Chester Himes

by James Sallis

  Himes meanwhile had gone to Majorca with Regine, just as he once fled there with Willa, to write the new books he’d contracted with Gallimard. He failed to find the tranquility he recalled and sought anew, complaining of endless distractions, Regine, the VW, of the cold weather and uncertain electric supply, of “the sea boiling like dirty gray water striped with green”19 and wind that howled and blew smoke back down the chimney. He worked erratically at a novel about his affair with Willa he’d begun in 1954, attempting at one point while there to incorporate “Spanish Gin” and a story he’d already written about Willa, “The Pink Dress,” into it. “Spanish Gin” of its own right made a bid for noveldom in It Rained Five Days, soon to be The Lunatic Fringe, a “white thriller”20 set in Spain for which Duhamel lacked enthusiasm when Himes pitched it to him and which he later rejected. Emotionally Himes was all over the place, as, apparently, was his writing.

  In addition to Duhamel’s rejection of The Lunatic Fringe, for which he had already drawn an advance, now Himes learned that NAL had rescinded its contract for the paperback of Cast the First Stone. He had received no income from the States that entire year. Nor could he place, anywhere, A Case of Rape. There were episodes of heavy drinking and of reckless driving. The whole of the dismal Spanish residence culminated in Regine’s emergency appendectomy, Herr Fischer wiring money once Himes had exhausted what little he had left; following Regine’s recuperation, the couple returned to Paris, moving into a hotel on rue Saint-André-des-Arts.

  On the positive side, with publication of La Reine des pommes, Himes was on his way to becoming a celebrity. A publication party at Leroy Haynes’s soul-food restaurant, with Himes and Regine, the Duhamels, Walter Coleman and Torun, and Ollie Harrington attending, momentarily darkened when a bristling Himes complained at everyone’s speaking French, but Haynes finessed it. Himes learned in November, having resettled on the Côte d’Azur, that he was to receive the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière, being the first American, and the first black, to do so. A month before, he had signed with Gallimard for two new novels under titles provided by the publisher, Tout pour plaire (which would become The Big Gold Dream) and Il pleut des coups durs (The Real Cool Killers). He had also spoken alongside Nikos Kazantzakis and Rebecca West at the thirtieth anniversary of Plon’s Feux Croisés series. And he had bought a dog, an Irish setter pup named Mikey, soon a great comfort to him.

  Himes, Regine, and Mikey didn’t remain long in Paris. When Duhamel suggested that Himes write a thriller set in New York but without his detectives and offered an advance, and when within the week Plon bought Mamie Mason for 50,000 francs, the trio departed for the Cote d’Azur, in June renting a flat in a villa in Vence with a view sweeping from the suburbs of Nice to the lighthouse at Antibes. They remained there fifteen months. Chester loved the Riviera, its constant sunlight and beauty, the easy society of those who lived there, the energy and liveliness of both landscape and people. That old phrase “the happiest days of my life” returns in his memory of the time. Often this is Chester’s code that writing went well, and indeed writing, too, went extraordinarily well there, with Chester completing Run Man Run in record time, writing it straight out. It was from Vence that Himes traveled back to Paris to receive his award and to be celebrated in such papers as Paris-Match and L’Observateur, the Brussels Le Soir, and La Tribune de Genève. Even Time magazine got in the act with a piece titled “Amid the Alien Corn,” though this proved to be more about racism than it was about Himes. Time would feature him again in 1970 (“The Hard-Bitten Old Pro Who Wrote ‘Cotton’ Cashes In”) after the success of the movie Cotton Comes to Harlem.

