On November 10, Chester gave a “Meet the Author” talk at the George Washington Carver School on 125th Street, an adult education bureau run by the poet Gwendolyn Bennett with heavy Communist support. A Harlem Renaissance belle, the Marxist Bennett approved of Himes’s novel for “presenting a true picture” of white prejudice and black psychological response. On the flyers, he was presented as “Chester Himes, author of the forthcoming George Washington Carver Memorial Award novel,” an error that was a source of embarrassment and resentment for him. Meanwhile, he received a self-described “fan letter” from his old Cleveland friend Ruth Seid. It was a compliment wrapped in barbed wire. While she “enjoyed” If He Hollers “very much,” she emphasized that she knew as much about writing as he did: “I’m more eager to see the next book. I suspect that it will be less purely bitter, or if as bitter, then more focused.”
A week later, he had a satisfying role on a panel at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg branch on 135th Street with sociologist Horace Cayton and anthropologist St. Clair Drake. The two social scientists had just completed Negro Metropolis, an enormous study of black-belt Chicago. Richard Wright had helped the men get a trade contract for the book and had written the introduction. A man with a perpetual curiosity regarding the social psychology of race relations, Cayton had fallen in love with If He Hollers Let Him Go. Before he left Chicago for New York, he wrote to Richard Wright, “very much excited about this book . . . I’ve gone all out for it.” Cayton, whose father had graduated from Alcorn, admired the book in his columns in the Chicago Sun and Pittsburgh Courier. A social reformer, Cayton prized the exposure of “the paralyzing fear and hatred which Negroes have developed toward their white suppressors” and encouraged his readers to buy the “courageous and strong book . . . a great piece of literature.”
The momentum of the reviews picked up. In Cleveland, Ted Robinson, the Plain Dealer’s reviewer, certified If He Hollers as “the ticket-of-admission of Chester B. Himes to the limited company of our top-flight novelists.” In New York Chester’s buddy Constance Curtis praised him for showing “the calculated castration of prejudice,” and, unlike the Times, glimpsed that the real problem was that “Bob had too much of the desire for unequivocal equality. That was his mistake.” Even in the pages of the more staid Crisis, editor Roy Wilkins admitted that Chester “tells so accurately how Negroes feel about the countless humiliations heaped upon them hour after hour.”
But to Chester the most important praise came from Richard Wright. Wright had approached the alternative left-leaning newspaper PM to examine If He Hollers Let Him Go alongside a new book by Arthur Miller. Wright delivered the review on November 25, beginning his article with a quote from Karl Marx and calling the two books “fairly competently executed novels.” Then Wright zeroed in on Chester’s book:
Jerky in pace, If He Hollers Let Him Go has been compared with the novels of James M. Cain, but there is more honest passion in 20 pages of Himes than in the whole of Cain. Tough-minded Himes has no illusions: I doubt if he has ever had any. He sees too clearly to be fooled by the symbolic guises in which Negro behavior tries to hide, and he traces the transformations by which sex is expressed in equations of race pride, murder in the language of personal redemption and love in terms of hate.
To read Himes conventionally is to miss the significance of the (to coin a phrase) bio-social level of his writing. Bob Jones is so charged with elementary passion that he ceases to be a personality and becomes a man reacting only with nerves, blood and motor responses.
Ironically, the several dreams that head each chapter do not really come off. Indeed, Himes’ brutal prose is more authentically dreamlike than his consciously contrived dreams. And that is as it should be.
In this, his first novel, Himes establishes himself not as what has quaintly been called a New Negro, but as a new kind of writing man.
