Chester, who did not earn a percentage of the film gross, considered himself the primary person exploited. He told the Hollywood studios who came after Cotton’s success that he wanted $100,000 for the rights to use the other novels featuring his gun-toting detectives. In New York he spent some time with the latest black artist to achieve a national audience, six-foot-tall Maya Angelou. He made a “big hit” with Angelou, who was in turn later “duly pleased” to hear that Chester had liked her. Then Chester broke a denture eating a rabbit’s leg and had to be rescued by his dentist. He went to Los Angeles to discuss future projects with Goldwyn, to whom he sold The Heat’s On, which became the film Come Back Charleston Blue, the sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem. During the negotiations, in light of the inconsiderate “general American attitude toward the value of my work,” Chester backed down to $25,000, but he would receive 5 percent of the studio’s net profit.
The U.S. visit also allowed him to be in New York on September 20, 1970, for the inaugural award ceremony of the Black American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization that grew out of the black cultural nationalist explosion of the period; the idea was to create a permanent institution somewhat parallel to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Someone burglarized his hotel room while he stayed in New York, but Chester was more happily distracted by appearing on television shows and the rising tide of approval from younger black writers. Ishmael Reed dedicated his new book 19 Necromancers from Now to Chester, and Donald Goines, a cult favorite of black readers, went on to call the protagonist of his novel White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, “Chester Hines,” the same name from the 1930 Ohio penitentiary census report.
Chester returned to his new but poorly constructed home in Spain. He welcomed his editor Helen Jackson to Moraira in October and they worked hard to get The Quality of Hurt, his autobiography, ready for publication in the fall of 1971. The book he published differed from the graphic manuscript he had submitted. “As you know,” his editor told him after a few months of work on the project, “there were deletions and occasional rewrites of sections dealing with subsidiary characters and major revisions of the references to Willa. These were mandatory—not based on editorial considerations but on legal grounds—and are not subject to reinstatement.” By May 1971 Helen Jackson had taken the unusual step of traveling to Spain again to see him because of difficulties at the publisher. Jackson told him that the editorial director Sandy Richardson “has shirked all responsibility” and that Chester’s agent, Rosalyn Targ, was “so busy playing the ‘grand dame’ ” that she had become “frankly impossible.” With all the corrections, Jackson worried that Chester would understand himself to be reliving the censorship crisis he had faced with Doubleday in 1945 with If He Hollers.
Doubleday asked Chester to tone down the sexual references to get the book into municipal libraries. Fearing that the autobiography would suffer in the process, at one point in the summer Jackson turned the entire project over to Sandy Richardson, insisting that he devote expertise to the manuscript. Jackson wrote Himes clarifying the racial terrain in a way he could clearly understand and for the first time in his publishing career. “Major authors are not given to junior editors—major white authors are not.” So, instead of appearing in the fall of 1971, the book was released in the spring of 1972 and Helen Jackson left Doubleday to open up a bookshop in the Caribbean.
When the galleys were sent out, Chester got raves from his latest group of admirers, the black artists drawing direct inspiration from the U.S. counterculture and revolutionary black politics. Maya Angelou put plainly the case for his esteem from younger black artists. “For those who wonder what to do with and about the young black radicals of 1972, it is incumbent upon them to read Mr. Himes’ book.” She insisted, “I admire the writer and after reading The Quality of Hurt I love the man.” The echo was heard overseas. Lindsey Barrett wrote from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria that his new collection of poems Lip Skybound was “influenced by your work and personality” and acknowledging that “many of us have only now begun to know your strength.” Howard University English professor Addison Gayle sent Chester a copy of his new work, The Black Aesthetic. Clarence Major, another significant talent as a poet and novelist, wrote to Chester that he enjoyed best the portraits of Spanish landscape and the train ride in Mallorca. Chester had written a relievedly humanist document for the black writers coming out of the deadly 1960s, “a very lasting and important human record for human beings who care about the individual pain and struggle of other human beings.” But the highlight of the year, beyond being embraced by a new bunch of glamorous and seemingly fearless young writers, came in December when he wrote to Bill Targ to have Putnam forward his share of the purchase price of the dramatic rights for Cotton Comes to Harlem. It was a check for $25,000. The sum was the rough equivalent of what he might have hoped to have gotten on the snowy November night in 1928 when he went to rob the Samuel Millers at their house in Cleveland.
