Chester later called the squall between himself and Ellison “a private misunderstanding,” but the sad turn of affairs in their friendship emphasized the pinhead that successful black writers tinkering away at American social problems had to stand upon. Clannish competitiveness, envy, and the burden of being deemed the only one good enough for acceptance by whites would prevent the friendship from going further. There was a shorthand way of understanding everything taken together. After the bitter night, both Cayton and Ellison concluded that Himes overregarded the effect of racism on black people.
Ellison glossed over the quarrel toward the end of the month in a letter to Richard Wright. He didn’t mention that they had been at a party together, just that Chester was having a “riotous affair” with Haygood. “Recently with Horace Cayton present he became so insulting that I had to threaten to take his head off, after which he calmed down; but I am afraid he will never forgive me.” Ellison here overestimated what the alcohol-sodden episode meant to Chester, while at the same time he correctly perceived the dynamic of violence unfolding between Himes and Haygood. “It gives me real agony,” he concluded, “to see a man so much in the clutches of the furies.” When he discussed what happened with Cayton, Ellison blamed it on Chester being “jealous.” For Ellison’s part, he wrote off not merely Chester but the entire group of people he had known in conjunction with Wright in 1945.
Ellison’s new gravity would grant him the last word. Within a year, William Targ of World Publishers, a genuine believer in Chester’s talent, would request a blurb from Ellison for The Cord. “By far the most intense and compassionate probing of the psychological predicament of a middle-class Negro family yet written,” Ellison would judge the novel. That comment appeared in January 1954 in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review. Chester knew, however, that for Ellison, “psychological” was a code word meaning that the book was artistically undistinguished.
Haygood was the most convenient and vulnerable scapegoat for Chester’s torn pride. In the week following the party, he battered her to the point that a doctor was needed. Even though Chester lived during an era when many men publicly humiliated, verbally abused, and roughed up their girlfriends and wives, his smacking Haygood is one of his most disturbing encounters. At the height of the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, he published this account: “When she went to Chicago to visit some old lover after telling me she was going to Washington, D.C. on business, I hurt her seriously. Physically, I mean. I began slapping her when she admitted the truth and all the hurts of my life seemed to come up into me and I went into a trance and kept on slapping her compulsively until suddenly the sight of her swollen face jarred me back to sanity.”
One obvious source of his brutality was his insecurity that Haygood preferred other men. To make matters worse, he was also desperately in love with Vandi, who he thought was unworthy of complete trust. But the sight of this badly bruised white society woman revived the possibility of returning to prison and made him bolt to Bill Smith’s in Vermont. During his escape north, Chester’s father, Joseph, succumbed to kidney disease on January 16, 1953, in Oberlin. To fly to Ohio on short notice to bury his father, Chester had to eat his belligerence and fear and ask the one person he knew with ready cash to let him have the airfare: Vandi Haygood.
Cast the First Stone was published a few days after Joe Sr.’s death, on January 19. Himes’s least remembered novel emerged as he returned to Vermont, spending a few weeks walking off the amphetamine jitters of Dexamyl on the frozen country roads and helping Smith on his second book, a memoir called The Seeking. Cast the First Stone did not garner rave reviews, but it was respectfully treated and Chester was acknowledged as a serious artist. One paper called “rough hewn” Cast the First Stone “the toughest book of the year” and added that it “expertly captures the flavor of prison speech.” Chester should not have expected much more, writing candidly about incarceration and, as Gilbert Millstein discreetly observed in the New York Times, “relationships among men deprived of women.” One obvious relief was that no one could accuse him of tearing down the race. Although the Pittsburgh Courier reviewer thought that Chester’s portrait of Duke Dido was “perhaps one of the foulest creations in literature,” he, like his counterpart in the Chicago Defender, gave Chester credit for the agenda of prison reform. As usual, the book was ahead of its time and quite difficult for the audience to respond to, perhaps especially for those who grasped the autobiographical seed within the story. Chester had dared to take prison life seriously and to portray situational homosexuality as something beyond pathology and sin.
