In June 1950 a still enthusiastic Bill Raney contacted Chester about making changes to the manuscript. Always ready to please, Chester accepted the recommendations, apparently removing Jimmy Monroe’s background story and orchestrating Duke Dido’s suicide. He simply needed a book contract.
Chester’s brother Joe, by then a tenured professor of sociology in North Carolina, provided the highlight of that summer: Chester gave a series of lectures and seminars in Durham at North Carolina College for Negroes. When Chester let it be known that he would be quitting the Stamford job to return to full-time writing, “there was a bit of unpleasantness.” “I was somewhat surprised,” mused Chester, that a wealthy Madison Avenue attorney “held such a low opinion of black writers.” Imagining a third successfully published, adult-theme novel with a high-end publisher, a feat that no other postwar black writer had accomplished in 1950, Chester was deluding himself. The conversation to terminate his and Jean’s employment brought him back down to earth.
At midcentury an African American could really be no closer to the ground in the United States than to live in the still acrimoniously segregated Southern states, with their offensive public signs and deadly customs, like the refusal of emergency medical care. And yet, Joe had gone on to a notable if not prominent career as a sociologist in the segregated college system. He and his wife, Estelle, lived walking distance from the campus in a comfortable stucco home with a Spanish-tile roof. The tidy black Durham neighborhoods, with well-kept bungalows full of the latest conveniences, seemed to epitomize the consequences of efficacious racial segregation. Many black Americans worked in the tobacco factory; others managed their own insurance company with a handsome three-story brick office in the downtown. They were as proud as whites of the heavy stone buildings on Duke University’s campus, despite not being able to attend college there, and blind Joe was treated courteously in nearby Chapel Hill, when he used the facilities at the state’s flagship university. A measure of public respect could be maintained if black North Carolinians subscribed to infinitesimal political gradualism.
Chester opened his public lectures with fire on Sunday, July 9, returning to his liberal politics stump speech from 1944, “Democracy Is for the Unafraid.” “Believers in democracy must have the courage to advocate equality of opportunity for all citizens,” he told the interracial audience, politely ruffling a few feathers. The next afternoon Chester spoke to an all-black college audience with the lecture “Lonely Crusade: The Composition and the Philosophy.” To inform his remarks, Chester had written publishing contacts, including Blanche Knopf, asking them point-blank whether there was a color bar among the mainstream publishers and editors. Invariably, each person responded with the “no good book goes unpublished” mantra, an axiom believed by some blacks but not by Chester.
Chester was particularly tickled to have his sessions featured in the pages of the local white dailies, the Durham Herald and Durham Sun, alongside coverage of the “test” discrimination case of Harold Epps, a black man who was trying to win admission to law school at the University of North Carolina. Chester noted that somber-looking Thurgood Marshall, whom he knew from Mollie Moon’s Harlem parties, was in Durham during the fortnight of lectures, before deciding to drop the Epps case. In his spare time in North Carolina, when Chester wasn’t visiting his mother’s relatives in the countryside and eating roast ham and potato salad, he worked on revisions of Black Sheep, rewriting to the specifications of Raney’s superior, the managing director at Holt, Ted Amussen. He mailed the draft to Raney from Durham, and received instructions to sign a book contract when he returned to New York.
Jean’s first visit as an adult to “the South land,” as she referred to the officially segregated region that many blacks avoided completely if possible, was not marred by any ugly incidents, although Jean petrified her sister-in-law Estelle by drinking from a “whites only” public water fountain. At the end of their stay, Chester and Jean took the night train northbound in good spirits and arrived in New York on Friday, July 21. They booked a room at the Theresa Hotel, “relieved” to have survived their Dixie visit. Readying themselves for the advance money from the book, he and Jean splurged on a case of Irish whiskey and called up friends to produce “a celebration memorable even in the Hotel Theresa.”