  That January, having completed Run Man Run, Himes wrote most of a fourth detective novel Imbroglio négro (All Shot Up). He also continued to work sporadically on The Lunatic Fringe. He was famous. And he had turned out an enormous amount of new work in a few short months. But things were hardly as idyllic as they seemed. Are they ever? he must have wondered. Doubts could never be folded and put away like linen. He’d had his taste of success before, just enough to know what it was like and just enough to make it seem likely, only to have it torn from him by circumstance. His distrust of publishers, too, was profound. Again and again they had cheated him, robbed him of his royalties and subsidiary rights, done hatchet jobs on his books. (Even with Gallimard there were future uglinesses.) Now Gold Medal had published For Love of Imabelle in a version so severely cut and scrambled that he thought it all but unrecognizable. To Malartic he wrote, “As my fame increases, my fate remains the same—broke, desperate, urgent and trying to work beyond the capabilities of my poor brain.”21

  Uneasiness came to a head with a visit from Regine’s mother during which she and Himes were often at odds. Frau Fischer adamantly urged her daughter to return and finish her secretarial studies in Hamburg and, while Himes avowed to having no objection, he strongly felt that he was being manipulated and said so. In one confrontation, perhaps fed by all his uncertainties, anxieties, and dissatisfactions, Himes’s temper erupted, and he stalked from the house. Intending to discipline Mikey, he struck his own eye with a switch. Regine subsequently drove him, eye bandaged, to Guérin’s La Ciotat, where he spent two weeks recovering (and where Mikey and the gardener’s dog killed all Guérin’s chickens) before returning, alone again, in April 1959, to Paris.

  There Himes stayed at Hotel Welcome, seeing a great deal now of Lesley Packard as together they strolled along the Seine, visited galleries and cafés, or motored into the French countryside with Mikey and Lesley’s Siamese cat Griot. Chester stayed briefly in Ollie Harrington’s apartment while Ollie was away in Berlin, then sublet an apartment in the 14th arrondissement on the southeast corner of the city belonging to a co-worker of Lesley’s at the Herald Tribune. Not long after the move, the VW was totaled in a crash on Boulevard Saint-Germain, affording Himes another exasperating encounter with French bureaucracy. From another of Lesley’s friends Himes bought a 1934 Fiat roadster he named Jemima, later still, from friends’ friends, an old Hillman.

  The thriller spawned by his Horn & Hardart days in New York, Run Man Run, was published by Gallimard as Dare Dare. By mid-October he was coming into the home stretch on his latest Harlem novel, Imbroglio negro (All Shot Up, working title Don’t Play with Death), with its portrait of Harlem politician and closet homosexual Casper Holmes.

  Himes first met Lesley on his return to Paris, and their relationship, for all his jealous nature and her own independence, for she was seeing others as well, developed rather quickly. She was, and remains, a remarkable woman, clear-sighted, practical, fiercely intelligent and capable, devoted. (“She would have had to be, to live with Chester all those years,” one hears in interviews.) At the time, she lived in an apartment on rue Grégoire de Tours and worked five to midnight at the Herald Tribune as photo librarian. On the very day they met, as she sat in Café de Tournon with William Gardner Smith, a photo of Chester had appeared on her desk consequent to his winning the Grand Prix. They decided to celebrate, made a night of it, and thereafter were often together. It was wonderful, Lesley recalls:

  Yet I did not see how there could be a future because I was young, attractive, had a good job, in fact two jobs, and was very independent. And while I had no hang-ups, probably due to the very secure environment in which I’d been brought up, Chester was so loaded with anger and complex emotions, all of which surface in his writing.22

  Lesley learned quickly of his emotional lability, how a letter in the mail could ruin his day or fill it with light, how he could pass from blazing anger to laughter in the space of minutes. Humor, she says, was his last and greatest weapon. At a showing of the Harlem documentary he later made with Pierre Gaisseau, which he thought derisory and insulting, she “could feel him sitting next to me sizzling with fury.”23 And while she understood his mood swings, even understood something of the reasons for them, this did not necessarily make it any easier for her.

  For his part, Himes persisted in his longing for t
hings lost, in his compulsion to rescue and “protect” white women, and in his perennial attempt (just as progressively his mother had edited her life, cutting and pasting) to have one more go at “correcting” situations, at making them right in accordance with his preconceptions, ignoring realities. For better than two years he was to shuttle back and forth from Lesley to Regine, at one point adding a third woman, Marianne Greenwood, to his ever more complicated dance card.

