Chester B. Himes

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Chester B. Himes Page 34

by Lawrence P. Jackson


  Chester was spending emotional coin he could not spare. He had been forewarned that he needed to get out of London by November, before the genuinely foul weather set in, but instead he had worked hard from August, typing and retyping, he claimed, fifteen hundred pages. Early in September he went to the posh Dorchester Hotel to meet with New American Library paperback publisher Victor Weybright. Weybright had influenced World to change the title of The Cord to The Third Generation, a decision demonstrating the company’s explicit choice that the book would sell better as a tale of black misery than as one of Freudian tragedy. It also emphasized the influence that the secondary paperback market could have on the original hardcover book run. In avuncular fashion, Weybright tried to impress Chester by talking of his own wartime journalism to advance social equality in England for black troops. He also asked about Chester’s finances and plans, offering to pay out the full sum of the reprint advance. Chester hinted that he had another novel on deck, about a white woman in Europe. Weybright walked him to the elevator, telling him he would boost Cast the First Stone to its English publisher. Chester shielded completely the fact that he was living with Willa, fearing that it would offend the sensibilities of a white man.

  The next month was disheartening. Early in October, World turned down the revised, coauthored two chapters of Silver Altar. “None of the readers recommends it for publication,” Targ wrote him with apparent sympathy. Chester decided to regroup and complete a full manuscript before abandoning hope. As if on cue, as soon as that first rejection appeared, the August $500 advance petered out, and the three-month British visas Chester and Willa had been granted expired. On October 5 he spent five pounds to get an “aliens registration certificate,” allowing them to extend their stay in London through January 7, 1954. Aided by the Dexamyl tablets, his mind started racing and the keys of his Remington portable clicking. He wrote Targ to appeal to Weybright, who had agreed to $10,000 for paperback rights to The Third Generation, but a “most reluctant” Targ considered the appeal presumptuous and unwise. Then Chester thought the novel should come out simultaneously in Braille. Soon it would be necessary to purchase a load of coal to fuel them through the winter; chilly August and September would be tolerable by comparison. London now struck Chester as “big, ugly, smoky and dismal.”

  In October he received the advertisement running in Publishers Weekly, two pages featuring the book jacket. In it a black man resembling Jackie Robinson in shirt sleeves and tie brooded over a desk while a defiant-looking, full-figured woman, imperceptibly black save for her ample mouth, held on to two brown boys in a doorway. The circumstance of the environment looked bleak, despite the clothes. Chester may have imagined that he had surmounted the problem of racial profiling as an artist, but World still thought that to publish the book it must emphasize both sex titillation and black despair. Always preferring the spartan Knopf cover of Lonely Crusade above his others, Chester described the jacket as being in “the most awful bad taste possible for adult human beings to achieve.” The advertisement featuring the book cover would run in the New York Times Book Review the day after publication. Thousands of miles from the place where his professional career was unfolding, he began to psychologically distance himself from his effort of the last five years. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed and cooking up all the other black magic I know to make this venture a success,” he wrote to Targ, as bravely as he could.

  In the second week of December Chester and Willa finished their joint novel of 520 pages, and sent it back again to World. Chester began howling for money to anyone who would hear him. They spurned his request at the PEN Center, so he resigned. Margot Johnson stood up to him and refused to send anything, so he withdrew his “account,” as he termed his unpublished work, from her agency. Finally Innes Rose, the London agent, agreed to advance twenty pounds to handle the couple’s manuscript Silver Altar, which he had never seen.

  Chester was in an odd place. Even to friends like Van Vechten, he did not want to admit that he and Willa were living together, apparently hoping not to embarrass himself in case of a future reunion with Haygood, and also cautious about letting anyone know the real depth of his interracial tie. He admitted to Van Vechten that he hoped his new book with Willa would “repay me well for all my effort,” important now that the cupboard was truly bare. Unsure of how to pay for the next load of coal, they were miserable and “too damn cold to bathe in the heatless bathroom.” Facing the expiration of their visas, Chester led a panicky rendezvous to the Home Office on January 7, where they were allowed one more additional month. Eight days later, World released $500. With Silver Altar no closer to finding publication, and no better prospects, Chester and Willa scampered away from London for the Spanish island of Mallorca.

  Chapter Eleven

  OTHELLO

  1954–1955

  Chester Himes and Willa Thompson purchased third-class tickets and left from Newhaven for Dieppe on January 26, 1954. Both of them were dazed and uncommunicative by the time they switched trains and headed southward in France, Chester was glazed over because the Channel crossing had been bad, and, as usual, he was violently seasick. Outside of the hardships of the war in Europe, Willa had not known what it was to travel in this fashion and was unable to grasp the pace of the chaos that had swallowed her; she withdrew “into herself like a hurt animal.”

  Chester had pulled off the boat ride to Mallorca by engaging World in an option ploy on the revised and completed Silver Altar. He asked them to reconsider the manuscript and to wire him $500. If they took the book, they could use that for the advance. If they rejected the book, then he agreed to have his account billed for the $500 and have that money taken from future royalties, such as the money owed him for the Third Generation paperback deal with New American Library. Chester hoped for a decision within two weeks. If the manuscript was declined, he and Willa could shop it around to other publishers.

