Chester B. Himes

by Lawrence P. Jackson

  Chester’s reaction—“furious and hurt because I had been absolutely honest”—was not exclusively self-serving. The day before the romance with Willa suffered its deathblow, he had written to Carl Van Vechten with some glee, “I am hoping to get married again when finally I get together the loose ends of my life, and as a consequence I am what is coyly known as ‘secretly engaged.’ ” Chief among the “loose ends” preventing marriage to Willa was the missing divorce from Jean.

  Chester held on to the relationship both because he wanted to end the romance on his terms and Willa made him feel important and wanted. Throughout April they Scotch-taped the torn love affair. Everything of course was contingent upon a speedy exit from the United States. “I would like to go somewhere small and cheap and live quietly, with you,” Willa wrote to him. “I think it would be a good idea for you to straighten out your own marital affairs too, though. Especially if you do ever have any actual intention of marrying me.” She kept after this point, adding, “I am not going to pretend to be your wife, when you are all ready married.”

  For Willa, Chester’s having led her to believe that he was divorced was the key prevarication preventing their harmony and success. She concluded that the reason they were having problems with Ken Littauer was that she had passed herself off as Mrs. Himes—thus she was “a liar,” and subsequently unworthy of his “respect and friendship.”

  Chester considered Littauer a racist and the other book industry operatives would seem like that to him too. After a minor success finagling a reprint contract with Berkley Books, Chester ran head-on into “gratuitous insolence” from one of his old publishers. He had written Blanche Knopf a brisk business note asking for a royalty statement and received an overly blunt reply from one of her staff. “You have not received a statement from this title,” William Koshland began, “because not only does the book have a sizable debit balance but also because royalties resulting from actual sales have not been enough to warrant reporting to you.” Among Knopf legal staff Chester acquired the nickname “General Himes” for the useless “running battle” he was engaged in that year to regain the rights to Lonely Crusade.

  Later in the spring he informed Willa that he had landed a menial job, a task that his girlfriend approved of so “that you finally have some money.” He pressured an advance out from Berkley and wound up with $100 at the end of May, hardly enough to dent a bill for $806 he’d gotten from the Internal Revenue Service.

  Then he lost more ground. Chester was forced to change the title of his new book from The End of a Primitive to The Primitive. The intellectual difference in the title was extraordinary, and in fact reversed the meaning of the book: from the black man escaping the stereotype of primitivism—his western burden—by murdering the white woman, to a black man becoming an animal through the act of murder. However, commercial transactions were no place for the nuances of philosophy. “The title,” New American Library informed him, “simply will not register on the newsstands—and that is where about eighty percent of our sales will be.” Chester would not recoup his advance and start receiving additional royalties until 100,000 paperbacks were sold. He consented to the title change. That same week he lost the promised job, so he was glad to have beseeched NAL’s Walter Freeman for another $100 to stay afloat. At the end of May, however, he returned to desperate measures: Chester wanted to persuade Doubleday to bring out a clothbound edition of The Primitive first. He would hold on to the idea and continue to try to place the book with other hardcover publishers, like Random House and Dial Press, but this effect would succeed only in slowing the appearance of the book: completed in 1954, it would not debut—still in paperback—until 1956.

  Although Chester had pulled the plug on his foreign literary agents for lack of effort (erroneously, it turned out), in New York he was having no success on his own. He had also battered the doors of every publisher and agent on Madison Avenue, so he turned once more to Lurton Blassingame. In Chester’s conciliatory note to his former agent, there were four opening paragraphs before he could write, “If you will accept my apology for my own inconsiderateness and feel we can work together again, I will be grateful if you accept me as a client.” Chester enclosed four short stories and two sketches. Two of them, “Spanish Gin,” and “Boomerang,” he had submitted to Esquire that year and had received the endorsement from the fiction editor, only to be rejected later by publisher Arnold Gingrich. Another, “The Snake,” had been passed over by a publication called Manhunt and “That Summer in Bed” was new. Chester informed Blassingame that he intended to use a European locale—France, England, Mallorca—in some future works, and that he hoped to yoke together a collection of short stories. He also added the Lloyd Brown review of Lonely Crusade from New Masses to the folder of manuscripts, to demonstrate “that I have been anti-communist from the beginning.” Charming and insistent when he wanted something, Chester successfully got Blassingame to work on his behalf.

