by James Sallis
Meanwhile, having received the remainder of his advance from Gallimard, Himes hit the streets feeling flush and thinking to himself: “Now I was a French writer and the United States could kiss my ass.”26 He celebrated in typical fashion by updating his wardrobe.
I wrote a new ending the same day, and the next I went down to Old England men’s store on Boulevard des Capucines to buy a shirt. After I had bought a shirt to please me, a tan and black checked woolen shirt to go with my brown and black sports jacket and charcoal brown slacks, I stopped in the shoe department and bought an outrageously expensive pair of English-made yellow brogues
and, after getting blind drunk, took comfort from a fat Swedish woman with “repellent, unkempt, greasy dark hair hanging over her fat repulsive shoulders like snakes from Medusa’s head.”27 A few days later, Regine walked into his room. Himes bought her new clothes and a cheap imitation-silver ring; they worked their way through a major confrontation in which Himes hit her in the face and kicked her in the stomach in “a blind insensate fury,” then went on to a party at Walter Coleman’s and Torun’s; they settled back into life together.28 This was the period in which at Regine’s urging Himes attended classes daily at the Alliance Française. The classes took up his mornings and, as he made little progress, after a month he dropped them, insisting that they interfered with his writing.
All those years, and all the years to come, the French language and Chester Himes were to stand staring one another down across an impassable river. He tells how the first time he tried out his new language, on the boat across, a waiter rather imperiously corrected him; he had used the incorrect auxiliary verb. Elsewhere he writes how, meeting translator Yves Malartic and wife Yvonne for the first time, he rushed toward them to enunciate the greeting he had memorized and practiced over and over: “Yves! Yves! Je suis très content de vous avoir.”29 Malartic, looking puzzled and not a little embarrassed, responded, “I’m so sorry, Himes, you must forgive me, but I don’t understand American very well.” It had been like that all along, Chester said. He shouted and screamed and threatened and cursed and these people just refused to understand him.
Just as they did in his own language—and in his books?
16
A New Intelligence
Jesse Robinson in The Primitive, walking New York streets and reminiscing about 1944 when all the liberals, black and white, were lining up behind Roosevelt and there was nothing like politics for getting love black or white, thinks of Harlem hostess Maud:
“What a bitch!” he thought. “A great woman, really. Greater than anybody’ll ever know!” Many times he’d considered writing a novel about her. But he’d never been able to get the handle to the story. “Great Madame, actually. Worked with her tools. That whore did everything. Besides which she was a cheat, liar, thief, master of intrigue, without conscience or scruples, and respectable too. That was the lick—the respectability.” He felt a cynical amusement. “Son, that’s the trick. Here’s a whore who’s friend of the mighty, lunches with the mayor’s wife, entertains the rich, the very rich, on all kinds of interracial committees, a great Negro social leader.”1
Maud had made an earlier appearance, as Mamie, in Lonely Crusade. There, she is a “fat, light-complexioned woman with black hair and sleepy eyes, clad in flaming red lounging pajamas”2 who at her St. Nicholas Avenue apartment hosts a more or less continuous party in which important blacks and inconsequential whites mingle. On a trip to New York, Lee Gordon attends with an old friend he’s run into at the Theresa Hotel.
But he had listened in vain for anyone, white or Negro, to make a single statement that had any meaning whatsoever. The Negroes were being niggers in a very sophisticated manner as tribute to their white liberal friends. And the whites were enjoying the Negroes’ tribute as only white liberals can.
