Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Willa’s combination of innocence, disciplined restraint, and courageousness also reminded Chester of his own reserved, willowy, and educated mother, Estelle. Which was unfortunate. Instead of making the break that overseas travel allowed, Chester latched on deeply to a chimera of American talent and wholesomeness from which he would extract himself only with difficulty. Three years later, he would reach a point where, reflecting on what had happened with Willa, he could write, “I have the kind of racial attitude, in general, which needs guidance.” This was an admission of being lost at sea. What’s more, after Willa revealed that she had been repeatedly institutionalized, he approached the relationship that would consume the next three years “as though she were my patient and I were her nurse.” An old taunt of the Cleveland pimps—“Get a white woman and go from Cadillacs to cotton sacks”—was appropriate to his situation.

  After the unpleasant dinner with the Wrights, Chester could understand that the tensions that emerged over the competition for black success in Paris were not so different from those in New York. One afternoon at Wright’s apartment, Daniel Guérin, whom Chester once described as “the rich, French leftist authority on the brother,” offered to host Chester at his artists’ colony at La Ciotat on the Côte d’Azur. Chester declined, thinking it would be better to “get out from under the wing of the Wrights and act independently.”

  The need for this was evident, especially after one weekend with Ellen at a suburban château of a couple whom he knew slightly. French intellectuals there hounded Ellen, questioning her husband’s abilities as a writer, and in terms more snide and belittling than Baldwin had used. Chester was not Wright’s acolyte, but he understood the influence of Americans in France and the implications for himself. “Richard Wright is a great man and a great writer,” he defensively told the crowded room at the mansion. Even though Chester believed Wright would be “foolish” to return to the United States, as a writer he hoped not to be trapped by a French public that adored him only as much as it could use his work to push the United States’s massive influence and power out of France. Chafing against the role of Wright’s protector, Chester had also observed elements “too subtle and complicated for explanation” that “reflected negatively on my stature as a writer and created hazards in the sale and publication of my work.” The subtle tensions by the end of April had started many tears in the friendship. Wright would leave for Ghana on the same day that Chester left Paris, and the two men would never regain the camaraderie of the earlier years.

  On May 11, Chester and Willa arrived at Malartic’s exquisite and enchanting retreat in the fishing village of Arcachon, between Bordeaux and Biarritz. A stucco villa with a bedroom and living room facing the street, as well as a kitchen tacked on in the back garden, made Villa Madiana a cozy pied-à-terre. Willa and Chester found that, away from the “hard hurried contest of sexuality” in Paris, they could wander the seashore hand in hand, build a fire, and drink champagne, and, as special guests of Malartic, be treated amiably by the villagers. They spent time learning to sail and reading to each other on the beach. In circling back to this infatuation with Willa, Chester found himself the object of envy: as worldly Ruth Phillips promised him a carton of cigarettes, she wrote him coyly, “It must be wonderful to be in the country with nothing to do but rest, relax and make love. I really must try it sometime.”

  Willa was more apprehensive. She had never lived with a creative artist before and found the rhythms of work and life a bit hard to catch. “I think Mr. Himes is also happy. I don’t know. I can’t be sure,” she wrote an acquaintance. One way that they accommodated each other’s rhythms was popping pills together. Chester used the sedative Amobarbital in addition to the Dexamyl, although Willa disliked the sensation of having her hands fall asleep, feeling cold and numb, and her loss of appetite when the drug took their blood pressure down. They would both have trouble sleeping, as Chester had already experienced in Vermont.

  For his part, he was satisfied with the relationship. To him, early on, it was a European fling, made better since Willa’s native language was English and she could translate French. “I am living here with the wife of a Luxembourg dentist who is writing a rather interesting book . . . hoping that her husband doesn’t come down here and shoot me,” he joked to Van Vechten. Willa’s poverty cut two ways too. Unlike Vandi Haygood, the American businesswoman of affairs whose appetites came first, Willa brought to the table her bearing, polish, education, and upbringing. She was not sexually hungry like Haygood and, since she was dependent on Chester’s money, seemed materially content.

