Chester returned to New York after a week, to strategize his way forward with Carl Van Vechten, who recommended that he try a brief stay at the writers’ colony at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. At first, Chester rejected the idea but Van Vechten took the additional step of broaching the matter with Langston Hughes, the first African American invited to Yaddo. “You know: give us the answers!” Van Vechten rattled to Hughes. However Hughes, who had done no less for Chester than he had for so many other black writers, was growing increasingly unsure about his Cleveland homeboy. “I expect by now that Yaddo has perhaps filled its quota for the coming summer,” Hughes replied accurately, but brusquely. Three months later, Hughes would turn down Blanche Knopf directly when she asked him to endorse Chester’s new book. “Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them,” he explained. Chester was now fully in the process of exchanging racial bases of support, as his recommendation letters for the Rosenwald fellowship indicated. He would cater to the tastes of the white vanguard more so than the franchise among black Americans.
Blanche Knopf also thought it imperative that Chester receive an endorsement from Richard Wright. Chester sent the galleys to Wright, working at one of the Safford cottages in Wading River and pondering a return to France. Wright responded warmly with a statement to the publisher on June 5. Noting the plot’s concern with the internal decision making of the American Communist Party, Wright initially understood Lonely Crusade as exclusively a novel of politics. “What he has to say will take the Communist Party of America twenty-five years to answer,” he fired off in praise.
At first, Chester was pleased by “this fine statement,” since he understood how central Communist politics were to Wright’s life and work. But then Carl Van Vechten threw a party and invited Chester, Wright, Blanche Knopf, and the latest black writer of national note, Willard Motley, whose novel about an Italian American juvenile delinquent, Knock on Any Door, became a best seller. About Chester’s age, dapper, and self-controlled, Motley seemed to have the world in his hands that June; the reviews of his naturalistically drawn Chicago were strongly positive. Despite its being a story of reform school, slums, pederasty, and petty crime, Motley’s book was being described as “beautifully written.” The apparent secret of Motley’s likable book was that, like Chester’s best Esquire stories, it had no central African American characters.
Chester spent his time huddled with Wright and his new business partner, the bob-wearing, chain-smoking aesthete Blanche Knopf. His book was scheduled for September publication. Chester begged Wright to revise his comment on Lonely Crusade, to one that emphasized “marital conflict and the Jewish-Negro angle.” Actually, he wanted Wright to recommend the book not only for more than its critique of communism, but for its “literary merit.” Not wishing to seem ungrateful, Chester added pleasantly that if Wright demurred, “it will in no way affect my great admiration for you and your achievement.” He was also remembering his unrepaid Authors League loan. Wright supplied another blurb in ten days:
Chester Himes’ Lonely Crusade chalks up another significant literary victory for Negro prose expression in America. His hard, biting, functional style reveals the truth about a marital situation never before depicted in novels of Negro life. Lee Gordon’s tense and tragic search for integrity cuts deeper into our consciousness than piles of academic volumes of sociology and psychology. Himes stands in the front ranks of literary truth-tellers in our nation.
Long live Chester Himes!
This statement represented approval, as well as being an act of friendship, but the groove was definitely narrow. Wright had succeeded because he was bright and worked hard, but he liked to fit friends into categories, which was perhaps the somewhat mechanical way that he understood the world. Chester, an ex-convict, served Wright as an example of a person who had transformed from the apotheosis of sin to civilized reform. But Wright would never consider him an artist.
After the hot months spent readying the novel to appear, Chester and Jean moved to Welfare Island, at first to a studio apartment, and then for three weeks in a two-room flat. The apartments were salvaged out of an old, condemned eighty-one-room mansion, renovated by the city and large, but still indelicate. Chester and Jean lived on the side of the island that faced Queens, enjoying the cool evenings and the relative quiet. Welfare Island was accessible only by ferry. Defending the choice of his hard-to-get-to residence, Chester stammered to Van Vechten, “Honestly, it is rather nice.”