The festivities were premature. A hungover Chester went to the Holt office to sign his contract on the twenty-fifth, and learned that he had nothing to sign. Blaming Amussen, Bill Raney returned Black Sheep, declining to publish it. The rejection was a body blow. His wind knocked out of him, Chester clutched his rejected manuscript and, late in the season when the editors were on vacation, prepared himself to interest someone else in the story. In the downstairs lobby he regrouped and telephoned Margot Johnson, the agent he had been putting off for months. She had just sold Motley’s Knock on Any Door to Hollywood for $65,000; the film would star Humphrey Bogart. Johnson agreed to represent him and would submit the prison manuscript, now under the title Yesterday Will Make You Cry. She discussed the possibility of film rights. But nothing happened for four long months. Her first success came when she sold the foreign rights of Lonely Crusade (apparently released by Lurton Blassingame) to the French publisher Editions Corréa on December 23.
Facing collapse, Chester and Jean gathered their luggage and retreated to Westford, Vermont, to Bill Smith, who had bought a ten-room hilltop dream house on 150 acres with an eastern view of the Green Mountains. The impressive brick residence had been featured in a March 1948 Ebony article, “Shangri-La in Vermont.” Whether on account of his career setbacks or his friend’s obviously flush circumstances, Chester could no longer conceal his bitter feelings of resentment and defeat. He directed his hostility at Jean. While he treated Bill’s spouse, Helen, honorifically, toward Jean he was so rude as to catch the notice and disapproval of his hosts. Even the Smith children noted with discomfort Chester’s abusiveness.
The unhappy Himeses went to Brooklyn again, then found a caretaker post in Craryville, New York. From October 1950 through the end of March 1951, Chester and Jean braved the weather and watched over a golf course, kept madmen in automobiles off the frozen lake, and drove around the country club in a DeSoto Town and Country. Chester was now toying with an autobiographical novel of his childhood years; at the same time, another novel began to take shape, one he had been “fooling around” with “a long time” called The End of a Primitive.
On November 28, five days after Thanksgiving, a hurricane lashed the northeast and caused $400 million worth of damage. Provisioned with yet another case of Irish whiskey, Chester and Jean hunkered down in a bungalow by the lake and, in the process of drinking the liquor, made such a robust fire in the chimney that they set the floor aflame and had to be rescued by fire trucks racing over downed power lines.
Chester mellowed after that, sipping from a basement cache of wine, and regained his stamina. By March he had written three hundred pages of the childhood novel. The fact that Chester was thinking about the two books, with different aims, at the same time was remarkable. The supposedly autobiographical novel The Third Generation, his “deliberately dishonest” book, was untrue to his life because he stressed the Oedipus complex—the sexual undertones in his relationship with his mother. In the era of the Kinsey Report and the broad popularity of psychoanalysis, he believed his audience wanted that condition. But in the other manuscript, The End of a Primitive, he would carry out the work begun in If He Hollers Let Him Go and intemperately scorch liberal beliefs about progressive race relations.
Once the Craryville job was over, he and Jean relocated to “pleasant” Bridgeport, Connecticut, easy driving to Manhattan and with a socialist mayor. With a portion of their saved winter salary they bought a used Plymouth sedan. At the beginning of the month, Chester got a speeding ticket, so he was nervous about the police. In the cool mornings, Chester would drive to a park near the seashore and sit in the car, listening to the lapping of the waves, and writing in the backseat with the typewrit
er on his knees. At the beginning of April, the firm of G. P. Putnam informed his agent Margot Johnson that it was turning down Yesterday Will Make You Cry. The comments were similar to those made in 1941: the novel was well written but too grim and it had too much homosexual content.
Toting around the unpublishable Yesterday Will Make You Cry manuscript seemed to invite having all of his work discounted. At a literary cocktail party in New York, rare for Chester, World Publishers’ editor James Putnam told him that the early chapters of The Third Generation were impossible to believe on account of the improbable emphasis on black pride. As a Negro, Chester was wrong to emphasize dishonor as a problem, lectured Putnam. “You could be as much of an Uncle Tom as any Negro,” Putnam told him. Expressing strong resistance to such slights seemed unwise.
