Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Despite his knowing publishers’ restrictions on content, later made plain in the 1957 Supreme Court decision Roth v. United States, which excluded obscene material from First Amendment protection, Chester was enchanted by the idea that World would support a manuscript of profanity and sexual situations. He could draw a fair clue to their likely response from an incident in Puerto Pollensa, when, after a long night drinking and partying, Willa fell in the bathroom, dislocating her shoulder and giving herself two black eyes. Willa’s bruises were the source of local gossip, turning the couple into a cause célèbre in the off-season colony. To the “titillated” local “American idiots and the British die-hards,” Chester was a brutal pimp, cruelly beating his whore. To cope with the new predicament, he and Willa drank overproof homemade alcohol to the point where Willa was hallucinating and Chester was blacking out.

  At the end of May 1954, Chester and Willa had to leave Puerto Pollensa as the expensive tourist season got under way. A local painter, Roche Minué, who disbelieved the scandals about them, suggested that they might live inexpensively in a village high in the mountains north of Palma, Mallorca’s capital. Minué, an old Spanish Loyalist and childhood friend of Federico García Lorca, favored this hamlet, Deya, so much that he wished to be buried there. Chester found a home that jutted from the rocks and faced the town’s main courtyard; the locals called it the House of Bleeding Jesus. Bleeding Jesus was affordable, but crumbling: the house oozed water between the floor tiles. Chester sealed himself against all distractions with Dexamyl and retreated to a backyard garden where he finished writing The End of a Primitive, the air redolent with the smell of the blooming lemon trees.

  The ancient village was also home to the English writer and classicist Robert Graves. When he invited Chester and Willa over for drinks, a predictable scuffle occurred. Graves asked Chester what musical instrument he played and Chester, hearing in the question a typical racist dig, replied that he played the radio. “The Americans and the English always made a point out of reminding me that I was black, as though it were a stigma, which brought out the worst in me,” he reflected. Then Willa and Graves conducted a hushed conversation in German, and it became evident to both Chester and Willa that Graves was trying to take her to bed. “I caught him looking at me in that funny way that night we were at his house,” she recalled. Later that night, Chester angrily accused her of soliciting an affair. She feared he would become violent. He was also, in a sense, tiring of her and the toil her support required. If Willa could find “such rapport with men of her own race,” he berated her, “why use up me?” He was locked into a pattern where he pursued a woman with ardor, wore himself out trying to win her, and then reverted to jealous rage once she had committed.

  Chester sent The End of a Primitive to Targ in two sections in the third week of June, anticipating that the manuscript would be at least slightly expurgated. Although the material was as controversial as Cast the First Stone, he wanted a speedy decision, since he was “practically begging in the streets.” By July Targ had read the entire novel. “If published it would bring down the roof on all of us,” he reasoned in words of crisp rejection. “It’s unthinkable for us, and I really wouldn’t know who to suggest as a prospect for it in this country. Even with expurgation.” Seeing Chester’s personal struggle a bit too plainly, Targ psychoanalyzed him: Chester was writing not art but for “personal catharsis.” Targ believed that only the Obelisk Press of Henry Miller, the bad-boy American writer who wrote about sex graphically and using four-letter words, would even consider it. The final comment in the letter signaled the end of Chester’s relationship with World. Regarding the manuscript, Targ informed him, “Let’s not confuse it with serious writing, such as The Third Generation. I’d been hoping you would adhere to that fine level of writing in your next book.” Vulnerable after he had written Targ the letter asking for support, Chester felt severely rejected and foolish for being vulnerable to Targ at all. But while he could not disentangle himself from World (or from any promising financial arrangement), Chester recognized that it was useless to remain a contracted author there if they were unable to support The End of a Primitive.

  Chester defended his book to Targ, stressing his determination to grow as writer and range beyond the thematic preoccupations and narrative style of The Third Generation. Denying that he wrote the novel to get over an affair, he decided that The End of a Primitive was “the best book written yet on the racio-sexual psychology” and a forerunner of a new kind of classic literature.