  They began their long journey through another country where “inexperienced and untraveled” Chester was unfamiliar with the language and with barely a $300 stipend to sustain them. Thankfully, the Spaniards proved entirely different from the racist Brits or the snobbish French. “I was taken up by the Spanish people because of my ignorance and my race,” Chester observed with gratitude. As vulnerable and flagging as he had been after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he knew, “I needed all the help I could get.”

  From Barcelona they booked passage to the Balearic Islands. Arriving in Mallorca on January 28, they were greeted, impossibly it seemed, by wet snow. As soon as they found a hotel, Chester availed himself of a liquor store and exited clenching the necks of two bottles of brandy. After regrouping for a few days, they set out to find Calla San Vicente, which had been praised by William Haygood, Vandi’s ex-husband, for its beauty and bargain prices. This quaint town was on the extreme northeastern shore of the island, across from the Bay of Pollensa. To get there they wedged aboard an ancient, wood-burning, smoke-gurgling train, sitting alongside “tearful, sinister-looking” Mallorcans, for a trip that took the entirety of the day, complicated by the fact that Chester missed their connecting point. After an afternoon-long rain-soaked ride in a broken-down taxi, they found a bar blaring jazz and English people who helped them secure lodging. Fatigued by his journey, Chester settled that afternoon on a first-floor modern apartment in the lovely house Calla Madonna, owned by Dona Catalina Rotger Amengual. The apartment had brown floor tiles, knotty-pine beams, hot water, and an American toilet, all for 750 pesetas, or about twenty dollars a month.

  Escaping London eased Chester’s feelings about the less than smashing response to his new novel. He hadn’t been in his new place a week when he admitted to friends that he had heard little of the book’s fate, “but the few New York reviews I’ve seen weren’t too good.” His dispirited attitude reflected the great expectations that he had for The Third Generation, though of course tempered by the reality of press responses in the past. And, unlike his other books, there was no uproar or out
cry of negative criticism. No longer a young sensationalist who could shock or surprise, Chester was now a journeyman in a field crowded by writers of black American life. The New York Times complimented his “considerable power” and attempt to “achieve tragedy.” It continued, stating that “his searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists.” “Tragic power,” echoed the Chicago Tribune. In the Chicago Defender critic Gertrude Martin agreed with Chester’s fond ambition; he had written “his best novel to date.” The others said what it was impossible to have anticipated: that by sticking as closely as he had to his own story, he had written something which seemed not a template of black life but an implausible and unending series of disasters. “The most dangerous kind of ‘Momism,’ ” observed the Boston Globe, was at the center of the book, but its critic rebutted the never-ending “painful incidents” and “debaucheries” which seemed repetitious and failed to aid character development. The signal that he received loud and clear from these reviews was one he had at least considered before: his own life was completely absurd. Or, as the New York Times reviewer had said, “a less depressing book” would be “a more convincing one.”

  Worse than plodding character development was what appeared to some of his later critics as a lack of authorial development. Blyden Jackson, a black professor at Fisk, would express disappointment with both Chester (“just an exercise in horror”) and Bill Smith’s novel South Street from that year, the difference between them being that with Chester “the lesion was always there.” But the condemnation was far from uniform, and Jackson, a kind of young George Schuyler with a PhD, unquestionably had the highest standards among the critics. Always a friendly reader of Chester’s, Howard University professor Arthur P. Davis would chart the movement from racial protest to the “problems and conflicts within the group itself” as a decisively important shift in black writers’ concerns. In fact, Chester had actually matured as a writer. He had published Cast the First Stone, a book he’d revised for more than ten years that ennobled not simply his experience, but all experience in prison. The Third Generation was even better, a compelling, artful tour de force of psychological revelation that bravely encountered the dissolution of his family. If it could have been said that his past was working against him, he had overcome it.

  Still, he had no hit on his hands. By February the reality of the book’s underwhelming reception had dawned on his editor. The best Bill Targ could say about book sales was that they were “moving along not too badly.” Despite his company’s fondest hope, Chester’s The Third Generation, a book of considerable scope and power, would sell just 5146 copies in its first crucial six months. Chester had snorted to Ralph Ellison that he would outdo him; now he was eating those words. Chester took refuge in irony, blaming World’s “big vulgar” advertisements in thre New York Times. They had overpromoted him.

  The unusually cold, rainy winter at Calla San Vicente was balanced by the extraordinary natural surroundings and the Spanish food that suited his tastes. Joined now to Willa, possessing a jointly written manuscript that had not been accepted by World and alchemized into the winning formula he had hoped for, and miserable at the dwindling fortunes of The Third Generation, Chester returned to the writing desk. He would need another book, another fish on the hook, to remain solvent. World had the collection of short stories Black Boogie Woogie, but it had already advanced him $500 on this book, which was unlikely to generate dramatic interest when it was scheduled to appear in the fall of 1954. The short story collection had been a gesture to his stature as a force in American writing, an assumption that, even now with four high-quality novels under his belt, was flimsy.