  He broached the idea to Willa about living together in New York over the summer, but she refused to share his room of “horror” at the Albert Hotel, contaminated as it was for her by memories of Jean Himes. After repairing the relationship somewhat, Chester still menaced Willa over the telephone, perhaps inebriated and certainly maudlin. “What are you trying to do, threaten me?” she growled. “We should have stayed busted up the first time, in April,” she wrote him. In another letter, she counseled, “Don’t get a divorce on my account, because I don’t want ever to marry anyone again. If I live with you again, I would like to do so openly, under my own married name.” Willa had decided she would no longer “pretend.” But the relationship had finally fully unwound. By mid June, Willa had bought a ticket to Luxembourg and was focused on her children. “If we’re through, then let’s be entirely through. No regrets or lingerings in memory.” Feeling as if his presence would disconcert her aunt and uncle, she requested his absence when she boarded the ship for Europe.

  Like other women in Chester’s life, Willa did not wish to become fodder for his literary workshop. She asked him to return all of her letters, which she planned to destroy: “I would not like to have very intense sincere emotions that I have poured out to you, my love in words, used in another book.” Chester held on to the letters, perhaps thinking of how little else he had that June, the prospects for publishing The Silver Altar as dim as ever, but also knowing their value in case of future legal claims.

  With Willa gone he turned his attention to Vandi Haygood, who seems not to have known that Chester was in town that spring. He telephoned her for the personal items he had cached at her apartment before sailing for Europe in 1953—oddly enough, a kind of trousseau: linens, his mother’s silver, and scrapbooks of his career. During the call, Haygood apparently let slip out, “Oh shit, I do so want to see you but he’ll be here all weekend.” Then she recovered, “I’ll tell you what to do. Call me in the middle of next week and come to dinner.” Chester didn’t wait until the dinner and on July 13 picked up everything from Haygood’s maid except for the scrapbooks. A day later, he phoned her office. In hushed tones the secretary told him that forty-year-old Vandi Haygood was dead, apparently from complications connected to taking Dexamyl. The headline in the Baltimore Afro-American was “Mrs. Haygood Dies in NYC: Aided Many Young, Struggling Writers.” Chester had reason now to be paranoid. He had a manuscript at press in which a character like Vandi Haygood in every conceivable way was killed at the novel’s conclusion by a man like Chester.

  Chester pulled himself together for a welcome reprieve at Carl Van Vechten’s on the Saturday night after Haygood’s passing. There he met the West Indian literary sensation George Lamming, whose novel The Castle of My Skin was a coming-of-age experience set in Barbados written with an elegance, racial pride, and sophisticated technique that showed the successful completion of a thorough apprenticeship to James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Lamming, an intellectually serious man, was also completing a travel memoir called The Emigrants about black diasporic exper
iences, especially in London. The long afternoon and evening at Van Vechten’s included drinks, a photo session, and dinner. Chester enjoyed the young Bajan’s company enough to take him up to Harlem, to the Red Rooster for drinks, after which, with difficulty, Chester stumbled back downtown to his hotel.

  The next week and with the help of Annie Brierre, the French journalist, he succeeded in landing The Third Generation with Editions Plon for its series Feux Croisés (Crossfire), a collection of French translations of foreign writers. Two weeks later Van Vechten had delivered two bottles of vodka for Chester’s birthday; Chester drank both of them with tonic, “and the next morning I woke up with a hangover suitable for all disappointments.” He was still trawling through Vandi’s death and Willa’s departure.