  We Negro writers seem trapped by our own development, which does not happen to other U.S. writers such as Faulkner or French writers say such as Camus, or other Europeans such as Kafka. Take Wright for instance. Obviously he can’t repeat Native Son, he can’t write another autobiography, he can’t continue hammering the same approach to a many-faced problem. But he has established a precedent, and can’t break out of it. Of course, he could do like Langston Hughes, just keep changing the words to the same idea, but he wants to be a writer in the world. As do I.

  Chester knew that the book’s sex scenes were mainly playful and not pornographic, and he presumed that the novel was dismissed because it exposed “the grim humorous attack on U.S. idiocy where it hurts the most.” However, he did not discard the manuscript, deciding “I like this book better than all the others I’ve done put together.” As if to make complete Chester’s degree of American estrangement, Yves Malartic wrote him from France saying he thought the book a masterpiece, even though he considered Chester’s gallivanting with Willa an ill-timed distraction. In subsequent years Chester would incorporate Targ’s “catharsis” jibe of The End of a Primitive, although he still considered it a groundbreaking, important book.

  The house in Deya proved not merely uncomfortable, but impossible. Chester confronted the landlord over the dismal conditions, refusing to pay rent until they were fixed. The spirited disagreement went on to include other townspeople, nearly resulting in blows between Chester and the town bus driver, after which he and Willa hustled out of town. At the end of July, in Terrano, a suburb of Palma, they traded away their privacy to share the house of a mechanic, his wife, and four trysting daughters. Meanwhile, the situation at World deteriorated even further. Chester’s decision to have the seventy-three-year-old Carl Van Vechten write the introduction to his short story collection was part of the problem. Van Vechten thought the collected stories barely apprentice works and declined to discuss them at all, framing his remarks around Chester’s masterpiece, Lonely Crusade. The introduction was obviously a personal favor to Chester for a book Van Vechten didn’t think should be published. World took the position that Van Vechten’s introduction was of little use.

  When the galleys of the short stories arrived in the middle of August, Chester was legitimately frustrated. On the one hand, the editorial staff at World called him a major writer, a man at the peak of his powers. Yet they were now interested in publishing only his early work and couldn’t find a place for his most stylistically complex and thematically daring ideas. Agreeing with Van Vechten, Chester finally wrote World awkwardly on August 23, “I must confess this bundle of amateurish manuscripts combined with these urgent queries have given me something of a shock.” He had turned against publishing the collection, which was heavily weighted with juvenilia. Targ was out of the office and the mail was slow in being rerouted. Every two weeks he received a letter from Donald Friede asking for his corrected galleys to get the book in production. Chester didn’t respond.

  With the coming of fall, the French and English tourists left Mallorca, the German tourists arrived, and the rains returned. From their backyard, Chester and Willa had an excellent view of the Bay of Palma. One rainy afternoon Chester took the short story galleys, now called My People, My People, and chucked them into the sea. He didn’t want his name attached to these short stories, and he had lost his faith in World. By September 19, Targ mailed him a curt note, canceling the spring book and reminding Chester how much mone
y he owed, and how many more copies of The Third Generation were being returned every day. A week later Targ reversed himself, however, admitting that the firm actually owed Chester money. After that, neither Chester nor World would trust the other again.

  The trust between Chester and Willa suffered as well. His repudiation of My People, My People was impractical enough to frighten her. All Chester noticed was her change to him in attitude, “distraught and intent on throwing herself away.” Secretly she was trying to find a job to work her way back to the United States.

  Deep in arrears, on September 11 he bounced a check for one hundred dollars from his Merchants Bank account to an English moneylender, F.G. Short and Sons. Chester and Willa slunk away from Mallorca hoping to regroup at Yves Malartic’s home in Arcachon, where their romance had blossomed. They headed to Barcelona and cleared French customs on September 20. When they arrived at Arcachon, they learned that Malartic had unexpectedly sold Villa Madiana. Added to that bad news, Maurice Nedeau of Corréa declined to publish The End of a Primitive. In the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and the demise of the colonial system, the timing for any critique of race relations was poor. Chester tried not to think about having accepted money for a collection that he had then judged was beneath his standards and literally threw away. He knew that World would take his gesture as betrayal and they would begin to accuse him of being unreliable or unable to shrug off his bitterness at racial injustice. Just before leaving Spain, he had put a typescript of The End of a Primitive in the mail to Victor Weybright at New American Library, begging for the novel to be published as a paperback original.

