Chester Himes
Page 39
and goes on:
In the end, the plague that full swift runs by
took you, broke you;—
in the end, could not
take you, did not break you—8
That vast, oceanic bruise, Chester knew well. He spent his life trying to understand it, giving himself over to doubt, passion, the madness of art, and if, in the end, of the three it was doubt that surfaced most surely, that doubt was not directed toward the work itself, the worth and value of which Himes rarely doubted, but toward the question of whether the work, so contrary, so sideways, so long in contempt of the larger society, would be allowed to endure. To Lesley in the final days he said:
Would you … keep my books alive? I don’t want to feel that I have lived without having accomplished something that’s going to be remembered and I don’t want to leave this world a common shade and I do so hope that my books will be read and that people will remember me.9
The world is taken from us, as it was given, by degrees. We learn to close doors knowing we’ll not come back to these rooms again. People, faculties, memories go away from us, and only slowly, with time, do we realize they are gone; only then do we begin to miss them. However he presumes to do so, a man can never sum up his life, as Chester tried to do, at the end; rather, he is summed up by it. But if he is a thoughtful man, a writer, Reed’s mystical detective, he has the privilege of being able to record the forces at work upon him both from within and without. In My Life of Absurdity Chester wrote:
I travelled through Europe trying desperately to find a life into which I would fit; and my determination stemmed from my desire to succeed without America …
I never found a place where I even began to fit[.]10
The bruise would not fade, the bad mother would not be left. Yet Chester Himes had long ago determined, like his stand-in Brightlights in the story “Prison Mass,” that he would pass through life no common shade. In one of his last works, “Island of Hallucinations,” intended as a sequel to The Long Dream, Chester’s friend Richard Wright addressed through an amanuensis the loss of racial history and the necessity of witnessing:
“Fish,” Ned said, “our race has no memory. Each generation lives as though no one has lived before it. What my father learned from his living died with him … You can’t blame your father if he died and left you poor; maybe he had no chance to control the economic forces that shaped his destiny. But, dammit, we can blame our fathers for dying and leaving us ignorant of what they encountered in life, what they felt about it. Now, Fish, it is to try to establish that continuity of experience that makes me talk to you like this.”11
Chester would not leave those who came after him ignorant. His life, his work, would be a record. I am a man, Jupiter, he said to his jailers—addressing himself as much as the others. He was, Milliken writes, “a man in the business of making verbal scale models of the world as he has known it, felt it, and lived it … a constructor of elaborate extended metaphors designed to guide readers into his own unique and private realm of experience.”12 And so he has left this amazing many-volumed record of what it was like, from his perspective, to live in his time, a record of encounters and collisions. He did not choose racism as his subject, but
he drove deeper into the subject than anyone ever had before. He recorded what happens to a man when his humanity is questioned, the rage that explodes within him, the doubts that follow, and the fears, and the awful temptation to yield, to embrace degradation.13
In April 1976, four months after a final version of My Life of Absurdity reached Doubleday, at Jean Miotte’s suggestion Chester and he began a series of conversations intended to become a book but Chester, unable to concentrate and exhausted by the effort, soon gave up. He was fiddling about with the contents of Black on White, but even correspondence had become too much for him; at one point he began a letter to Larry Jordan only to apologize that he would have to let Lesley finish it for him. Stephen Milliken sent copies of his book on Himes’s work, which appeared that year and of which Chester thought highly; James Lundquist’s study also came out. Chatham Bookseller had begun republishing his older novels and planned an edition of The End of a Primitive, but in 1978 wrote that it was bankrupt. Chester was pleased with Yves Malartic’s translation and editing of the autobiography into a single volume for publication by Gallimard. French editions of Cast the First Stone and of A Case of Rape in a new translation were due that fall. That fall as well, in October, a film crew came to Moraira to make a TV documentary on Himes. In November his divorce from Jean was final; later that month he and Lesley traveled to England to marry.