  At Arcachon, Chester awaited the return of the galleys of The Cord from World. He steadied himself by reading Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, an activity that he likened to writing a book in and of itself. He admitted that he was puzzling a bit on the new book he had under way, the story of the affair with a white woman. Still wanting Wright as a friend, Chester admitted in a letter to him the agony of his composing process, confessing, “I’ve made so many false starts on this book of mine I’m going to begin all over and come in another door.” The new direction would take him to use a first-person narrator and telescope the action into a single weekend.

  But the book of his ruptured family life and the misery of the black middle class required completion. Chester locked himself into the villa’s library at a rolltop desk one morning to finish the final chapter, which he rewrote completely. Chester telegraphed Bill Targ to make sure World waited for the return of Chester’s galleys and did not proceed to press while he worked to resolve the plot “in one dramatic incident.” In the finale Chester completely left the field of autobiography, having the hero Charles Taylor’s father stabbed to death in a gin mill and Charles preparing to leave for the South to make amends with the girl he got pregnant. Regrettably, in spite of the fine overall quality of the material, the final upturned ending was abrupt and not entirely convincing. Chester had tried to resolve his story with a Freudian gloss on the family dynamic in a sensational manner, such as Ellison had already accused Chester of doing crudely with Marx and Lenin in Lonely Crusade. Chester had “hopes” of The Cord “doing fairly well,” since he had been promised a paperback contract of $10,000, but his core talent as a writer was his willingness to tread uphill against the mountain of orthodox opinion, not conform to it.

  But more than a melodramatic ending shaped the novel’s future. Highbrow black American writers in 1953 and 1954 would not fare very well in the wake of Ellison’s Invisible Man, and there were several underacknowledged books: John Killens’s Youngblood, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, Ann Petry’s The Narrows, and, at least in James Baldwin’s opinion, Go Tell It on the Mountain. These major contributions to American literature barely dented the surface of public perception, evidence of an embarrassment of riches, but a setback personally for those creative writers.

  On May 25, two weeks after he had arrived at Arcachon, he mailed Targ, the editor in chief at World, the ending of the The Cord, writing, “I got what I wanted.” Overall, the autobiographical novel was quite possibly his finest and most intense piece of fiction. Before the end of June, Targ forwarded the corrected proofs and read the concluding chapter approvingly, “with great interest and satisfaction.” The press had made some minor deletions at the end of the book, in places where Chester had graphically described his hero’s sex relations with a scarred moll operating a gambling dive. Targ said that while they would surmount censorship for the initial publication, the appearance of obvious “sexual matters” might greatly curtail the possibilities of paperback sales, Chester’s new bread and butter. Always wanting to make a lavish gesture to a woman he had deliberately wounded, he dedicated the book to Jean.

  At the end of June 1953, Chester was euphoric again. He was confident about this long project begun in 1949, his most extended piece of writing. World was betting heavily on the book, preparing considerable publicity, and anticipating its selection by a book club, as had launched both Wright’s Native Son
and Black Boy. The affair with Willa took on a kind of grace, not incidentally because she made it easy. Chester described her as a gallant sidekick, if without much personality: “courageous, uncomplaining, adaptable, and congenial.” By the time the page proofs went back, Chester was trying out his love story between white Kriss and black Ken. The garishly sentimental “extreme hurt” of the passage when Ken “asked Kriss how she could do this to him, be unfaithful, when ‘we’re engaged’ ” convinced Thompson that he had been in love with Haygood. But the dawning success of the new book helped her affair with Chester seem worth an investment of emotion in spite of evidence for real doubt.

