In February he saw a Les Temps Modernes article he liked that had been written by René Micha. “The Parishioners of Chester Himes” praised Chester’s detective books as a technical achievement beyond his earlier fiction. Complimenting Duhamel’s thought concerning the power of the absurd, Micha recommended the books because they were unconcerned with bitter resentment and nineteenth-century moralizing:
a humorous catalog of Harlem painted one could say by a Flemish or a Dutch: which shows in turn the garden of delicacies, the triumph of death, the miracles, the proverbs, the games: not to make horror but to make laughter. More satisfying from the aesthetic point of view than from the moral view: allowing illumination which is not at all from grace, which is from the pittura brillante.
Chester was now officially addressed by the French left intellectual scene, at roughly the same time that he had the economic wherewithal to become something more than a prole. Undeniably on the ascent with his Putnam advance, the largest single payment he had ever received, he started scanning car advertisements, determined finally to purchase the most exclusive of English automobiles, a Jaguar. Now, as he neared completion of the new novel, he rewarded himself with a Greek holiday. Draped in a shantung silk suit and Italian leather shoes, Chester took Lesley to Rhodes on May 1 and then to Crete, where they spent two weeks feasting on roast kid and honey-covered yogurt and puttering around at the excavation of a Heraklean temple. He had his brief moment of luxury appropriate to an Achillean hero.
In the Athens airport, Chester left a manuscript on a seat in the lounge and forgot it while boarding. He never saw it again, although Lesley tried to bolt from the plane to retrieve it. The man known for sending a table load of dishes to the sidewalk when he wasn’t seated quickly enough at a café had become uninspired by physical activity. Lesley would double up on tasks. As Van Peebles would crisply report, there was a strong functional element to the deepening relationship with Lesley: “Chester needed a fucking nurse.”
Chester and Lesley returned to Nice to find Walter and Torun separated and, when they did stumble across the couple, the pair were engaging in bitter, sometimes violent fights. Although Torun had visited Chester at his studio apartment alone, they had remained chaste friends. While at fifty-five he had better control over his sexual impulse, she gave him one final seductive taste: Chester, Lesley, and Torun together sunbathed nude on her terrace. “I hated to give up the pleasure of looking at her,” he wrote after the neighbors complained. Torun left Walter in Nice and drove to Paris with Chester and Lesley, where she planned to return to Sweden. Always fond of the underdog, in Paris Torun met and quickly took up with a young black guitarist from Detroit named Charles who had gone tone-deaf. Meanwhile, Chester and Lesley took another apartment, on Rue d’Assas.
Before the end of winter, Chester could also see that he had something of a hit on his hands with the U.S. publication of Cotton Comes to Harlem. The detective series, which he had considered in the beginning as “cheap,” had won over the critics. The New York Times now decided he had an “extraordinary series.” In Los Angeles, where there would be a catastrophic explosion of violence that summer in Watts, the work was considered beyond simple genre fiction, and likened to the edgy intellectual humor of black comedian and civil rights star Dick Gregory, who also had had a hand in instructing Malcolm X. “More important in this book than its entertainment value is the social comment it makes throughout,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “In this picaresque novel of crime and violence, Himes has employed a plot that enables him to speak out in an oblique way on some of the Negro problems current in this country.” The only problem was that Cotton Comes to Harlem—like the reissued The Heat’s On after it, as well as Run Man Run several years before—sputtered in hardcover sales; what kept him in good graces at Putnam were the paperback deals for these three books, which turned “losses into a modest profit.” Genre fiction aimed at a mass market was destined for paperbacks.
Back in Paris, he and Lesley made themselves comfortable. He was contacted by Bill Targ, his old editor from World, who was now the editor in chief at Putnam, and learned that Targ was marrying a young literary agent. Rosalyn Siegel came to Paris and she and Chester went to dinner, where Chester marveled at the “quick, sharp, sexy” and “good looking blond businesswoman.” He thought that Rosalyn would be fiercely loyal and tireless on his behalf, “just the type of agent I needed.” Almost as surely, she created the terms for a renewed friendship between Chester and Bill Targ, after the Third Generation misfire and the aborted story collection My People, My People in 1954.
