Chester Himes (32 page)

One conversation between Wright and Himes concerning European publishers Himes must have taken to heart and recalled often in later years, especially as he was at this time (with the assistance of Ellen Wright as agent) challenging the publishing firm Corêa over royalties for
La Croisade de Lee Gordon
, Corêa insisting that the novel, despite an estimable critical success, had not sold enough to earn its $250 advance.

“Get all you can for an advance, boy,” he said. “That's all you'll ever get.” He went on to say that none of his books had ever earned more, according to the publishers' accounts, than the advance; and in the case of one, his Italian publisher, he'd had to go to Rome and sit in the publisher's waiting room until he was paid his advance. “I sat there for two days,” he said, “and whenever anyone came in to see the editor I would ask, “Are you trying to get your money too?” They paid me to get me out of there.”
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Himes's experiences would prove similar, even if, for many years of his life, books largely out of print in his homeland, it was upon those very European advances and royalties that he subsisted. His last act before leaving France for London in July would be to challenge publisher Albin Michel over royalties for
If He Hollers;
Annie Brièrre went along as translator.

From the first Himes was unusually clear-eyed about Wright, deeply respectful of him while at the same time freely acknowledging his humorlessness, his fussiness over small matters, his arrogance and affectations. Seeming instinctively to realize the importance of maintaining an emotional distance between them, Chester seemed also to be constantly aware of Wright's personal history and the ways in which it had shaped him; this was not a concession Himes vouchsafed many others in his life.

Himes's admiration for his senior emerges clearly in a 1963 interview with Michel Fabre. Wright, Himes insists, wrote exactly what he wanted to write. He never wrote for anyone but himself, spinning plots and characters out of his own emotions and inner life, wholly uninfluenced by others. Himes might have been speaking of himself, of course, and as though indeed aware of the self-reflective quality of his remarks, adds
that what Wright liked most about him, Chester, was his inner toughness. His remarks on Wright's expatriation in that same interview reflect on Himes's own European expectations. Wright wanted, Himes held, to be a part of the bourgeoisie, wanted to achieve a place in French society consummate with his ambition and reputation, and when late in life he discovered this not to be possible, he became somewhat aimless and adrift. This was about the time of
The Long Dream
, Himes says, and occasioned Wright's return in that work to his Mississippi—American—past.
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Surely it requires a certain acrobatics of both expectation and thought to envision finding a place in foreign society when unable to possess or forge such a place in one's own. Initially Wright trusted that his work and presence would create,
ex nihilo
, such a place. Otherwise his approach was adaptive; he went native, became, in effect, a Frenchman, moving easily through every level of intellectual and daily life. Himes's approach by contrast, as in so much else, was headlong, combative. He always came to the ring expecting cheers, cheers he rightfully should have gotten, and when he didn't get them, began snarling and snapping contumaciously at the audience.

Then, suddenly, Willa was there. They had been writing one another daily throughout the three weeks spent apart, but somehow she'd not been real, not been truly
remembered
by Chester, until he spoke with her two days before her arrival, at which time he felt himself resoundingly in love with her. He sought and found somewhat better rooms, one for each of them, in a hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens. Wright, who had decided that Willa had to be little more than a tramp and made no effort to conceal his contempt, came along with Chester to meet her train. When eventually the couple got away from Wright, they went directly to bed.

