He accused those of his peers who had achieved polite acclaim of “a trenchant sort of dishonesty, an elaborate and highly convincing technique of modern uncle-tomism,” and gave out some dazzling turns of logic which probably seemed like a con man’s spiel to everyone but Cayton: “Any American Negro’s racial experience, be they psychotic or not, are [sic] typical of all Negroes’ racial experience for the simple reason that the source is not the Negro but oppression.” The fact that he was right made him more doomed. As for the “guiltless” liberals in the audience, they were told bluntly that they “abhor . . . the revelations of Negroes’ personalities.” He insisted, making the crowd uncomfortable, “What sort of idiocy is it that reasons American Negroes don’t hate American whites?” He concluded that “the whole Negro race in America, as a result of centuries of oppression, is sick at soul.” Chester, who had fortified himself before he took the podium with champagne, topped off by capsules of the stimulant Benzedrine, noted sadly that “a dead silence” followed his remarks.
After attempting to forget his Chicago audience’s disbelief by way of binge drinking and philandering, Chester staggered back to Yaddo, where he continued the pageant of self-indulgence and self-pity. “Until the period of my visit expired,” he recalled, “I was drunk every day.” As he described himself to another writer in 1952, “although I might not be the wittiest person I do think of myself as being jolly, especially when I have had a great deal to drink, which is one of my favorite hobbies.” Others among Yaddo’s guests joined him in debauchery. During one evening spectacle a high-spirited female artist slapped a man down and then broke some of the Mansion’s windows. When Elizabeth Ames reflected upon the cohort whose eight-week stay ended in July, she confessed to Malcolm Cowley that “there has been a lot of very rowdy drinking.”
Chester conducted his heaviest drinking downtown, at Jimmy’s, which was a hangout for the Yaddo crowd, and at afterhours dives for the black cooks and waiters who worked in town, like Glenn Finley’s Blind Pig, where they served barbecue and Chester could drink until five in the morning. Chester described himself at the all-black joints as “a man going home after a shipwreck.” But recuperating at the bar with his kinfolk meant that the experience with the white artsy crowd was equivalent to drowning at sea. A sentence from his 1955 novel The Primitive (which punningly used Skidoo for Yaddo) uncovered his bewilderment and anger, “Some day he’d have to sit down and discover why he hated Skiddoo and all the artists there.”
One element of the discontentment was Chester’s realization about himself. In 1948, Chester wrote a moving short story based on the Saratoga Springs artists’ retreat. “Da-Da-Dee” took its title from an onomatopoetic transcription of Ella Fitzgerald scat-singing “I’ll Get By—As Long as I Have You.” The maudlin tale centered on Jethro, “a famous writer of two racial novels,” who has been invited to an artists’ colony to “work on a novel called Stool Pigeon.” The short story exposed two places of rot: first, the protagonist could no longer escape the fact that his life was governed by his race; second, drinking, the salve he used to endure the first problem, was destroying him. Forty-one-year-old Jethro scats and drinks in the all-black Saratoga Springs bars until he discovers “how much of the street was in himself and how much of himself was in the street.” In an epiphany, he realizes that “the street” was simply ordinary, low-ceilinged black life. Instead of nobly writing to resolve the race problem and to inspire individual triumph, a fitful Chester, revealing his innermost feelings later, in The Primitive, “felt more like just lying in the gutter and never getting up.”
To make matters worse, by June 8 he was broke. Chester pushed back from the bar long enough to dash down to New York, in a “desperate need to raise some money.” Predictably he went first to Carl Van Vechten. Chester claimed that he needed $100 to defray expenses before Jean started a new job as a recreational director for federally funded housing projects in New York on July 1. Van Vechten seems to have resisted being dunned, because the next day Chester wrote Blanche Knopf, telling her that Jean was “ill and our need urgent.” Confronted by “the bare and irreducible problem of expenses which I have been unable to relieve,” Chester requested $100 from his publisher, who was already heartily disinclined to advance him money. Blanche Knopf told him so on June 14: “This is a rather unusual request of yours, which I know you realize, in view of the advance paid on the next book and the bad position we too are in on Lonely Crusade.” But because Chester had invoked the helpless tragedy of his wife, Blanche Knopf was “of course sending your wife a check immediately.”
Chester returned to Yaddo and continued his sport. Befriending the Iowa mural painter Francis White, who used the term “atomalypse” to describe the contemporary geopolitical moment, Chester tried to reassert his pride by recommending White’s work in a letter to Knopf. But having failed to submit the Immortal Mammy manuscript, which he seems to have abandoned completely by the end of June, or to repay the money to Blanche Knopf, from roughly that point forward the firm considered his every communiqué importunate.
The disaffection that grew between Chester, prestigious publishers like Knopf, and the artistic circles Yaddo represented was apparently mutual. By the time he left Yaddo in July, Elizabeth Ames was not likely to invite him back. If she believed in the summer of 1948 that “a good many now here are mistakes,” she almost certainly counted Chester as one of the people who “have very not definite objectives in work.” Facing increasingly desperate circumstances in subsequent years, Chester would try to rejoin the guest list, but he would never be invited to revisit Saratoga Springs, which, more than anything, probably shaped his unflattering portraits of “Skiddoo” in 1955 and in his memoir in 1972.