Chester traveled to London to pick up his sand-colored 1966 Jaguar MK10. The car cost more than £2000. Within a few days of returning to France he had dinged it up, but this swift (“faster than any car I had ever driven”) large auto that stopped traffic made his point. Success was at hand. Chester and Lesley turned over the new Rue d’Assas apartment to Melvin Van Peebles, who had just won a French award for an original screenplay, the same prize for which Jacques Panijel had tried to submit Une Affaire de viol. Van Peebles would also write a graphic adaptation of La Reine des pommes for the French satirical magazine Hara Kiri, published in June 1966.
Piling their belongings into the luxury car that fall, Chester and Lesley drove to Copenhagen. They rented a town house in Holte, an outpost eighteen miles north of Copenhagen. With his new common-law wife, beautiful car, and cash, Chester succumbed to the more boorish element of his personality. At a succulent meal with a painter named Herb Gentry and his circle of friends, Chester told the crowd that he had not even a dilettante’s concern about the quality of his art or its political dimensions. “I don’t write for money accidentally,” he lectured, “it’s my main purpose.” Continuing, he said that he wrote “just for money, to buy a Jaguar.” His guests had expected a more delicate inspiration, and Chester continued to exalt wealth until everyone felt uncomfortable and left. After so many years with so little to show for it, he refused to apologize for good fortune.
He was also more comfortable with his crude parts. When he and Lesley proudly received a work of art from their friend Romare Bearden, the Harlem-based painter famous for his collages, Chester drowned it in varnish. He similarly ruined a bottle of prime champagne at a party by dumping it into a punch. There was a gauche quality about him, a streak of unsophistication, linked to having been bred in the rural South, and come to adult maturity in prison.
The same ragged edges enabled him to maintain the salacious fawning after Torun, whom Lesley heartily disliked. Nonetheless, he and Lesley took off for a “rugged” Christmas in Sweden with Torun and Charles at Torun’s family’s farm, southeast of Malmö.
When Putnam brought out the novel The Heat’s On in January 1966, Chester received applause. Name recognition, book sales, and the tensions before a summer that would bring more rioting would make this story of a speedball-shooting albino giant appeal to a wider readership than ever before. “In its wild funhouse-mirror way a powerfully contemptuous picture of a venal and vicious world,” clucked Anthony Boucher. Chester’s writing hadn’t gotten better, but the New York Times critic of crime and suspense tales no longer ribbed him for creating hyperboles for European audiences. Back in 1959, unable to ignore Chester, Boucher had erected a special category of disdain for him. “I have a feeling [Chester’s characters] would be denounced as chauvinistic stereotypes if they were written by a white,” he had suggested about The Crazy Kill. In America, if there was no higher praise for a writer born Negro than to claim they had transcended their race, there was no stronger criticism than to claim a black person was demanding the right to do something from which whites were excluded. Typically Boucher had liked to give Himes a slight brace of adjectives: “perverse blend of sordid realism and macabre fantasy-humor”; “shocking, grotesque”; “turbulent, nightmarish, sometimes harshly comic.” But by 1966 Chester’s naturalistic arguments of black bitterness in standard English had pierced white literary circles. Now they began to see Che
ster as “underrated and underpublicized,” and they were willing to understand something else about his work that had been there all along, the point that he “tempers anger with humor.” So Boucher had espied the new land for Himes when he called Cotton Comes to Harlem “the wildest of camps—grotesque, macabre, black humor (using ‘black’ in a quite nonracial sense).”
One of the people reading Boucher’s assessment was the film producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., son of one of the founders of M-G-M. In 1944 Chester’s fortunes had nosedived when Jack Warner determined that “niggers” didn’t belong at his film studio. More than twenty years later, in late fall of 1966, Goldwyn took an option to film Cotton Comes to Harlem. Goldwyn had first come across Chester’s name in a biography of Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond novels, who died in 1964 and had admired Chester Himes. Then Boucher’s swirling adjectives in the New York Times caught his attention, and Goldwyn plucked a few books from the shelves. “I’m convinced they will make superb, unusual thrillers that also will be gallows humor at its best,” Goldwyn told the press after inking the deal in December. Chester was delighted and wrote back to Goldwyn suggesting that he secure Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, America’s angry young black memoirist, to write the screenplay. Although the film industry was notoriously labyrinthine and fickle, especially concerning financial arrangements, if the deal went through, Chester would reap a considerable financial reward.
