Chester Himes (14 page)

Anyway, I went out to Hollywood—Los Angeles—where I met Hall Johnson and a number of other black people on the fringes of the movie industry … Most of them were connected with the Communist Party. I saw these people and then I got involved also with the Communists out there.
¹⁰

One Party project involved collecting used clothing from wealthy Hollywood patrons. Proceeds from sale of these donations supposedly went to refugee camps for those uprooted by the Spanish Civil War, but the collectors (perhaps more in touch with Communist reality than theory) as often as not wound up appropriating the finery
for themselves. “I had more expensive clothes then than I've ever had since,”
¹¹
Himes remarked in a letter to Williams. Chester and a companion made the pickups at huge Hollywood estates where well-wishers would set them up with a few drinks in the kitchen. Sure, it was all for one and one for all, Himes said, laughing—but that didn't mean they got out of the kitchen!

I swear to God, my material for writing
Lonely Crusade
came from these experiences. I met these people. And the CIO union there was beginning to print a newspaper. At the same time I had been considered for a place on the staff. But, you see, the communists were also playing a game. They wanted people like me to help break the color line. I was a tool: they wanted to send me to thousands of places that had no intention of employing blacks at that time because Los Angeles was a very prejudiced place and the only jobs black people had were in the kitchens in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
¹²

Believing it to be as exploitative in its own way as capitalism, if in a somewhat different manner, Himes grew increasingly cynical toward the Communist Party, and his final connections shattered with the Party's condemnation of
Lonely Crusade
, published in 1947.

Milliken contends that the articles Himes published between 1942 and 1945 “leave no doubt at all as to the completeness of his own commitment at that time to a social philosophy that was frankly idealistic and totally optimistic.”
¹³
The important words here, the ones that go by so fast you hardly notice them, are
at that time
. For there's much in the stridency of these articles, as there is in the very structure of
Lonely Crusade
, to suggest a man talking himself into something. Himes may have been reacting like the rest of the country, of course, to wartime camaraderie and factitious optimism, though neither his letters and memories of the time nor the self-questioning themes of
If He Hollers
or
Lonely Crusade
support that idea. The sense once again is more that of the fitting of a new, if temporary, self. Himes always wrote like some manic actor preparing for a part, spurring himself to the task, forever raising the stakes, as though he knows that in order to maintain momentum and intensity he has to jack reality up several notches and keep it there.

“He was, as always,” Milliken reminds us, “a creature of extremes, and one set of preoccupations or one particular orientation never seemed to exclude another, even the most apparently incompatible.”
¹⁴
Himes liked a new suit of clothes as much as the next man, so for a time he could be seen in public wearing political tracts and mawkish stories. Making sure, just as in his college days, that he was turned out well.

Some apprehension of knife's-edge truth may have attracted him to this work as well. In all of Himes's writing there is a sense of gospel—of truth-telling,
word
in current slang—held in delicate balance with despair, one hauling furniture downstairs on its back as the other hauls it up. Specific gospel, word, or writ would change; would be abandoned, turned in for some new model. The despair and disillusionment remained the same. They'd come back onstage in patched old clothes, telling the same crusty jokes (“Then we must hang ourselves immediately”), and what else could you do but listen, laugh and, afterward, cry?

As Himes's articles grew more strident and posturing in this period, so too did the stories. In “All He Needs Is Feet” (1943) a black man, because he will not step off the sidewalk to let a white couple pass, has his feet doused with gasoline and set afire and consequently loses them. At the end of the story another white man becomes enraged when the man fails to stand for the playing of the national anthem at a movie theater, even though it is pointed out that he has no feet. In “Christmas Gift” (1944) a father and husband returning decorated from the war is senselessly beaten to death by two white sheriff's deputies who refer to him only as “the Stevens nigger.”

With stories like these, and with the far more accomplished “All God's Chillun Got Pride” (also 1944), Himes began to edge toward his belief that racism is so endemic to American society, so much at its heart, that nothing short of programmed violence could ever erase it. This Himes is very close to the Himes of the Harlem novels, to the fulminating culmination of
Blind Man with a Pistol
and the apocalyptic “final” Harlem novel
Plan B
. Pitting Grave Digger and Coffin Ed against one another,
Plan B
tells the story of that necessary programmed violence: America's second revolution. Left unfinished at Himes's death, it has been ably completed by novelist and Himes scholar Robert Skinner.

Soon with
If He Hollers
, all these strains, Himes's own experiences in the L.A. shipyards and unions, his growing concern with racism as crippling and ubiquitous, the slow, inevitable failure of his marriage, would come together. Scooping up all of the promised land's iciness, Himes threw it in America's face, a snowball with the hard, hard rock of racism at its core.

Not to put too keen an edge of romance on the thing, most writers by virtual definition are social if not metaphysical outlaws. They don't make much money, they keep peculiar hours and habits; their very choice of profession makes for a lifestyle and a way of relating to the world that are rather outside the norm. This person living in a cheap room somewhere, burrowed in and obsessively trying to do what he does best, is necessarily at odds with much of the culture around him. As Frederic Exley, a man who knew better than most, pointed out, not only the act of writing but the enterprise itself sets one apart: “The malaise of writing—and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise—is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman.”
¹⁵

Writers, then, like many artists, choose to stand sideways to mainstream culture. All too often hardship and poverty, along with solitude, become part of the fallout they accept. Perhaps, too, they instinctively recognize that often the best work is done by outsiders, by those such as Tocqueville who move between cultures, by self-exiles such as Joyce and Beckett, or by those who stand so apart from their culture by temperament and perspective that effectively they become outsiders within it.

