A few months later and in a move that signified the impossibility of Ellison’s ever sharing intimacy again with Himes, he tore the book apart in a letter to Richard Wright. “Personally I was disappointed,” he began. “I found it dishonest in its pseudo-intellectuality, and as false as Cayton’s ‘fear-hate-fear complex’ in its psychology.” For Ellison, Himes made tawdry intellectual and artistic missteps and then dared to tell people he had written a best seller. Ellison had been told by a Knopf editor that although the publisher “eagerly put money behind the book it laid an egg.”
At the end of 1947, Chester called Ellison about a holiday party and sent a Christmas card, but Ellison had written him off as a “mixed-up guy” and an opportunist. And while Earl Conrad believed that Ellison, Cayton, Wright, and Himes all had the personality of Bigger Thomas, for Ellison the joke was on Himes. Cocky and feeling superior, Ellison mused about Chester’s wounded feelings. “Could he fear that I might put him in my book?” he noted to Wright before making a Native Son reference. “If so, he should forget it; you put him in a book seven years ago.”
Chester Himes always maintained that the overall response to Lonely Crusade ruined his literary reputation in the United States. “It was then that I decided to leave the United States forever if I got the chance. . . . I felt like a man without a country, which in fact I was.” Certainly it was true that some former allies were now pointing to him as fearful, vindictive, and ignorant. But Chester held on to his desire to write the stories that had both come out of his prison past and relied upon what he had learned in California—his critique of the evolution of racism in the United States and the creation of the modern integrated industrial workforce. Unlike Wright’s Native Son, which produced a Communist defense attorney to deliver the work’s lacerating social critique, or Ann Petry’s The Street, which needed its narrator and a series of male villains to make plain the argument of the racist urban environment of the North, or Motley’s Knock on Any Door, which reproduced Wright’s courtroom melodrama and made explicit the environment-as-culprit theme, Chester had relied upon a dramatic narrative lodged in concrete historical circumstances to identify the contesting pressures wrecking the mass movement for peaceful social transformation. He exposed all comers, from the black family under segregation to the autocratic ultrapatriots, and the quixotic left-wing movement itself. None of his characters were improbable cutouts. But even more significant than crafting the book’s uncompromising, smart originality, Chester had exposed the crisis of industrial work as the postwar national woe. “I will never change on the book,” he wrote five years later about Lonely Crusade, “with all its faults it still tells the truth as I saw it then and see it now.”
Chapter Nine
INFLICTING A WOUND UPON HIMSELF
1948–1952
By February 1948 Lonely Crusade was a certified flop. The hardcover sales petered out at thirty-five hundred copies and Chester’s greatest book was never considered for a paperback reprint edition because of the heavy pile of remaindered surplus. Lonely Crusade would pass quickly into obscurity, as if the book had not been written at all. And if Knopf did not deliberately sacrifice the book as Doubleday had If He Hollers Let Him Go, they did not overadvance authors whose books were not doing well. Chester earned only $1701.89 from book sales after Lonely Crusade had been out a month, not enough to recoup his initial $2000 advance. Before the end of 1947, Knopf accountants had started billing his Immortal Mammy advance for all fees and expenses against Lonely Crusade, which by then showed “a debit balance.” That December Knopf had docked him $123.78, reducing that month’s stipend to around $28. Even his agent, Lurton Blassingame, was surprised by the unusually harsh accounting practices. “Advances against royalties paid to finance the writing of a new work have never, in my experience, been subject to charges held over from a previous work,” Blassingame lobbied the publisher, requesting that Chester’s final money be remitted intact. The last $150 Immortal advance payment was paid in full at the end of March. Downcast about Lonely Crusade’s failing and feeling punished again by a publisher, Chester was hard-pressed and “needed support badly.”
But the more difficult task of writing was intolerable while he and Jean resided in a cramped apartment with the dandyish Caribbean bandleader Eddie Bonelli on Franklin Avenue in the Bronx. “It is a great self punishment,” Chester concluded about their comedown after leaving Welfare Island, “to write a book while living in a small room in someone else’s house.”