  That June Himes drove to Hamburg where he and Regine moved in as resident house- and dog-sitters for Dr. Ramseger, literary editor of Die Welt. Himes could not work, he drank heavily, drove wildly, finally had to be treated for ulcers: the rift between what seems and what is grew ever wider, ever more difficult to ignore. When Regine went in September to visit her family, Himes returned to Paris and to Lesley. In December, Regine joined him in Paris, where she had found a secretarial job. The reunion went poorly. Himes and Regine quarreled every day, and it was not long before Regine discovered that he was still seeing Lesley whenever he could slip away. Once Regine turned up screaming abuse at Lesley’s door; another time she phoned to inform Lesley that she was about to kill herself, and was turning on the gas just as Chester arrived home. She and Himes fell to blows one day when she found Lesley and him together on the street. She returned to the apartment, where Himes came upon her later, and slashed her wrists.

  Regine went from the local hospital to a psychiatric clinic at Vincennes, then on to clinics at Nogent-sur-Marne and Giesherslag. From there she posted an unbroken stream of “pitiful” letters to Chester. Correspondence from Herr Fischer meanwhile, to which Himes responded testily, begged him to assume moral responsibility and leave his daughter alone.24

  Beginning work on a new detective novel he was calling Be Calm (Ne nous énervons pas!, The Heat’s On, later filmed as Come Back, Charleston Blue), Himes’s feelings toward Regine were deeply ambivalent. Her dependency, underlined by the suicide attempt and intensified by the hospitalizations, infuriated him. Yet he was drawn to his old caretaker role, and certainly, that given, could not in the present circumstances abandon her. And while her instability frightened him, he seemed unable or refused to see how he contributed to it. “What is the right thing?” he asked in a letter to Dr. Fischer.25

  That March Himes and Lesley went off on holiday, driving to Italy in the Fiat Roadster to visit a prospective publisher before renting a house short-term at Cagnes-sur-Mer near Biot. One night while visiting Walter Coleman and Torun, who lived nearby, Chester grew jealous that Lesley was speaking to Walter’s brother Emmett and struck her. They quarreled, Lesley insisting “I won’t accept to be treated this way” and Chester that “You’re my woman” before they came to some understanding or some impasse they could agree to let stand as one. Returning to Paris, they discovered that Regine was back in her old apartment and back at her old job. Lesley told her that she didn’t know where Chester was when she phoned. Chester then fled back to Biot to stay with Walter and Torun, remaining with them all that spring.

  By summer 1960, however, pity or latent guilt perhaps having got the upper hand, Himes was again living with Regine, this time in Austria, at Kitzbühel.

  By September, he had left Regine and was back with Lesley, representing her as his fiancée in a letter to Van Vechten. In two months while at Kitzbühel he had finished The Heat’s On, “about Sister Heavenly, Uncle Saint, Pinky (a giant Negro halfwit), a three-million-dollar bundle of dope … and my two hard shooting detectives.”26 Shortly thereafter Lesley resigned her job at the Herald Tribune and she and Chester drove once again, in the Hillman, to Italy, touring Genoa, Naples, swinging in from the coast to visit Rome, before settling into a house at Acciaroli on the western shore below Salerno. Himes spoke vaguely of going from there to Africa. But the trip proved expensive and, winding up in Rome by the second week of November, Himes had to borrow money from Duhamel to settle debts. He and Lesley returned to the Riviera, to St. Tropez, where late that month they learned of Richard Wright’s death. Back in Paris, Himes consoled Ellen and the children, helped with funeral arrangements, and afterward encouraged (perhaps even had a hand in) Ollie’s writing of “The Last Days of Richard Wright” for Ebony.27

  This period in Himes’s life is the most unsettled of all, ceaseless hopscotch as he moves restlessly from Paris to Italy to the Cote d’Azur, from Lesley to Regine and back again. He and Lesley returned to the Riviera in early December following Wright’s funeral. In March they were in Paris to attend the opening of an exhibition of Walter Coleman’s jazz portraits. By April Chester appears to have been living alone in a small flat on the edge of Paris, across from the park at Les Buttes-Chaumont, as he put finishing touches on Mamie Mason for Olympia Press. The following month, it seems, he was again living with Regine, and in June the two of them returned to Hamburg, house- and dog-sitting again for Dr. Ramseger. From there they made their way to Darmstadt just south of Frankfurt, where they were guests of Chester’s publisher, then on to Wiederstadt, where in early August Chester was arrested for drunken driving, held overnight, and, brought before the court the next morning, forbidden to drive again in Germany. Furious, Regine departed for her parents’ home. Chester stayed with Walter and Torun before taking an apartment in Mougins-Village not far from Duhamel’s splendid new home; at his editor’s instigation he lunched and spent an afternoon with Picasso and family. Lesley, meanwhile, had returned to work, now with Time-Life.