  In early July they had to leave Arcachon and they considered the warm and inexpensive Spanish Mediterranean islands. But because the British publisher Falcon Press now owed him money and because Chester believed that his $2500 advance from World for The Cord was a replenishing lodestone, they decided to go to London. Regrouping briefly in Paris, they bumped into an acidly direct William Gardner Smith on the street. Like the Wrights, Smith insulted Thompson by looking her up and down and remarking, “Oh, there are lots of American white women around the Latin Quarter.” Despite the snub, Chester and Willa accepted Smith’s list of contacts in London. Chester also withdrew his books from Ellen Wright’s agency and had her return his short story collection to World.

  After a rough Channel crossing, he and Thompson arrived at Victoria Station late on the evening of July 7. At a telephone booth where he looked up numbers for a hotel, Chester’s portmanteau with their passports, money, and address book was stolen. After the bellman refused him at the Wilton Hotel, they spent the night in a fourth-floor walkup on Vauxhall Bridge Road, delighted to find a place with a clean bed after their moneyless, identityless trial. But their ordeal wasn’t over. A man attempted to follow Willa into the hall bathroom and Chester had to raise a ruckus to stop him. It took several fingers of Haig & Haig to put them to sleep. It was the inauspicious beginning of a most inauspicious sojourn.

  After receiving a letter of endorsement from the office of his English agent Innes Rose, Chester and Willa went to the housing agencies in London to secure a flat for a three-month stay. What he found was supremely discouraging. “Race prejudice is about the same here as in American cities like New York,” Chester discovered when he went to find a house. The British practice was to write “No Col” on the advertising cards if the landlords refused black patrons outright. Housing agents liked to describe him as “slightly colored” and sometimes it took several days for a landlord to discern the fact that Chester was black. They finally passed an interview with a widow on Randolph Crescent and secured a four-room basement apartment in her four-story town house. With its bedroom, office, windowless galley kitchen, and sitting room filled with furniture they were implored never to use, the flat was gloomy and, at the peak of summer, ice cold. The sunken bedroom window opened on to the chained ash cans standing sentinel above them at street level. They had one bright spot: their passports were miraculously found in Hyde Park.

  The overcast, damp, and chilly English summer tempered his ebullience; inside the house they had to spend a pound per day on coal to heat the rooms. Having realized that Chester was black, his landlady wanted him to move and began making it uncomfortable for them, despite the lengthy contracts he had signed and the advance money paid. Hugely disappointed by the city, he took in his first and only tourist attraction, a boat tour on the Thames to see the Tower of London, a “drab, walled prison” such as he had known from the inside. But he returned his corrected page proofs to World on July 14, feeling like a man with soaring prospects.

  After the middle of July, Chester and Willa moved to a second-story flat on Glenmore Road in Hampstead, close to the Belsize Park tube station. The house was owned by the Galewska sisters, two elderly Polish Jews who accepted foreign boarders in their house. In the first weeks in the new neighborhood they walked Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill, and Regent’s Park, and took measure of the many libraries on Antrim Road, Finch Road, and Keats’ Grove, where Chester was unable to locate “a single volume by an American Negro.” Food at the street-corner stalls and markets was abundant and cheap. But Chester’s real pastime was the quick ride to Leicester Square to hit up the American Express office, hoping for word of literary favor from America.

  William Targ’s letter of July 27 rendered unwelcome news. Chester could forget the Book-of-the-Month Club, with its guaranteed sales and literary stardom. “I think they are off their rockers, but what can we do?” his editor consoled him. Over the next several weeks the Literary Guild and the Book Find Club would also turn The Cord down. Donald Friede, one of World’s most experienced editors, wrote to get him over his disappointment. “The book you have now in print—in galleys, at least—is an excellent realization of the complex story you wanted to tell. And I read it with real enthusiasm.” Feeling that The Cord was “close to being a major achievement,” Friede looked ahead “to working with you on future books.” With so much of the novel set in Mississippi, World sent galleys on to William Faulkner, hoping for some kind of miracle endorsement. The press never heard back.

  Downcast and unsure of himself, Chester confessed his private view of race relations in the United States and his experience in the publishing industry to his editor. A key incident for Chester was the photo-dramatization of Invisible Man by Gordon Parks, which, as he explained to Bill Targ in his developing paranoia, was an aggressive undermining of Richard Wright’s prominence.