A typical comment that showed the misapprehension possible in reading the book came from Ralph Ellison, who reported on the contents of the book in his last letter to Richard Wright. Ashamed of the book and apparently by what it revealed about Himes’s past, Ellison understood it to be a basic admission of an inner homosexual conflict: “I am afraid it is not up to snuff. He writes mainly of homosexuality in prison but was unable to resolve it.” As the more tolerant critic Richard Gibson would write, their circle of literary people and leftists, black and white, was “decidedly homophobic in the 40s and 50s.” Chester’s willingness to broach the topic of homosexuality seems most strongly connected to his determination to confront the reality of lived experience, despite the penalty. Even though he was uncomfortable with its contents, he kept his files complete and never destroyed Rico’s love letter to him as he was leaving the London Prison Farm.
At Smith’s, Chester received the French edition of Lonely Crusade and several critical reviews from the French papers. Excited, he wandered the village looking for someone to translate them. On the last day of January World Publishers sent Bernard Schubert, his new literary agent, the remaining $2500 advance for The Third Generation and held out the possibility of $10,000 more when the paperback rights were sold. Meanwhile, Chester wrote his French publisher, Editions Corréa, trying to leverage 1 million francs (about $2000) for both Cast the First Stone and The Cord, so he could travel to Paris.
Chester booked a reservation on the boat Ile de France for April 3, after a flurry of letter writing. He happily received a report from Dan Levin at the Hotel Maurice, who suggested he room at 137 Boulevard St. Michel in the Latin Quarter. Fearing he would have document problems like Wright, he wrote to Ruth B. Shipley, the notorious director of the State Department’s passport division, who was known to use her bureau to punish outspoken government critics. In his letter, Chester admitted his felony conviction, showed the proof of the restoration of his citizenship, and included the New Masses review of Lonely Crusade, his anti-Communist credential. His letter crossed his passport in the post office on its way back to him. For a last step, Chester secured a set of records to study French language.
In the process of renewing ties to Wright, Chester would soon learn that Wright needed him. An expatriate since 1947, Wright had not been as dazzling since going overseas. He had failed to win a commanding audience for the 1949 film version of Native Son, which he bankrolled and in which he himself starred as Bigger Thomas.
What’s more, Wright was taking quite a few public lumps in France and again in the States at the hands of James Baldwin, a protégé. Wright had once recommended Baldwin, as he had Ralph Ellison, for fellowships and opened his home to him. But Baldwin, once launched, had completely dismissed the value of black literary realists like Wright, first in a 1949 essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” and then again in 1951 in “Many Thousands Gone.” Both of Baldwin’s essays were published by Partisan Review, the powerhouse journal of art and politics, which had also excerpted a chapter of Ellison’s Invisible Man. In 1953, USA, a magazine edited by the critic Lionel Trilling for distribution from U.S. embassies around the world, recirculated Baldwin’s article. In all of Baldwin’s critiques of Wright he could easily have inserted Chester’s name; in fact, he had begun the dismissal of black literary realism—in the process inventing the term “social realis
m,” a swipe at the Marxists—with his 1947 Lonely Crusade review. Baldwin’s critique of Wright and Himes would continue to influence until the shift away from the nonviolent civil rights movement to black power in the mid-1960s.
So the embattled Himes and Wright were natural allies. “I suppose you received the copy of Cast the First Stone,” Chester began a letter in early February. “I must say it has been very thoroughly stoned in the press here.” Sly and funny, he was endearing himself to Wright, whom he hadn’t seen in years but whose help he needed to move abroad. Still, his message also contained a note of frustration. As a result of the extraordinary work of Wright and Ellison (who had in fact won the National Book Award, on January 27), the standard for black literary success had shifted. If you did not receive dramatic praise from the New York Times, a heap of publicity from Henry Luce, and a cash payout from Book-of-the-Month Club, it was as if you hadn’t written a book. The Red Scare made the criticisms of segregation or imperial blundering un-American. Chester admitted to being a mortal. “I am stuck with having to write about what I know about, and prison happens to be (along with being a Negro) one of the subjects on which I am an authority, having been sent to prison when I was nineteen and kept there until I was twenty-six.” More pressing to him was the conversation he had not yet had with Wright, about the dismissal of his novel Lonely Crusade. “The critics beat it as if it was a snake and beat me as if I was a snake, and the Sams went along with their white folks as they always do, only when it comes to beating another Sam the Sams always try to outdo the white folks and quite often succeed.”