To relieve himself from the tiny room and the bleak disappointment connected to the reception of Lonely Crusade, Chester violated one of his better principles. In February he applied for two months’ residency at the artists’ colony at Yaddo. A billet there would not bring relief financially—all that Yaddo provided was room and board—and, since Jean would not be allowed to live with him there, he would still have to sell stories to contribute to their room rent. But he was hoping that intangibles like scenic beauty, prestige, and a crew of new backers could inspire him and prove therapeutic. The first small victory was to be admitted.
For the application he pitched Immortal Mammy, the story of the black girl in the all-white world that would feature the “psychological processes of an ‘exceptional’ member of an oppressed group.” He planned for the novel to be a semibiographical piece, probably drawn from some of the episodes attributed to the popular and beloved singer Billie Holiday, who was released from federal penitentiary after serving nine months for narcotics possession, and performed at Carnegie Hall that March. He considered using a first-person narrator and exploring the life of the blues singer using the environs of Cleveland, Los Angeles, and New York.
His friend Horace Cayton, supervisor of the Parkway Community House, tried to lift Chester up a bit, inviting him to Chicago to lecture in May. Chester was working up treatments of articles for the slick magazines and hoping that the new book “won’t take me long . . . when I get going.”
While struggling to draft Immortal Mammy and dealing with “a siege of virus X” shared with Jean, Chester renewed his political ties. He lent his talents that winter to Grant Reynolds, who had joined forces with union leader Asa Philip Randolph and created the Committee Against Jim Crow in the Military. In March, the committee started issuing press releases, threatening Gandhian civil disobedience against the Universal Military Training and Selective Service Acts being debated in Congress. At the beginning of April, Randolph and Reynolds conveyed their demands for desegregation to President Harry Truman and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Although ultimately successful, their spring of 1948 stand went against the growing anti-Communist hysteria that sought to quash all dissent to government policies.
Like the hero Lee Gordon in his novel Lonely Crusade, Chester shared that outspoken commitment to ending Jim Crow wherever it appeared. By April he was writing newspaper editors in Cleveland and Chicago to advance the Randolph–Reynolds campaign in favor of “mass civil disobedience” if segregation in the armed forces was not summarily abolished. To the movement he also contributed a short story, called “These People Never Die,” published in the Amsterdam News, about a courageous black draftee who accepts prison instead of serving as a “sugar boy” in the Jim Crow army. But while Chester was suggesting that prison was more dignified than stooping to federal law, he was growing increasingly doubtful of the existence of a public that wanted to read Immortal Mammy, the manuscript of which was due to Knopf on May 1. With the sales of Lonely Crusade what they were, Chester admitted that “I don’t have any great enthusiasm for another racial novel.”
What he also meant was that he was losing his taste for writing literature that engaged the politics of American social class, a true disappointment on account of two brilliant character portraits from Lonely Crusade. The New Leader’s reviewer, twenty-three-year-old James Baldwin, had immediately recognized Chester’s Luther McGregor as a nefarious and significant character in African American literature. Chester perhaps slightly mishandled Lut
her by repeatedly emphasizing his likeness to an ape. However, it is smooth-talking Luther McGregor who quotes the epic Signifying Monkey rhyme in its entirety, and thus introduces a syncretic version of African rural folk culture into an urban American setting. Luther also delivers the Hamlet-like “I is a nigger first” soliloquy, a moment when black fear and violent reprisal are transformed into twentieth-century ethnically rooted national citizenship.
Another prime distinction in Lonely Crusade was the portrait of Louis Foster, and the character, though drawn from Louis Bromfield, quite brilliantly and accurately modeled the beliefs of several powerful Americans whose oligarchic attitudes consistently not only imperiled civil rights and democracy in the United States but threatened to bring on atomic war and global catastrophe. Henry Luce, the propaganda-producing publisher of the newsmagazine Time, which was described in the 1940s and ’50s as “misinformation trimmed with insults,” and his friend, General Douglas MacArthur, who consistently defied President Truman and brought the United States to the brink of all-out war with China and the Soviet Union, were both eerily similar personalities to Foster. Chester was really the first black writer to wrestle onto the page a psychological portrait of a righteous plutocrat from the atomic bomb era.
