Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  * * *

  How many times during the five years since she had divorced Ronny had she awakened alone? She wondered vaguely. Too many! Too, too many! And not because she played hard to get. She was easy—too easy, she knew—but she couldn’t help it; she hardly ever did it now for any other reason than to keep them near. God, what slobs some of them had turned out to be!

  But at this moment of awakening, before her mind had restored its defenses, regained its equanimity, phrased its justifications, hardened its antagonisms, erected its rationalizations; at this moment of emotional helplessness … she could not blame it all on men. That was for a time later in the day. Night was the time for crying, and day for lying; but morning was the time of fear.7

  Fumbling to piece together events of the night before (we’re told she goes through six bottles of good Scotch a week), Kriss breakfasts, showers and dresses, fortifies herself with Dexamyl, and sets off to work.

  And here, in the following chapter, is failed novelist Jesse Robinson waking from a dream in which, skating, he falls through the ice and no one saves him—or even sees him:

  He awakened and went to the dresser and poured a water glass full of gin. The faint glow of the city night came through the two side windows, silhouetting his nude body in the dim mirror. His hand trembled and his teeth chattered against the rim of the glass as he forced the gin down his throat.8

  Jesse falls back asleep and dreams in quick succession that he’s at a banquet where no one will talk to him; in a chaotic parking lot watching cars lurch into one another in their desperate attempts to break the jam and get out, then witnessing a brutal fight; and sitting on a bed, seventeen years old, kissing the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. “There’s nothing lonelier than a double bed,”9 he thinks upon waking again. The night before, he’d wandered from bar to bar looking for a woman. He’d come home and begun drinking gin and reading Gorky into the early hours, till the story he was reading started getting all tangled up with stories of his own imagining and “he’d become entombed in a completely new and frightening world,”10 dreaming that he was dead with no record or evidence that he had ever lived.

  He got up and surveyed his nude body in the mirror. It was a trim, muscular body, the color of Manila paper, with the broad-shouldered proportions of a pugilist. From the neck down he could have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. Only his face ever showed his age; now it was swollen from heavy drinking and had the smooth, dead, dull-eyed look of a Harlem pimp.11

  For the past five years, we’re told, since publication of his latest novel met with universal condemnation, Jesse’s brain has never let down but is always running with “futile rages, tearing frustrations, moods of black despair, fits of suicidal depressions,”12 and no matter how much he drinks, no matter what he does to deaden his thoughts, there is no surcease.

  From Kriss, Jesse has taken on the habit of stimulants. Day after day they stoke themselves with Dexamyl, then drink to level off or come back down: “Vandi and I had always drunk ourselves blind at night in order to get to sleep; and she took barbiturate sleeping tablets on top of that.”13

  Society’s victimization of them perpetuated by their own demons, Jesse and Kriss circle one another in a ritual dance, a deadly pas de deux, backing and advancing, spinning past and sliding off one another, through collision to catastrophe to chaos.

  Much of that dance, again, was taken from life, as when Chester discovered a supposed Washington business trip to be Vandi’s alibi for a rendezvous with an old lover in Chicago.

  I began slapping her when she admitted the truth and all the hurts of all my life seemed to come up into me and I went into a trance and kept on slapping her compulsively until suddenly the sight of her swollen face jarred me back to sanity … For an instant I thought she was dead.14

  Vandi, reeling about with her blackened face, couldn’t leave the house for two weeks. Chester nursed her, bathed her, made excuses for her, cooked and cleaned, all the while overcome by guilt. Later, near the end of the affair, he returned from a movie to the apartment he’d vacated so that she could have a tryst with an elderly lover and, looking at the stack of bills beside her, felt his guilt drain from him. That misogyny one senses forever poised just behind Chester’s chivalric manner—and in such seeming contradiction to the equation of suffering he asserts between blacks and women (though perhaps, finally, but another proof of it)—emerges when he writes of the incident in his memoirs, in a statement eloquently complex beneath its patent sheen.

  The final answer of any black to a white woman with whom he lives in a white society is violence. She knows as well as he, that no one, neither white nor black, will support his contentions. There may be many who will plead his cause, but if she is adamant, there are none who will take his side. Of course, like me, he might not give a damn if anyone takes his side or not as long as he thinks he’s right. And the only way to make a white woman listen is to pop her in the eye, or any woman for that matter. But it is presumed only right and justifiable for a black man to beat his own black women when they need it. But how much more does a black man’s white woman need it; maybe she needed it when she became his woman.15

  Other times Himes’s violent impulses were deflected from Vandi to visitors. The Caytons once watched in horror as Chester mocked Ralph Ellison for his success, verbal attacks stopping just short of physical. (Chester insisted in later years that Ellison had pulled a knife on him.) Much of all this, too, was layered into The Primitive. To Yves Malartic Himes wrote that American women, who in their hearts hate and envy writers, pursue them for the sole purpose of hurting them.

  By December 1952 the affair was over. Himes departed for Vermont to stay with Bill Smith, lugging along the huge trunk that went everywhere with him, a horsehide suitcase given them by Jean’s nephew back in L.A. days, and the clothes that proved almost his final word on Vandi.