Back in the Bronx, without a finished book and depressed, he edged toward ragged dissolution. His marriage to Jean had been brokered on his determined effort to appear masculine and in command, in spite of the vulnerabilities of his characters and his willingness to write about homosexuality. But he was too tattered and feeble to uphold the front of prowess and control any longer. Even Jean, whose past life and lack of erudition sometimes embarrassed him, “felt truly sorry for me then.”
A shriveled Chester sobered up at the end of the summer, when budget cuts eliminated Jean’s position. “The support of the family reverted to me, and I had to take my position as the man and the husband,” he reported in his memoir. The solution for their well-being was to work as off-season caretakers at summer resorts, and Chester cast about, placing an advertisement in the Times and facing a few anxious weeks of interviews. “If I can spend this winter in some isolated camp or summer colony or estate I will be able to come up next spring with another complete book,” he wrote Van Vechten, the strongest of his allies.
By October he at least knew where he would live for the following six months: Andover, New Jersey. Chester signed on as caretaker at Sussex Village, a former German American Bund parade ground and resort owned by Frank Bucino, a Hoboken real-estate broker. Chester thought Bucino, who claimed to be Frank Sinatra’s godfather, had seen Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar too many times. The one-eyed man certainly looked the part of a gangster, from his “voluptuous” wife to his street-fighting bodyguards and Lincoln Continental. Bucino paid $150 a month, the same as Chester’s literary advances, and he supplied plenty to eat and drink. With dogs for company and three upstairs rooms of their own in an old tavern, Chester and Jean agreed to look after thirty-six bungalows surrounding Clearwater Lake.
Even though the first month involved quite a bit of drudgery—such as painting and repairs—the Himeses wanted for little. The cozy, rustic life of walking in snow-filled woods suited them. He pored over novels like Hiram Haydn’s The Time Is Noon, John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run, and Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Horace Cayton visited for a week in December with his new wife, Ruby, whom he had just married on Yaddo’s grounds. Flamboyant but manic-depressive, Cayton had tried to ge
t off alcohol the previous year, but when Chester met him in Chicago at the Creative Writing Forum he had returned to heavy drinking. Now Cayton was in free fall. Burly, but always dignified in manner, he had previously divorced two white women and was now with a former showgirl. This marriage wouldn’t last long and the visit was a drunken folly. After spending a week together Chester couldn’t recall a “moment of lucidity” with the Caytons, other than lengthy rambles from Horace about his sessions with psychiatrists. Then, instead of working on Immortal Mammy, Chester focused instead on preparing a stage adaptation of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Just before Christmas he had completed 140 pages, consisting of two acts and three scenes. In an unguardedly optimistic moment, he reflected that “I think in many ways [it] is better than the book.”
Chester would never find his métier with the stage, although he did write another play, Baby Sister, in 1961. While he sat out the fall and winter, he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship hoping to work on a book called An Uncle Tom You Never Knew, and he thought that if American audiences were so misinformed about the prison-house of race and class, that he might take upon himself, “an autobiographical novel til the time I went to prison.”
In late January 1949, Chester wanted to send his play to Margot Johnson, the same agent used by Willard Motley and Patricia Highsmith. Since the connection was through Van Vechten, he sent the script, which has since been lost, to his patron first. Van Vechten disliked the “smutty and profane” adaptation of If He Hollers, causing Chester to apologize and admit, “I got lost in the character and forgot about the stage.” But what was holding him back was his everlasting resistance to a world that did not have a place for a black artist who didn’t emphasize the value of assimilation. “What I have done will be repugnant to those Negroes who define their progress in terms of their similarity to upper class whites,” he wrote in justification of his ribald play. The real worry was Van Vechten’s dimming enthusiasm.
By March Chester learned that he had not received a Guggenheim. He was feeling pressure about the unwritten novel and his missed deadline with Knopf. “I know what I have to do” and “have it all in my head” were how he tried to persuade Van Vechten, saying it more to himself. No new writing had occurred since the play. All he knew was that “it will take a little time.” But the six months in New Jersey were up, and on April 2, 1949, Chester and Jean returned to their small room at Eddie Bonelli’s in the Bronx.
Instead of producing a new manuscript, Chester had actually been rewriting Black Sheep. Circumventing his agent and the wilting relationship at Knopf, on March 1 he had presented his latest version to editor Bill Raney at Rinehart. Raney had a reputation for giving contracts to incorrigible geniuses. He had been involved, toward the end, with the fight to have Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead published, and he left Rinehart in April for another job. Raney asked Chester to withdraw the book from Rinehart and resubmit it at his new employer, Henry Holt. Chester agreed.
Chester’s formidable coming-of-age novel Black Sheep never featured black main characters, probably because at the beginning of his career Chester had reasoned that success with American editors and audiences meant white protagonists. Notwithstanding the white cast, Chester had again broken convention and cut a path by writing about the misery and brutality of life inside prison. Chester’s novel combined the development of his protagonist’s homosexuality with a hard-boiled exposé of the penitentiary that had never appeared in an American novel. He was blazing a trail on two issues, but he elected not to blaze a third, on race relations.
