Chester Himes (36 page)

There in New York in 1955 Himes peered into newspapers and watched the streets to see what might come of all this. Driven by newly aroused social expectations as much as by personal failure, he grew furious at the invidious racism about him: white cab drivers who refused to take black citizens to Harlem or to pick them up at all, restaurants denying service to black customers by simply refusing to see them, publishers turning away books by black writers. This confirmed everything Himes felt pacing across the bare floors of his heart. He sought out argument, confrontation, wrung dissembling's neck. Sat in his “solitary room at the top of the Hotel Albert, where, except for the occasional sounds of revelry from my neighbors, I felt as remote from civilization as though I lived atop the Himalayas”
²⁷
and went into the streets like some anchorite down from his mountain, amazed at what he saw and forever apart from it. Ascetic? Scourged, rather. And if nothing human was alien to him, neither was it, now, a part of him. Chester Himes had seceded.

He had been trying for some time to obtain an overdue advance from Berkley Books for its reprint of
If He Hollers
. Finally he appealed to the Authors' Guild, who straightened it out with a phone call. Himes went directly from the Berkley offices to a bank where he
exchanged the publisher's thousand-dollar check for traveler's checks, and from there to the Holland America Line to book second-class passage for France. A week before departing, he had dropped by Van Vechten's to have his photograph, the one that eventually appeared on the cover of
The Quality of Hurt
, taken. “How I could appear so young and happy I will never know,” Chester said.
²⁸

The S.S.
Ryndam
sailed at midnight on December 14. In Himes's luggage were a new tweed overcoat for windy, raw Paris days, a brown and black tweed jacket, and charcoal brown slacks that would be a “second skin” for him, and newly printed copies of
The Primitive.
²⁹

The book's back cover read: “This is a powerful novel about a white woman and an embittered Negro man, each a misfit in his own world, whose desperate effort to find love ended in a nightmare of drink and debauchery.” Three brief lines were quoted from a longish blurb Van Vechten had provided: “… immense flow of intensity and passion; it must have been written at white heat.” Inside were ads for a Herbert Gold book, for Ann Petry's interracial novel
The Narrows
, for
Invisible Man
and
The Outsider
, and for Hubert Creekmore's saga of three generations of a Southern Negro family,
The Chain in the Heart
. It was Signet book #1264, and sold for thirty-five cents.

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and translate the passions which are its material.”
¹

T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and Individual Talent”—and by Eliot's standards, Chester Himes might have been the very image of the imperfect artist.

But Eliot, for all the modernist trappings of his work, emerged from essentially late-Romantic notions wherein that conjunction of “perfect” and “artist” went unquestioned, a conjunction more likely, in our skeptical era, to bring knowing smiles. We might also suggest at this remove, apprised of the facts of his life, that Mr. Eliot plays hide-and-seek here, expressing in terms of general criticism something of the mask of propriety, of the life, he so carefully constructed for himself.

Deep underground rivers connect the pools of fiction and autobiography. The writer uses what he can retrieve from the physical world around him, bits of string and cloth, twigs, straw, plastic, to build his nest. As capital he has his own life, what he has read and thought, the people he has known—and whatever accrues from his investments of same. The rub comes with how this contiguity is to be interpreted and according to what bias, whether, indeed, it should be of serious critical interest at all. There's little doubt, however, that at some level this opportunity to re-create oneself and one's world proves a major drive toward creative work. And one major attraction for the thematically minded reader may be those glimpses he catches of the author peeking out from behind the pillars and lean-to porches of his work.

Himes's work invites, insists upon, such speculation, even if, as Michel Fabre said of
A Case of Rape
, the reader attempting to construe what he reads as autobiographical repeatedly gets shunted back from actual events into the world of fiction.
²
But this is what the artist always does: with select strokes taken from life, a figure, light on broken glass, the sounds of a street, he builds a facsimile of one small corner of life, a facsimile which is clearly not a model
of
, but modeled
from
; an abstraction, a recombining and reclothing, a representation.