When Wright’s most ambitious novel, The Outsider, was published that March, he sent Chester a review copy. Chester took the time to read the book closely. He wrote back to Wright that the novel about the character Cross Damon, who repudiates ideology, conveyed a “really stupendous idea” and that, in the weeks after having been involved with act after act of violence toward his intimates, he was personally terrified to have such a tight identification with this socially isolated, homicidal existentialist hero: “I’m so goddamned close to that boy I don’t want to talk about it,” he confided. Wright believed in the outlaw as an important subject in fiction, and Chester, who had lived the outlaw life and survived the sentence, had something fundamentally in common with Wright’s fictional creations.
Feeling some remorse over his behavior at the New Year’s party, Chester also tried to rendezvous with Horace Cayton. Knowing that Chester considered the dramatic fight at the party Haygood’s fault, Cayton now claimed he would avoid his “strange and strained” relationship to Haygood in the short term. He was, however, happy to have “a few things clear” with Chester because their friendship was “something I would pay a price for.” But Cayton insisted on one point that angered Chester. Racism “does not explain everything. . . . The reality of change is upon us. It calls for the development of a new kind of person—one who is not licking his wounds but is in someway aiding and encouraging change.” Chester would settle with him in The Primitive.
Chester repaired the love affair with Haygood by March 24, when he returned to New York and settled at her apartment. He bought a new wardrobe, splurged on an Abercrombie and Fitch kerosene stove to cook with in French hotel rooms, and retrieved electronics parts and copies of The Outsider for Wright. Despite the hurried week of activity, he still managed to reach the boiling point again with Haygood, breaking his own toe in an attempt to kick her the day before his ship sailed. He would leave the United States from a room at the Albert Hotel, encumbered by one trunk and a couple of pieces of luggage, his swollen foot in a felt slipper.
Chester boarded the Ile de France on April 3, 1953, an overcast and cold day. But things brightened considerably when William Targ sent a bottle of champagne to Chester’s third-class cabin. Then, editor James Putnam, who had labeled him an Uncle Tom and who was now the secretary of the PEN Center for writers, appeared aboard and introduced him to his ex-wife, “stylish, nice-looking” Marion Putnam. A noted sculptress born in 1905, Marion Putnam had grown up in New York, the daughter of a patron of experimental musicians, and her statuesque good looks and worldliness appealed to Chester. If the relationship with Haygood had fizzled, perhaps the new freedom on the other side of the Atlantic would bring into view wealthy sophisticates like Putnam, a woman who was sometimes invited to the White House.
During the crossing Chester had moments of deep reflection, especially on the dissolution of his marriage. He imagined he would remain abroad a few months while his money lasted, and he paused over the gravity of this new choice. Attempting to recover from seasickness in the room he shared with an Austrian violinist, Chester encountered a slight, terrified woman in the lower berths. Frightened, she clung to a hallway until he escorted her to her room. Later, on deck, he exchanged introductions with Willa Thompson, a divorcée from Boston who had attended Smith College. Now the tables had turned. Heaving over the side with seasickness, Chester needed help and Willa, having made fourteen voyages, consoled him.
Thompson led Chester boldly into the exclusive second-class cabins, with better food and top-shelf drinks. While Chester had been living on the prison farm in Ohio, Willa Thompson had been winning literary prizes at her high school in Brighton, Massachusetts. A direct descendant of John Hancock, she surprised him with her frank conversation, confiding the harrowing details of her life and her reason for the voyage. She had impulsively married a Luxembourg dentist while studying abroad in 1936, been unprepared for the trauma of sexual relations, and then she had become pregnant rapidly and regularly. Thompson’s “fidelity to sexual detail” when discussing her married life shocked Chester “to the core.” But an innocent-looking white woman chatting about sex also aroused him.
