Chester B. Himes

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Chester B. Himes Page 36

by Lawrence P. Jackson


  After a conversation with Yves Malartic, Chester began to realize that he was wasting his time entreating French publishers to bring out translations of his work. The gist of it was that his books were too tragic and too intellectual. The French publishers wanted a Negro Harlequin, not a Negro Hamlet. Malartic confessed that in 1952, when he had written to Himes about the density of the narrative in Lonely Crusade, there was actually a battle going on at Editions Corréa (a struggle made obvious by the published cover). Maurice Nedeau was convinced that Malartic had removed the comedy from the book and had turned a story of hilarious shenanigans into a cheerless funeral. Duhamel’s translation of If He Hollers Let Him Go had in fact taken that book and transformed it into a “rough and funny story.” Indeed, when French critic Jean-Claude Brisville reviewed that translation, S’il braille lâche-le, in 1949 for La Nef, he had chastised Himes for failing to provide “an art strong enough that we can tell it apart from vulgar pastiche.” Arguably Brisville’s comment was better directed at Duhamel.

  Imagining that he would shortly have at least $3000 from New American Library, Chester decided to revisit London. He hoped to sell British editions of his books in England, especially now since he had fired all of his foreign literary agents, and to get enough peace to finish the Duhamel-inspired crime story. More practically, life in Paris had increased its challenges without Willa as translator and white face. Despite visits to twenty-six rental agencies and fifty landlords, he was homeless again. Meanwhile service in the cafés had grown “insolent and hostile.” One time, Chester responded to slights by hurling a table full of crockery and glassware into the street.

  Before setting out for London, Chester visited Albin Michel, which had published If He Hollers Let Him Go, and learned that Wright had been correct about the duplicity of French publishers: the accounting practices at Albin Michel were so suspect that he himself was charged the full price for books he bought, even when they were on remainder. There were of course no royalties. He arrived in London on December 10 and went back to Hampstead, now to 45 Glenmore Road, a neighborhood of Africans, South Asians, and East Asians, and began contacting literary agents.

  While he waited on agents and publishers, Chester looked up Wright’s friend George Padmore, a Trinidadian intellectual educated in the United States who had created the Kremlin’s Africa policy during the 1930s. Disgruntled by Soviet political waffling over directly fighting colonialism, Padmore had left the USSR for Germany in the mid-1930s, then been deported to London, where he founded a variety of African nationalist organizations. The mentor of Namdi Azikwe, Nigeria’s first president, and Kenyan first deputy Tom Mboya, as well as an inspiring figure to Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah, Padmore was the modern philosopher and political organizer of pan-Africanism. He was known in some circles as “the black Prometheus cursing the white Jupiter.”

  Probably no writer attacked with more vitriol western colonial practices and Soviet manipulation in Africa. Padmore’s most recent book had been Africa: Britain’s Third Empire, and he would soon bring out a collection of essays called Pan-Africanism or Communism?, that, riding the wave of favorable views of the postwar United States, advocated an American-led Marshall Plan for Africa. Although both Padmore and Chester believed Communists were insufficiently concerned with black rights, Chester did not wish to be schooled in a new rhetoric of political awareness. Padmore was lecturing Chester about the achievement of Richard Wright, but Chester made the point that Wright had come to a dead end without an ideological absolute like Marxism or Christian humanism to anchor his defense of the poor. Even though an antiblack riot had occurred that November in London, the kind of topic of interest to both, the discussion with Padmore ended weakly and drove home the solitude that Chester had to accept.