  The situation which now exists in the US critical world, I believe, is something like this: There seems to be a sort of unspoken agreement, at this stage to keep the Negro author in his place, to keep another from getting out of control, becoming successful and world famous. One might say the reception of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man disproves this. I don’t think so. I know it to be a fact that the guiding source in rallying support to Ralph’s book was the Time-Life clique. Gordon Parks, a Negro photographer on Life staff, who had been assigned to cover NATO in Paris for a couple of years, sold his editors on the idea of building up Ralph to beat Dick down. I know that Ralph was interviewed secretly and at great length by the top echelon of Time-Life, and they were satisfied by his comments on Dick. After which they assigned Parks to do a twelve-page picture story of the book at unlimited expense, and Time assigned a woman reporter to stick with Ralph for several weeks and do a profile for Time. Parks spent thousands of dollars having the sets built and photographing scenes for his story. In the meantime Time-Life exerted influence on as many other critics as they could. In the end only a couple of pages of the picture story were used and I don’t recall whether the profile was published or not; for by that time it had become known that Ralph’s book would receive the publisher’s award.

  All of this, I feel, was done more against Dick than for Ralph. Of course, I could be very much wrong; but Time-Life knew of Dick’s forthcoming book, and knew the contents.

  Now, all of this, I feel, is part of a vast propaganda campaign to silence Negro voices raised in protest, and to relegate the Negro to a place of unimportance in the literary world.

  I believe it is going to be very difficult to rally support to The Cord. In their attempts to disparage books by Negro writers, the criticism can be vicious, brutal, and merciless and will resort to bald faced lies to make their point. You have probably already sampled some of this in the reports from [Book-of-the-Month Club].

  Friendless in an overtly racist metropolis, in a nation conducting a “limited engagement” in Kenya that Chester thought was closer to mass lynching, and disappointed by the literary news from America, he tightened himself further to Willa Thompson. Since June, Chester had been courting Bill Targ to interest him in Willa’s manuscript, which was called Silver Altar. After Targ gave some of Willa’s chapters to Donald Friede to read, he rejected the book in July. At the beginning of August, Chester committed himself to helping Willa revise the book for resubmission at World and he won the firm’s approv
al to consider freshly revised chapters. Even though Friede had been unimpressed by Willa Thompson’s writing, he wrote Chester approvingly, “I shall look forward to seeing what you do with it.” A novel concerned with the flight and fall of its heroine, Helen, from a Swiss ski resort to a gothic French chalet and her evil husband, Marcel, the manuscript seemed to combine draughts of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith, and Catholic anti-Communist pamphlets. Chester’s imaginative contribution could be seen chiefly in the graphic portrait of the unpleasant sexual consummation, a climactic scene that they shuffled around until fitting it in at the manuscript’s conclusion.

  By the middle of August, he received news that he had been advanced another $500 from World for The Cord. He also tried to interest Donald Friede, editor of the anthology New World Writing, in a short story he’d recently finished, “The Snake.” Friede turned it down, but the creation of this story, set in the summer of 1946 with Jean, shows Chester having doubts about his relationship with Willa, as his thoughts returned to his life before Lonely Crusade.

  On the lookout for problems down the road, Chester made a semiformal contract with Willa and secured a half-interest in the sales of her book. Then the two got to work in earnest. She drafted in a sitting room downstairs; he rewrote in the upstairs kitchen. As he worked, Chester felt a surge of pity for Willa. The story of the young American married to a sadistic European whose domination was underwritten by medieval European cultural traditions caused Chester to conclude “a nice, healthy, wholesome, innocent, and rich American white girl is as vulnerable on the Continent of Europe as a American black girl in the white South.” The image that came to him was of the girl crushed under the wagon wheels at Alcorn. As he made his way through his lover’s book, he found her enticing prose “hurt me as I had been hurt then.”