The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume I was fairly well received in American newspapers, caught now between roaring militants quick to accuse them of racist gatekeeping and the old tradition of expecting gratitude from black writers for any notice at all. Arnold Gingrich tried to have it both ways, in a widely serialized review, by claiming credit for having launched Chester, while also complaining of Chester’s “son-of-a-bitchery.” A weirder, more openly negative critique appeared in the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was Nathan Huggins, a black Columbia professor who had just published The Harlem Renaissance, a history of black writers of the 1920s. Proclaiming that Alex Haley’s portrait of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (both men mentioned by name in the prison sequence of The Quality of Hurt) had achieved “direct, straightforward, honest, self-critical, socially critical, and proud black self-expression,” Huggins accused Himes of writing a book that was “vacuous and unimportant.” And Huggins’s comment that the book was “perhaps directed to American readers of the early 1950s, who might have found something daring in interracial sex,” showed the formidable amnesia that had already set in. Chester had been unable to sell his novels in the 1950s precisely because they broached sex, as he had struggled in the 1940s when they broached politics.
Activist and writer Julius Lester wrote to the Times to correct the “unfair” review, “so unkind and cruel.” Lester, who sent Chester a note saying “I feel that it is the job of some of us younger black writers to deal with a review like that,” was a Himes fan. “Because this book tells me of a world I could know no other way, it is an extremely valuable addition to my life and the lives of other young blacks.” The Los Angeles Times called the book “raw” and “penetrating,” and the Amsterdam News’s Myra Bain admired the “truthful” portrait of the writer and his milieu. Given that white literary critics like Christopher Lehmann-Haupt judged Chester first and foremost “an angry, alienated black who feels that his considerable body of writing has suffered because of bigotry,” the notices were not bad.
Chester returned to the United States with Lesley in early February 1972 for, considering his health, a whirlwind series of interviews, book parties, signings, and readings, mainly in New York. A portion of the book came out in Contact magazine and on the twenty-seventh he was interviewed for the television show Soul by Nikki Giovanni, the twenty-six-year-old member of the radical black aesthetic vanguard. Giovanni threw a party for him at her apartment downtown and old friends like Melvin Van Peebles stopped by. A core group of irreverent black artists appointed him their hero.
On March 12, after Chester traveled in New York and to North Carolina to see Joe, the Harlem Writers Guild, under the direction of Rosa Guy, held a book signing for him at the United Nations Plaza Hotel. There were seven hundred guests, most of them young and black, and they were unapologetically outspoken. Critics like Addison Gayle, Larry Neale, Mel Watkins, and John Henrik Clarke, novelist Toni Cade Bambara, playwrights Loften Mitchell and Ed Bullins, a
nd uncompromising jazz musician Max Roach were on hand to cheer him, along with five hundred copies of the book. Ossie Davis opened the program and his wife, Ruby Dee, read from The Quality of Hurt. Then John Williams introduced Chester, who gave a short speech.
Another day the young black literary lions Steve Cannon, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Clarence Major partied with Chester in his suite at the Park Lane Hotel. Chester served so much scotch that when Cannon got to the Fifty-Seventh Street subway station, he fell down an entire flight of stairs and was bedridden for a week. Reed, an uncompromising high priest of his artistic generation, seconded the assessment of the event that produced some memorable photographs: “all of us really enjoyed being with you and Leslie [sic] and the cat that wonderful afternoon at the Park Lane.”
