Chapter Thirteen
FIVE CORNERED SQUARE
1959–1962
Shortly before Christmas 1959, a thin, aggrieved Regine Fischer arrived unannounced at Chester Himes’s apartment at the southern edge of Paris. A few days later Chester arranged to meet Lesley Packard at the Time-International office near Place de la Concorde. Before he reached the glass door of the building, Fischer surprised him, smashing him in the face with her handbag, and in the process breaking the glasses that Chester had now begun to use to drive. She accused him of indiscretions, and he responded by wrestling Fischer into the car and driving home, where they struggled over the ringing telephone in the apartment—obviously a call from a mystified Lesley. He slapped Regine and she dashed into the bathroom, took his razor blade, and slit her wrists. It had taken half a century, but Chester recognized it for what it was, “the worst moment in my life.”
He had to telephone the police because he could not stop her from fighting him, despite nearly bleeding to death. The concierge and the policemen arrived and took Fischer to jail. Chester reached Christian Millau to help with the translating and had Fischer released to the American Hospital and then to Maison de Santé, a clinic in Nogent-sur-Marne. She underwent psychiatric sessions and shock treatments. Chester admitted some responsibility for Regine’s woes, but that feeling was typically overcome by a core obdurateness which enabled him to feel entitled to take advantage of people when it was convenient. He was also conscious of the manner in which using people added to the misery he was experiencing himself, what he disgustedly called “this veritable ocean of motherraping goddamned self-torture I’ve lived in for all my goddamned life.”
Chester agreed to stop seeing Regine but characteristically battled with her father about who was to blame and how soon or in what manner he ought to break off contact. Shortly after the crisis had passed, he resumed his position of disregard. “This is me, Chester Himes,” he rebutted Otto Fischer’s prayer to abandon ties to Regine in early 1960, “you don’t expect you and I to agree.” Fischer arranged for his daughter’s admission to a mental health facility in Austria. For her part, Regine downplayed the significance of the bloody episode. “You know that I really did not intend any harm at Christmas,” she wrote from a room with barred windows. “Tell those people that I did not intend to kill myself this time.”
Despite the distance between them (it was twenty-four hours by car), Chester now lived warily in fear of Regine’s rages. In fact, he became convinced that she was planning a cruel reunion in Paris to splash acid on Lesley’s face, a dreadful retribution lifted from the pages of A Rage in Harlem. When Regine did reappear in Paris, at the beginning of spring, a rueful Chester scurried back to the South of France. Regine expressed deep ambivalence about the two of them, saluting Chester as “my only love” but looking critically at the three years: “For you I have never been but a toy. You plaid [sic] with it until it broke.” Partly to keep her at bay, and partly because he was compelled by her devotion and felt responsible for her, Chester would write back, make veiled insincere promises about the future, and send her a few dollars, but always shield his whereabouts. “I don’t have your address down on the coast,” she wrote to him, trying to find a way to belong in his life. After a couple of weeks, Regine circled back to Hamburg, where she still had a few credentials in publishing circles as Mrs. Himes.
During the winter Chester completed a detective novel now called All Shot Up, the story of a double-crossed, bisexual machine politician. With money from this book, he purchased a 1934 Fiat two-seater and in March went with Lesley to Nice. Afterward, they took a train to Milan to see the publisher Longanesi about bringing out For Love of Imabelle. The four-day trip to Italy went so well that Chester and Lesley decided to move in with each other. He was still avoiding Regine, who made occasional, sudden appearances in Paris, one time phoning Lesley to say that she had her head in the oven with all of the windows closed. Chester retreated to his most preferred terrain, the pastoral and calm South of France, typically within a twenty-mile coastal arc including St.-Tropez, Antibes, and Nice. Close to the shore, about five miles from Antibes (“a village of poor, gangster-like Italians”), was the Biot home of Walter Coleman and Torun Bülow-Hübe. Hiding from Regine that spring, he made a refuge in their storeroom.