By August Chester’s other supporters came through for him. Horace Cayton told Knopf that Lonely Crusade rivaled A Passage to India and that it was “a great work of art.” Carl Van Vechten surpassed everybody in applause, declaring “this novel boasts such power of expression and such subtlety of treatment, the author possesses so sensitive a command of character and incident the culmination is so reasonably magnificent, that I, for one, am not afraid to call this book great.” Chester was wooed by competing book publishers: William Targ, a writer for the Cleveland News, and Ben Zevin, the president of World Publishers, also located in Cleveland, took Chester and Jean to the Algonquin Hotel, the watering hole of the New Yorker staff and writer John O’Hara, for lunch. An interview with the New York Times went so well that Chester allowed himself to say that he retained “happy memories” of the South. If they slightly misrepresented him on that point, when Chester said that his favorite writers were Wright and Faulkner, whose bizarre accounts of twined black and white life gave him hope, they had it correct. In a piece in the newsmagazine Newsweek, which appeared a week before publication, he found himself lauded as “among the most promising of younger negro writers,” and his book “brilliantly introspective” and “forthright and compassionate.” Negro Digest contracted to run the third chapter of the novel, which revealed the early years of Ruth and Lee Gordon’s marriage and exposed the Communist shift away from protesting against racial discrimination, in its December issue. Meanwhile, a mended Joseph Sr. traveled from Cleveland to be with Chester on the triumphant publication day in New York. All the signals indicated that enduring commercial and critical success was at hand.
An array of publicity ventures had been arranged in advance by Knopf, in contrast to the Doubleday scrambling and errors. On Sunday, September 7, 1947, Chester recorded a segment for the WCBS program This Is New York, to be broadcast a week later. Early Monday morning, Chester was scheduled to appear at Macy’s bookstore for a pep talk with booksellers. For that afternoon Knopf publicity director William Cole also scheduled a live WNBC radio interview with the fashionable Mary Margaret McBride to coincide with the book’s release.
But on Monday morning, a warm day with a sprinkling of clouds, the best laid plans began to unravel. This Is New York went ahead with their broadcast, despite their promise to air later. McBride’s secretary heard the interview at 9:15 A.M. and angrily telephoned Cole, canceling the afternoon program, because their contract to exclusively launch the book had been violated. Then, even though Chester was on the early ferry to Manhattan, the boat broke down, delaying him by forty-five minutes. When he arrived at Macy’s at ten o’clock, his audience of book clerks was already hard at work. He collared a few from the fiction department, but rushed back to the Seventy-Ninth Street dock to get Jean and his father for the McBride interview. Another ferry ride later he arrived and Jean told him the appointment had been canceled, kindling a desperate “fustle and bustle.” Chester felt bad and showed it. Joseph Himes tried to console his youngest child, who had known so much anguish and grief. “Remember, son, New York is not the only city that has skyscrapers,” he sputtered. “We have one on the new Union Station in Cleveland.”
After this opening fumble, there were some minor recoveries, courtesy of his friends. In the Amsterdam News, Constance Curtis approved of his “tightly constructed . . . good novel.” For the New York Herald Tribune, Arna Bontemps reviewed
the book he thought a bit long, deciding that “the story has power” and provides “excitement quite out of the ordinary.” In Atlanta, reviewer Marian Sims, who liked the book particularly well for its attacks against Communists, thought that Himes had imbued it with the “terrible and tragic ring of authenticity.” Another fan, John Farrelly at New Republic, gave Chester his due: “The victim is the classic modern hero; undefined, pervasive fear, emotional and physical insecurity, sexual neuroses, the abnegation of beliefs, the loss of values, a general cynicism and brutality; these are universal disasters.” Farrelly agreed with Chester’s skepticism about “the healing aspects of an equality which is as much a problem for the white man as the Negro.”