  In February, Chester prepared a long treatment for Ebony on his travels in Paris and London and took a few jabs at Richard Wright. But the piece was too racy for the magazine. He settled in to drafting the screwball romance that had taken place with Vandi Haygood. He was still processing London’s palpable racial prejudice, and contrasting that gall with Mallorca’s similarly prejudiced colony of English-speaking settlers and its sizable “number of American lunatics . . . real lunatics, not play lunatics.” The effect was to unstopper his rage.

  Chester was “furious” at whites “feigning outrage and indignation” at the sight of an interracial couple. The flip side of the enmity directed toward him from the Mallorcan Anglos was its psychic underbelly, the “sick envy” of psychic voyeurs imagining his and Willa’s “perpetual orgy.” The book would demolish the notion of white innocence or a white monopoly on rational behavior. “I was trying to express my astonishment at this attitude and say that white people who still regarded the American black, burdened with all their vices, sophistries, and shams of their white enslavers, as primitives with greater morality than themselves, were themselves idiots. Not only idiots in a cretin manner, but suffering from self-induced idiocy.” While he believed that, to an American, any description of nude black men and white women would automatically seem pornographic, Chester had already begun to draft “some of the most pornographic passages ever written” in his description of the sexual dynamics of his affair. “I doubt if this is going to be a particularly good book, but I’m going to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, in it in the hopes it might have a little sale and get me out of this barrel.” For once, Chester, who liked to put himself beside his protagonists, felt like he had the ending right.

  Even as Chester was taking charge by letting himself go—a return to the energies that he had unloosed when writing If He Hollers Let Him Go—his sense of himself as a man of “firm position” among American novelists was crumbling. In mid-March Chester asked World to send Silver Altar to literary agent Virginia Rice, who had written Willa the year before asking to see it. In a week’s time, they received a note from Rice declining to even read the manuscript. His brother Joe wrote him that World was mishandling the publication of The Third Generation, in the same way as his previous publishers had, causing Chester to become convinced that World, like Doubleday and Knopf, did not represent him well.

  He mailed a five-thousand-word letter to William Targ, unburdening himself of the fear that he had become persona non grata. “I don’t want you to lose your belief in me. And that is what I feel is happening,” he confided. With two seasons of peremptory rejections for Silver Altar following very promising leads, Chester had begun to conclude that he and Willa weren’t getting offers for it on account of his connection to the project. “What I’m worried about is having my name rejected, not my work.” He feared his name had been added to a blacklist—perhaps one reserved for black men who seduced white women. Jewish himself, Targ knew about Anglo prejudice, and told Chester part of what he wanted to hear, but he would have to accept a strong dose of paternalism with that cheering. “Everyone here believes in you and thinks of you as a Major writer. You may not have achieved major sales, but that does not alter the dimensions of your artistic stature,” Targ wrote, helping him to straighten his back. “Chin up, Chester. Everyone has problems,” he chided, “you are not being ignored, conspired against, victimized.”

  Chester returned to his new novel, The End of a Primitive, a book that was as uncompromising as anything he had yet written. Confident only that he could swing a wrecking ball and was writing “one of the most profane, sacrilegious, uninhibited books on record,” he doubted whether it would ever be published. Convinced that such a book would hardly pass muster with the editors at World, he included a line in his manuscript to rally his spirits. “ ‘At least we niggers will have a chance to come into our own,’ ” his hero decides, “ ‘We’ll be the most uncouth sons of bitches of them all.’ ” The line would not be published until a second edition thirty-six years later.

  The “uncouth” novel delivered the messy weekend affair between a black writer down on his luck and a modern white woman; it could perhaps be thought of as a postwar New York version of Light in August. But Chester
hesitated to send the uncompromising outline of The End of a Primitive to Targ, presuming that a resumption of the sexually violent encounters between characters like Bob and Madge from If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Lee and Jackie Forks of Lonely Crusade would make people wince. He asked World for an additional advance, hoping to be kept afloat through the paperback sales of The Third Generation. Weybright of New American Library was no longer supportive, so Chester had little leverage at that firm. Already that winter he had urgently contacted his older brother Eddie in Harlem, putting the touch on him for $50. When Eddie sent the money to his younger brother with a note saying “every good soldier should stand on his own two feet,” Chester stopped writing until 1971.

  At least part of him still held out hope that Silver Altar would win financial reward. World agreed to stake him and it sent $50 directly back to Eddie and $150 to Chester’s bank in Tangier, Morocco. It took until the end of May for the money to creep overseas. In the meantime, Chester started to describe his novel as having a “good deal of surrealism,” which for him meant a competition between the third-person narrative frame and his protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, along with dreams, flashbacks, and bursts of ditties, doggerel, and fabulist minstrel dialogue. He abandoned his naturalist concerns and lampooned and satirized American gadgetry, especially the new craze of television, and he used a talk-show chimpanzee to provide prophetic commentary about atomic bombs, Vice President Richard Nixon, Senator McCarthy, and the Cold War. However, in a book pulsating with eroticism, there wasn’t, finally, any sex.

 

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