In spite of the fact that he was drinking a fifth of Pernod every other day to manage his personal life, his stay was almost pleasant. Chester was captivated by gorgeous Torun and he marveled at Walter’s stories in the way he had enjoyed the banter with Harrington. Still sporting his beard, Coleman liked to entertain white women with the complete panoply of sexual mythology, telling them he was twelve before he knew he was making babies. Chester had his own advice to dole out, privately, to his younger friend. He told Coleman that when it came to business with whites, “Never stop giving them hell. The moment you let up, they’ll slap you down.” Walter was struggling to make a living on his art. When his cubist paintings of Billie Holiday didn’t pay the bills, Walter had found a niche moving narcotics. But even living with working artists (Torun was a silversmith), Chester was unable to do any writing in early 1960, shuttling back and forth to Paris to see Lesley, and dodging Regine.
The only project showing signs of life was the Harlem screenplay project with Christian Millau. Chester had begun the preparatory work, which included some documentary filming to fill in production, and he had unashamedly reestablished contact with his cousins the Moons to obtain the permission of Urban League honcho Lester Granger to film portions of Harlem’s Beaux Arts Ball. Meanwhile, the crisis in Algeria was threatening to spill out into the streets of Paris: “Everyone here, even the most level-headed and responsible Frenchmen, were [sic] so shaken by the Algerian uprising that they thought any minute there would be civil war and fighting in the streets of Paris,” Chester wrote back home. In the political confusion, Millau had mistaken the dates of the ball and didn’t get to the United States to film it.
Probably seeing more wisdom in living with Regine briefly than running from her, Chester decided “suddenly” to meet his old girlfriend in Germany that June. While this was a quicksilver impulse helped by alcohol, the decision to live with Regine always worked magic for the detective series. The battling couple rented an attic in Hahenhof, Austria, where he successfully finished another novel. The Heat’s On introduced memorable characters like Pinky, an albino giant, and Sister Heavenly, an elderly Bronx drug pusher, as well as underworld delicacies like “speedball”—injected cocktails of cocaine and heroin.
By mid-September he submitted the manuscript for the book and with the income, returned to Lesley Packard in Paris. Uncomfortable in France, the couple went as far as securing visas to Yugoslavia, a trip they ultimately did not make. Angry that he left her once again, Regine wrote him threatening, sarcastic letters from Austria. “It’s so sweet of you to wish me well after you did everything to make me sick,” she complained. “I am not well at all and if nothing happens I shall be back in the hospital soon enough.” Ignoring both her determination to marry and the threats of suicide, but seeing the wisdom of independence in his new and preferred relationship, Chester drove down to the Côte d’Azur, with Lesley following in another car; they then proceeded east to Italy, taking writing implements and their assortment of cats and dogs along the way. They passed through Genoa, Livorno, Civitavécchia, Naples, and Salerno, stopping to see the Isle of Capri from the hills north of Naples. Along the way, they made a short obligatory trip to Rome to take in the Via Veneto, which they knew from Fellini’s new film La Dolce Vita, and settled in a little burg called Acciaroli on the Gulf of Salerno.
With the sound of the pounding surf from the nearby beach in the background and ample markets at his doorstep, Chester found it easier to concentrate. He was hoping to push onto Tunisia, then meander south to Ghana, in the process conducting “an extemporaneous journey through the more settled of the new nations.” It was a trip that Frantz Fanon had just taken, under harder
circumstances. Like Richard Wright and William Gardner Smith, he was smitten by African independence and sentimentally curious about the land of his ancestors, but he ran low on money. Early in November, he heard favorable news—a payment of 1000 francs and a publication date for Mamie Mason—from Suzanne Blum, an attorney he had engaged to force Editions Plon to finally publish the book. He hurried to Paris to pick up his money, barely avoiding Regine, who was haunting the Hôtel Richou—escorting Madame Richou to the theater, chatting up William Gardner Smith on the street, and waiting for Chester. He decided to go with Lesley to the South of France.