Chester and Wright became men of shared vision. Recuperating at home from a bad cold, Wright received Chester on December 14. Having their boyhoods in Mississippi in common—Himes in Lorman near Vicksburg and Wright seventy-five miles north in Jackson—the two men bonded easily and warmly. Chester confided to Wright about his youthful criminal rebellion, and his nearly eight years in jail—this was of great interest to Wright, who that spring had completed a novel about juvenile gangs and crime he was calling The Jackal (it would be published after his death as Rite of Passage). Unlike the literary men whose work came exclusively from the library, Chester had known and survived deadly, torturous adversity. After recounting the adventures and punishments, he told Wright, “Nothing can hurt me.” Chester’s prison experience impressed and thrilled Wright, a mild-mannered man, as the verification of a kind of machismo. Nevertheless, at about the same time that Chester’s relationship collapsed with Henry Moon, a guiding force for him for eight years, Chester befriended and was befriended by Richard Wright, the most famous living black writer.
A couple of days after their get-together Chester sent Wright a note of “appreciation.” “The manner in which Horace Cayton, you, Ralph Ellison have come forward with such good will and interest,” the letter began warmly, “is indicative of a new day on the literary front.” Chester thought Wright able and mature, beyond the “petty jealousies, snipings, bickerings, animosities that have plagued Negro writers.” He proudly enrolled himself “in this new school which it has fallen your responsibility to head.” A day later they arranged a morning rendezvous so that the Himeses and the Wrights could meet. Chester and Jean later had “a wonderful time” at the Wrights’ Christmas Eve party. On other occasions they met over West Indian food at a restaurant called Connie’s in Greenwich Village. When Joseph Himes Jr. came to town for New Year’s, Chester and Jean invited the Wrights to their party. In turn, Wright took Himes to meet some of the staff at the Book-of-the-Month Club, and publicist Vivian Wolfert helped Chester draw out a new strategy to advertise If He Hollers. They continued getting together at the Wrights’ Washington Square apartment with Wright’s inner circle of friends, including Ellison, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, C. L. R. James, and his companion, the professional model and socialist Constance Webb. While the good times were genuine, sometimes serious tensions flared up. At one of the parties, according to Webb, Wright teased Ralph Ellison about his novel in progress so persistently that a frustrated Ellison drew a knife and Himes intervened to disarm him. Wright would sometimes exaggerate to his other friends that Chester had committed murder.
Chester almost certainly mentioned to Wright his relationship to Ruth Seid. Before Seid’s The Wasteland was published in 1946, Wright reviewed the galleys of the book, a novel he liked because it helped him understand the narrow racial prejudice of his mother-in-law, an immigrant Jew from Poland. But that circle of acquaintance was too small for Chester. He put some distance between himself and the next star alum of Cleveland’s Writers’ Project. If Seid thought his character’s emotion overblown, he declared that she “used to pump frustration through me almost as intense as that suffered by Bob—only I, being inhibited by the numerous restraints of life, never quite showed the depth of my resentment.” Chester wanted her to understand that she had no right to presume any familiarity. He had been out of sorts, more or less at every stage in his life, and had finally found peers. He was now anxious to keep others at bay.
The year 1945 for Chester was a watershed, like 1928: the book publication and his mother’s death, the survival of the marriage to Jean—or her forceful claim to it, in spite of his drunken infidelities—and the cutting of his ties with his influential cousin, in favor of two of the twentieth century’s most influential American novelists. In the process, Chester had become a national figure. Near year’s end, he gave an interview to Earl Conrad of the Chicago Defender. Conrad’s article, complete with a large photograph of Chester, corralled him, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright into a “blues school of writers” who were “trying to show what the inexplorable caste system can do to the human being.” Chester offere
d a series of polite, highly temperate responses and he revealed to Conrad that while he worked on the WPA, “I developed a hatred of the ruling class of whites.” But Conrad regarded Chester as having internalized racism and turned negrophobia on its head. He wrote of Chester and his mates as “literary projections of the social type they portray—Bigger Thomas.” If they were not driven to murder in their confrontation with racial discrimination, the “blues school” men were “highly sensitized, nervous, jittery, ultra-critical, cynical.” Chester’s cynicism and rejection of ideology were palpable to all, and they paid at least one tangible dividend. In December 1945, deciding that he made poor material for the Communists, the special agent in charge from Los Angeles requested that the director of the FBI shutter Himes’s file.