  Refugees Chester and Willa took shelter with a friend of Yves Malartic named Dr. Thé; all that Chester had left to spend in Arcachon was his good name. He wrote a long imploring letter to Ben Zevin at World, pleading with him to take The End of a Primitive but, in the same missive, attacking World by sharing Van Vechten’s privately conveyed low estimate of the press and the short story collection, word for word. Deciding that “it’s better for me to stay alive, even in jail, than die forever,” Chester then bounced a check to Dr. Thé at the end of a week and limped to Paris, leaving his winter clothes and trunk behind since he and Willa could not afford to have it shipped. Arriving in the chilly, drizzly dawn in Paris, they trudged from Luxembourg Gardens to the Louvre and back, searching for a hotel, Chester carrying two suitcases and Willa lugging the typewriters, and trying to keep warm. Only late in the afternoon when Willa went in alone, could they secure a room at Hotel Jeanne d’Arc on Rue Buci. The French were drawing the color line in the metropolis to keep American tourists pleased.

  Attempting to maneuver, Chester ran into Slim Sunday, a Nigerian musician and one of the characters from the Latin Quarter café scene, always dressed in black, who gave him the address of a pawnshop. Chester pawned Willa’s diamond engagement ring in a shop at Place de Clichy, before hurrying to another to unburden himself of his typewriter. With thirty dollars to his name, he dashed over to Yves Malartic for help on getting The End of a Primitive into the hands of a likely publisher. Chester and Malartic received an appointment at Gallimard, where Chester hoped for a quick decision. In a bad mood that showed, Chester gravely put The End of a Primitive in the hand of an editor as soon as Malartic made the introduction. “Himes, you’ll never be a French writer,” Malartic scolded him after this meeting. “A French writer gives his book to an editor and then takes hours to explain what his book is about so that by the time he’s finished explaining the editor doesn’t want to read it.”

  Highly cultured, long-winded Paris seemed the wrong place to be. Another overseas agent, Jean Rosenthal, wrote to him that she was unable to sell his books on account of the “puritan wave flowing around.” Over the next couple of days, Chester spotted Dick and Ellen Wright in their café but since the friendship had “cooled off mightily,” he said little beyond pleasantries. It was sad they had little to say to each other. In Ghana, Wright had acquired a serious illness that would be mistreated and contribute to his death six years later. Wright would soon be on his way to Bandung, Indonesia, and Chester, unknowingly, was headed back to the United States.

  To keep them afloat while they tarried in Paris, Willa landed a job occasionally proofreading; they ate in their hotel room off Chester’s camping stove. When she wasn’t working Willa was drinking heavily to ease the pain of their circumstances (she remarked later, “I was an awful person in Paris”). She found it difficult to contribute to the household affairs. She and Chester took Dexamyl to work and phenobarbital to go to sleep, and both of them noticed blood in their urine, the effect of their too long use of the stimulant.

  Struggling for survival, Chester began systematically berating all of the European literary agents who were supposed to have marketed The Third Generation or Cast the First Stone. Annoyed that Rosenthal had not attempted to sell Lonely Crusade to northern European countries, and pitched Cast the First Stone to “off-trail” publishers, Chester withdrew from the agency. He met with another agent, a woman named Jessie Boutelleau, and tried to persuade her that even though Albin Michel hadn’t taken The End of a Primitive, she was foolish to suppose that it would dismiss Cast the First Stone. Another Paris agent, “Dr.” Hoffman, working indirectly for World, claimed he had never even seen The Third Generation to take to publishers, which initiated a flurry of letters. “Sick at heart by all this mess,” Chester visited Gallimard’s offices in futile search of Marcel Duhamel, who had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go.