  But even the unsatisfying talks with Padmore were better than corresponding about the future with Willa. She was struggling in New York. Chester had imagined that Willa would have speedy success in selling Silver Altar. He banked on the magic of Willa’s white skin and erudition to tip the scales in their favor, but she was treated like an amateur running errands. Penniless and looking ill, Willa learned that publishers weren’t interested in their novel. Then, when she found Jean’s name in the telephone directory under “Mrs. Chester Himes,” she became disturbed. Chester had told her that he was divorced but now she knew he had lied. “Are you really divorced or just separated?” she wrote furiously to him in England. She’d had enough of New York. On Monday, December 13, Willa caught the bus to her aunt’s house in Brighton, Massachusetts, taking the manuscript with her and deciding to hand-deliver Silver Altar to Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

  Deep fissures threatening their being together were on every line of the perhaps 300 pages of letters that they exchanged between December 1954 and July 1955. Willa wrote him on December 20, “I think your writing is a gift and it is more important than whether we are together or what happens to us individually, as long as you can keep on writing . . . that’s the only thing I know is right.” For Chester’s part, he had a fatalistic if plain assessment of what was under way: “We had each, from the first contact with America, gone back into our separate races.”

  Chester preferred to see his returning Willa “home safe” as “the only valid achievement of my entire life.” Their novel itself presented the same “achievement”: a Smith College heroine returning to the security of America from decadent Europe. But, at bottom, Chester was attaching to Willa emotions that emanated from his incomplete emotional life with his mother, the woman he not only couldn’t make safe but could neither satisfy nor heartily repudiate.

  While living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, desperate to sell the book, and mailing emotionally fraught letters, Chester and Willa fell out of sync. They wrote daily but received the garbled letters in batches, unable to respond to the shifting tide of emotions and rapidly changing circumstances. After the first glum note from Chester—“I am backing out quietly (as quietly as you will let me) and closing the door gently so as not to disturb anyone”—Willa flung back on January 5 that he was free to do with the manuscript whatever he pleased; Houghton Mifflin had also turned them down.

  Giving up on London, Chester sailed for New York on January 15, 1955, aboard the Samaria, “broke, bitter, defeated” and “unbearably chagrined.” He tried to sustain his ego with a brief affair and didn’t write Willa from the boat. On January 25 his passport was stamped back into the United States and he checked in at the Albert Hotel. New York was the same as he had left it: the inconsiderate doormen declined to assist him with his trunk, and for two days it remained on the street. The day Chester docked in New York, Ken McCormick at Doubleday rejected Silver Altar. Chester needed a publisher and he was contacting a new agent, Kenneth Littauer, shopping books and short stories to publishers after his years at Collier’s. But Littauer wouldn’t get a manuscript until February because Willa had the wrong address, and then he would want major changes.

  Willa had declined to meet Chester’s boat when he was scheduled to return. Their letters had remained accusatory, and she believed she would brave ridicule from “so many [of his] friends” described to a T in The End of a Primitive. She also played his game back to him: “I’d hate to have to compete with a wife and an ex-mistress.” When Willa did come from Massachusetts to visit him the last weekend in January, not even physical intimacy could reconcile them. “Everything is such a terrific strain,” she reasoned, while also taking him to task for inattentiveness, which signaled to her his having had affairs. He had mysteriously lost his leather-bound copy of The Third Generation; he had not written; he offered her cigarettes automatically, but Willa didn’t smoke. Gainfully employed as a receptionist in a physician’s office, she was of course in position to badger him: as usual, his finances had collapsed. Earning forty-eight dollars a week, Willa made a point of mailing a weekly stipend, tendering the patronizing relationship Chester always claimed to have abhorred. She also had learned enough with him about the business
to believe she might survive as a writer. “It won’t be literature, of course,” she wrote to him about “the Luxembourg book,” “but it might be magazine material.”