On Tuesday morning, November 29, Chester was in St.-Tropez with Lesley, where they had traveled to visit her friends. Their landlady told them she had heard a radio broadcast reporting that Richard Wright was dead. Newspapers that week were filled with headlines about the capture of Patrice Lumumba and the discussion of Algeria at the United Nations. Alarmed, Chester turned to Lesley and told her, “Get the cat and the dog. We must go to Paris,” then headed for his room to pack. In an hour they were on the road, hurtling over five hundred miles like pilgrims to a sacred altar of black literary affairs. Chester, like Langston Hughes (who had visited with Wright on November 25), had not known that Wright was ill or in any danger. They had become suspicious of each other after A Case of Rape, where Wright had the chance to see himself through Chester’s eyes “as a failure.” Wright had organized a “Paris Club” of black expats and kept Chester out. But Wright had also fallen upon tough times. He had had to sell the grand apartment on Rue M.-le-Prince for smaller quarters on Rue Régis, and his farmhouse retreat in Normandy had also been sold. The final time Chester had seen the Wrights together, Ellen had accused him of dragging Richard back into the world of deprived black sharecroppers and ghetto dwellers in his writing. She may also have held Chester, a man known for his unkempt personal affairs, as a contributor to the couple’s marital difficulties. Ellen had reportedly shouted at Chester, “I don’t want him to wallow in the gutter like you.”
Since the fall of 1958, Ellen had been living in London with their daughter Julia, who studied at Cambridge; Wright had tried to settle in Britain but had been turned down for permanent residency by the British Home Office, which, apparently, declared him an undesirable. And though Chester sometimes squelched rumors that Ellen and Richard Wright were separated, at the end Wright had been closest to his girlfriend, Cecilia Hornung, and to Ollie Harrington, whom he telephoned every morning. Another recent girlfriend had been Japanese.
Chester and Lesley took a room in a hotel off Boulevard St.-Germain and made arrangements to see Ellen Wright, who they learned planned to cremate her husband and bury his remains without a funeral. Chester was appalled that a figure of such international stature would have no ceremony of benediction. “How dare she do this?” he sulked to Lesley before reaching Ellen on the telephone and arranging dinner along with Ollie Harrington, who was back from the USSR. To persuade her to hold a more formal memorial service, Chester built up his fallen friend. “Dick was the greatest black writer in the world,” he found himself repeating. At the meal Ellen acceded to the request and they scrambled to assemble a program, agreeing that the gentle Senegalese journal editor Alioune Diop should deliver the principal eulogy.
After Diop’s words, on the morning of December 3, a coffin holding Wright with a copy of Black Boy on his chest was cremated at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Despite the success of the formal ceremony, Chester concluded that most of the guests were Wright’s “enemies,” precluding much socializing after. (Meanwhile, the rumor mill declared that Wright had been poisoned by an elusive female CIA agent.) Although Chester made amends and conducted himself amiably with Ellen on several subsequent occasions, he was also angrily suspicious of her and he relieved his feelings by habitually circulating rumors that Ellen had in some manner participated in a conspiracy—like the one surrounding the demise of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba—to murder her husband. Wright’s champion George Padmore had also died unexpectedly in 1959, as had the Cameroonian politician Félix Moumié, who had been poisoned in early November 1960, elevating the sense of panic among the vocal black critics of western colonial power. Harrington apparently took the conspiracy so seriously that, despite the military standoff between the Americans and the Soviets during a visit to Berlin in October 1961, he would decide to live in East Germany.
“I had never realized before how much influence Dick had over me,” reflected Chester after the funeral, for the first time wrestling seriously with Baldwin’s heartfelt remarks over drinks eight years earlier. That black men one generation removed from slavery had taken it upon themselves to write fiction about blacks murdering whites and lusting after white women, while defiantly blaming whites—from the Negrophobes to the Negrophiles alike—was unprecedented. “The realest thing about Dick was his absurdity,” Chester wrote, also rationalizing his own course against conventional piety and ideologically driven politics. Chester’s closeness to Wright also had the effect of a kind of passing of the torch; people who knew the men involved understood that Himes was responsible for carrying over hard-earned wisdom about literary affairs and the black writer’s life to the next generation. He was the senior black international writer for younger blacks to seek out and, even though Chester was private and easily irritated, he didn’t discourage their fond attachment to him. Harvard graduate William Melvin Kelley, author of the Faulkneresque A Different Drummer (1962), visited Paris in 1965. Ten years later, he was still berating himself for not having the wisdom to seek Chester out. But, once the two men established contact, Kelley, by then a well-received artist in his own right, wrote ebulliently, “DChief call d’young Proofessor tcome t’d’golden Stool.”
