Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Mrs. Hancock was a casualty of white Christian society which fails to enforce the moral laws it has ordained … one of those unfortunate victims of a code of ethics promulgated by the white race as its own private doctrine for the elevation of whites only.34

  Here as elsewhere Himes holds that black men, and all women, live permanently excluded from, yet surrounded by, enclosed and defined by—bound by—that culture. That if they are misshapen, monstrous, or pitiful, it is only because they’ve grown to fit the mold they were formed in.

  On the one hand, as Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno points out in The Continual Pilgrimage, A Case of Rape shares its dominant theme of love overcome by society’s strictures and taboos with that of the memoirs; on the other, in its relentlessness, in its exploration of the roots of violence and self-despite and its tragic outline, it provides an addendum, one powerful far beyond its slight proportion, to The Primitive.

  In the end, A Case of Rape, like so much of Himes’ work, must be read as a record of the destructive force of racism. At the same time, the book is not a protest novel in the sense of Native Son. Rather, it is a cry from the soul, an indictment of society from the inside out. Rarely did Himes write more convincingly, with such mastery over his narrative, than in A Case of Rape. It is a brilliant, multi-layered examination of the intricacies of race, sex, and power, but what ultimately makes the novel so compelling is that it is a chronicle of doomed love. Neither Hamilton nor Hancock can live in a world fully of their own making; instead they inhabit a vicious, absurd universe, which insists on cutting up everything literally into black and white.35

  One might recall the ending of Nabokov’s The Defense in which Luzhin, driven mad by his obsession with chess, looks down from the window from which he is about to throw himself only to see “the whole chasm” divide into dark and pale squares. Even in death he cannot escape his obsessions, cannot escape the way in which he has come to perceive the world, cannot escape his history or himself.

  We are all guilty.

  17

  Gone So Long

  Himes had been talking to Marcel Duhamel at least since January, upon his return from New York, about the possibility of writing a detective story. Duhamel had translated If He Hollers for its French edition and now was editor of Gallimard’s La Série Noire, which published novels in the American hard-boiled mode. He thought Himes’s writing with its stark prose and strong images would fit right in. But Himes demurred, saying that he didn’t know anything about detective stories; that he was a serious writer.

  By October, with Himes back in Paris alone from that initial visit to Regine’s home, the situation was desperate enough to cause him to reconsider. Plon owed him $300 for The Third Generation but the book had yet to be published. And while Gallimard had published The End of a Primitive, Chester, since NAL retained all rights, received no payment for it. Retrieving a portion of his Mamie Mason manuscript from the typist he’d left it with, he took it around to Plon, telling them he needed a decision in two days. When they insisted on more time, he carted it on to Gallimard, and there ran into Duhamel, who again broached the subject of Chester’s writing for him.

  “Get an idea,” Marcel said. “Start with action, somebody does something—a man reaches out a hand and opens a door, light shines in his eyes, a body lies on the floor, he turns, looks up and down the hall … Always action in detail. Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what—only what they’re doing. Always doing something. From one scene to another. Don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages.”1

  Recalling that he had in fact started out to write If He Hollers as a detective story, Himes said he’d give it a try. Duhamel advanced him 50,000 francs out of pocket: “When you get about a hundred pages let me see it.”2

  Himes took him at his word regarding that 220 typed pages. In an interview five or six years later he told Melvin Van Peebles that before he started a new novel he’d count out 220 pieces of carbon paper and 440 pieces of typing paper. Then he would place a carbon sheet between two sheets of paper. The pile went on the right side of his typewriter. When he finished a page he’d take it out of the typewriter and put on his left. And when the pile on the right got low he’d know it was time to start winding the story up.3

  With other of Duhamel’s advice he had greater difficulty. When he had pushed his way through to sixty pages and took the portion in, Duhamel for the most part approved but counseled him to use more dialogue; there was still too much of the author in it. Keep the suspense going, he said. Don’t have your people talk too much. Use the dialogue for narration, like Hammett. Himes revamped what he had, then went back to Duhamel, who said: “Just add another hundred and twenty pages and you’ve got it.”4 He wrote Himes a chit for 150,000 francs: half the advance of 400,000 francs, minus the 50,000 advanced earlier. To Chester’s question “You think I should have some police?” Duhamel responded, “You can’t have a policier without police”5—which is why Grave Digger and Coffin Ed appear almost as afterthoughts in the first book.