Lasting fame and financial success had arrived later in life. By now Chester was achy. He checked into a hospital when he got a cold that winter, only to discover that he was really bothered by arthritis. He was hobbling around, unable to carry anything heavier than the groceries, and relying more than ever on Lesley for the necessities of daily life. In 1966 they would go down to La Ciotat, taking a ferry from Sweden and driving through East Germany on their way to Switzerland and France. Chester reunited with Daniel Guérin, rented the main house, Rustique Olivette, where the artists’ colony formerly had been housed, and hosted a “sumptuous feast.” In a warm house with a roaring coal furnace and plenty of bouillabaisse to eat, Chester turned seriously to his latest project, his autobiography; he would poach from what he had already attempted in The Way It Was, the novel describing his relationships with three white women.
Patricia Highsmith wrote him from London, letting him know that she had reviewed Cotton Comes to Harlem for the Times Literary Supplement. Surprisingly to Chester, she began the review by admitting the fact of racism. As an “American Negro, one can understand why he chose to live in France,” she allowed, while noting that he was no longer wielding the “hatred” of If He Hollers Let Him Go days. Now that he was “mellowed,” making money with the detective stories and poking fun at Harlem high society in Pinktoes, Highsmith felt that he had become an artist. While Chester was yet “concerned with the Negro’s plight,” and although “Mr. Himes’s underlying violence is still with him,” he had reached a new plateau for her and those she represented: he was a “novelist.” “It is his value as a writer, and it makes this book a novel, that he jests at all of it, makes stiletto social comments, and keeps his story running at the speed of his Buick ‘Roadmasters’ in the days of yore.” Nearly twenty years later, she wanted to let people know that she knew the kind of car Chester had once driven. In 1965 and 1966, Chester would make almost $50,000, his best earnings ever for a two-year period. Now he was a member of the club, and the independently wealthy Highsmith was solicitous, as she would continue to be for the rest of the decade.
The spring at La Ciotat was pleasant, with trips to see a jazz band led by Roger Luccioni and slurp crème de cassis cocktails on a yacht owned by Roger’s father, the proprietor of a large Bandol estate. Chester was visited by Alan Albert, a Jewish French writer who had published critiques in Présence Africain and masqueraded as a black person, apparently a ploy to help him publish a novel. Daniel Guérin took Chester and Lesley to swank restaurants along the coast and Chester was “beginning to enjoy France for the first time.” New followers took inspiration from his work. A young black New Yorker named Kristin Hunter wrote a novel about housing exploitation called The Landlord and dedicated it to Chester. Closer to the urban turmoil that would engulf America shortly, the young black Chicago poet Don L. Lee, a legend in the making, published a poem “Understanding but Not Forgetting,” that was “about my mother whom I didn’t understand but / She read Richard Wright and Chester Himes and / I thought they were bad books.” Chester’s years priming the pump for black activist-artists had begun to yield results as he moved ever further from the fray. Later in 1966, he and Lesley rented a mud-walled two-story farmhouse in Aix-en-Provence, where they were surrounded by the lush French countryside and a town teeming with cafés and well-stocked food stores plentiful with wine. “It was the first time I had really lived as I wanted,” he remembered.
Living as he wanted and dealing with the arthritis and tooth troubles made him more cantankerous. Chester could be generous from time to time, like when the old-timer Jay Clifford stopped by for a drink, but was mean with everybody else. Carl Van Vechten had warned John Williams back in 1962 that “people say bad things about [Chester] because he doesn’t like most people and he shows it,” but Chester was living up to his reputation and the friendship with Williams, who had been slated to visit Chester in Paris in late October 1965 but had a travel mix-up, would soon suffer. Walter Coleman came by for the big catered feast of New Year’s 1966 with his new Polish wife, but Chester’s attitude showed brittle disappointment. Now he feared his creativity and work ethic were lost. After the days of writing with his typewriter on his knees in a car, or in longhand at a café, he now brooded listlessly in his ample studio, trying to compose, but “nothing jelled.” He found that the thrill of writing the racially explosive work had waned once he had landed better deals and had domestic tranquility. “Once upon a time I could run across a sentence in If He Hollers Let Him Go, or For Love of Imabelle that would thrill me like writing them had. But no more. I was thrilled by driving my Jaguar 125 miles per hour.”