In early April Chester heard from Yaddo administrator Elizabeth Ames that he had made the “guest list” for the coming season at the artists’ colony. Guests, as the admitted artists were termed, stayed for short stints in the spring and summer, typically six or eight weeks. Chester arrived by afternoon train at Saratoga Springs on May 10, 1948, and took a cab to the six-hundred-acre estate on Union Street, once the home of financier Spencer Trask and his wife, Sylvia. Yaddo featured gothic revival buildings, slender lakes, and lush sculpted grounds. The principal building was the Mansion, a hewn granite structure of twenty-seven rooms, closed when Chester first arrived. Artists had studios for their work and the writers too went out to ateliers every day. A heavy garage housed some of the studios and Chester had a bedroom in a two-story clapboard manor called West House. Elizabeth Ames’s office was in a stucco building called East House. A statue-lined rose garden covered what, in the early nineteenth century, had been slave quarters. The only uncomfortable part of the arrangement was that Saratoga Springs, New York, a resort famed for its racetrack and its mineral springs, was like Atlantic City, a Jim Crow town.
The nearly deaf, prominently leftist Ames was the original director of the artist’s colony and her vision guided the place for fifty years. When Chester met her, she had just left the hospital, having spent three weeks convalescing after an eye operation. Unsure of whether or not he would encounter racial prejudice, he tried to befriend Ames by gushing to her about Van Vechten, whom she knew. Although Ames was admired by her “colonists,” she was also punctilious and officious, a morally rigid woman who left typed admonitory notes for guests on the escritoire in the great hall, where they took their meals. Liberal, like the members of her admissions committee—Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and Newton Arvin—but averse to risk, Ames admitted that Negroes “should have come before” the racial barrier fell in 1941. Then, she had had to defy at least one Yaddo trustee who resigned when she and Arvin resolved to start admitting black artists. Ames tried to break segregation down by small, safe degrees.
In the first season of black guests, she confided to Malcolm Cowley that integration seemed to have spawned “one or two weird things,” likely a sobriquet for sex and drunkenness. One of her apparent responses was to henpeck black Yaddoites. On the grounds they were not to be overloud or create large phone bills; in Saratoga Springs, they were not to run up bar tabs or be in debt. She did not want them carousing drunkenly or lecherously, activities that reached legendary proportion among all who went to Yaddo. As one Yaddo researcher suspects, “the formal integration of Yaddo was subtly undermined by ‘well-intentioned’ inquiries about the behavior of African American guests.” Eventually Jim Crow Saratoga Springs made certain grudging exceptions. When asked specifically by Ames if he would object to Langston Hughes being served at the New Worden restaurant, proprietor Edward Sweeney relented, somewhat. “I do not object to Langston Hughes, the colored writer, coming in our bar as long as he is in the company of someone else from Yaddo.”
Not all black guests accepted Ames’s grooming. The year before Chester arrived, hard-drinking Horace Cayton had frightened Ames with his behavior. Even fifteen years later, Cayton’s loud escapades were clearly recalled. Despite Cayton’s genuine attraction to Yaddo, his requests for readmission were refused by Ames, who explained to Malcolm Cowley, “we have decided that an alcoholic is too sick a person to be invited to Yaddo.” She would be looking closely at Chester.
At first, Chester marveled at the new level of splendor. “It is an ideal place to work,” he bragged to Van Vechten about his room, which had four windows and a view of the manicured grounds. His basic needs were catered to. Guests could count on a buffet for breakfast and lunch packed in a black tin box at noon. Yaddo even had quiet hours—no visiting or public talking from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.—that were enforced. The dinners were grand jacket-and-tie affairs, known for the rich quality of the food and turning the guests into “beaming Sybarites waddling out from the groaning board,” in the words of the writer Eleanor Clark.