It would have had some meaning to Lee if the purpose of the party had been sex. A prelude for adultery, or even suicide. But there at Mamie’s, sex had been but a vulgar joke.3
If Jesse Robinson never had been able to get the handle to the story, Chester Himes did. The result was Mamie Mason, published in the U.S. as Pinktoes, where, unlike that of Lonely Crusade, the purpose of the party, the purpose of everything, it seems, is sex. Himes’s only extended satire, Pinktoes proves more successful by far than such earlier satiric forays as the scenes with Alice’s family in If He Hollers or Kriss’s drink-riddled black guests in The Primitive. Its sexual farce leapfrogs in part off a novel virtually unknown to whites but one which would have been familiar to black readers of the time, George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), in which Negroes pay to be by “the strange and wonderful workings of science in the land of the free” turned white, gaining “the open sesame of a pork-colored skin.”4
Here, Mamie becomes “Harlem’s most famous hostess … of a color termed ‘yellow’ by other Negroes and ‘tan’ by white people … a thirty-nine-year-old, big-boned, hard-drinking, ambitious, energetic woman with the instincts of a lecherous glutton.”5 Given to periodic consumption of entire turkeys and hams and eternal dieting in order to fit into her fashionable size-twelve sheath dresses, Mamie is always seen smiling or laughing, “both of which she could perform convincingly while in a state of raging fury.”6 With husband Joe, a consultant on interracial relations for the national committee of a major political party, she aspires by way of her freewheeling parties to be recognized as the undisputed social leader of Harlem and simultaneously to solve the Negro problem, or “if not solve it, at least tire it out.”7 Here, from a chapter entitled “Wrestling and Pole Vaulting,” is one interracial summit conference.
So what happened to the unidentified distinguished-looking white lady and the young dark Negro poet who looked like Jackson? They left Mamie’s to go somewhere and make some poetry, and, oh, brother, they are making it, white and black poetry, that is.
This poetry is not only being made but it is being said, between pants and grunts and groans, that is.
HE:
Birmingham.
SHE:
Oh, you poor lamb.
HE:
Ku-Klux-Klan.
SHE:
Oh, you poor black man.
HE:
Lynch mob.
SHE:
Oh, you make me sob.
HE:
Little Rock.
SHE:
Oh, what an awful shock.
HE:
Jim Crow.
SHE:
Oh, you suffering Negro.
HE:
Denied my rights.
SHE:
Oh, take my delights.
HE:
Segregation.
SHE:
Oh, but integration.
HE:
They killed my pappy.
SHE:
Oh, let me make you happy.
HE:
They call me low.
SHE:
Oh, you beautiful Negro.
Finally the verses ceased as the rhythm increased to a crashing crescendo with a long wailing finale:
HE:
Ooooooooooo!
SHE:
Negroooooooooo!8
Much of the inspiration for Pinktoes seems to derive from several months Chester spent as guest at the Moons’ Harlem apartment in 1944 after returning to New York from California. Henry was then public relations director for the NAACP, Molly volunteer president of the National Urban League Guild she had founded two years previously; both, as part of the President’s “Black cabinet,” were staunch campaigners for FDR. Henry and Chester had corresponded on and off since Chester’s prison days. Henry, passing copies of his cousin’s stories on to Sterling Brown, then its director, had been instrumental in getting Himes work with the WPA; the Moons’ support also helped secure the Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed Chester to complete If He Hollers. (The “Rosenberg” Foundation and its fellowships become a comedic element in Pinktoes.)
I went to New York to live with Henry and Mollie
Moon in their fabulous apartment at 940 St. Nicholas. It was during the time Roosevelt was running for his last term. The communists, the negroes, the negrophiles and friends were getting together to elect Roosevelt. Henry Lee was working for the CIO Political Action Committee … and Mollie was giving parties sponsored and paid for by the various groups, including the Democratic National Committee … There is hardly a prominent middle class negro of today I did not meet at that time—Walter White & Co., Lester Granger, Ralph Bunche—oh hell, all of them. It was from this time and from these people I have taken the scenes and characters for my book.9
Relations grew strained even while Chester was there, especially over a woman with whom he had an affair and of whom the Moons roundly disapproved. Shortly after that 1944 visit, the relationship would decay. The Moons failed to praise unreservedly If He Hollers when published the following year and, with most liberals black and white, no doubt harbored still more fervid reservations toward Himes’s portrayal of interracial relations and leftist movements in 1947’s Lonely Crusade. On Himes’s part there seems to have been a curious if altogether Himeslike anthology of emotions: envy of the Moons’ central position in Negro and New York intellectual life, disdain of their middle-class lifestyle and disgust at their hypocrisy, disappointment that they’d not done more to help him and grudging resentment at what they had done. Either because he felt he had license to such use or because he had made them so imaginatively his own, so recast them, in the work, Chester always expressed surprise when those in his life from whom he had modeled characters—Jean, Vandi—disapproved, and it was no different with the Moons. How could anyone possibly be upset by this? It was all in the cause of good literature, or of good fun, was it not? And (this thought, too, must have crossed his mind) had he ever in his fiction been harsher on anyone, used anyone else harder or more unsparingly than he had himself?