Willa’s tale was the stuff of fiction. During the war, she had sheltered downed Allied airmen and had been beaten and persecuted by her husband, a Nazi sympathizer, as a result. She left for the United States and brought a lawsuit, winning custody of two of her daughters after a scandalous 1946 trial. Unhappy with the outcome, she reconciled with her husband in Luxembourg, had another child and, after another rift, was threatened with confinement at a mental institution. She had retreated again to America and was now headed back overseas to renew her custodial fight.
Thin and dowdy, the thirty-seven-year-old Willa Thompson had survived the hardships of the war in Europe and lost a stillborn child. At forty-three, Chester conveyed the air of a more youthful person. However, Thompson was sprightly, easily literary, and from the New England upper class, at a postwar moment when it seemed as if America’s elites had something to offer the world. And she was working on a novel. She told him that Edwin Seaver, an editor and the former director of the League of American Writers, the hard-left literary group that had closed in 1943, had offered to help her tidy up her book for publication; she had balked at giving him $500 for the job. Already she’d been featured in Time magazine and had received requests from literary agents to see her manuscript. Chester decided that “assured, distinguished” Willa was “the best of American society.”
Ile de France docked at Le Havre on April 8 and late the next day Chester made his way by boat train to Paris, expecting to meet Richard Wright and his translator Yves Malartic at the station. Chester had written to Malartic that “if things work out as I hope, I shall stay a long time.” Paris was the literary and intellectual capital of the West and, absent the aggravating custom of racial segregation, an attraction for blacks for many decades.
The infantry veterans among the latest crop of American novelists, like William Styron, Norman Mailer, and James Jones, were making Paris an expatriate hub. Chester’s gamble to take his book advance and live in Paris for a season or two was a canny business move. It was not far-fetched at all to think that with some good connections to publishers, artists like Marion Putnam, and the literati, a far more successful career was available for Chester in Paris than in New York. All he needed was to hit the ground running before his finances gave o
ut, to get a couple of good breaks.
Because of a mix-up at the train station with Wright and Malartic, Chester spent his first night on a small side street in a loud tourist hotel. The next morning Richard Wright found him, banged on the door, and ushered him to a nearby café for coffee and croissants. Chester relocated to the Hôtel de Scandinavie, 27 Rue de la Tournon, steps from the Luxembourg Garden. Toward the Seine, Boulevard St.-Germain was lined with cafés, nightclubs, boutiques, and medieval ruins, a friendly, cosmopolitan environment that reminded jazzy Parisians of the strip of New York’s Fifty-Second Street centered around the interracial club Café Society. Paris was still recovering from the war, but the lines for necessities like meat, milk, and wine were offset for Americans by the inexpensiveness of the city. Rooms with “eau courante” (running water) were available for as little as thirty cents. Chester paid $1.37 a night at his hotel.
Wright hustled him over to Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookstore, to display the copies of The Outsider that Chester had carried in his luggage. Two days later, Sunday, April 12, Wright hosted him more properly for lunch at his apartment at 14 Rue M.-le-Prince. Oliver Harrington, a Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist whom Chester had known from Mollie Moon’s, joined the group. Chester noticed that Richard Wright’s wife, Ellen, had transformed her style entirely. She had “gone completely French,” dyeing her hair blond, cutting it short, and becoming thin. Playful Harrington, well-known for his close association with the Communist Party, and who had in turn grown stout, asked for Chester’s help in securing a publisher to bring out a book of cartoons. Seeing other black writers and creative artists maintaining full lives abroad was inspirational.
Chester experienced the Paris of American tourist legend: balmy weather, chestnut trees in bloom, crowded cafés, and bookstalls and fishermen along the quays of the Seine. The customary pattern began with one of the Wrights wakening him for breakfast; then he toured the city or developed contacts such as he could. He dined with his translator Yves Malartic, whose authors included Upton Sinclair and John O’Hara, and endured the barbed wit of the French intellectual crowd. Overcharged for his daily necessities by shop owners, Chester noted the graffiti chalked on the walls throughout the Latin Quarter: “U.S. Go Home.” When he broached the subject, people would embarrassedly tell him that they didn’t mean him. After all, he wasn’t “really American,” which surprisingly doubled his feeling of rejection.
Chester B. Himes Page 31