What mattered to her was she had lost herself in the darkness of my race. She had hid from all her hurts and humiliations. In a strange and curious way, by becoming my mistress, the mistress of a man who'd never been entirely free, she had freed herself. That is a curious thing about race relations. We can free the white man's women, and they can find freedom in us, but we cannot free ourselves.
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Unlike Wright, the Malartics took instantly to Willa, offering the use of their getaway villa in Arcachon. Himes gratefully accepted, receiving from Yves and Yvonne three pages of instructions, a
petite encyclopédie
Arcachon covering everything from keys and electric meters to where and when to put out trash, the best butcher shop, who might be loaned books from the villa's library. Lugging as always his oversize trunk (for which he routinely had to pay extra: “more for carrying that trunk around with me on European trains than I paid for house rent during my first two years abroad”
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), Himes struck out one early morning by third-class carriage with Willa beside him. They arrived just after seven that evening. Chester was much relieved to be away from the contestations and boulevarderie of Paris. Here, he wrote, it was “peaceful and warm and friendly—the way one hopes the world would be.”
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Arcachon is in southwest France, on the coast just west of Bordeaux in the Bay of Biscay. Originally a modest stucco building with bedroom, combination living-dining room and multifunction shedlike structure out back, the villa itself had been built up and onto until it now resembled “a typical summer camp in Sullivan County, New Jersey, except that the living room contained a roll top desk and several worn leather armchairs and the walls were lined with books in several languages.”
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Willa and Himes quickly and easily settled in. They swam, ate oysters and seafood, and drank quantities of the local wine, lounged in cafés and restaurants, painted the Malartic's boat, watched fishermen plod up and down the dirt streets, and tended the flea-ridden, pregnant cat Mrs. Moon, who came with the house, as well as her mate, a battle-scarred, scabby tom with missing teeth known as M. Berdoulas.

“When it was learned that I was a writer in addition to being a black American,” Chester wrote, “I was treated with the awed deference accorded a zombie.”
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Children came to stare when he and Willa sat together on the beach, blushing and giggling when Willa spoke to them in her perfect French. Townspeople never spoke directly to Chester, addressing their remarks (Does Monsieur like seafood? Does Monsieur have money?) instead to Willa. They also vied for the couple's business. In one instance, to prove that her catch was the fresher, one of two competing fish merchants let loose an eel which bounded across the road, through the fence, and away.

Himes is often at his best when describing such Innisfrees: the desert ranchhouse he and Jean shared in California, the Newton, New Jersey, lakefront resort and Stamford, Connecticut, farm where he worked as caretaker. In such idylls words to the effect of “best [or happiest] time of my life” are likely to appear, and he writes movingly of the people, animals, the pace of life, seasons, nature itself. Fully nineteen pages of
The Quality of Hurt
are given over to Arcachon where, essentially, nothing happened.

All in all, our two months there had been exquisitely happy and satisfying, and for a short time I had become completely free of my soul brothers' envy and jealousy and intrigues, and my fellow countrymen's obsession with the “Negro problem.”
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While there, Chester received galleys for
The Third Generation
from Bill Targ and, at Targ's suggestion, trying to buck up dramatic impact, rewrote the final chapter. He and Willa began working together on her autobiographical novel
The Silver Altar
. (Himes also referred to the book as
The Silver Chalice
and
The Golden Chalice
.
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) In early June Himes forwarded a portion of this novel to Targ, identifying Willa only as a writer staying temporarily in Arcachon; a larger portion followed, from London, that September. Willa and Himes, believing it to be very commercial, had high expectations for the book. They planned to publish under Willa's name, taking full advantage of that and of her social status, with every expectation of tapping the women's market and perhaps even selling movie rights. When Targ disliked the book and promptly returned it, they were shaken. Nevertheless, there in the secluded seaside villa, exposed continually to Willa's kind, adaptable manner, Chester conceived new respect and admiration for her.

On the first of July, they left Arcachon, initially intending to go to Daniel Guérin's writers' colony at La Ciotat, where the Wrights had sponsored Chester's stay for the months of July and August, considering for a time Majorca, where Vandi's ex-husband William Hay-good then lived, at length deciding instead to resettle in London and turn their full attention to Willa's novel.