  Cagier by the day and disinclined to resume his old associations, Chester was rattled by Willa’s presumptive questions: “Have you heard from anyone, about your EOAP [End of a Primitive], Weybright, have you seen [the] Ellisons? Or Carlo?” Willa had difficulty imagining that Chester—sober and with four published and well-received books and a manuscript at press and another under consideration—would not be fêted by his New York circle of Carl Van Vechten, Ralph Ellison, and Horace Cayton, as well as editors and agents. And although Chester maintained that his stay in New York in 1955 was one of unending embarrassed humiliation and isolation, he and Willa seem to have met at least with Fanny Ellison, perhaps conducting ambassadorial duty without her husband, Ralph. Willa was impressed by the finely educated, professionally accomplished wife of the famous writer. “I liked Fanny the best tho of anyone woman we’ve met anywhere together, the most intelligent & the kindest,” she told him. Two years after his contretemps with Ralph Ellison, tempers had cooled and Chester had much to report about life in France, England, and Spain; the Ellisons themselves would move to Europe in the fall of 1955, for two years in Rome. Desiring pizzazz and contact with his cosmopolitan, celebrated friends, Willa pressed him for more than “making love to her as long as physically possible.” “We might be able to go out together at sometime with the Ellisons,” she suggested before packing her grip for one winter weekend, “or anywhere with Music where it’s nice.”

  By February Chester and Willa began to have satisfying times together. They turned to the bedroom to try to resolve the disconsolate, anxious letters they had been exchanging since she left Paris. “Darling, thank you for this last weekend. It was really the nicest time I have ever had with you. The most secure, the most beautiful, the most reassuring. It is so wonderful to be sure. I never have before, of us. I am now,” she cooed. He had fallen back onto the relationship and the result was unique devotion from Willa. Chester reckoned that he enjoyed “her white tiny body, her small shrinking breasts, her wild tuft of pubic hair, her strong gripping thighs, and the little spasm she would have at orgasm.” She now had a pet name for his penis, “booney,” a gesture so out of character for her she wrote asking him “are you shocked that I type such a word?”

  While she made pleasurable sex possible, her mental and cultural endowments were the principal sources of intrigue for Chester, who never seems to have strayed too far from trying to provide the exoticism that he believed white women desired. Willa also proved useful by sending barbiturate pills in the mail, joking, “My, what a problem we have!” and observing that she now needed higher doses to remain alert.

  They kept after agent Ken Littauer and tried rewriting sections of Silver Altar. When they finally met with Littauer, Chester was asked to conduct his part of the conversation through an open door, from another room, while Willa sat in the only available space in the agent’s cramped office. During the conversation, Littauer reminisced about the “blackface” stories of the South Carolinian writer Octavus Roy Cohen. Then he suggested Chester title a story “Panther Boy.” Chester concluded that the agent was rudely trying to humiliate him. Throughout the winter Chester and Willa worked up promotional material for New American Library’s publication of The End of a Primitive; they also revised Silver Altar again, transforming the humorless, insipid manuscript from first person to third person and producing the copies necessary for agents and publishers. This latest draft seemed bent on heavy-handedly making the broken-leg heroine a saint, and even introduced a medical doctor who returns the protagonist to the United States, explaining Helen to herself. “God loved Eve. She was his first Woman. . . . He sent her out through the gateway of Eden into the world only when he was certain that she was fully equipped to cope with all the difficulties that life on earth presented.” The novel’s last line was “He said simply, as God had said, ‘Go now . . .’ ” Showing weariness at their romance, Chester relieved himself of Willa in their novel by sanctifying and ennobling her but, in the end, casting her out.

  Willa spent a few afternoons scouting apartments near Boston Common, then floated the idea of his moving to Boston, even though she was earning an education about active New England prejudice in the face of laws explicitly forbidding racial discrimination. If they tried to live together in New York they would starve and if he moved to Boston they ran the risk of defamation. “People, Americans, don’t like scandals. . . . It would be foolish to mess things up now with the book so near to completion and money just around the corner because we did something foolish,” Willa cautioned. In New York they were invited to have dinner with Walter Freeman, a New American Library editor, and his wife, until Chester let it slip that Willa was not his spouse but his “fiancée”; after that Mrs. Freeman steadily postponed the dinner, a tactic Willa understood. “Very few white women will accept in their homes a mixed couple, especially engaged,” she explained, presenting the durable facts of life.