  Soon afterward Lurton Blassingame, handling some of his short stories, scored a hit and got Esquire to accept “The Snake.” Chester felt that Esquire, now a wealthy, established magazine, owed him since he had been involved in its early years. He telephoned editor Arnold Gingrich to ask for decisions on several other short stories and then he told Blassingame his theories of persecution. What Chester seemed unable to recognize was that he obliterated professional relationships when he squeezed through barely ajar doors in the publishing world, perhaps particularly with whites who believed they were doing him a favor to begin with, or risking their reputations by involving themselves with him. In the Esquire case, it would be several years before the magazine actually published this short story bought that June of 1955. Gingrich, responding to Chester’s letters over the next year, would respond with comments like “I can’t make a commitment at this time as we’re having terrific troubles with inventory. . . . But at least I’ll make an effort to try to shove the story forward.” By the time “The Snake” appeared, in October 1959, Gingrich considered Chester pushy and ungrateful.

  Working with him on The Primitive at New American Library was Walter Freeman, who positioned himself as a strong supporter of Chester’s oeuvre: “I have found it a pleasure to work on Cast the First Stone because I greatly admire the book. The same is true of the present manuscript. Since we have become friends I have found my work even more gratifying.” But in September when the galleys were prepared, shortly after Dial passed on doing a hardcover, Chester felt he had been deceived. He asked to see the original manuscript and was dismayed to find commentary from five editors in different colors, none of which had been shown to him for approval. He was fighting the same battle he had prior to the publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Freeman defended the firm, saying “practically every change was made from the viewpoint of censorship,” and he was willing to restore “almost all of the deletions to which you object.” But the corrections seemed ridiculous to Chester. The editors had removed references to the popular novelist Kathleen Winsor and jokes about Quakers, and he was now being asked to supply permissions to quote single lines of dialogue from Ziegfeld Follies stage shows.

  To Freeman’s request to revise the manuscript, Chester thundered he would seek legal redress if the version of the book published differed from “the one version, the only version” he was returning with green pencil marks restoring his exact language. Then, between outrage and acquiescence, he accepted Freeman’s invitation to lunch.

  That week bold Jet magazine published the pictures from the funeral of a Chicago eighth grader named Emmett Till. The child had whistled at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, not so far from where Chester had lived as a boy, and he had been shot and had his eye gouged out as punishment. Till had then been submerged in the local river for three days with a cotton gin fan weighing him down. Six hundred thousand people viewed his swollen, mutilated body during the funeral proceedings because his mother kept the casket open and allowed it to be photographed. “I am innately sad, a dreamer, a very lazy lonely dreamer who wishes the world were a paradise and life but an opium dream,” Chester consoled himself, considering the state of American life and what needed to change for him to live there contentedly.

  The dam burst by the end of September: he had to find work or be thrown out of his room. Everything, including his typewriter, was pawned. “The only jobs in New York available to a black writer without recommendations or connections were the menial jobs available to all transients and bums. Which is what I was, I suppose,” he estimated. Joseph Sr., who had described his weariness of life’s torture, by saying “hell is hell,” had faced a similar downfall in his midforties. Chester joined the pool of men on Chambers Street looking for a day’s work washing dishes or wringing a mop. He became a roving afterhours janitor for the Horn and Hardart Automat Cafeteria chain, eventually winding up as permanent staff at the branch on Thirty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. He polished stainless steel and mopped from nine in the evening until six the next morning. He did not merit the sympathy of a letter-writing Willa at all because he got to eat as much as he could hold: three quarts of orange juice in a sitting, dozens of raw eggs, feasts of steak, and whole chickens. Wolfing the food made him feel better and there were other payoffs as well. “I was storing up all the imagination and observations and absurdities which were destined to make my Harlem novels so widely read,” he recounted. Of course Chester needed only to observe himself to recognize a detail of absurdity: on August 15 Berkley Books had brought out its mass-market paperback edition of If He Hollers Let Him Go, and he could have seen his book for sale at busy newsstands throughout New York while he weaved through crowds on his way to his custodian’s job. Berkley had ninety days to pay out the rest of the advance, so he wouldn’t get all of his money until mid-November.