As the prison manuscript was rejected over and over again, Chester grew angrier with Knopf, whom he began to consider his real enemy, because he had written Black Sheep and large chunks of The Third Generation, works they had shown no interest in. In June 1951 he approached them incautiously, asking relief from the contractual option clause and demanding to be held responsible only for the Immortal Mammy advance he had been paid in 1947 and 1948. “Legally I am only indebted to you for the $2,000,” he snarled in a letter, trying to invalidate the entire contract after he had drunkenly ignored the May 1948 submission date, and had conveniently forgotten the money Blanche Knopf personally conveyed to Jean on his behalf a month later. Chester was burning another bridge.
The downturn in literary success was compounded by the day-to-day indignity he faced. He couldn’t support a family; he couldn’t find a place to live; he couldn’t secure regular work commensurate with his skills. And even on the occasional payday when advance money came through, the Stork Club in Manhattan or a fancy Saratoga Springs restaurant would still reject him. Editors and agents seemed willfully to ignore the uphill struggle of a black person trying to make a living as a novelist—especially one who exposed difficult American topics—and one who was completely barred from high-paying magazines and offered only the most basic, boilerplate literary contracts when they were offered at all. It was not possible to find decent, affordable lodging in the cities where the book business was conducted, effectively network with the publishers and editors, or pick up temporary work at colleges and universities, even though these institutions were mushrooming with demobilized GIs. He felt jammed by the expectation that he should write a novel filled with platitudes extolling democracy and liberalism in the style of Fannie Cook. He refused.
After this, Chester would not hesitate to—or apologize for attempting to—shake loose money and dodge repayment without scruple, to play the ends against the middle, in a nonstop sparring with agents, editors, and book company presidents. Some professionals considered the approach merely guile but to others it was criminally dishonest. With Lurton Blassingame and now Margot Johnson, he would press for money from his agent personally, loans that were to be “against Advances.” Once the debts were piled up high and no book was sold, Chester would dart to another agent and try to wheedle money out of her or him. It was not personal. He was desperate.
Chester decided to bet his chips on selling The Third Generation, but he and Jean’s money gave out in July, forcing them to sell the Plymouth to finance a return to New York, where Jean could find a job. The day Chester tried to sell the automobile, when Jean had gone for interviews, a Bridgeport traffic cop arrested him for denting the fender of the car of one of the town’s blue bloods, on her say-so, and without any other witnesses. After thirty-six hours behind bars Chester reached Jean’s younger brother Andrew in Baltimore, who wired $100 bail to the jail. By then, however, Chester had been transferred to the county prison, awaiting a trial that was then delayed a week. It took Jean twelve hours of tearful haggling and beseeching jailers, wardens, judges and court clerks, to retrieve her brother’s money to have her husband released. They left immediately for New York, and once they got out of the train station there, Chester tore up the summons and never looked back.
He re-created the episode in both the 1955 novel The Primitive and his 1972 memoir. Being incarcerated again was deeply threatening.
That incident shook me. It wasn’t that it hurt so much. Nor was I surprised. I believed that the American white man—in fact all Americans, black or white—was capable of anything. It was just that it stirred up my anxiety, which had gradually settled down somewhat. It scrambled the continuity of my memories, probably of my thoughts also. That is practically the last thing I remember about the United States in such vivid detail.
The conversation in Stamford when he planned to leave custodial work and found out precisely his employer’s measure of him as a human being, followed by his arrest and jailing for a traffic offense, signaled that he might not quite escape the black dives in Cleveland or Saratoga Springs after all.
So Jean took over as the leader. They regrouped in a room in the northern Bronx until she accepted a residential job as a recreational director at the New York State Women’s Reformatory near Mt. Kisco, about an hour north of the city. Following his wife in December 1951, Chester rented a bedroom in nearby White Plains. His landlady, a proud, flinty woman who reminded him of his mother, kept him on his toes and her house chilly. Jean visited him for a day and a half each weekend and paid the tab. Chester was helpless and furious at being helpless. Chester applied for work at Reader’s Digest, presenting himself at the magazine’s White Plains offices with all the charm, youthfulness, and bonhomie that he could muster. “Of course,” he learned, “they had no suitable opening for a person of my capabilities.” But Chester was hungry, not idealistic: he yielded to a job in the mailroom, where he remained until he proved incapable of mastering the technique to make metal stencils. He was fired before Christmas.
