Chester left for France, “where I am safe,” on April 26. “I have discovered,” he noted with some wincing, “that there is absolutely nothing for me here in the U.S.” He was not convinced that life in a busy European capital was a final refuge either. After having written his story of “the lost and hungry black people from black Harlem . . . dreaming of the day when they could also go back home in triumph and contentment,” he yearned to see Ghana. “I want to go to Africa,” he wrote to friends, but not to work on an African book: “I just want to go to Accra and live while I am writing.”
Upon his return to chilly, overcast Paris, Chester moved into Lesley’s apartment. As before, having been reduced to desperate measures in his relationship with the New York publishing world meant he would have to write without the security of an American publisher’s advance. In contrast, two publications strengthened his position in France, once again making him the heir apparent to Richard Wright. The Présence Africain pamphlet “Harlem, or, an American Cancer” was making the rounds of intellectual circles interested in the African diaspora and decolonization that spring. In May, A Case of Rape, Chester’s playful but most concisely intellectual book, was released as Une Affaire de viol by a small French press sympathetic to the Algerian liberation movement, Editions Les Yeux Ouverts; translated by André Mathieu, a Café Tournon pal, it featured an afterword by the French feminist writer Christiane Rochfort. The book brought him a new audience that started to connect him more to the Présence Africain article than the detective fiction and If He Hollers Let Him Go.
A Case of Rape, his foray into France and its touchy racial politics, produced a swirling controversy. “I became very much disliked,” Chester recalled. By suggesting that African Americans couldn’t get a fair trial in France, the book indirectly jabbed at French racism and strong anti-Algerian bias. “All the Parisian press claimed that I was calling the French racists,” he remembered. But he was helping them understand the world. Paris-Presse ran a headline “In Harlem This Summer It’s Going to Be Hot,” above an interview with him. Toward the latter part of 1963, he noticed “a number of articles in the French press about the growing racism in France (and how un-French it is),” and his work and words contributed to “a sort of soul searching.” If he did not get a best seller out of it, his publicizing the problem of racism in France during the epochal American summer of the March on Washington and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham brought him visitors by the score. By now, when he heard a knock on his door, he protected his time, shouting, “Go away!”
“People are crowding in on me and I am hoping to get somewhere relaxed and warm,” he told Van Vechten. As usual, he would hustle down to Torun and Walter Coleman’s home in the South of France. Before leaving, he had a visit with Thierry de Clermont-Tonnerra, the head of Editions Plon, and the marketing staff about the manuscript he had finished in Mexico. Chester insisted on a share of the royalties, “not like my other books that Plon had published” (La Troisième Génération and Mamie Mason). Like their American colleagues before them, the French publishers were unused to having an author call them dishonest; de Clermont-Tonnerra’s “face fell” and the head of publicity walked out.
Chester took solace in his friendship with Walter Coleman. The two chauvinists went to the Cannes Film Festival that spring, where Christiane Rochfort was secretary, and attended some of the champagne-fueled parties on the terrace at the Bleu Bar. When Rochfort called American directors over to shake Chester’s hand, and they instinctively snubbed Walter, Chester roared hysterically. Americans, he thought, would never change.
On his return to Paris, his notoriety had intensified. It struck him that he was “more famous in Paris than any black American who had ever lived.” What it meant was a nonstop parade of the trivially curious, and an end to his serenity. He balanced the superficiality of the celebrity by attending the talks at the Présence Africain lecture halls, where the elite of African writers held discussions. Guy de Bosscheres reviewed Une Affaire de viol in that magazine and decided, “The purpose of this work is precisely to denounce the odious mechanism of the racist conspiracy that irresistibly leads the black man in the infernal circuit from where he will be unable to escape henceforth only by forfeiture and death.”