  Willa sent him a chatty note from Rotterdam, with her usual backhanded compliment. “One thing I learned from you is how to live on nothing, darling.” Indeed she would return to Paris, somewhat comfortably, by September with a job as the director’s assistant at the American Hospital, “way out” in the suburb of Neuilly. By then all reminders of Willa were unsatisfactory.

  The problem for Chester was, actually, living on nothing. About a year after the fact, the final disposition of the empty check to Short caught up with him. He would have the judgment summarily passed against him on October 30, at which time the First District Manhattan Municipal Court could take action by garnishing his wages. He had no means to resist the suit, and had in fact been in correspondence with Milton Cooper, Short’s New York attorney, throughout the year. Chester had problems with not only NAL’s The Primitive but also Coward-McCann, which he had asked for a royalty statement and a paperback publication timetable. Of course, there had been no royalties from Cast the First Stone and no plans for a reprint edition with New American Library. After his letter, the accounting department contacted him for payment because “current earnings have not covered the purchases.” Chester was publishing books that almost never earned royalties whatsoever.

  By November 9 the final galleys of The Primitive were ready and Chester was counting down for Berkley to pay him the rest of his paperback advance. It took another four weeks and the assistance of a legal-aid attorney before Berkley issued him a check for $900. “I felt I had to get out of the U.S. and get out fast if I ever wanted to write again,” he wrote reflectively, “because it has been rough and I am getting too old to take it like that anymore.” Forty-six-year-old Chester would collect his money and secure the first ticket on a boat to France.

  The only shipping line operating in December was booked solid, so he waited for a cancellation while he took care of renewing his passport. He bargained in the Bronx for a coat and splurged on a tweed blazer and charcoal brown slacks, to buttress his self-esteem for another trip to New American Library to pick up copies of The Third Generation. NAL had kept World’s hardback cover art for the novel, but they did remove the “cheap, tenement-like effect of the background.” Reinforcing his desire to leave New York, when he stopped by the automat for farewell chow with the other janitors, a drunken white policeman came upon the men, pistol drawn, and accused them of stealing his car. Chester flas
hed his passport, with its youthful clean-shaven picture of him wearing a tie spotted with Nefertiti cameos, and was allowed to escape from the menacing lawman. When he telephoned the shipping line on December 13 at 9:30 P.M., he learned that there had been a cancellation on SS Ryndum out of Hoboken. The boat would sail at midnight. He packed his gear, checked out of the Albert Hotel, wedged the big trunk into a cab, and headed for the New Jersey pier. Walking hard and feeling proud, he was the last person up the gangplank.

  Chester would never again work or reside in the United States. When he thought about the exodus, the final flight from friends, enemies, lovers, critics, and publishers, he knew that his reasons for getting out were simple enough. He left America “just to stay alive.” The flip side of the coin was what he told Constance Webb: if he didn’t leave he would kill someone.

  Chapter Twelve

  A PISTOL IN HIS HAND, AGAIN

  1955–1959

  On December 22, 1955, debonair in his secondhand clothes, Chester Himes arrived in France with $200 in his pocket. After two consecutive seasons of celibacy, Paris was not just a refuge but also a place for a man testing his limits in debauchery and inebriation, a contest that began as soon as he collected his bags at the Gare St.-Lazare and checked into a nearby hotel. Incurious about Willa, he instead accosted women randomly—prostitutes and students—in an alcoholic stupor. “I got America out of my mind,” he reflected, “but in so doing I was rapidly destroying myself.” Pulling himself together, he managed a visit to Editions Plon the day after Christmas, accompanied by Yves Malartic. He learned that Plon wished to execute a contract for The Third Generation for roughly $142, a lowball pitch that he thought “diminished me as an author, and my book, as a work of literature.”