  But first it was blank-paper time.

  Chester recalled a con Walter Coleman had told him about, The Blow, that revolved around a machine purported to make large bills out of small ones. He began writing, chiefly about the square who becomes a mark for three hustlers. The title at that time was Trouble Wears a Skirt He stalled out more than once, struggling all the while with the material, with his doubts that he could do this, and with himself. He was a serious writer, and this was anything but serious. How could he, writing it, be other than a cheap hustler himself, with Gallimard and readers as his marks? He consoled himself with the thought that he was writing only for the French:

  I would sit in my room and become hysterical thinking about the wild, incredible story I was writing. But it was only for the French, I thought, and they would believe anything about Americans, black or white, if it was bad enough. And I thought I was writing realism … Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one can not tell the difference.6

  Shortly thereafter, the story “came unstuck,”7 and Himes, working through Christmas Day and on into the new year fueled by boiled chicken and rice and quarts of rum, was able to complete it by January 18. The thought stayed with him the whole time he was writing, he said, that what he was writing was not a detective story but an action story, and that it was really a kind of protest against the idea of racism being behind all the brothers’ sad faults. Black victims might be foolish, gullible, even childlike (they often were, in Himes), but the black criminals were grazing sharks, predatory, vicious, constant. The whole setup was absurd. And it wasn’t Mamie Mason, as he’d thought, but The Five-Cornered Square (Himes’s new title for the book) that came as the logical follow-up to The Primitive.8

  In such musings we hear distinctly the clockwork of rationalization whirring and clicking, though finally there’s considerable truth to them. Himes went on for some time convincing himself of the worth of his enterprise. By April, as he was finishing the second detective novel, he was, he said in correspondence, not at all ashamed of the work he was doing. He recognized at some level the freedom these stories gave him to write outrageously, to keep the game going without bogging down in protest, without having to overburden his tale with superficial meaning or follow through on any line of programmed argument. He could juggle balls, Indian clubs, knives, and a plate or two all at the same time. He began drawing attention, his own as much as others’, to the books’ singularities: their humor, the absurdly overdone bloodiness of them, their simple, jagged story lines. Yet he still spoke of Wright’s novels as something apart, legitimate literature, even after himself gaining similar validation with publication of La Troisième génération by Plon in March, and that December wrote to Van Vechten from Majorca that should his present books become sufficiently popular he’ll return to writing a different sort of
novel. As late as 1965, in Cannes working on Blind Man with a Pistol, he was still wrestling with feelings—feelings any working artist knows well—that the books might be inferior, mere potboilers, uncommitted exercises. He had, at any rate, as of February 1957, a contract for eight Serie Noire books to be delivered one every two months. “At the end of 1956,” Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes in The Continual Pilgrimage, “he was nearly destitute; six months later, thanks to three advances from Duhamel, he had nearly $4000 in his pocket, two books finished, and a third well underway.”9

  In My Life of Absurdity Himes wrote: “Making up stories was my business. Not only my business but my salvation. No one ever believed me when I told the truth, neither the blacks nor the whites, for different reasons of course.”10 He was writing here of a personal lie, as opposed to fiction, but his statement rings with much the same belltone of self-justification. If no one believed the truth when he tried his best to tell it, then why not just go ahead and tell lies? But he’d make them outrageous lies, lies that couldn’t be avoided or ignored, lies that grabbed your attention and held it while they were slipping around behind to sink their teeth in. He would give them something (as he said of The Primitive) to hate him for.