It is very difficult to say what Himes was looking for or what he hoped to find with his move to Europe. Certainly to some extent he believed that he might be fleeing racism and, like Baldwin, his frightening reactions to the same. Probably he believed that he could live more cheaply there. He may also have thought that, with Wright and his circle in place, he stood a chance of becoming part of a community of artists, something from which he seemed forever excluded in the States. There was, too, the possibility, if not of status, then at least of official validation for his work. Early interest in his novels suggested such a possibility; as with many other American writers abroad, it wasn't so much that Himes expected to be taken to be important as that he was gratified just to be noticed. Perhaps, finally, the move to Europe was Himes reverting to his gambling days: a simple roll of the dice. For years, whenever things became intolerable, his solution was to withdraw, to strike camp and move along. Italo Svevo has character Zeno say, “I honestly believe that I have always needed to be in the middle of an adventure, or of some complication that gives the illusion of one.”
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So it was, one suspects, with Himes. He seems to have needed adventure, craved complication; his solutions often worked only to create new and further difficulties. Was the move to Europe but the grandest of many self-deceptions? As Maugham wrote in
The Summing Up
, disparities between appearance and reality are the fount of all art; they become addictive, wonderfully diverting habits, those disparities, and one is apt when he cannot easily find them to create them.

Himes and Willa arrived in London on July 7, spending the first night in a hotel near the train station, where Willa was chased down the hall by an apparent madman, after losing their passports. The next day, seeking rooms, they made rounds of rental agencies (from
the number of vacancies listed, Himes said, it seemed as though half of London were uninhabited) and were sent to interview with Mrs. Mather, “a tall, thin, impressively bony woman with hair and face of such indistinguishable whiteness as to create the effect of some nocturnal cereus blooming in the black-dark chair.”
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The interview took place in an ice-cold, pitch-dark, musty-smelling parlor, securely curtained against the corrosive effects of the gray daylight and hermetically sealed against poisonous outside air, which the true Londoner breathes only when sleeping.
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Nonetheless, they took the four-room basement flat, even after Mrs. Mather stacked deposits, cleaning, laundry, and telephone fees atop the quoted rental. Presently they discovered her practice of tiptoeing down the stairs to close windows whenever, trying for a bit of breathable air, they opened them. She would descend “soundlessly, her garments billowing as though from an updraft, emerging from the perpetual gloom of the staircase like the last of the Shakespearean ghosts,”
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and close windows to keep out the damp when it rained, to keep out cats in fair weather, and on bright days to keep out sunshine. While about it, she'd read their mail.

By the end of the first week Mrs. Mather, perhaps acting upon complaints from other tenants, had taken to trying to evict Himes and Willa, first with an appeal concerning relatives who required the rooms then with threats of legal action, but they held her to the contract she herself had insisted upon their signing. The couple left only after she capitulated and agreed to return deposits. Next they found lodging in a home owned by two ancient Polish sisters in Glenmore Road in Hampstead, a flat of two rooms with a separate attic kitchen, where they settled to work on the tale of Willa's love affair and nervous breakdown in Switzerland. Willa would turn out page after page in the sitting room of the flat proper while Chester reworked it into chapters in the little attic kitchen above, adding material on her background and sexual awakening with the apparent intent of transforming it from personal memoir to psychosexual history. Both still believed that the book had solid best-seller potential. For relaxation they walked to Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill, Swiss Cottage, Jack
Straw's Castle. They often visited the Regent's Park Zoo, took cards at the local library on Finchley Road, sampled Soho nightlife and the occasional show in the West End, took in classic movies at Everyman's Theatre. Afterward, Willa remembered their time there in what Chester called “this big ugly and dismal city”
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fondly.

They finished the book, 520 pages of manuscript, in mid-December, and though pleased at their accomplishment and happy to have it done with, were also completely out of money. Chester pawned his typewriter, Willa her wedding ring. She had assumed Chester from his outward style and manner to have plenty of money while he, characteristically, never broached the subject. They had both put their faith, though perhaps to different ends, in Willa's book. Rejected by Targ, the manuscript went next to an editor at Macmillan; it was finally published years later by Beacon Press, retitled
Garden Without Flowers
, in a shorter version with, apparently, all Himes's emendations excised.
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