One perk of fame was a radio broadcast that led to an invitation to tea with Clara Malraux, wife of France’s culture minister, the novelist André Malraux. Chester received a note the next day from the writer “asking me what had happened,” or if he and Clara had had sex. (They had not.) Meanwhile, a professor named Jacques Panijel enticingly dangled another potential film project; he wanted to bring Une Affaire de viol to the screen. Over drinks, Panijel, who had scored a hit with the controversial film October in Paris, concocted a plan to prepare a screenplay with Chester, enter a government-sponsored contest, and split the prize money for best film scenario. Chester thought it through while spending a month with Lesley on vacation in Antibes and Corsica, writing, seeing friends, and eating well.
He was getting to a comfortable place now. When Chester’s friend Dean Dixon, now sought-after, returned to Paris in November for concerts, Chester took the maestro out afterward to meet the saxophone sensation Roland Kirk. With Dixon and his old buddy tenor Charles Holland, Chester was sure of himself as an uncompromising professional, a black expatriate artist. After all, he wasn’t alone in his sacrifice or persecution, gargantuan as it appeared to him. Their expatriate choice seemed wise at the end of the month, when the assassination of President Kennedy exposed an instability in their country that had seemed reserved for the likes of Cameroon and Congo. Also, like France, America seemed vulnerable to being toppled by the grasping right.
In December 1963, Chester went back to his retreat in the South of France for thoroughgoing revisions of the Back to Africa novel, which he was now calling The Cops and the Cotton. From Christmas through January 7, he saw and spoke to no one, concentrating on his manuscript. Like the original in the series, La Reine des pommes, this book was not a potboiler. Philippe Daudy of Plon had asked for rewrites and Chester was surprised at the level of grammatical mistakes as he reworked and tightened the book. The added diligence allowed him “time to sharpen it and make the points.” The detectives “express just how they, and other black people, feel in Harlem,” he wrote in his regular update to Van Vechten. “It’s been so long since I’ve worked at my occupation,” he reflected, “that I am surprised to find out how well I like doing it, and how well I can write.” He had hit another stride. “I am a writer and a writer writes.”
Away from his desk, he dropped in on Walter and Torun, and dashed over to Nice for provisions, where fresh fish, chicken, oranges, tomatoes, and good quality typing paper were abundant and cheap. Falling into his old habit, on New Year’s Day Chester drank by himself a bottle of vodka with tomato juice, until his face swelled. “Holidays always bother me,” he philosophized, trying to figure out the emptiness that drove him so deeply into alcohol. Then, in a message to Lesley, he said simply, “I am a mean and evil man.” But for his next project, the mature rascal had a clear vision. “I am anxious to get to work on my projected book about my life and experiences in Europe—and that will shock EVERYBODY.”
At the end of 1963 Lesley Packard rented a duplex at 3 Rue de Bourbon-le-Château, a “fantastic location” with good markets nearby and where they could see St.-Germain-des-Prés and Place de Furstemberg underneath the window. She took over the apartment from a Smith College graduate. Chester admonished Lesley for having shared his books with the young American preppie, convinced that she represented precisely the type who had sought to demolish his career. “My books drive these people crazy,” he warned his lover. “She’ll make you suffer just a little, hoping it’s me.” He didn’t complain about the apartment, with its expansive red-carpeted living room, a built-in dining room table, large bath, and an upstairs bedroom with a grand balcony. The only downside was that it was seven flights up from the street.
/> The apartment he would enjoy with Lesley boded good things for the coming year. In 1964 Chester would be fortunate with his many publishers. Plon got behind Cotton Comes to Harlem (published in France as Retour en Afrique), issuing such a large print run that Chester was autographing books for two days. In the spring he would learn that, following the reissue of If He Hollers Let Him Go, NAL would reprint new paperback editions of The Third Generation and The Primitive, and Avon would reissue For Love of Imabelle under its most enduring title, A Rage in Harlem. Also back in the States, negotiations got under way with Stein and Day for Pinktoes, and Putnam promised a hardcover of Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1965. The angry, bluesy humor of these unflinching books had increased their value by explaining Americans to themselves as the sharp teeth of a cruel decade were bared.