  By the time he completed the second book, Himes claimed that “the only time I was happy was while writing these strange, violent, unreal stories. I accepted them to myself as true; I believed them to be true as soon as they sprang from my thoughts”11—perhaps recognizing that he had tapped into some reservoir of expression beyond the personal, beyond the naturalistic and mimetic, something that had little to do with typical European models. He goes on (this is written, remember, some years later, circa 1970) to describe the Harlem books, both their character and their significance to him, as well as anyone has done.

  I was writing some strange shit. Some time before, I didn’t know when, my mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought. All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting. It was funny really. If I could just get the handle to [the] joke. And I had got the handle, by some miracle.12

  Himes also spoke here, in retrospect, with mixed bitterness and pride, of the way in which America, while rejecting the writing from which they derived, and by which he lived, increasingly over the years took up his thoughts.

  Under the working title A Jealous Man Can’t Win, Himes finished the second detective story, published as The Crazy Kill and as Couché dans le pain, “a simple domestic story which involved a couple of killings,”13 in late April. The French title and opening scene came from a story Ollie Harrington had told him about a man falling unhurt from an upper-story window into a bread truck. Himes wrote that while working on it he went back to Faulkner again and again to sustain himself on that writer’s ripe violence and absurdist view of life.

  By the middle of September he’d finished a third, If Trouble Was Money, published as The Real Cool Killers and as Il pleut des coups durs. The following month, October 1958, the first of the series, La Reine des pommes (which had come out in the States the year before as For Love of Imabelle), was finally published.

  Himes had gotten the handle. He’d started off writing for the French, giving his new public what he thought they wanted, peopling his Harlem with exotics, with figures so exaggerated and actions so unreal as to be cartoonlike. But he was a serious savage, and the material, as often before, changed in his hand, changed almost without his knowing it. The supposed lightness of what he was writing relieved him of what had become to him burdens—protest, high seriousness, autobiography—and offered in their stead a new freedom of imagination. Himes had found his way to a fresh language, to that “new intelligence’ of which he had spoken, in which Harlem became, and remains, an enduring metaphor for America’s many wars upon itself.

  It was due to the detective novels, specifically Himes’s receipt of the Grand Prix, that he met not only future wife Lesley Packard but longtime friend Melvin Van Peebles as well. Van Peebles, then working for the Paris-based weekly France Observateur, found himself on “a slow week in the mayhem department” assigned to interview “this guy who had just won some big French crime writing prize,” a guy about whom he knew nothing at all:

  A significant, insidious fact, striking to the core of the African American artist’s dilemmas. Despite the fact that Chester, this literary giant, had been publishing essays, short stories and novels for over a quarter of a century, despite the fact that I, a black American, had grown up, gone to college and never once heard his name mentioned in the myriad literature courses I had taken spoke volumes about the walls of prejudice and the barriers of racism.14

  The door was opened by “a not quite medium-built man with European features and caramel-colored skin, a dashing figure, in a matinée idol sort of way, his rakish features made even more handsome by several wicked scars lining his face.”15 He’d caught Himes working, with the remains of a breakfast of caviar and toast nearby. Van Peebles thought him “a mind-boggling mixture of frail and ferocious.”16 Each surprised to find the other black, the two men immediately got on, and were soon laughing so hard that Lesley called out from the next room to be sure all was well. In 1964 Van Peebles wrote the text for the Georges Wolinski comic of La Reine des pommes published first in the avant-garde magazine Hari-Kiri and later, by Editions du Square, as a stand-alone. Van Peebles also began a film scenario for A Case of Rape that went uncompleted. The following year, he won a prize from the French government allowing him to shoot his first feature-length film, La Permission. Earlier efforts had included La Fête à Harlem, about a raucous Harlem rent party attended by the Devil, who then can’t find his way out. Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback Baaadass Song was a commercial success in the U.S., though, believing it un-American, the selection committee refused to send it to Cannes; its maker was by this time a counterculture hero. Writing of Chester in 1996 to introduce the first of Payback Press’s three-volume The Harlem Cycle, Van Peebles observed:

  Chester was like that Flemish painter out of the dark ages, Brueghel the Elder. Brueghel called it like he saw it too. So unflinchingly in fact that doctors today, 400 years later, have been able to identify medieval maladies from studying the characters that he painted, diseases of which people weren’t then aware. Chester saw America unflinchingly too—hilarious, violent, absurd and unequal, especially unequal. All of the so-called “new” racial antagonism bursting to the surface in the streets of these United States (diseases people claim weren’t even there) lay festering just below the pavement of Harlem in Chester’s work years ago.17

  Writer and future TV producer Joe Hunter also met Himes about this time.

  I first met Chester in Paris in ’59. I had read If He Hollers and Lonely Crusade in Philadelphia. Bill Smith and I were close. He, Bill, had not gone to Paris yet. He was truly pissed off with me for telling him that Himes was writing the way Blacks were supposed to write, and that he (Smith) was a pale imitation of Hemingway. He and Richard Gibson wanted to write like “white” writers.

  Smith went to Paris. While traveling in Europe, I stopped off in Paris to see him. He took me to the Café Tournon where I met Chester. When we looked at each other for the first time and shook hands, we both burst out laughing … as if we knew a secret about each other … I had never heard anyone laugh in that uproarious manner. It was as if we had known each other for years.

  Richard Wright then appeared and Chester introduced us. I was curious to see how those two reacted to each other. Wright was urbane, and Chester was his raucous self. I became just as raucous and Smith and Wright kind of looked at each other. When I looked at Chester we both burst out laughing. And I thought, how weird, we’re both thinking the same damn thing which was: Smith and Wright must be saying to themselves— “what a couple of real Harlem niggers.”18

  Now, upon his
connection with Duhamel, Himes had money and, having signed with Gallimard for further books, reasonable expectation, at least for a time, of more. One of his first purchases was a used VW that immediately demanded as disproportionate an amount of his time as it takes up disproportionate space in the memoirs. Page after page fills with breakdown adventures, convalescent stays in mechanic shops, letters to the VW factory, bills presented and paid, accounts of new pistons and engines and sheared lug bolts.

  That June, Himes and Regine had barely cleared ownership of the auto (following a series of visits to government offices concerning import, licenses, taxes) and had barely cleared Paris on their way to Germany for a visit to Regine’s family and Himes’s literary agent in Stuttgart, when troubles began. They drove on, in literal stop motion, from garage to garage, at length making their way to Copenhagen for a visit with Timme Rosencrantz, a Danish jazz authority married to black singer Inez Cavanaugh, whom Himes had met in March back in Paris. Deciding that she liked Denmark, Regine prevailed on Himes to stay, which they did, taking a flat for the summer in Seeland, between Copenhagen and Helsingor. There Himes set himself the goal of ten pages a day and quickly completed his next detective novel, published second (as The Real Cool Killers) though written third. Ever the outsider and odd man out, outside of his work Himes found little to his satisfaction. Clean, ever civil Denmark displeased him fully as much as stern, regimented Germany; how far more tolerable he found Spain’s many slow-moving, often maddening inefficiencies. He kept to himself and socialized with no one, complained bitterly of the continuous rain and wind, and became so furious at a Danish barber’s miscutting of his hair that he shaved his head.

  By October 1 the couple was back in Paris at the little hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur, where they learned of M. Rachou’s death. Himes also learned that Duhamel was busily gathering testimonials for impending publication of La Reine des pommes, weaving into a tattersall such ringing phrases as “destined to become a classic” (Mystère-Magazine), “prodigious masterpiece” (Cocteau), and Jean Giono’s declaration that he would “give all of Dos Passos and Fitzgerald for a few pages of Himes.” Fall in Paris was the season of literary awards, and it was for this that Duhamel prepared. Already, the buzz among café literati was formidable.