For Silberman at Dial, Himes summarized his novel as the story of how Mamie Mason tries to force the wife of great race leader Wallace Wright to come to one of her parties, how in so doing she all but ruins the lives of a number of people and then must go about setting them right again. In a later note for one of his publishers Himes expanded rather grandiloquently on this synopsis, describing the novel as
a Rabelaisian treatment of the sex motivation of New York City’s interracial set by a member of long standing. The author reveals some of the backstage and bedroom scenes in the great struggle of Negro equality in a graphic detail seldom found outside psychiatric case histories. Underlining the depiction of the Negro people’s illimitable faith in a just solution of their dilemma is a hilarious account of the aphrodisiacal compulsions of the “Negro problem” in which the dedicated crusaders against racial bias are shown more often falling in bed than in battle. The story is authentic and many of the scenes and characters are drawn so closely to life as to be recognizable.10
Like The Primitive, then, Pinktoes is a romanà clef, if a confusing one. Himes portrays himself as ever-broke and -hopeful outsider Julius Mason, brother to Mamie’s husband Joe. He’s something of a country-bumpkin figure, “a five-cornered square” who has left his wife behind in California and is staying with the Masons. Other life studies, though rarely direct given the nature of the novel, include Horace Cayton, Walter White, Himes’s old editor Bucklin Moon, Richard Wright, Ollie Harrington, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell, and Ralph Bunche.
Pinktoes was quite a departure from Himes’s prior novels, and finally may have had more in common with his freewheeling conversation, which we understand from friends teemed with jokes, stories, and exaggerations, and with the goings-on among Ollie, himself, and others at Café Tournon, than with his fiction up to that point. It brought Himes’s flair for outrageous comedy, so much a part of the Harlem cycle, into the foreground, as well as the associative, anecdotal style that increasingly occupied those novels. Most important, the freedom of invention that he found or allowed himself in this book seems to have worked to liberate him both from the earnestness of writing “proper” protest novels and from the burden of autobiography. Retrospectively at least, Himes agreed, remarking in My Life of Absurdity that
I had the creative urge, but the old, used forms for the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break through the barrier that labelled me as a “protest writer.” I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism.11
A June 1956 letter to Van Vechten from La Ciotat, where Himes completed the novel, reaffirms this. The novel’s conclusion, he writes, is terrific, much of it funny, none of it bitter. Curiously he calls the book an experiment in good will (the French title in full is Mamie Mason, ou un exercice de la bonne volonté), adding: “I have a great feeling now that I am going to be free forever.”12
Pinktoes came twelve years after Chester’s extended stay with the Moons at their Harlem apartment. Much of it he wrote during long days at the heated Café au Départ, where he sat wrapped in his gray Burberry overcoat trying to stay warm, too impoverished to buy cigarettes or even stamps, cadging tiny sums from friends and watching the steady parade of interracial sex everywhere about him on the boulevards. He began the book in early 1956, in March sent two completed chapters to Walter Freeman at NAL, who in declining nonetheless passed it on to Dial Press’s James Silberman. By April Himes had 120 pages in final draft. There, temporarily, feeling the strain of keeping up the novel’s pace and comedy, he stalled, taking time out to write the synopsis of a long-contemplated novel about black American expatriates in Paris. Though he had conceived or at any rate spoken of the book as a major project, Himes went no further than this synopsis, eventually published as A Case of Rape. Pinktoes, however, he completed in two weeks at La Ciotat.