  Himes’s emotional state, as one might surmise from the heavy drinking and arrest, was as inconstant as his address. He was heavily overdrawn on his account with Gallimard and months behind on the new book due them. External distractions abetted the internal: bad weather, visitors, the temptation of new work (journalism, scripts and treatments) that promised to bring in money but seldom did, the constant scramble for funds. He loved Lesley yet still felt bound, often infuriatingly so, to Regine, and at any rate “responsible” for her. He felt himself to be directionless, writing in a letter to Van Vechten that, now aged fifty-two, he has found neither country nor work nor destiny. “My brain was stale,” he wrote of this period in My Life of Absurdity.28 As for his work, he sensed little unity there either; in a manner, he believed, he had spent his time chasing after phantoms, skittering from one bare foothold to the next. All the old dissatisfactions with what he was doing reemerged. His detective stories had been fun at first, a pleasant change, full of new challenge and adventure and freedom, but now they’d become a grind. Even commercially, for all their popularity, the books remained on shaky ground. He couldn’t count on U.S. publishers. They didn’t know what to make of his thrillers, failing to realize, as the French did, that these novels were “violent and funny in a way never seen before,”29 and proved hesitant to take the books on. When they did, they paid little, and brought them out in versions markedly cut, jumbled, or rearranged—scrambled, as Himes said. Even Gallimard, he suspected, constantly gave him short shrift, manipulating royalty statements, copies in print, and even actual sales to keep him in their debt and turning the books out.

  He seems, in short, to have grown sick of the whole business, weary and exhausted from what he perceived as a continuous struggle. Quite the worst of it may have been that the drive to write, whatever it was that for all those years had impelled him past frustration and failure, was in decline: “I didn’t like to write any more, but I knew there were several stories I had to write. I had to write until I found the definitive story or as long as I was able.”30 The passion was gone, or going, he suspected—and if not the passion, then certainly the energy. Yet at fifty-two, with absolutely nothing to fall back on, with no home—no country or other work, no destiny—what else could he do but go on writing?

  A long letter to Lesley from this period serves both to reflect Himes’s mood and as a rare document of self-analysis—a letter that, in its honesty, Lesley found deeply moving. He is, Himes says, hopelessly incomplete, wounded, alone and insecure; it is essential that Lesley understand this, that she not e
mbrace some fantasy image of him. He is a liar, undependable, and for the most part despicable. He drinks to deaden his emotions and has lived in an agony of self-torture all his life.

  I am in for it. The only thing that is going to let me out is death … You should have known. Can you and I change this old and terrible world?31

  Yet he bid heartily for her love, and would continue to do so. He loved her, he said, as he had loved only one other woman, Willa. Early the next year (1962) they began living together. Three years later from the Riviera, where he was working on the novel that would become Blind Man with a Pistol, he wrote asking her again to marry him.

  At the same time that he was writing his letter of confession to Lesley, Himes initiated an affair with Marianne Greenwood, a photographer and friend of Torun who lived in Antibes. Both Chester and Marianne thought the affair time-limited, as she was soon to leave for Guatemala to do a book on Latin America with writer Ernest Taube. Taking her to Paris when the time came, on October 23, and starting back home at 3 A.M., Himes fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the Hillman. Lesley hurried to the hospital at Sens, having been called by the police, and after Chester’s discharge (Ollie Harrington paying the bill) stayed with him at Hotel Aviatic, where shortly he collapsed. This time they went to the American Hospital at Neuilly. Acute anemia and a broken pelvis required weeks on crutches and bedrest.