Thankful for being largely left out of Chester’s autobiography, Ralph and Fanny Ellison got back in touch with him. (Ellison, who sparred throughout the 1970s with this same group, told Steve Cannon that Chester had stabbed him at Vandi Haygood’s New Year’s party in 1953.) In his account Chester had not removed them from his memoir, but he had quietly glossed the action, boiling down the sequence of rich events between the fall of 1944 and the summer of 1947 until he had reduced them to less than two pages. Both volumes of the memoir would show his life with two women: Willa Thompson in volume one and Regine Fischer in volume two. Jean Himes and Lesley Packard, respectively, would obliquely balance it out with their understated roles in each volume. In effect, Chester had fleshed out a bit the material he had wanted to write on a black man’s love affairs abroad.
Despite the memoir’s preoccupation with interracial sex (and avoiding the backlash that John Williams feared from the reviewers “who are proponents of the every white chick is a tramp theory”), Chester continued to get a lift from black-run publishers and magazines and the younger generation. Melba Boyd, an assistant editor at Dudley Randall’s radical Broadside Press, wrote to him, enthralled by his corpus. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a twenty-two-year-old black graduate student at Oxford University who would become a famous academic in the 1980s and ’90s, was among those clamoring to talk to Chester. Writing an article on black expatriates for Time, and having succeeded in interviewing James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, he hurriedly telegrammed Chester, sending greetings from Baker, and imploring, STOPRY [sic] INCOMPLETE UNTIL I SEE YOU. Chester’s buddy Nikki Giovanni told him the story he knew, but which she was reckoning with at the age he had just gotten out of prison. “I think fame,” she wrote to him about celebrity in the United States, “is more trouble than it is generally stated to be.” Chester knew she was right. After the large parties and interviews in New York, he and Lesley went back to Spain at the end of spring 1972. There, Chester felt the telltale tingling and numbness. It was another stroke.
Chapter Sixteen
AFRO-AMERICAN PEOPLE’S NOVELIST
1972–1984
The new stroke in Spain left Chester feeling completely worn out, and it took even more time than before for recovery. After a long convalescence, he was requesting medical help from the American Hospital in Madrid for maladies that were serious and threatening. “I still suffer from my stroke all along my right side in addition to my hernia in my right groin, and my arthritis in left shoulder and chest,” he wrote to the staff physician. “I cough a lot and am continually in pain seemingly all over my body.” Meanwhile, a valetudinarian Chester was working on the second volume of his autobiography in what he felt was a drive against time.
In early 1973, Black on Black, the “admittedly chauvinistic” salvage of the collection of short work he had chucked into the Mediterranean in 1954 and for which Doubleday had paid only $3000, was published to minor notice. He tried to stir up interest and protect himself from obvious critiques in his preface. “You will conclude if you read them,” he wrote about these early short stories, “that BLACK PROTEST and BLACK HETEROSEXUALITY are my two chief obsessions.” Since most of the book was from an earlier era, he was cast as the antidote to the black militants, “no jive or rage; just real talk and real people.” Chester’s exceptional gift as a black novelist ultimately resided with his interior portrait of black life and black speech, the topic of his work when the white overlord was absent. The offbeat, funny, uncanny, always erotically charged scenes he created—between Bob and Ella Mae in If He Hollers Let Him Go; among Susie, Johnson and Play Safe, Lee and Luther in Lonely Crusade; and during the television-set delivery scene in Blind Man with a Pistol—all kept paramount the tapestry of ordinary organic black life, rich and fructifying on its own. By comparison, the less robust material in the short stories justified the “briefly noted” epigraph-length reviews, even if the screenplay Baby Sister was still fascinating.
Perhaps the brightest news of that year came from Chester’s older brother. Joe wrote to him in the summer, saying that he was scheduled for a cornea transplant on his less damaged eye, which might then restore his sight on the left. With the successful landing on the moon, technology seemed poised to remedy the most severe of injuries. After the surgery, in May 1973, Joe reported “substantially improved sight, not enough to read, but very useful improvement.” Joe’s first graft was not a success, but the next year, surgeons implanted a living graft and he reported, “I can see more than I have for over half a century.” Joe’s increased eyesight, after so many years, cheered Chester. Indeed, it seemed to reverse the great symbol of the downfall of his family.