The new book went begging as Chester moved on to write the first of his detective novels. Finally in 1958 Plon, publishers of The Third Generation, offered an advance of 50,000 francs, then promptly lost the manuscript, necessitating Chester’s appeal to Yale’s James Weldon Johnson Collection for a copy of the manuscript he’d given over, per his agreement with Van Vechten, to their archives. Himes meanwhile sold the book to Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, so that, when Plon in due course offered a contract, he signed it in violation of his prior contract with Girodias. Olympia published the book in English in 1961, Plon in its French translation in 1962; after much negotiation the two publishers agreed that, in exchange for making no claim against French rights, Girodias would retain all foreign rights.
Maurice Girodias heard I was in Paris and knew exactly where I was and I was surprised one morning when I got a telephone call from him asking me to bring in the manuscript for him to read. I told him the manuscript was owned by Plon but he said he would take good care of it and read it overnight and we’d talk about it tomorrow. When I talked to him the next day he said if I put in six good sex scenes he’d give me a contract and a thousand dollars advance. I had Marlene [Regine] type the original manuscript, the one Plon had bought, and I went to work putting in six sex scenes; but I put in so many sex scenes I had to take two thirds of them out. Girodias wanted to call it Zebra Stripes, but I came up with Pinktoes, which he liked better.13
Despite Himes’s claim of juicing up the novel for Girodias, few significant variances between texts exist. Sex scenes there are, in abundance—“Bessie Shirley was hanging head down from a walking stick stuck through the chandelier with her long hair hanging to the floor, and embracing Mr. Tucker, who stood confronting her,”14 for instance—but none appear to have been cobbled up to meet editorial demands or better suit Olympia’s perceived image.
Mamie Mason as published by Plon, Himes wrote in his memoirs, made quite a stir. Copies were on display all about the Left Bank, the book was well reviewed in the newspapers and magazines (one, Paris-Presse, ran a front-page story headed “Do You Want to Look Like an Overcooked Frankfurter, Madame”), strangers greeted him on the street: “I felt like a real author.”15
But the thickets kept getting
deeper. In 1964, claiming afterward that he didn’t understand the rights were not his, Himes sold Pinktoes to Putnam, only to learn that rights had already been sold, by Girodias, to Stein & Day. Eventually, after much sawing back and forth, the two U.S. publishers worked out a unique agreement for copublication. Pinktoes appeared in hardback in 1965, and, the following year, in a paperback from Dell. Both editions sold extraordinarily well, providing Himes his highest advance to date ($10,000) as well as his sole best-seller.
Walter Minton was buying up Girodias’ books. He had been successful with Lolita and Candy and he was anxious to get Pinktoes. Stein & Day had offered me seventy-five hundred, so Minton upped it twenty-five hundred. And then Stein & Day and Putnam started a lawsuit against one another, and that’s why they published it jointly. They figured it’d be more expensive to go to court so they just decided that they would work out a system, a very elaborate one, so elaborate that I ran into difficulties with Stein & Day because—Putnam kept the trade book edition, they were responsible for that and for collecting my royalties—Stein & Day were responsible for the subsidiary rights and the reprint and foreign rights and so forth. And finally Stein & Day began rejecting various offers from foreign countries. The last one—the one that really made me angry—was that they had an offer from a German publisher to bring out a German edition of Pinktoes and Stein & Day rejected that, and I went to the Authors Guild and to the lawyers to see what I could do. And they said that that was the most complicated contract they had ever seen.16
Himes’s account, finding such fault with Stein & Day while failing to acknowledge at all his own culpability, is skewed in a fashion that, reading Chester, one soon comes to find familiar. He did, as cited, in mid-1968 address his misgivings to the Authors Guild. In a four-page letter of August 12 a Guild representative responded. In the usual one-author, one-publisher relationship, he wrote, there would be a number of fairly common and common-sense steps to take, though none seemed applicable in this case. He suggested several possible courses of action: putting the rights by mutual consent of all involved into the hands of an agent; arbitration; referral to a lawyer who would serve simultaneously as author’s representative and as arbitrator between publishers. Ultimately, however, he had more or less to throw up his hands and quit the field: “I’m not King Solomon, and I don’t have the wisdom to solve one of the most tangled contractual arrangements that I can recall hearing about.”17