  Her thoughts about the future with Chester were made more poignant when she also had moments to marvel at his talent. She showed the manuscript in the winter to her aunt Margaret, an English teacher, who went through the clean draft, separating Willa’s sections from Chester’s and highlighting his passages as examples of “magnificent” writing. Willa had moments when she exulted in him. “It is the first time I have seen you so, completely assured and mentally and physically completely at ease and strong and certain, as if you knew just where you were going and why and how you were going to get there. You looked strong, darling, in all ways.”

  But after a couple of months in America—Willa rooming with snobbish relatives—Chester’s appeal began to lose some of its glow. The interruption to their daily lives as a couple and the new burden of conducting an interracial relationship in America worked to reduce Willa’s empathy for the racism that Chester faced. Even the weekends she spent with him in New York did not alter her voicing a typical white liberal belief: the race problem would go away on its own.

  In one of her most revealing letters on race in America, she mailed a gently worded reproof. Chester was a “little bit wrong” when he had previously opined that “intellectual negroes” were preoccupied by segregation and racism. Willa’s point of view was limited mainly to Boston, where she worked in the Back Bay office of Dr. Henry Marble and bunked at her aunt’s house in a white upper-crust neighborhood. However, she seemed to share the conclusion of Ellison and Cayton in their drunken argument with Chester in January 1953. Willa had become certain that many black writers and thinkers were not the “least bit interested in the race problem, or even aware of it.”

  For her counsel to Chester she claimed a venerable source of authority: a silent “old colored chauffeur.” The man was in his sixties, and had been at work for Dr. Marble for thirty years. He suffered from heart disease and, according to Willa, couldn’t “work hard anymore.” Willa was moved particularly by the white-haired man’s outer appearance of quiet dignity and self-respect. She assured Chester that her black patient looked like an academic, was “certainly not uneducated,” and was “well-read.” She observed that when the office became chaotic, the old chauffeur, the “quietest person I have ever seen,” had the capacity to revive her and lend an air of tranquility, using only his grave taciturnity. Confident that the man was nearing death, Willa felt more than relief when he was around: she felt “how good it is to be alive.” Because he relieved her of anxiety and tension, Willa decided that “I don’t think he’s aware of color at all.”

  Chester could glimpse what he would be in Willa’s eyes in fifteen years—what his older brother was already, and what his father had been. They were servants to white people, best liked when completely silent, necessary to shore up white peoples’ feelings of generosity and humanity, and to make them feel serene. And Willa saw race first: a literate, docile chauffeur was the intellectual
equivalent to the man she had lived with and who had been a publishing black writer for twenty years. The portrait she had drawn was singularly dismaying.

  For her part, Willa was sorely disappointed by Chester’s cavalier sexual mores. He had told her that they were in their final stage of full sexual expression; as they aged further, Chester believed their sex lives might end badly if they hadn’t found a compatible partner. He supported his case by referring to novels he enjoyed, like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a tale of a married couple’s misadventure set in North Africa and replete with sexual liaisons and doom. Once, when Willa made a brief weekend visit to New York, he casually announced that he had tried to have a prostitute come to his rooms, but she had been too expensive. He fended off Willa’s obvious displeasure flippantly; Chester only desired “to be with a woman.” Then he turned the question around, saying, “What’s the difference between masturbating and being with a prostitute?” Willa did not agree and thought he lacked “self-discipline,” which, when it came to fidelity, he regularly dismissed as an antique element of old-time Boston morality.

  During another visit, on March 29, Willa’s worst fears were proved. While Willa was in the bathroom, Jean Himes entered Chester’s room and quickly departed, passing Willa in the hall. “Can you imagine how I felt coming to see you,” she wailed, “and then to have your wife walk in, when supposedly you were divorced?” Fanny Ellison had forewarned Willa about the woman with whom Chester had begun his adult life, “a very attractive intelligent person who has had a rough time and who is most likely still very much in love.” The effects of the encounter were predictably devastating. In May, after six weeks of an emotional roller coaster, Willa confessed, “I never believed it possible that a man could shatter me so.” She told him that they should end their relationship.

 

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