Stepping into his role as the royal patriarch was not without obvious pitfalls. After the impromptu funeral it was not difficult to see that Wright would not be immortalized in the United States; his death was commented on in slender notices in the black press, along with a few other terse statements. Ebony presented the richest portrait of Wright’s last years in Paris, along with a photograph of Ellen and Julia consoling each other as three Frenchmen carried Wright’s ashes in a catafalque. That elegiac essay, nominally written by Ollie Harrington, was actually orchestrated by Chester. Harrington’s obituary presented the details of “the Gibson affair,” the Life magazine predicament from 1958, hinting that Wright had met with foul play.
With Wright dead and Himes an heir apparent for some of the slings and arrows Wright had received, Chester morosely tried to prepare his new girlfriend for what was in store. “If you want me,” he wrote to Lesley, “this world is going to crucify you.”
She was not deterred. They drove to Biot in December, arriving to relentless feuding between Walter and Torun. On Christmas Day 1960, Torun packed the children into the car and drove to Sweden, leaving Walter, Lesley, and Chester to feast on a liquor-soaked turkey that made Lesley ill. Torun and Lesley never got on well; in the fall of the next year Lesley would admit to Chester that she liked speaking to Torun “as much as I would want to speak to the devil.” But as an interracial couple themselves, Chester and Lesley had to accept overtures of friendship where they occurred. Chester and Lesley hopped around St.-Tropez for the next several months while Chester stewed, disappointed that Walter did not intellectually admire him as much as he did Wright and Harrington. In an attempt to punish his friend, Chester ignored Walter’s opening gala in March at Karin Moutet’s Parisian gallery. The combination of being slighted by his friend and still having some financial miscues left Chester feeling “broke, outcast, put down by American publishers, ignored by English publishers, nibbled on by German publishers, only honored by the French, for almost free.”
Lesley and Chester drifted apart in the spring and at one point Chester returned to the Latin Quarter and its cheap rooms. At the Blue Note jazz club he observed his expatriate twin Bud Powell, the genius architect of bebop, dragging behind his dope-pushing girlfriend. In a dismal episode
, Powell, wracked by alcoholism, begged Chester for a beer.
To complete Mamie Mason for the Plon contract, Chester realized that he would need one of his original copies; the only one he knew of had already been deposited in the collection at Yale established by Van Vechten. He requested it and it was mailed to him. Playing with fire, he took a room in the Nineteenth Arrondissement on Rue Botzaris, in a section of Paris distant from his friends, and invited Regine to type the manuscript.
Chester and Regine shared a bond with each other in the way that prizefighters need deadly rivals for their careers. While no steadier than usual, Regine proved her value immediately by retyping the manuscript and then helping arrange for a German book contract and advance through agent Ruth Liepman for A Rage in Harlem. For two print runs, he was promised $2000. On the French scene, the “very pleasant” Maurice Girodias, director of Olympia Press, telephoned Chester and made overtures about a book contract. Chester decided to sell him Mamie Mason, which he renamed Pinktoes, a black male slang term for desirable white women. Although Chester was only capable of selling Girodias the rights to the English-language version of this novel, since he had already agreed to publish it with Plon, he preferred to think of the arrangements as two separate and completely distinct literary deals. On April 28 Chester signed a contract with Olympia, a press noted for its taste for pornography (Girodias had also made a small fortune issuing Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita when no one else would). Chester agreed to add some racy sex scenes and accepted 5000 francs, similar to what the German press had promised. He would learn shortly that the bawdy Girodias, when it came to literary business, was a hawk. Pinktoes was Chester’s first book written and published originally in French that was not a detective story.
Chester B. Himes Page 43