  At least I had got some clothes while living with her. At that time, Kaskel’s was a big pawnbroker on Columbus Circle with an outlet store on Fifty-seventh Street which sold new suits of good quality and seconds of those slightly damaged by window display, and I had bought two new suits from them at about half the customary retail price; a beautiful three-button suit in Oxford blue flannel the likes of which I’ve never seen since, and a two-button suit in beige wool gabardine. In addition I had bought a good suit of dark-gray herringbone tweed from Rogers Peet at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue and a gray Burberry overcoat from a shop on Fifth Avenue called Nica Rattner, as I remember. And some shirts and ties and good English-made shoes from Brooks Brothers, and some odds and ends, summer suits, shirts, pajamas and such, all seconds, from Klein’s and Gimbel’s.16

  While Chester was in Vermont, helping Bill Smith with the rewrite of a novel, trying to walk off his daily Dexamyl buzz and adamantly doing little else, Joseph Sandy died of complications from a hip broken in a fall. Chester was prepared for his death, he said; his father had been in ill health for years. But he had no way to get to the funeral. Finally he called Vandi to borrow the money to fly to Cleveland.

  She did not like it at all. She felt that I was taking advantage of her, knowing that under the circumstances she couldn’t refuse, and of course I was.17

  Chester and Vandi would see one another again on April 22, 1953, when she arrived on a Paris visit within weeks of his own arrival. Chester’s new friends were duly impressed by her, and the two old lovers passed such a riotous night together that the manager of their hotel was forced to relocate them to a back room. While in Paris Vandi learned that she was to be the subject of Himes’s new novel. She pressed Ellen Wright, then serving as Chester’s agent, to show her what he had written thus far, but Ellen refused. Two years later, in February 1955, Chester was back in the States on business, staying at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village, and tried to call Vandi. Told she had died of a drug overdose the night before, he hung up the phone and wept.

  Scheduled for October 1952, Cast the First Stone was dela
yed until January. All through the affair with Vandi, Himes and editors at Coward McCann were in dispute; finally the novel reached publication in radically truncated form. That edition passed quickly out of sight, as did a 1972 Signet paperback. The novel didn’t fare much better in Europe, going unpublished there until 1978. It became a difficult find in any edition, and not until 1998, when Old School Books and W. W. Norton, returning to the original manuscripts at Yale, reissued the novel under its original title Yesterday Will Make You Cry, did we see the novel Himes wrote. Himes’s prison novel became his counterpart to Ellison’s protagonist, Himes’s invisible novel:

  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.18

  Chester maintained that the publishers had pulled out the book’s very heart. Van Vechten agreed, writing in a letter to John A. Williams that “Yesterday Will Make You Cry is probably his best but it was so cut for publication that in that form it is worthless.”19 The editors’ changes, however, went much further than simply cutting. “They upset the whole structure of the book and reordered the chapters, even rewriting certain passages,” restoring editors Marc Gerald and Samuel Blumenfeld assert. “The editors [at Coward McCann] deliberately and relentlessly erased the tenderer and more artistic aspects to turn Himes’s manuscript into a hard-boiled prison novel,”20 in effect turning an intensely personal statement into just another ready-to-wear, something instantly recognizable, a type.

  Taking their cue from Himes’s complaints, commentators have stated that reviews of Cast the First Stone were poor, as in the case of other early novels an exaggeration. While it’s true that reviews were few, they were by no means altogether negative, and appeared in major publications.

  Crime novelist W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle) began his review for the Saturday Review of Literature: “This is a very odd book.” Though troubled by the novel’s preoccupation with homosexuality and apparent artlessness (two-thirds of the book, he said, had “none of the esthetic generalization of a novel, but instead the unrelieved particularity of factual writing”), he nonetheless pronounced it “highly original.”21

  Gilbert Millstein in the New York Times took the low road of damning with a sidelong gaze, noting that the novel

  reads exactly like the autobiography of one of those penitentiary lawyers very often thrown up by prison life. Such men are glib, reasonably literate, authoritative in a superficial way, full of self-pity and whining mannerisms.22

  Frederic Morton in the New York Herald Tribune doubly praised the novel:

  Mr. Himes seems to have pounded his typewriter with brass knuckles without losing either accuracy or aim. He has succeeded twice: in recreating the inferno of a penitentiary; and in recording the ordeal of a convict’s emotional growth.23

  With that observation Morton urges into light the novel’s chief structural problem: its bifurcate nature. For two novels coexist, not always peacefully, here. One documents the dreariness of prison life with its sadistic guards, horrible food, homicidal convicts, unrelieved boredom and petty hierarchies, the other is a novel of character, dramatizing Jim Monroe’s coming of age as he moves toward a connection with humanity and eventual redemption, and the two narratives do prove at points immiscible. Himes’s feet are one moment on this path, then on the next, some fields over.