David Lodge stands among those believing that just such transformation and investiture are at the heart of being a novelist.

Faced with two versions of the same story, one historical and one fictional, most people in our culture will tend to regard the former as more “real,” hence more meaningful; but the novelist is someone who believes the opposite—otherwise he wouldn't go to the trouble of writing fiction. These fictions, however, have the superficial appearance of the historical, and the novelist works his effect partly by concealing the seams that join what he has experienced to what he has researched or invented.
³

Thinking of the early novels and most especially of
The Primitive
, a novel he greatly admires, John A. Williams with some justification calls Chester Himes our single greatest naturalist writer. Few others approach the acuity of structure and focus he reaches in
If He Hollers
and
The Primitive
. And Himes continues well into the Harlem cycle, even as his tales become increasingly fabulist, to shadow actualities of the world alongside co-opted elements of his own biography on the screen. Yet he is from the first an artist forever trying for, reaching for, grappling his way toward
more
, a writer beating at whatever walls would contain him—if not upon every occasion to satisfyingly aesthetic ends, then always to interesting ones.

Himes is preeminently a writer who is fully aware of the gap that separates art from life, of the permanent incapacity of art to capture fully the complexity of life itself. His style can veer sharply from soberly conventional naturalism to the most radical extremes of surrealism. He is forever seeking the form
that will fit, and he never denies to his characters the full range of contradictions that he finds in himself.
⁴

Seeking the form that will fit
. Fit the historical facts of his life and the realer “fictional” ones, fit his ever-stronger vision of the American Negro's absurd life, a life in which horror and comedy blend so completely it becomes difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. The American Negro is something that has not existed before, a new man, Himes insisted, and the old forms to express his life would no longer do—these must be new as well. So by sheer force of will and intuition Himes pushes forward into unmapped territory, grapples his way hand over hand from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, toward those new forms. For the journey he has set himself there are no guides, no trails, no markers. And for this very reason, Milliken holds, for the very boldness of his ambition, this variety, this wildness, few writers resist classification as persistently as Himes:

Chester Himes has always been above all else a man who does not take advice. His work is totally innocent of the smooth, professional polish of the writer who has been told ad nauseum, to the point of final belief … that you simply cannot do everything at once, that art involves choice, that final solutions have been found to many writing problems, that models that work do exist, and that in the end every writer must submit himself to the exigencies and expectancies of the typical cultivated reader. Chester Himes never even entertained the notion that his writing could be more effective if it were motivated by anything other than pure Himesian impulse and instinct. His work is ferociously idiosyncratic.
⁵

In the most engaged and forceful contemporary writing, Maurice Blanchot perceives a shift from the genre dominating the European novel, that of the novel of formation or
Bildungsroman
, to the
récit
. Sequential, autobiographical, moored in time, this historical genre has as its concern verisimilitude and “the world of the usual sort of truth.” The
récit
by contrast is unmindful of verisimilitude, antigeneric, ahistorical. It is not, Blanchot maintains, the narration of an event but the event itself, ever changing, ever in the process of becoming—the
process of thought rather than thought's reiteration—marked by the violence of its own internal transformations and, because it takes place at borderlines, as a voice for all that is excluded from the static worlds to either side where papers are always in order, forever contestatory in stance.
⁶

Such a reading follows close upon George Lukács's definition of the genre of the traditional novel as one of accommodation in which, by accumulation of experience, exposure to received wisdom and a generalized process of acculturation, the problematic individual becomes reconciled to society at large.
⁷

Or as Himes puts it in
The Primitive:

No more worrying about what's right and what's wrong. Just what's expedient. You're human now. Went in the back door of the Alchemy Company of America a primitive, filled with things called principles, integrity, honor, conscience, faith, love, hope, charity and such, and came out the front door a human being, completely purged. End of a primitive; beginning of a human. Good title for a book but won't sell in America.
⁸

This genre of the traditional novel as described by Blanchot and Lukács, of course, presupposes commonalities of belief and lifestyle that may no longer apply. And the movement of modern literature itself, in its break with or extension of tradition, has been away from an assumption that the world is transparent and thus available to lucid thought and language, to assuming that the world is opaque.