  World’s president Ben Zevin contacted him then, stunned to have heard that Chester was accusing them of shabby treatment and giving him a precise accounting of the advances he had received from late September 1952 through July 1954. Chester’s books had earned the company $4,380.96, and he had been advanced $6,580.

  Chester wrote again to New American Library’s Victor Weybright, beseeching him a second time to take The End of a Primitive. He also queried magazines for work to bring in cash but found his suggestions of profiling blacks in Paris like Charles Holland were considered “too specialized.” Chester summed up the fall to Carl Van Vechten: “things are now bad enough to start getting better.”

  Toward the end of October, Marcel Duhamel returned to his Gallimard office. Chester discussed publishing Cast the First Stone, since it had had a good reader’s report. A hipster surrealist, Duhamel was friends with Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Erskine Caldwell, and he knew the New York jazz scene. He proposed to Chester, who seemed “rather frail” and “not at all relaxed,” that he try to write for a crime-fiction series he was editing, La Série Noire. Duhamel wanted a “Negro detective story,” and he dangled $700 and the promise of an initial print run of 37,000 for Chester. In the meantime, Duhamel came through with a contract for The End of a Primitive and 20,000 francs, about $1000.

  A few days later, Chester turned in a one-page outline for a novel about an American black man framed for the murder of a white woman in Paris. Duhamel and his assistants asked Chester to fill it in, making the lead character a piano player in a jazz club. But when he fleshed out the story with details after a week or so, which contained a Bud Powell–like musician riffing off Chopin and other characters marrying white women, Duhamel informed him that he was disappointed. Chester realized that Duhamel “wanted this Negro to be a clown.” He dropped the Paris story and suggested a new tale, “a detective story based in Harlem,” with “plenty of comedy” and “not too much white brutality.” Called It Rained Five Days, the novel would be held together by what Chester liked to describe as “real cops and robbers stuff.”

  Meanwhile, Chester had good news from the United States. On November 2, Victor Weybright agreed to publish The End of a Primitive as a twenty-five-cent paperback original. While it seemed a defeat at the time, an acknowledgment that the novel wasn’t good enough to appear in hardcover, Chester’s work was pioneering a new style: the paperback original. The advance upon signing the contract was $1000, which
Chester gladly snapped up. Seeming eager to bring out his work, New American Library also contracted to reissue Cast the First Stone as well as The Third Generation in paperback. At the publication of each book, Chester was guaranteed additional money.

  With this advance, Chester paid some outstanding debts, retrieved his belongings from Arcachon, and covered the check he’d floated Dr. Thé. He still hoped to outrun the debt to F. G. Short in the flight from Palma. Setting aside the Harlem detective potboiler, he turned to a new project, a first-person account of his experiences in Paris, London, and Mallorca, “and how I managed to do this and similar experiences without being frightened, upset or panicked, and in fact enjoying it.” His next move was to buy a mildly resistant Willa a second-class ticket home on the Holland-America Line, leaving on December 1. The day she departed, over cognac in the train station, he told her “she shouldn’t think of it as separating.” He needed time alone in Paris to write and think things through, and she was heading “back to America to sell our book.”

  In December, Chester was interviewed by Annie Brierre, a journalist and editor at the newspaper France-USA, who had been wanting to meet him since his first arrival in France. She questioned Chester about contemporary writers, especially William Styron, whom she had written about in Nouvelles Littéraires. Chester admitted that he wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest technicians of the American novel, even though Styron’s book Lie Down in Darkness had appeared to much acclaim. Closer to his new home in Paris, Styron had also written an editorial in favor of creative work and against hyperintellectual criticism to launch the new American expatriate magazine Paris Review. Chester’s page-long interview appeared in January 1955, by which time Brierre had read The Third Generation, a book she savored, “every paragraph of it, in every way.” She helped him get the book to Editions Plon for consideration, admired The End of a Primitive, and took him out for dinner in fashionable Montmartre.