Chapter Eight
MONKEY AN’ THE LION
1946–1948
Unnamed in the Chicago Defender interview was the intellectual leader of the “blues school” of black postwar thought, E. Franklin Frazier. During the first week of January 1946, Chester convened “the upper IQ brackets” for a party: the Schomburg librarian Laurence Dunbar Reddick (who would also write the first serious biography of Martin Luther King Jr.), Horace Cayton, and Frazier, chairman of the sociology department at Howard University. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James probably also attended. Taken all together, it was an extraordinary informal convention of black humanists and social scientists.
Chester was finding distinctive import in the views of the fifty-one-year-old Frazier, whom he knew from Mollie and Henry’s. Born in 1894 and a University of Chicago graduate, Frazier had become the most celebrated black academic of his era, a gutsy infighter who confronted bigotry and injustice and published leading studies on the condition of the black family—books that innovatively tapped the work of novelists like Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes—all while achieving the highest honors and positions of leadership in spite of segregation. Wary of Frazier’s commitment to ordinary black people, his Howard University colleague Ralph Bunche called him a “crazy racialist.” Chester gravitated toward the commanding view of Frazier in one key area: the Negro family. Frazier believed that black Americans needed a firmly patriarchal family structure to compete for resources in the United States; and when he examined the past, he didn’t see one in evidence. As disgruntled as Chester, Frazier sensed that the situation of black Americans had not yet reached the threshold of even subordinate caste relations. “It is not a question of the Negro being all right in his place but rather that there is no place for the Negro,” Frazier wrote that year. The absence of patriarchal models was part of the “no place” problem.
This meeting with these intellectual heavies confirmed in early 1946 that Chester had secured a niche. He received $2000 in fat royalties from Doubleday in January, and then, after a minor delay, $2700 more came in March. Having accumulated within three months a sum equal to what he was used to living on for two years, Chester felt like this was the dawn of financial success. The reviews of If He Hollers Let Him Go continued to compliment him. Highbrow liberal magazines like New Republic treated him respectfully, even when pointing to the narrow range of the characters’ choices, between the hammer of “limited opportunities as a Negro” and the anvil of “suicidal . . . militancy.” Only one review, in the Cleveland Call and Post, mentioned that Chester had gone to prison, where his blemish became “the one clouded spot in the young writer’s life, an unfortunate experience indulged in by a youngster.” Walter White, smeared in If He Hollers (“If he asked me if I knew Walter Somebody-or-other I was subject to tell him to go to hell,” snaps the hero), quibbled a bit in the Chicago Defender before deciding Chester had made a “contribution to American literature and American racial thinking of no small distinction.”
Arthur P. Davis, a Howard University colleague of Frazier, called If He Hollers a “stout weapon” with a “powerful message.” Davis understood that the black middle class would reject the novel’s literary naturalism and its portrayal of unrefined blacks. But he believed in Chester’s vision, partly because a “writer like Himes, who has worked in the factories and the shipyards, knows the masses: he has seen the effects of discrimination, bad sanitation, and malnutrition in the shocking speech and low morals of these people and he puts down what he sees and hears. But he also puts down a whole lot more and that redeems the work for me.”
In the Communist-controlled organ of the National Negro Congress, the Congress View, New Yorker Ruth Jett mouthed the hoary Party line used against Native Son; while “powerful” the book had failed to “see the progress made in Negro-white relations through the progressive section of American labor.” Then an odd, minor miracle occurred. In the Communist Daily Worker, writer Eugene Gordon unreservedly praised the book, even though it had criticized the Communist wartime line that racial grievances should be subordinated for the sake of the war effort. “Communists should read the book, so that they may be reminded of much we forgot in the past period,” Gordon told the rank and file. If He Hollers would “shock” because, unknown to the Party faithful, “there is a hell of a lot of work to be done among the Negro and white masses.” A black Communist like Gordon was in a good position to critique Party politics in the months following the removal of leader Earl Browder, which was a time of “self-flagellation.” Curious about the Daily Worker endorsement, Richard Wright, who had had his own falling-out with the Communist Party, telephoned Chester to warn about “maneuvering.” But Himes hoped to harness the Communist energy to give the book a push. “The thing I have been trying to do is promote book sales,” he wrote, “since my company doesn’t seem to give a damn about it.”