One of his visitors from the French press was a young black American reporter with a Dutch surname. Melvin Van Peebles was a self-confident novelist and filmmaker in his early thirties from Chicago who had landed in France in 1960. Van Peebles was capable of surviving on his own. He didn’t flock to the Tournon and isolate himself among the soul brothers, but he wasn’t an opportunist mimicking Europeans. He was in the midst of preparing a tense, surreal screenplay about a black GI and his French girlfriend, called Story of a Three-Day Pass. In sync with Chester to explore the erotic energy from black-and-white pairings, Van Peebles’s cinematic oeuvre would bring the legendary black sexuality and its full implications—erotic, folkloric, and militantly revolutionary—to the big screen. When Story of a Three-Day Pass was released in 1968, it would mark the first time a U.S. motion picture directed by a black American was distributed by a major Hollywood studio.
But in February 1964, Van Peebles climbed to the top of the stairs and, after a little impolite confusion during which Chester initially told him to shove off, the two men delighted each other in long conversation. Lesley had marching orders from Chester to interrupt a discussion after twenty minutes to free him from the legion of visitors but, recognizing a friend, Chester waved her off. Go-getters with sympathetic artistic visions, Van Peebles and Himes had independently achieved their radical political goals.
Settling down to tall glasses of vin ordinaire to fortify themselves against the winter wind, the Midwesterners talked about black life in Paris. When Van Peebles asked about Richard Wright, Chester called him “the greatest black American writer who ever lived.” When he was asked about Baldwin, whose full color portrait had adorned a May 1963 issue of Time magazine, Chester used a long anecdote about the great bebop drummer Max Roach, the most political of the jazz musicians. After a show, a white man, a music producer who owed Roach’s son money, stood in a line to congratulate the musician. When the producer approached the drummer, Roach hit the man in the mouth with his fist, knocked him to the ground, and kicked him with his feet. He extracted the white man’s wallet and exactingly pocketed the money in question. He turned to his child. “Let that be a lesson to you, sonny,” Roach was heard to say. “He must be made to see that you exist.” Baldwin’s two breakaway best sellers in the United States, Another Country of 1962 and The Fire Next Time of the following year, had both explicitly chosen love as the best method to transform the country into a multiracial democracy. The eloquent Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. said much the same thing in his national addresses that year, but especially in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” touting a “more excellent way of love and non-violent protest.” Theirs was a path to social reform that Chester did not share. He told Van Peebles that what he had to say to Baldwin was that he needed to prepare himself for confrontational violence, akin to Roach. Van Peebles called the interview, “Chester Himes, the Unvanquished.”
Despite the fact that his detective series and satires finally seemed to be catching on in American markets, Chester ached to write what he called “a good book I suppose.” A “good book” meant a long, direct narrative drawn unflinchingly from his life. But when the left-wing French press asked what he was working on, he admitted to a change of heart about the value of his detective fictions. He told them he was writing in the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Dashiell Hammett, and Macbeth, a “very bloody book.” “I write novels, that’s all,” he told a reporter for Louis Aragon’s highbrow Communist-y literary sheet Les Lettres Françaises. “There’s no difference between the genres. There isn’t one side so to speak, the ‘detective stories,’ and the other the ordinary novels. . . . I simply describe the social conditions of poor people who need to win money.”
Chester and Lesley traveled to London, where he saw the film Dr. Strangelove, which satirized American military commanders bent on winning a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, and Chester had an epiphany to surrender to the autobiographical book he’d been wanting to write. He decided to continue the “long journey” that he had begun, fictionalizing the relationship between himself and Willa, and show the shift in the man’s affection, “the love goes into pity, the pity into sacrifice.”
His ambition was cooled at the end of May, when his health failed him again and he had to be hospitalized and reprioritize his physical well-being, taking the blood pressure medicines Ismelin and Hygroten. Soon to turn fifty-five, he had outlived Wright by three years. But when Arche magazine placed him on the cover of the June issue, with the tagline “Jews and Blacks: A Discussion with Chester Himes,” he looked “handsome” and “full of life” as an admirer recalled.