However, one of the dissenting reviews injured him personally. Willard Motley wrote him “regretfully,” five days before publication, to warn Chester that he would review the book for the Chicago Sun. “I didn’t like Lonely Crusade,” he began, “I react violently to it—my ideas and opinions are so different from yours.” Repudiated by a writer who described expertly the meanness of the modern city and its destructiveness to human beings, Chester wasn’t sure how to respond. He had regaled Motley’s Knock on Any Door and identified personally with the story of choirboy Nick Romano’s trip to the electric chair, calling the book “wonderful.” As Nick gets his taste of life behind bars in the boys’ reformatory, Motley explored the world of cruising gay men exploiting children and teens in the slums. Chester knew of few other published books that put a contextual perspective on the “degenerate” episodes of his own life, books lifting him out of isolation and providing language to unpack his own complex experience in prison. Before reading Motley’s review, Chester tried to patch up their differences in a letter. While he did “regret exceedingly” Motley’s dislike of Lonely Crusade, he wanted to keep him as a friend: “Please do not feel that I would ever have you do otherwise than be honest to yourself.”
But then the Chicago Sun piece appeared. Borderline calumny, Motley’s review was a series of oversimplifications, which worked quite well in the pithy format of a newspaper. In a critique that refused to distinguish between the novelist and his chief character and ignored the novel’s sophisticated political dimensions, Motley decided that since Lee Gordon was a graduate of UCLA, he would have shared the experiences of its star black athletes: “We learn early that Lee hates all white people (at least men) though he must have met some decent men of different color in the University of California at Los Angeles. Kennie Washington, All American football player, and Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodger first basemen, did.”
Himes had clumsily but directly responded to Motley’s chief critique at the end of the book. Bright and perceptive in the midst of his own doom, Lee decides that “some white people must have been his friends right down the line from slavery. All of them could not have been his hateful enemies.” Motley’s suggestions that Lee Gordon’s life “pivot[s] on race or nationality” and “through bitterness or pride he turns his back on the people as a whole” made Chester consider the review “a vicious personal attack.” He never spoke to Motley again.
Even though some black college graduates out of Chicago thought Motley was “closer to the ofays than he was to the Brothers,” this review demonstrated what was at stake for the middle class. (Motley’s uncle Archibald, a celebrated painter, had famously done a series of portraits extolling light-skinned black beauty at the expense of darker-skinned women.) In the pages of Ebony, where he had been celebrated a short time before, Chester found personal slander: “Gordon—and his creator Himes—are infected with a psychosis that distorts their thinking and influences their every action.” In New York’s The People’s Voice he received the same diagnosis, but this time from the black left, which was also solidly middle-class, educated, biracial, and married across the color line. “It has been rumored that this novel is largely autobiographical. If this is true, then Himes should repair to the nearest clinic before writing another novel. For he is a mighty sick man.” These critiques showed the unwillingness of African Americans with public voices to push loudly against racism or to prick the weaknesses of postwar white liberalism. Timid black reviewers convinced themselves that they were risking black progress by mounting vigorous critiques a year before American armed forces were formally desegregated. Nor were they comfortable in admitting to personal feelings of enmity toward whites, a standing taboo for the black professional class. So they assailed Chester as neurotic.
Further to the left, he was declared insufficiently working-class. The Socialist Workers Party sheet The Militant, ridiculed Chester as “a Negro intellectual,” which meant being bourgeois. “He does not know the worker, and least of all the Negro worker,” the article charged. “Mr. Himes has fought with his typewriter alone in his room.”
The newly reorganized U.S. Communist Party took a turn. Chester had written bon mots such as “It was not that the Communist Party lacked integrity; it simply did not recognize it.” Lloyd Brown, a new African American reviewer for New Masses, was assigned Chester’s book, which was probably the most detailed fictional exploration of blacks in the Communist Party. He promptly called it a “literary lynching” and then decided, “I cannot recall ever having read a worse book on the Negro theme.”