During the holidays in White Plains, with its flourishing black middle class (including Gordon Parks, the photographer for Life magazine), Chester began slowly “to lose confidence in myself.” Jean’s job claimed her time and energy, while he shared the boardinghouse with a young woman whose cheap clothes and hairdo seemed to reflect his own spreading poverty. Knopf kept mailing letters to get what he didn’t have: the $1000 used to buy out his contract from Doubleday, and then the $1000 advance for Immortal Mammy, upon which he had lived during the revision of Lonely Crusade.
A glimmer of hope came by way of a letter from France, from a man who had begun translating Lonely Crusade into a French edition to be called La Croisade de Lee Gordon. Yves Malartic was concerned that he was misperceiving black language, so he wrote Chester: “I believe the book is not some sort of an exciting sexy thriller written in a queer language which would have the ‘flavor of american negroes idiom’(?!) and which should be translated into rough popular French.” For his perception and solicitation, Malartic won a friend. Chester wrote back, “Please, by all means, follow your first impulse and do the translation on the highest intellectual level.” For that fidelity, Malartic would earn Chester’s “undying gratitude.”
Malartic’s sense that he was dealing with a masterwork, one with profound insight into the human condition, might have been the only thing standing between Chester and psychological collapse. For his next move, Chester became the “day porter”—the janitor—at the White Plains YMCA. Three months of swinging a mop and pushing a broom, cleaning showers and latrines, togged in coveralls and cap, seemed to confirm his lowest estimate of himself. It was as if he had returned to the top bunk in an Ohio cell block. Bewildered, he no longer worked at his marriage. Too proud to take the humiliation of being marginally supported by Jean, he drank and lashed out. When they squabbled over household affairs he told her she was just a correctional officer, title or not. He blamed her for their difficult circumstances and when he couldn’t blame her, he repudiated her with silence.
It is unclear whether Jean was an active or passive partner in the ending of their fifteen-year marriage. By June 1952 Chester would confide to Malartic, “My wife
and I have been separated for about six months—we should have been divorced years ago.” In his memoir he was more prosaic and less precise about the timing of their breakup: “Jean stopped coming to visit me and to support me and I was faced with the necessity of having to support myself.” Still gripped by the puritanical views of his parents, Chester believed that his sins—“pride and arrogance”—had betokened his fall. And if Jean was the correctional officer, he was once again the prisoner, yearning for freedom.
Chapter Ten
CADILLACS TO COTTON SACKS
1952–1954
Chester quit White Plains in February 1952, taking a room in a sprawling six-story apartment building on Convent Avenue in Harlem. From his window he could see the City College gates down the street and, when the sky was clear, the tip of the Empire State Building farther downtown. But reduced to a seven-dollar-a-week room in an unsavory crowded apartment where privacy was impossible, he was not impressed by the view.
In an untimely flourish, his old buddy Ralph Ellison delivered an inscribed copy of his just published novel, Invisible Man. Biding his time and living off his wife’s salary, Ellison had finished a career-defining masterpiece and his triumph was like a judgment against Chester. Touchy in his dealings with a friend turned rival, Chester concealed his separation from Jean, who would visit occasionally throughout the spring, and, concerning the book that would only be thought more significant with time, replied with polite banality: “Thanks greatly for the inscribed copy of your book. Jean and I are looking forward with much excitement to reading it. We feel confident it is a wonderful story.” Chester had admitted to Horace Cayton, who printed it in a Pittsburgh Courier column, that Ellison had written “the first allegorical Negro novel,” but the note was all he would ever write about a book that is routinely considered as the high mark of twentieth-century American fiction.
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