Himes's development is consonant with all this.
The Primitive
begins in earnest Himes's abandonment of the logical, sequential world that culminates in the Harlem cycle with what H. Bruce Franklin has described as an unraveling of the mystery genre. Classic genre figurations, along with its basis in accepted social forms and the application of reason, progressively give way to portraits of nightmarish characters and strings of incidents related more by resonance and rude poetics than causally, concluding on an image of absurdist impotence as Himes's detectives stand helplessly by in the midst of a citywide riot shooting rats.

Structuralists like Tzvetan Todorov would insist that any story is adumbrated in its first sentences, exfoliating from some central
impulse; and that the mystery, a species of grail quest narrative, unlike adventure tales that proceed horizontally along lines of plot, action, and sequence, proceeds vertically through repeated events, echoes, aspects. Each fictive motion encompasses also the attempt to penetrate to the material's secret, its hidden truth, so that finally the story that is being told and the story that is telling become images of one another.

Just so is Himes's development as a writer adumbrated in his earliest work, in the dream sequences that structure
If He Hollers
, in the rage and murderous madness of
Lonely Crusade'
s Luther McGregor and Lester McKinley, and so does it continue exfoliating in
A Case of Rape's
relativism, in the gravitational pull of history therein, in the farce and fantasy (no longer earthbound) of
Pinktoes
, in the city as stage for violence and transformation emerging through the early detective novels.
The Primitive
, this neglected masterpiece, one of American literature's great novels, is where the road forks.

The Primitive
is, as Lundquist notes, the novel in which Himes pushes to the limit two obsessive themes: his rage at being rejected as a writer, and the black man's fascination with white women. Lundquist perceives the novel, in fact, as a culmination or stopping point, an end to the confessional period; more generally, as a summa after which Himes was done with settling old scores and with which he exhausted his autobiographical impulse.

Certainly interracial themes pervade Himes's work, as does his identification of black men with women in regard to the disempowerment and lasting psychological damage reserved for them jointly by society. In jacket copy written for
The Quality of Hurt
Himes described himself as “a black man who pitied white women.” In
A Case of Rape
and in his collaboration with Willa on what is after all a quintessential woman's story, he gave that sympathy form. Very early on in
The Primitive
, struggling to formulate her father's defeat, Kriss also finds its image in self-identification: “Not defeated like a man in battle, but like a woman who is defeated by her sex, by the outraged indignity of childbearing, menstrual periods, long hair and skirts.”
⁹

There's little doubt that
The Primitive
was landmark work for Himes, or that he recognized it as such at the time. In
The Quality of Hurt
he describes writing the novel while living with Willa in Majorca:

I would get up at five, and by the time I had made coffee the first rays of the rising sun would strike our garden. I used the kitchen table for a desk and by the time the first peasants passed along the walk several feet below the embankment of our garden, humming the rising crescendo of the death song of the bullring, I would be typing happily, writing
The End of a Primitive
. I still had a good supply of Dexamyl. In fact, my tranquilizers sealed me inside of my thoughts so that I was almost completely unaware of the peasants and the flies and the movement in the distant street and could only experience the sweet, sensual, almost overwhelming scent of the lemon blossoms and the nearly unbearable beauty of the blossoming day far in the back of my mind. I wrote slowly, savoring each word, sometimes taking an hour to fashion one sentence to my liking. Sometimes leaning back in my seat and laughing hysterically at the sentence I had fashioned, getting as much satisfaction from the creation of this book as from an exquisite act of love. That was the first time in my life I enjoyed writing; before I had always written from compulsion. But I enjoyed writing
The End of a Primitive
… for once I was almost doing what I wanted to with a story, without being influenced by the imagined reactions of editors, publishers, critics, readers, or anyone. By then I had reduced myself to the fundamental writer, and nothing else mattered. I wonder if I could have written like that if I had been a successful writer, or even living in a more pleasant house.
¹⁰