In May 1980 Chester and Lesley flew again to the United States. Tests at the Mason Clinic in Seattle confirmed what they had been told in Paris and Marseilles: the left side of Chester’s brain was virtually destroyed and there would be further, inevitable decline; neither medication nor treatment of any sort could counteract this. While on this visit Chester was given a party by the staff of The Black Scholar and much fussed over by Bay Area writers. Ishmael Reed wrote of the visit:
Though disabled by a series of strokes, Chester Himes and his devoted wife, Lesley, managed to visit the United States for the last time in the summer of 1980. Writer Floyd Salas and I greeted them at the airport with flowers. He was celebrated by the Northern California literary community. He didn’t talk very much, but the wit and the mischief were still there. I remember the gleam in his eyes, that which Carl Van Vechten captured in one of his portraits of Himes, when Lesley recounted how he’d recently run into trouble with Spanish courts for engaging members of the police force in a gun battle. He’d mistaken them for burglars. “It was the kind of gun you’d shoot an elephant with,” Lesley said. Bad contracts with publishers had left Himes in need of funds during his last years. As a nominator for a foundation with billions at its disposal, I tried to obtain a grant for Chester. Instead, the money went to members of the permanent graduate school that’s done so much to turn American poetry into gibberish and alienate the average reader and student from verse. Unlike Himes’s friend, the intellectually daring and political hot potato Richard Wright, who died under mysterious circumstances surrounded by enemies, Himes managed to survive his critics and to see the country that hurt him so honor him, however belatedly.14
During their stay Chester and Lesley were guests not only in Ishmael Reed’s home but also in that of Maya Angelou. Lesley recalls Angelou setting the table with absolutely huge plates and glasses, explaining that she was such a big woman she had to have everything about her big: a reflection of the poet’s appetite for life that Chester must have enjoyed. Another time she queried how he responded when asked what kind of books he wrote. That had always been a problem, Chester told her, but he thought that from now on he was just going to say he wrote best-sellers. On their next shopping trip Angelou did just that, Lesley laughing the whole time, when a shopgirl posed the question.
Sometimes visibly disoriented on the California visit, Chester, upon returning to Spain where he received copies of Bill Targ’s fine limited edition of A Case of Rape, seemed to rally. Chester and Lesley moved from Casa Griot into Casa Deros; Le Manteau de rêve was published to good notices and sales; the same publisher, Lieu Commun, in 1983 brought out Plan B, reconstituted from drafts and a detailed summary that Michel Fabre discovered among Chester’s papers.
One of the most important things any writer or other artist does is to try to make the world large again, to reinvest it, or our attentions to it, with something of the grandness, mystery, and wonder everywhere about us, to break through the crust of dailyness, of our habits and self-limitations. But Chester’s world now was shrinking daily, receding into itself. He could no longer read. The correspondence that had meant so much to him, that had been for so long his connection to the world, was beyond him now, increasingly of little interest. He grew ever weaker. One morning he woke to find all use of his legs gone; by July he had become totally paralyzed. There were severe blockages in his arter
ies, an aneurysm near his heart. His esophagus had grown so contorted that he had great difficulty swallowing, eventually being put on a liquid diet when he refused to eat. Finally he gave up even speaking, though Lesley believed that he might still have had the capacity and heard him, hours before he died, murmur “Oh Lord, oh Lord.”
Lesley tried to see to and to anticipate all his needs. On the morning of November 13, 1984, alarmed at Chester’s appearance—he had become so pale, she thought, and somehow insubstantial, as though he were fading before her eyes—Lesley called the doctor, who came and told her that Chester would be dead within hours, then a priest, who failed to arrive in time. Wishing no pictures to be taken of Chester in his drained, emaciated state and this being the custom in Spain, Lesley prevailed upon the mortician, a fan of Chester’s work, to help. He did so, taking the coffin to an older, little-used graveyard in Benissa to divert journalists there before returning it to the newer cemetery just in time for the graveside service. The plaque Lesley placed by her husband reads:
Chester Himes
Escritor
Missouri, USA, 1909
Moraira, 1984
Su esposa Lesley
What all art finally asks is this: How should we live, and how work against the self-destructive nature of ourselves and our history? If there are no final answers—and one suspects there are not—there is still great privilege and honor in forming the material of our individual lives and our times, as Chester Himes did again and again, into the very shape of the question.
A fellow Triestine who had known the great writer Italo Svevo for decades once wrote to Eugenio Montale about the danger of overanalyzing Svevo, of coming to see him as something more than just a man who wrote—a man like the rest of us, spilling over with faults, failures, fears, foibles—thereby turning his life into legend. What this correspondent said might well have gone on the marker of Chester Himes’s final resting place: “All he had was genius, no more.”
Works by Chester Himes
Black on Black. Garden City: Doubleday, 1973.
A Case of Rape. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994.
Cast the First Stone. New York: Signet, 1952.
The Collected Stories. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990.
The End of a Primitive. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
The Harlem Cycle. Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1996–97.
Vol. 1:
A Rage in Harlem
The Real Cool Killers
The Crazy Kill
Vol. 2:
The Big Gold Dream
All Shot Up
The Heat’s On
Vol. 3:
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Blind Man with a Pistol
Plan B
(Also published individually by New York: Vintage Crime, 1988–89.)
If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986.