In July, Harlem cracked apart, as Chester had already indicated that it must, and deadly battles with the police, looting, and arson swept the neighborhood that he had introduced to the postwar French public as the most significant and subtle hive of black people on the globe. Chester noted the black revolutionary Jesse Gray speaking of almost the same strategy that he had advocated in 1945 in the Afro-American newspaper: fifty thousand well-organized black men ready to die could change the nature of U.S. race relations.
Van Peebles came to him again for another article for France-Observateur. In “Harlem on Fire,” Van Peebles compared remarks by New York police and the FBI to the effect that the rioters were simply criminals and hoodlums with “the same terms used by French authorities about 1954,” referring to the Algerian uprising. The article included a short fable by Chester called “The Mice and the Cheese,” his way of explaining the insincere liberal sops thrown at American blacks in pursuit of dignity in the north. Undeterred by the casualties that mounted in the violent unrest in the United States, Van Peebles and Himes considered the bloody riots a signal that “the black revolution is irreversible.” Chester’s views, which had trod vigorously against the opinions of both friends and enemies, would be vindicated in 1964 and made prophetic after 1967.
Chester was an offstage director of the extraordinary events unfolding in the United States, his work a conduit for the blistering attitudes of young black Americans, who were demanding either immediate full participation in the nation or their right to tear it apart. Congressional committees of inquiry would summon writers like Ralph Ellison and Claude Brown to Washington to explain the riotous summer, and soon enough politicians were waving studies declaring that black matriarchal households and emasculated patriarchs were the root cause of American racial inequality. The rage leading to violence and the crisis of black domesticity, much of it due to prejudice and economic inequality, had been Chester’s bailiwick in the 1940s and 1950s—even if the anomalous robust employment years of the Second World War, the massive suburban expansion aided by the GI Bill educating veterans and guaranteeing mortgages, and the subsequent interstate highway system had collectively made it difficult for his observations to take hold. Whites puzzling through televised images of escalating racial unrest and increasing reports exposing crushing economic inequity were wondering how the literary tradition and its custodians had been so inept at shining a light on these hidden nooks of U.S. life. Admitting that the media industry he worked for had never effectively published or distributed Chester’s writing, edito
r Don Preston wrote to him, “I’m sure you have not really had your say, and that recent turmoils and tensions have not left you entirely unmoved, even from a distance.” America was turning, somewhat, to Chester.
After the Harlem eruption, Chester gave in to his impatience to see Africa and be inspired. Needing a destination that was convenient and easy to secure entry to, he skedaddled with Lesley to Egypt for two weeks of bedbugs, nausea, and diarrhea. Most appalling to him was the obvious racism of the Arabs toward Africans. “Not only is there indefinable poverty shrouding Alexandria and Cairo, but the Arabs haven’t gotten over their tradition of slave trading. In fact, the black Africans and their descendants are still slaves in Egypt,” he fumed. Despite the squalor, the prejudice, and the bloody, fly-covered meat carted through the street, Chester was glad he had gotten to visit the ancient artifacts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, “which I consider the best museum in the world.”
While Chester had convincing firsthand evidence discounting any racial panacea in parts of Africa itself, by October he had discovered in Paris “that racism has greatly increased her [sic], like the number of automobiles and the standard of living.” He mused, “I’m wondering where I can go now.” He found himself unsatisfied with his visits to the Côte d’Azur and dissatisfied with his homeboy Walter Coleman. Walter held Torun, a talented, pretty, successful woman greatly attractive to Chester, in a trance it seemed. But now Walter acted “as bad as those Egyptians, but in a different way.” Chester began to think of Walter as “a French uncle tom,” a black man who praised whites without the idea of a reward. As for the way Chester saw himself at the same time: “I’m an evil, highly sensitive, unsuccessful old man—but I am not an American Negro in the usual connotation of the word . . . unless there might be some resemblance to Malcolm X.” Publishers were recognizing that fact. On the recommendation of John Williams, Seymour Lawrence, vice president at Knopf—the same firm he was still disputing charges and the copyright to Lonely Crusade with—wrote a friendly letter to see whether he had written his memoirs, the project that Chester admitted to having held “in the back of my mind for some time.”
Chester B. Himes Page 47