  Stephen Milliken, beginning chapter four of his Himes study with a brief essay on autobiography and fiction, points up the conflict that must always exist in the artist between the formal exigencies of art and “his sense of the unalterable reality of his own experience”24—compasses that may give quite different bearings. Unfortunately, Milliken says, Himes never chose to clarify in any detail the relation of fiction to fact in his three autobiographical novels of the early 1950s. Portions of his life explored exhaustively (one might say obsessively) in the novels are little more than sketches in The Quality of Hurt: six pages for his seven-and-a-half years in prison, a single chapter to cover all the events of his youth and his parents’ doomed marriage, three pages devoted to his affair with Vandi Haygood.

  It is firmly established that almost all of the basic events that make up the plot structures of the three novels are factual, but no light at all is shed on the validity of the characterizations and patterns of motivation developed in the novels.25

  To the language we use there is forever a kind of gravity that pulls narratives down into recognizable shapes, the shape of our own life, our preconceptions, shapes we know from other tales like the one we are relating, against which gravity the artist constantly must struggle if he is to say anything meaningful; the two streams of narrative in Himes’s novel are discrete languages drawing his story toward different, perhaps irreconcilable ends. Still, we must remember that this is an early, in fact a first, novel, and one several times rewritten over a period of years, years in which the author was himself undergoing dramatic changes. That the novel is something of a patchwork should not surprise us. Nor, finally, is it at all unusual that Himes’s text should be in conflict with itself; so many of them, so patently and so energetically, are.

  Gone now, however, are the anachronisms that littered the previous edition’s lawn with broken refrigerators and cracked fountains. Himes’s prepublication updating of the novel had moved the period from just after World War 1 (1928–36, his own prison years) to just after World War 2 (1946–52) by altering a few dates and sprinkling in references to contemporary figures such as General Patton. But the time in which the prisoners exist remains adamantly the 1930s: they shave with straight razors, the prison band plays hot jazz, and the whistle of freight trains underlines their immobility.

  Gone, too, is the first-person voice adopted for the book’s initial publication, which had the effect, probably intended, of bringing the story in line with traditional hard-boiled fare and the circumstantial one of suppressing the reflectiveness so important to the novel’s more personal aspect.

  In addition to being his invisible novel, Himes’s prison book proved a source of considerable confusion to early commentators. Assuming it to have been written after If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade, that is, in order of publication, epimethean readers perceived in the novel a shift in emphasis, a bending toward the brutalities and crime-laden atmosphere of the Harlem novels that followed five years later. There was confusion as well over Himes’s choice of a white man as protagonist. Had Jimmy Monroe, they wondered, been written black and later changed, either at the author’s discretion or at the behest of his editors, to white? and to what purpose if so? Was this a further attempt to reshape the stuff of a troubling book into something more mainstream, more identifiable—something tamer?

  In an introduction written for its reissue, Himes’s old friend Melvin Van Peebles relates, in a tone Himes would have admired, his rediscovery of the novel he thought he already knew.

  BLAM! By the second page, I realized what a chump I had been! I had accepted without question the swinging of the pendulum towards pulp in Cast the First Stone as Chester’s unmitigated intention…

  What a fool I had been! Chester hadn’t veered off toward the pulp genre, for which he later became famous, at least not of his own volition.

  Turns out Yesterday Will Make You Cry had made the rounds of the publishing houses with successive waves of editors and agents imposing “improvements” on the manuscript, forcing him to delete his more literary touches. They jammed Chester’s head in their toilet of racist preconceptions and pulled the chain and kept pulling the chain, flushing away what they felt were his uppity literary pretensions, forcing him to dumb-down his masterpiece before agreeing to publish it.26

  Reviews for Norton/Old School’s reissue of Yesterday Will Make You Cry though not plentiful were on the whole intelligen
t and laudatory. Jabari Asim in Book World found Himes at his best in detailing the gray, grim realities of prison existence.

  Although maddeningly uneven, the book presents an illuminating sociological portrait of prison life—certainly one of the best available in fictional form … Himes spent his last days worrying about his posthumous reputation as a writer. He would be pleased to know that at least 18 of his books are now in print—and interest is high.27

  Allen Cheuse, a reviewer with little sympathy for anything middlebrow or unambitious, contributed a fine, all but breathless appraisal for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Publishers Weekly (bringing to mind that “indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed” from Himes’s Chicago speech) capped its review:

  Himes … masterfully presents the arbitrary violence (from both inmates and guards), the corruption, the regularity of unlamented death, the uneasy relations of the races and the psychological elongation of prison time (“Each moment was absolute, like a still photograph”). Yet it is the depiction of Monroe’s love affairs—their comic absurdity, obsessive intensity and transformative emotional depth … that mark the book as both a superior prison novel and a moving fictional record of the perseverance of humanity amidst unrelenting degradation.28

  That, for all its horrors, lapses, and longueurs, is what the novel comes to represent to us. For Yesterday Will Make You Cry is at heart and uncharacteristically an upbeat, hopeful story. Its two major characters are engaged in a relentless struggle—Jimmy and the prison whose outstanding features are its dirtiness and its debasement, which would spread those qualities to each of the human spirits it houses—a struggle that Jimmy wins. “Big, ugly prison, but I’ve got it beat now.”29Jimmy has won through, has managed to forge his identity in an environment conspiring on every side to negate identity and deny the human spirit itself.