Lonely Crusade. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986.
My Life of Absurdity. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
Pinktoes. New York: Dell, 1966.
The Primitive. New York: Signet, 1955.
The Quality of Hurt. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
Run Man Run. New York: Dell, 1966.
The Third Generation. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. New York: Signet, 1956.
Yesterday Will Make You Cry. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
Acknowledgments
I cannot, of course, thank everyone who has had a part in this book.
Like all who will come after, I owe an immense gratitude to those who, in first writing about Himes, have provided the floor we walk on: Stephen Milliken, James Lundquist, Gilbert Muller, Ed Margolies, Michel Fabre.
On a more personal level, I must thank Lesley Himes and Roslyn Targ, who have been close in spirit for many years now, and who have provided invaluable information, insight, and assistance.
Gratitude, too, to friends of Chester who took time to share with me their memories and impressions: John A. Williams, Joe Hunter, Jean Miotte, Herb Gentry, Melvin Van Peebles, and especially Constance and Ed Pearlstein.
Special appreciation is due my friend and fellow Himes enthusiast Bob Skinner, who throughout the project stood valiantly by ready to read, advise, even to ferret out the occasional recalcitrant fact. All biographers should have librarians as friends.
Similar thanks to Tish Crawford for many conversations face to face and via e-mail about Chester and his work, and to Patrick Millikin, draft reader, book finder, coffee mate, and friend extraordinaire.
Sincerest thanks to the staff of the Amistad Collection housed at my alma mater, Tulane, and to that of the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
Editorially, fond thanks to Robert Shapard, who many years ago as editor of Western Humanities Review published my first long essay on Himes, and to Jamie Byng, whose encouragement and support quite literally brought this book into being.
Thanks, always, to agents Vicky Bijur and Stella Wilkins for taking care of business, running interference when necessary, and generally helping me maintain the illusion of professionalism.
Finally, thanks to Karyn, who has had to live with Chester and me, even when, as sometimes happened, Chester and I weren’t getting along so well, for a year and a half of new chapters, endless revisions, self-interrogation, panic, sudden trips to New York or California, and not a little whining. Chester would have loved her.
Plate Section
Photograph of Himes as dashing young man—note damage to teeth—inscribed “To my beloved sister-in-law ’Stell From my beloved me, Chester.” (From the papers of Joseph Himes. Reproduced with permission of The Amistad Collection)
Faculty of Lincoln University, 1912. Includes Chester’s father, Joseph Sandy Himes (second row, far left).
(From the Lincoln University Yearbook. Reproduced by permission of the Ethnic Studies Center at Lincoln University)
Chester in teen years.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
1946 Van Vechten sitting.
(Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. From the Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection of the Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress and the Van Vechten Trust)
Chester in 1954, shortly after arriving in Europe.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester at work at La Ciotat, circa 1956.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester in Paris in 1958, at the time of publication of his first detective novel, La Reine des pommes.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester with the VW, Vence, 1957.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester and Mikey, Vence, 1957.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester, Marcel Duhamel, and Picasso at Picasso’s château near Mougins, Cannes, 1961.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester with Mikey and pups, Paris, 1960.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
1955 Van Vechten sitting.
(Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. From the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reproduced by permission of the Van Vechten Trust)
1962 Van Vechten sitting.
(Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. From the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reproduced by permission of the Van Vechten Trust.)
Chester, Lesley, and Griot, circa 1965.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester and Lesley with Joe Himes and Arlone at Joe’s house in North Carolina, Christmas 1973.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester with Joe Himes, North Carolina, 1973.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester and Lesley with Joe Himes and cousin, North Carolina, 1973.
(Photograph from the collection of Lesley Himes. Reproduced by permission of Lesley Himes)
Chester on his final visit to the States, 1980, taken while he and Lesley were staying at Ishmael Reed’s home in Oakland.
(Photograph by Kaz Tsurata. Reproduced by permission of Kaz Tsurata)
Notes
1. Unnatural Histories
1. My Life of Absurdity, p. 391.
2. The Harlem Cycle, Vol. 2, p. xv.
3. Writin’ Is Fightin’, p. 123.
4. My Life of Absurdity, p. 391.
5. The Quality of Hurt, pp. 65–66.
6. Muller, p. ix.
7. Conversations with Chester Himes, p. 68.
8. Lundquist, p. 117.
9. The Harlem Cycle, Vol. 3, p. 379;Vintage, p. 191.
10. My Life of Absurdity, p. 106.
11. Cakes and Ale (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 201–202.
12. The Quality of Hurt, p. 4.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. The Third Generation (Signet), p. 26.