After the remarkable season of reviews for If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester was right to feel slighted by Doubleday’s handling of the book. In 1945 and 1946 it skimped on his novel, which made the press uncomfortable, and went all out for Fannie Cook’s Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. Written by a white woman, what was obviously valuable about the book was its pointing to a “brighter future.” From the beginning of its advertising campaign to booksellers in January 1946, Doubleday deliberately seemed to contrast Chester’s book with Fannie Cook’s. The publisher ran a full-page advertisement dominated by a black maid, a representation of the main character, Honey. The text of the ad explained, “Mrs. Palmer’s Honey is a book which you can sell to any reader. It is an honest, intelligent novel, devoid of lynching, mixed love affairs, and profanity. Shunning the sensational, Fannie Cook has written a fine, sincere novel. . . .” Doubleday seemed to disparage If He Hollers by suggesting that blacks were too emotional to know with certainty whether or not they were being oppressed; the firm also dismissed Chester’s book as being without appeal to white readers. Bucklin Moon, the editor of both novels, made recommendations about the advertising campaigns but shared little of his decisions and strategies with Chester.
By February a storm had erupted that mimicked the jeering the New York Times initiated when Cook received the Carver Award. In an advertisement in Saturday Review of Literature, written to seem like the commentary on a published book review, Doubleday tried to temper the appearance of ill will, by emphasizing its credentials as publishers of black writers.
[Mrs. Palmer’s Honey] is a novel which has a social conscience, and yet is “devoid of lynchings, mixed love affairs, and profanity”; a novel which eases its points along with good reading rather than a series of sledge-hammer speeches punctuated by spit; a novel which was chosen only after we had considered books by Walter White, Arna Bontemps, Chester Himes, and many others.
Still shielding Cook’s white identity, the advertisement nonetheless manages to score all black authors as writing venomous and unworthy tracts. Jack Conroy, the white man who wrote They Seek a City with Arna Bontemps, was curiously spared inclusion. The circulation of these sullied mea culpas incensed Chester, who began his redress with his Doubleday editor. Bucklin Moon told Chester that he was imagining conspiracies and making “unreasonable” co
mplaints. The two men would more or less fall out over the ads and the handling of If He Hollers. In desperation, Chester mailed a clipping of the ad to Ken McCormick, the editor in chief, protesting “the veiled references to my book and the use of my name” to market Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. McCormick reportedly responded with a ten-line telegram of apology.
The situation with Doubleday became ugly after Chester stormed the publisher’s Manhattan headquarters, armed with letters from Cleveland, North Carolina, and Los Angeles attesting to the fact that books were unavailable in markets where he would be sought out. Going upstairs, he griped to Hilda Simms, the beautiful star of the Broadway play Anna Lucasta, who also happened to be in the elevator. But Chester was overheard by a freelancer in advertising, who rushed ahead of him and alerted the staff. Chester was determined to be heard. He revealed his suspicion that a Doubleday editor or vice president had disrupted the print run, then he turned to McCormick himself. Chester accused him of appointing Buck Moon to preside over a “black corner” at Doubleday, a Jim Crow section that held books written by African Americans to a quota. Then, he insisted that “someone in the firm was against the book.” After a few minutes of “bad words,” he left the company president’s office, finished, in the near term, at Doubleday. “I believe conclusively that my book was sabotaged by some one in the company,” he wrote a few months later, still seething.
Despite the fireworks, it’s unlikely that Chester was making a bad situation worse. Even mild-mannered Arna Bontemps agreed with him, having already written several months previously that Doubleday “treated us like stepchildren” and that the powers in control there planned to sell “10,000 copies of this title—and no more!”
Chester B. Himes Page 23