Homosexuality was still taboo in the 1940s but a shift was under way. New studies by researchers like Indiana University sexologist Alfred Kinsey had appeared throughout the decade, greatly complicating the portrayal and range of what was considered “normal” male sexuality. By the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey would suggest that 37 percent of American men had had at least one homosexual experience. Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, with an adolescent gay protagonist and an adult gay transvestite as a key character, had been well received in 1948. Also published this year, and more graphic than Capote’s book, was Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, featuring the gay love life of an adult man. As arguments for tolerance and civility, other postwar novels about gay men tended to explore the theme tragically, like the novels about the cruelty of racism.
Chester’s first-person novel depicted a young man coming of age in prison under physically and emotionally grueling conditions. It concluded with the protagonist, Jimmy Monroe, demanding in a self-sacrificial gesture that he be charged with violating the prison regulation against “sex perversion,” forsaking an opportunity for a commuted sentence. Jimmy’s self-awareness occurs at this decisive moment: “I had done it to be a man. And if I had lost freedom by doing it, I’d never had freedom. . . . I had done a lot of time and I could do plenty more. But I couldn’t be a man later. I couldn’t wait.” Chester revealed much of his own story throughout; the last third of the book offered a candid sketch of his yearlong relationship with Prince Rico.
While Black Sheep was not precisely a “gay” novel, in that ultimately it did not have as its central concern Jimmy’s coming to terms with homosexual desire or even homosexual romance as its central plot, it was certainly a “queer” novel, a word used repeatedly throughout the book. Duke Dido, the character in love with Jimmy Monroe, explains “queer” when he tells Jimmy about Hollywood.
“Everyone else seems to think a lot of them are rather queer.”
“Queer? That’s a funny word.”
“I mean sexually.”
He looked at me strangely. “There’s really nothing lost when a physical change is made unless you feel that it’s wrong. It’s the feeling that it’s wrong that makes it queer.”
“How did you feel?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“It never came to that,” he said again. I didn’t know why I needed to be reassured so often.
“Do you think queerness in prison is right?” I pressed.
“That’s an odd question—” he began.
“Why is it odd?”
“Do you?” he countered.
“Not particularly so,” I said.
Provocative and searing, Black Sheep cautiously approached portraying sex acts. However, Jimmy was undeniably queer.
Chester’s instincts for survival were tearing him in different directions: toward what he was driven to narrate on the basis of the life that he knew and toward what he was told incessantly his audience wanted to hear. For the latter, he published “Journey Out of Fear” in June 1949 in the journal Tomorrow. In the essay, Chester revisited the experience of driving out to California, rifle in hand, buffeted by the slights of Jim Crow and expecting the worst from his white fellow citizens. He wrote that he and Jean, after living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, had overcome bitterness and fear and finally achieved “inclusion in the social and community life of the neighborhood.” He put in the buzzwords that might have come from the mouth of his Louis Foster, his Lonely Crusade plant owner. “Most important of all,” he concludes, “we lost all consciousness of race . . . and were welcomed not as Negroes but as individuals.” The final flourish signaled not real depth but dishonesty. “I managed to recapture a feeling I had left behind when I grew out of early childhood—the happy, secure feeling of being wanted.”
Chester was either lying to himself or to others on his views of being black in America. If it later seemed to Chester that his autobiographical The Third Generation, a new novel he was working on in 1949, was “a subtly dishonest book, made dishonest deliberately,” then “Journey Out of Fear” marked the beginning of the deceit. He managed a similar kind of fake performance in a stilted boyhood morality tale set in the Deep South called “Mama’s Missionary Money,” which would be published in The Crisis that November, after Collier’s accepted and then rejected it.
Worse than being reduced to a writer who soft-pedaled the race pro
blem was being reminded of what the world considered his labor was worth and the kind of labor which best suited him. Chester had salvaged himself from 1948 through mid-1949 with the caretaker job in New Jersey, which enabled him to appear like a competent husband in his marriage, so essential to his mind-set. For the next four years he would perform similar off-season custodial work on what he called the “Borscht circuit” in New York and New Jersey, resorts for Italians and Jews that were “like the Bronx set down in hot rural terrain.” When the seasonal jobs ended, Chester and Jean took refuge where they could in overcrowded New York, in the Bronx at Bonelli’s or in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. To make ends meet between the caretaker posts, he had to serve as a bellhop, porter, or janitor, where he was reminded how basely the white world considered black servant men.
In the spring of 1950, another caretaker assignment presented itself, for a Madison Avenue attorney who owned a Thoroughbred horse farm near Stamford, Connecticut. Chester and Jean had light duties, though they were required to cook, serve, and clean for their proprietors when the couple arrived with their personal maid and a gigot of mutton on the weekend. Otherwise, he and Jean had a Jeep, a sedan, unlimited gas, and food at their disposal. They could travel to New York City or head up to Vermont to visit Bill and Helen Smith, as they wished. “Life there was like something in a Hollywood film,” Chester recalled.
Chester B. Himes Page 28