Chester’s anxiety extended to the screenplay he was sweating over for the film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem. Goldwyn had written him that he wanted more from the novel’s villain Deke O’Malley, “a wonderful character.” “As I’m sure you know,” the producer advised Chester, “this kind of melo-dramatic movie is often as good as the villains in it are.” Goldwyn also felt strongly drawn to the commingling “quality of violence and wacky humor with its underlying seriousness.” If Chester didn’t want to botch the possibility of making the film, with its possible payday and acclaim, he would have to continue to work on the screenplay.
Taking a break from his obligations, Chester plotted a speedy trip to Spain, where he sought relief from the French winter. It was also an excuse to get into the Jaguar and drive. In a journey of notable scenic beauty, he and Lesley sped down the Spanish coast, walked into Gibraltar, and then hurried back to Aix. Chester seemed on the verge of living the life of a successful tourist. But in April 1967 he had a characteristic experience in France that sweetened his thoughts about the Spanish countryside. He went to the dentist, who, before making any inquiries, pulled his front tooth, which had had serious and costly recuperative work. When he learned that the patient was the famous writer Chester Himes, the dentist apologized for resorting to methods reserved for the indigent. Chester felt the sting of being a black man in France. “That was my entire life in France; I was treated like a nigger until the natives recognized me and then I became a celebrity and the natives tried to make up for the damage they had inflicted.”
As before, he needed the resources of home. He arrived alone in New York on May 2 for dental work and business. Chester had all of his teeth pulled after the dentist confirmed their poor condition. Looking as if he had gone a few rounds in a boxing ring, Chester awaited his dentures and stared into the utter erosion of his youth and vitality. When the false teeth arrived in June, they cut into his gums for
a couple of days, but he was pleased with the job.
Also that spring, the New York Times Book Review, which he considered his nemesis, solicited a couple of paragraphs describing which of his books he would most enjoy rereading. Always eager for U.S. press, Chester had responded with alacrity. His reply was in the June 4 edition, along with others from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Isaac Bashevis Singer, and John Updike. In what was Chester’s last essay for the highly literate American public, who saw little of the social critiques he had published in France in the early part of the decade, he would claim, “It has always been my opinion that we American Negroes are one of the most sophisticated people in the history of mankind.” He defined his terms: sophisticated as in deprived of original simplicity, complicated, refined, subtle. Chester boosted his new favorite among his works, The Primitive, and punished Willa and her class in the process. He had written the book “while living with an American woman socialite, graduate of Smith College, descendant of the Pilgrims, in a state of near destitution . . . on the hot, dirty square at the foot of the steps in Deya, Mallorca.” If The Primitive had not fully reached an American audience, he would yet find a way to drag America’s best and brightest through his own brand of blackjack mud.
Chester had reversed the stereotype. “Believing that this cultured woman with whom I lived and this other white woman of whom I wrote were more primitive than I, it amused me to write this book, and it still amuses me to read it,” he offered. He gloated about having the affair in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. He cast whites like Willa Thompson and Vandi Haygood as primitives. “Being largely autobiographical (I did not kill the white woman, however gladly I might have), the book acted as a catharsis, purging me of all mental and emotional inhibitions that restricted my writing.” But with the climate in the United States boiling—urban riots that summer of 1967 would be put down by Vietnam-hardened paratroopers in a situation like the French in the Algerian capital in 1956—Chester’s representation of black frustration leading to homicide now made perfect sense. The junior staffer who solicited his reply wrote him back delighted by the “superb” comment. As America swiveled toward its year of public death and conflagration, Chester’s previously considered outrageous observations on American culture were becoming practical common sense.
Chester B. Himes Page 49