These were what the Cleveland Press’s Emerson Price had in mind when he noted that “extreme leftists” had delivered a “really serious beating” to the novel and made “grave charges” against Chester personally. So Chester’s ground became ever more narrow, when the highbrow press belittled him both as a middlebrow hack and as a heretic to the faith of postwar American antiracist zeitgeist. Atlantic Monthly reviewer Stoyan Christowe offered this memorable quote: “Hatred reeks through his pages like yellow bile.” Honest about the attitude of an audience wanting to see discontent smoothed over, Forum derided the book because it was “bound to stir up animosity rather than sympathetic understanding.” In the highly charged Red Scare political atmosphere of loyalty oaths and Communist purges, Lonely Crusade was opposed for spearing the hypocrisy of two warring, unequal sides.
If his portrait of whites like the aircraft company executive Louis Foster and Jackie Forks, the Communist dilettante, maligned the middle class, Chester had not so much made a sharp critique of the left as he had exposed some of its social world, and particularly the roles of blacks and Jews in it. But the big question of black industrial employment after the Second World War—enfolding the key issues of migration, home ownership, and college education connected to the GI Bill—would wind up defining much of the second half of twentieth-century American domestic politics. Chester dramatized the barriers in practice and thought that prevented the integration of the labor force in heavy industry and caused the emergence of the ghetto as the central locale of black urban life.
As he had done two years before with If He Hollers Let Him Go, he attempted to direct the novel’s reception, a rare duty presumed by a black novelist for their own work. When Milton Klonsky, the reviewer for Commentary, dismissed the novel with “Such writing, no matter how well intentioned, and the graffiti in the men’s rooms are part of the same debased culture,” Chester took the time to rebut him in Klonsky’s own magazine. In a March 1948 letter to Commentary’s editor, Chester blamed the graffiti comment on Klonsky’s “sub conscious disturbances,” and his “prejudices.” Believing himself “fulsomely condemned” by “learned colored people” like black critic J. Saunders Redding, he addressed Redding in his own column in the Afro-American. He insisted that one fictional character “is one colored person, not all colored people” and “Lee Gordon is presented as mentally ill. The author does not imply that all colored people are mentally ill.”
Amid the messy reviews Chester was also losing a friend, Ralph Ellison, who saw in Himes’s career an example of what not to do. Like a seminarian, Ellison had once committed himself to the Communist Party. Later, feeling more at home with the ideas of the midcentury critic Kenneth Burke, he moved to the philosophy of art and lit
erary technique. He disproved of Chester’s freewheeling compositional style, which in Lonely Crusade involved the addition of material from the press, oral poetry heard in bars, the problems that his brother Joe and cousin Henry had written about, and what seemed to Ellison the transmutation of whole portions of the Lenin pamphlets he himself had supplied to Chester. Ellison faulted his buddy for making Communist arguments seem frivolous.
Ellison could not, however, get around the fact that Lonely Crusade was the most important novel written by an African American in the seven years since Native Son. So he chatted the book up with his white friends, feeling them out while making up his own mind. He had been excited to recommend the book to his main patron, Ida Guggenheimer, a wealthy sponsor of the Communist Party. Now he was sour. “For the most part I didn’t like it, especially not his attempts at political criticism,” Ellison decided a year after publication. He described the novel as “unclear” and worse, called Himes’s “motives questionable” for publishing the book. Guggenheimer, to whom the novel Invisible Man would be dedicated, agreed with his estimate, judging Lonely Crusade “very poor stuff.” A friend Ellison cherished, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and college professor who also wrote for The New Yorker, dismissed Himes as well. Hyman was just getting around to reading If He Hollers and wrote Ellison to levy the negative verdict: “I read the old Himes book, just about the time the new one came out and didn’t think it came to much.” Hyman would be the prime critical voice in Ellison’s ear as he wrote Invisible Man.
Chester B. Himes Page 26