Chester and Lesley came to the United States in the late fall of 1973 and they spent the holidays in Harlem and Durham, North Carolina, with his brothers. Eddie, a high-ranking mason and official with the service workers union, told Chester that his detective fictions had attained veracity, particularly Run Man Run, the story of the white cop on a murderous rampage. Joe had received an honorary doctorate of science degree at Ohio State in the football stadium where, forty-eight years earlier, Chester had helped pulled down the goalposts after the fall games. It was possible to accept some closure, some measure of redemption for the lives they had lived and what they had accomplished. Chester tried to return to active writing, now with the gambit that the detective fiction contained “the best of my writing and the best of my thinking and I am willing to stake my reputation on them.”
Pushing himself physically for a journey, Chester traveled to Germany to appear on an NAACP-sponsored “Black Literature Night” inaugural dinner in Stuttgart on February 11, 1974. There, a bearded Chester shared the dais with James Baldwin. Twenty years after the two men had first met each other through Richard Wright, they found mutual comfort side by side; their professional achievements and public stands were, in the end, self-sustaining. Baldwin was gracious and charming to him, a kindness to which the obviously ailing Chester responded warmly. Baldwin, fifteen years younger than Chester, would outlive him by barely three years.
Perhaps inspired by his brother’s medical gains, in July 1974 Chester went to London for a hernia and prostate operation. At first, the prospects seemed bright. “My health has improved (I hope) at great expense and I hope this will be my year. I am desperately trying to get part II of my autobiography finished for summer.” Chester would be at work on the volume until he eked it out at the tail end of 1976.
Chester, correctly it turned out, anticipated a turn in the reviews for the second volume: his praise as a pop star. He had tried, in mid-1974, to inch Doubleday into bringing out a collection of the eight Harlem detective stories. “The Harlem detective stories featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson is [sic] my biggest contribution to literature,” he wrote to Sandy Richardson. “I have been brainwashed into thinking otherwise by American book reviewers, which I know now and have always known was a mistake.” But getting Doubleday to take such action at this point in his American career was like turning an aircraft carrier around, and no offer was made to lasso the various copyrights and contracts and bring out the collection of detective fiction in a single volume as he had hoped.
So he labored on, but w
ith increasing difficulty, even after the modest physical improvement from his surgery. By the end of 1974, Chester was at work “desperately” trying to make the publisher’s deadline for volume two of the autobiography. Also concerned about releasing Une Affaire de viol in English, he asked Michel Fabre, a professor of American literature at the Sorbonne, who had written the first comprehensive biography of Richard Wright, to help translate it. “I have great hopes for this little book,” Chester confessed to the French scholar. Then Chester’s rheumatoid arthritis acted up so badly he couldn’t stand up straight. To compound matters, his Spanish bank temporarily refused to let him withdraw $40,000 of his money, starting a flurry of letters of complaint to the U.S. embassy. Mixed in, there were occasional moments of good news, such as when Ishmael Reed sent him a message, noting that he had published an article in popular urban magazines giving credit to “Gravedigger [sic] and Coffin Ed for being seminal ideas for my two occult detectives.”
My Life of Absurdity contained at least one instance of calculated revenge. Chester alleged, apparently because of an emphasis in articles by John Williams during the 1960s on Chester’s frailty, that the younger man was a frivolous opportunist. Williams, understandably upset, stopped speaking to Himes. After Chester’s death, when Williams was asked privately about his relationship with Chester, he praised Chester’s writing and reflected on their camaraderie—that is, after he had warned Chester about homosexual-seeming overtures and excessive gophering, “punk shit.”
Chester B. Himes Page 52