The retreat catered to both the already famous and young prodigies. Unknown Flannery O’Connor, a young, sheltered, “thirteenth century” Catholic girl from Georgia, arrived on June 1. Chester had prepared himself for elevated literary discussions with the Yaddo crowd, and he brought with him Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Faulkner’s Light in August, and a translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. But what O’Connor found with annoyance, and that Chester must have been amused by, was dining-room table banter about the latest vogue that kept Billie Holiday in the news: narcotics.
In Chester’s session the white wunderkind was twenty-six-year-old Patricia Highsmith, who awoke to a breakfast of liquor and biblical passages. Yaddo stimulated and deranged her; she was “a coiled Spring” and “happy like a battery chicken.” Slender and tall, the dark-haired Barnard graduate hailed from a Texas slaveholding family and consistently tried to tackle Chester on his own turf: evil and sexuality. Their rooms were across the hall from each other, and at the end of May they went into town, found Jimmy’s, a bar on Congress Street, and drank themselves into a stupor. Then Highsmith followed Chester into his room, where he attempted to consummate rather perfunctorily what seemed to be unfolding. When Chester tried to kiss her, Highsmith, free-spirited and sexually libertine during her eight weeks at Yaddo, withdrew. She camouflaged the episode of interracial hanky-panky by writing about it in German in her notebook, but it was vivid. As she wrote to him dryly after almost twenty years, “Maybe you remember me from Yaddo. Anyway, I remember you.”
Highsmith’s seeming dismissal of sex with Chester and, what’s more, a writer’s friendship, is curious. She was hatching the well-received novel Strangers on a Train, which became famous when turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. When Highsmith completed the important “raison d’être” murder scene in her novel that summer, she wrote in her diary, “I feel I have grown older, completely adult.” At Yaddo, Chester was the hands-down expert in crime and murder, but mainly Highsmith remembered him talking about his car. In the 1960s, after she had become comfortably wealthy and reviewed Chester’s novel Cotton Comes to Harlem for London’s Times Literary Supplement, Highsmith received a letter from Chester, asking what he never found out from the hallmate he drunkenly tried to seduce. “I was sitting here, wondering, when the postman brought your letter, how your life has brought you the intimate and detailed knowledge required to write such a realistic and living story.” Underneath Chester’s polite question was the thinly veiled accusation that, like many other writers, she had taken something from him without acknowledgment.
Another obvious tie between the two writers was Highsmith’s ache over her sexual preference. Chester had written a book on the subject:
he had his prison manuscript with him, and he was, around this time, separating out the competing plot strands from the book. One part, “Stool Pigeon,” would deal with the prison fire and have a reptilian black preacher as its protagonist. The other story, “Yesterday Will Make You Cry,” would present “the boy’s development of homosexuality.” Highsmith should have been a natural comrade, but perhaps the simple fact is that a talented young white woman sowing her oats would be wary of a Negro ex-con from Cleveland, Knopf novelist or not.
Chester broke off from the excitement at West House and caught a train to be at the University of Chicago on May 18. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Forum, his evening lecture was advertised as “The Individual in Our Writing World,” but Chester was speaking nearly exclusively about “the dilemma of the Negro artist.” He had emphasized to a reporter in advance of the talk that Lonely Crusade “was more concerned with Lee Gordon’s search for the meaning of manhood than with any lengthy condemnation of prejudice as such.” He also quoted at length from Horace Cayton’s essay “Race Conflict in Modern Society.” From the stage Chester told his audience of postwar collegians that writing was about intellectual and emotional experience, and then, even more philosophically, that “the essential necessity of humanity is to find justification for existence. . . . We are maintained at our level of nobility by our incessant search for ourselves.” But the inner journey of self-definition led him to an abyss in terms of creativity. Ignoble himself, he had been “brutalized, restricted, degraded” and his “soul” was “pulverized by oppression.” As a result, he could not but succumb to “bitterness, fear, hatred, protest.” Chester supposed that an honest reflection by a black writer on the black way of life in the United States would “be like inflicting a wound upon himself.” The reward for integrity was being reviled.
Chester B. Himes Page 27