than $1000), for a book called Don’t Play with Death. One of the strongest in the series, it would be published in English in 1960 as All Shot Up.
Chester totaled the Volkswagen in May, and a few weeks later purchased an English roadster. He drove to Hamburg to see Regine Fischer, by now a sort of condolence visit, which he contrived to keep her attached but remaining in Germany. He was demoting her from the position of wife to consort; once he returned to France, he sent her crisp business letters that downplayed the personal dimensions of their tie. He spent July with Regine in Hamburg, making arrangements with a literary agent handling foreign-language rights named Ruth Liepman to sell his books to German publishers. After a visit with George Ramseger, the editor of the newspaper Die Welt, Chester and Regine were allowed the use of Ramseger’s villa for the month. Drinking too much wine, Chester still managed to send wooing letters to Lesley Packard in Paris. While he sometimes referred to Regine as his “wife,” he was determined finally to end their connection. “I confess it is a relationship that is absolutely dead,” he wrote to Lesley.
In the middle of August he developed severe stomach pains and was diagnosed with ulcers. Chester returned to Paris and was put on a strict diet that excluded alcohol for three months. The day the doctor announced him recovered from the ulcers, Chester returned to old habit and drank a bottle of French gin. When Regine visited, she stayed with him, and when she returned to Germany, he raced after Lesley Packard. Regine wished badly to be in Paris, and she warned him that she was coming and would not be put off: “I am going to Paris with or without a job.” Now that a modicum of success had arrived, she intended to share it too.
In a sign of Chester’s increasing visibility, Christian Millau and Serge Bourge, two Paris-Match journalists, sought him out to make a Harlem film treatment. Chester created a fifty-four-page scenario about a preacher on a white horse kidnapped to perform a miracle by the mob, which was good enough to secure $100 from a producer named Louis Dolivet. Chester had a celebratory dinner on Boulevard Brune with friends of William Gardner Smith and Ollie Harrington, which turned into a drunken debacle, with Chester falling down the stairs and sideswiping several cars on his way to the Mars Club, where bebop pianist Art Simmons was playing. Lesley gamely jumped in the swerving car to try to protect him. Chester’s mishaps with cars, regular and increasingly dangerous, are strong evidence that his drinking had reached the stage of a deadly condition.
Now there was a restrained hum of applause from American critics. They ignored the prize-winning La Reine des pommes/A Rage in Harlem, but daubed his lesser subsequent books with the brush of approval. “The French,” wrote New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, “have gone mad over the work of Chester Himes, an American Negro now resident in Paris.” Boucher blamed the French for wanting a tawdry portrait of the United States and sniped at Chester, observing that “Himes writes about the America that a European likes to believe in . . . a lurid world of squalor and oppression and hatred and meaningless violence.” Still, Boucher supplied tantalizing adjectives to describe the new books: “fascinating and not uncomic” and “shocking, grotesque.”
A week later, thre New York Times again gibbered him into its fold, in a kind of replay of the Doubleday advertisements in 1945 and 1946. “The question arose as to just who Mr. Himes is,” wrote critic Lewis Nichols with mock folksiness, then calling Chester “an old friend who was around these parts a decade back.” Chester never forgave what came next, as Nichols categorized all of his books as “thrillers,” putting If He Hollers Let Him Go in the Série Noire and describing him as “forty or so, with a small mustache and a large red setter dog.” The notice continued incorrectly, “He last visited the United States in 1958,” before ending that Chester had an easy, carefree life in Paris or touring Europe. Chester, whose story “The Snake” was finally published in October’s Esquire, now basked in the same lukewarm applause in which the ultrapopular African American novelist Frank Yerby was drenched. But Chester clung to his bitterness, regarding all comments about him in the U.S. press as negative. “I dread reading any reference to me in the American press,” he wrote, depressed that the “calculated ill will” would ruin the chances of placing books like Lonely Crusade and The Third Generation with German and Scandinavian publishers. “It hurt more than I care to admit to be rejected by the American press,” he explained in 1976, quite similar to the suggestion he made in 1959: “The New York Times could not have chosen a more unfortunate time for such misinformation.”
More accurately, Chester was rejected and embraced simultaneously. “I haven’t seen anything of my compatriot writers in many months,” he had written to Van Vechten in the spri
ng of 1959 from Vence. By that fall, he was back in the mix. In November 1959, shortly after Chester was in newspapers in Paris and New York, U.S. Army Communications Zone Europe officers were in contact with their operative at the Tournon. The operative informed the military that Oliver Harrington belonged to “a group of negro residents in Paris who are disciples” of Richard Wright, still considered a thorn in the side of the United States, and featured in a report called “Possible Subversives Among US Personnel in France.” Chester, too, was fingered as a Wright acolyte. After a hiatus of twenty years, his public opinions had resurfaced as an interest of the American government.
The one other “disciple” in the report was Jamaican mathematician Joshua Leslie. Tall, dashing, and married to a white American, Leslie introduced young African colonials, like Abiola Irele from Nigeria, to their first taste of Marxism, to the Chameleon Jazz Club, with its cellar playing space, and to Chester Himes. Irele, studying French and living on Rue des Ecoles across from the offices of Présence Africain, was brought to Café Tournon in 1960 as a part of his education. Irele saw the author of La Reine des pommes “lots of times,” and remembered Chester as, “very quiet, suave in a reassuring way, not a clever suave, and he got on well with the black people at the Tournon.” Noted for his hostility toward white supremacy, his suspicion of Marxism, but also for his versatility in international western capitals, Chester was a necessary component of a young intellectual’s education in Paris during the era of decolonization. He was chiefly known to the African crowd for If He Hollers, but his body of work, in diverse genres, was widely available in English and French by 1959. He exposed the depravity and racism of urban America, countering the promise of Eisenhower and then Kennedy’s “New Frontier” world leadership. African writers in France, particularly Cameroonians Ferdinand Oyono, a sharp satirist, as well as Mongo Beti, had written books on traditional African societies invaded by a colonial power and the rupture created by modernity. Beti had read La Reine des pommes and then met Himes, whose spending for drinks was appropriately “flamboyant” and whose attitude toward Europeans and Communists “truculent.” Chester’s anger and his survival skills were necessary for the younger writer, so devastated by the French army’s assassination of Cameroonian socialist politician Ruben Um Nyobé in September 1958 that he stopped writing fiction for more than a decade. Chester’s novels, his attitude, and his sensibility defied the notion that Europe was the only appropriate passageway to civilization.
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