In contemporary American culture where the writer becomes ever more marginal, it's important to recall just
how
marginal a writer like Himes, a black ex-convict writing novels on themes and in manners no one seemed prepared to confront, was. Himes stood apart from America's bounty long before he departed from America itself. For much of his life he lived on air, shuttling between cheap rooms or apartments and houses lent him by others, a chronic borrower (Ruth Seid recalls) as early as his Federal Writers' Project days. Even Joe spoke of Chester's habit of using people, especially women, without the least embarrassment or remorse. His early books earned little by way of advances;
Cast the First Stone
went begging for years;
The
Primitive
knocked on door after door; most of the Harlem books appeared solely as cheap paperback originals in the States. Only late in life, with
Pinktoes
, movie sales and a steady income from foreign editions—even while his works were out of print in his own country—did Himes achieve some measure of comfort.

“Dirty deals were Himes' lot,” Calvin Hernton wrote in his introduction to the
Collected Stories
, “and he was consistently robbed. Broke most of his career, he was easy prey for the exploitative advance. Such was the situation with several of his nine Harlem novels … He wrote these novels quickly and sold them (practically gave them away) just as quickly, because he badly needed whatever money he could get.”
¹⁶
In rhetoric reminiscent of his principal, Ishmael Reed remembers “the piddling advances, the racist distribution and promotional policies, the sleazy covers, and dumb jacket copy” that dogged Himes's career that “make the promotional abilities of his publishers seem a step below those of the man who hawks hot dogs at the football game.”
¹⁷

Claiming to be the lowest-paid writer on the face of the earth (“It's pitiful, you know, it's really pitiful, pitiful”), in a 1970 interview Himes told John A. Williams that again and again publishers had paid him a thousand-dollar flat fee, then turned around and sold rights for ten times that.

Typical of many others, this interview is a
corrida
, an invitation to perform. Anyone often interviewed knows the tedium of repeating the same things yet again. Responses become reflex, formulaic, harden into icons. At the same time there's an innate hyperbole to the whole process. Rooms become ever larger, situations more intense, moments of personal adventure more pointed. Himes approached interviews as opportunities for aggrandizement, as well he should—but also as another kind of fiction. He used interviews, as he used his work, for purposes of self-definition, to push shadows out of the circle, to hold the forces of self together. He is signifying, yes, but signifying around that hard knot of truth at the heart of the thing.

Williams: Now wait a minute, Chester, people have known you since the forties. They know everything that you produced and they offered you a thousand-dollar advance for each of these three books?

Himes: Oh, yes, that's what they paid, a thousand-dollar advance.

Williams: Goddamn!

Himes: You talk about double standards. I find this quite annoying. Y'know, I have been in desperate circumstances financially, which everybody has known and they've just taken advantage of this—friends and enemies and everybody alike.
¹⁸

Back home, Williams tells him, young black writers always say Chester Himes has given away more books than most people have written.

Himes: Now, I couldn't find a publisher for
The Primitive
. I was very broke and desperate for some money, and I finally thought that I would send it to Weybright because they had begun to publish originals. So I sent it to Weybright, and Weybright wrote me this long letter about how we'll pay you a thousand-dollar advance on this because we feel it's best for the author to have a small advance and have substantial accruals [laughter]. I'll never forget that phrase. I never got any accruals, substantial or otherwise, from that book [laughter].
¹⁹

Moving from job to job, writing when he could, Himes, a man who had difficulty keeping his balance at the best of times, tottered at the edge there at the edge of the continent, playing off his charge as husband and breadwinner against a compulsion to make his way and earn fame as a writer. Working in California for low wages at a succession of jobs he hated among people he considered bigots, Himes must have felt he was in training for a lifetime of mere subsistence. Whatever feelings of inadequacy or impending failure he harbored were intensified when Jean became employed, at much higher wages, as codirector of women's activities for the eighteen Los Angeles area USOs, and Himes's frustrations, for all the new ease of their life together, mounted. They lived in a comfortable house on a hill in the City Terrace area. Himes worked at the San Pedro shipyard and, after hours, at the writing of
If He Hollers
. His always vulnerable pride had taken a big hit, and thirty years later, when he wrote of it briefly in
The Quality of Hurt
, this still stung.

It hurt me for my wife to have a better job than I did and be respected and included by her white co-workers, besides rubbing elbows with many well-to-do blacks of the Los Angeles middle class who wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole. That was the beginning of the dissolution of our marriage. I found that I was no longer a husband to my wife; I was her pimp. She didn't mind, and that hurt all the more.
²⁰

Himes's feelings toward women were deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, reared as he was to middle-class values, he believed it was the man's place to provide for and protect his woman. There loomed, however, the foundering, confounding example of his father. Built into that responsibility, too, was the desire to have women dependent upon him. On the other hand, for much of his life, in order to continue writing he used women, living off them (as Joe emphasized) just as he lived off and used others. Himes always claimed that his and Jean's separation, when it came in 1952, arose from his inability to bear being supported by his wife. In reality it was another manifest of what we see often in Himes's life, some long-smoldering ember suddenly bursting into flame—like people consumed by spontaneous combustion in Charles Brockden Brown novels.

Chester did what writers too often must do, staying home to tend his small garden, becoming ever more inward in his self-obsession and ever more misanthropic, while Jean, flourishing, sallied out into the world. In his first novel Chester would lampoon the very people, those liberal whites and middle-class blacks, among whom she now made her life. Later still, with a slight dramatic pause before the word, a kind of catch, he would hint at the “friends” who had made all this possible for her, and of what
she
had made possible for them.