Chester Himes (29 page)

Stephen Milliken, beginning chapter four of his Himes study with a brief essay on autobiography and fiction, points up the conflict that must always exist in the artist between the formal exigencies of art and “his sense of the unalterable reality of his own experience”
²⁴
—compasses that may give quite different bearings. Unfortunately, Milliken says, Himes never chose to clarify in any detail the relation of fiction to fact in his three autobiographical novels of the early 1950s. Portions of his life explored exhaustively (one might say obsessively) in the novels are little more than sketches in
The Quality of Hurt:
six pages for his seven-and-a-half years in prison, a single chapter to cover all the events of his youth and his parents' doomed marriage, three pages devoted to his affair with Vandi Haygood.

It is firmly established that almost all of the basic events that make up the plot structures of the three novels are factual, but no light at all is shed on the validity of the characterizations and patterns of motivation developed in the novels.
²⁵

To the language we use there is forever a kind of gravity that pulls narratives down into recognizable shapes, the shape of our own life, our preconceptions, shapes we know from other tales like the one we are relating, against which gravity the artist constantly must struggle if he is to say anything meaningful; the two streams of narrative in Himes's novel are discrete languages drawing his story toward different, perhaps irreconcilable ends. Still, we must remember that this is an early, in fact a first, novel, and one several times rewritten over a period of years, years in which the author was himself undergoing dramatic changes. That the novel is something of a patchwork should not surprise us. Nor, finally, is it at all unusual that Himes's text should be in conflict with itself; so many of them, so patently and so energetically, are.

Gone now, however, are the anachronisms that littered the previous edition's lawn with broken refrigerators and cracked fountains. Himes's prepublication updating of the novel had moved the period from just after World War 1 (1928–36, his own prison years) to just after World War 2 (1946–52) by altering a few dates and sprinkling in references to contemporary figures such as General Patton. But the time in which the prisoners exist remains adamantly
the 1930s: they shave with straight razors, the prison band plays hot jazz, and the whistle of freight trains underlines their immobility.

Gone, too, is the first-person voice adopted for the book's initial publication, which had the effect, probably intended, of bringing the story in line with traditional hard-boiled fare and the circumstantial one of suppressing the reflectiveness so important to the novel's more personal aspect.

In addition to being his invisible novel, Himes's prison book proved a source of considerable confusion to early commentators. Assuming it to have been written after
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
, that is, in order of publication, epimethean readers perceived in the novel a shift in emphasis, a bending toward the brutalities and crime-laden atmosphere of the Harlem novels that followed five years later. There was confusion as well over Himes's choice of a white man as protagonist. Had Jimmy Monroe, they wondered, been written black and later changed, either at the author's discretion or at the behest of his editors, to white? and to what purpose if so? Was this a further attempt to reshape the stuff of a troubling book into something more mainstream, more identifiable—something
tamer?

In an introduction written for its reissue, Himes's old friend Melvin Van Peebles relates, in a tone Himes would have admired, his rediscovery of the novel he thought he already knew.

BLAM! By the second page, I realized what a chump I had been! I had accepted without question the swinging of the pendulum towards pulp in
Cast the First Stone
as Chester's unmitigated intention…

What a fool I had been! Chester hadn't veered off toward the pulp genre, for which he later became famous, at least not of his own volition.

Turns out
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
had made the rounds of the publishing houses with successive waves of editors and agents imposing “improvements” on the manuscript, forcing him to delete his more literary touches. They jammed Chester's head in their toilet of racist preconceptions and pulled the chain and kept pulling the chain, flushing away what they felt were his uppity literary pretensions, forcing him to dumb-down his masterpiece before agreeing to publish it.
²⁶

Reviews for Norton/Old School's reissue of
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
though not plentiful were on the whole intelligent and laudatory. Jabari Asim in
Book World
found Himes at his best in detailing the gray, grim realities of prison existence.

Although maddeningly uneven, the book presents an illuminating sociological portrait of prison life—certainly one of the best available in fictional form … Himes spent his last days worrying about his posthumous reputation as a writer. He would be pleased to know that at least 18 of his books are now in print—and interest is high.
²⁷

Allen Cheuse, a reviewer with little sympathy for anything middlebrow or unambitious, contributed a fine, all but breathless appraisal for National Public Radio's
All Things Considered. Publishers Weekly
(bringing to mind that “indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed” from Himes's Chicago speech) capped its review:

Himes … masterfully presents the arbitrary violence (from both inmates and guards), the corruption, the regularity of unlamented death, the uneasy relations of the races and the psychological elongation of prison time (“Each moment was absolute, like a still photograph”). Yet it is the depiction of Monroe's love affairs—their comic absurdity, obsessive intensity and transformative emotional depth … that mark the book as both a superior prison novel and a moving fictional record of the perseverance of humanity amidst unrelenting degradation.
²⁸

That, for all its horrors, lapses, and longueurs, is what the novel comes to represent to us. For
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
is at heart and uncharacteristically an upbeat, hopeful story. Its two major characters are engaged in a relentless struggle—Jimmy and the prison whose outstanding features are its dirtiness and its debasement, which would spread those qualities to each of the human spirits it houses—a struggle that Jimmy wins. “Big, ugly prison, but I've got it beat now.”
²⁹
Jimmy has won through, has managed to forge his identity in an
environment conspiring on every side to negate identity and deny the human spirit itself.

H. Bruce Franklin argues that all Himes's achievements, even his existence as an author, came directly from his experience in prison; that this experience manifestly shaped both his creative imagination and outlook on American society. Pitching his elemental struggle in the closed environment of a prison that refused man's identity and threatened his very soul, Himes knew that he was writing about the plight of blacks in American society, recreating on personal ground the threads of a much older, an epic, struggle.

Anything can save you, if you grab it hard enough and hold on.

On the ship across, two or three days out, Himes begins to convince himself that he is again in love of some sort, slipping into the state as into a fine, old shoe. He has earlier been introduced to Willa Thompson Trierweiler, Boston socialite, unhappily shanghaied wife to a Dutch dentist, novelist-in-progress; now, standing in a ship's corridor clutching at him, in a matter of minutes she tells Himes of her husband's sexual aggression and infidelities, of her four daughters, of her most recent nervous breakdown. She is returning home to obtain a divorce and is at work on an autobiographical novel,
The Silver Altar
. Flashes of intimacy and intimation are exchanged. They'll work on the book together, it's decided, meeting in Paris and proceeding to Majorca after her necessary return to Luxembourg. Willa is lively, “innocent”
¹
and, very much like the Kriss we meet on
The Primitive's
first page, beneath a facade of confidence and success emotionally bereft. Himes finds this combination of social status, bearing, and desperate insecurity irresistible. Another vulnerable, damaged woman to protect—with the added benefit of endless distraction from the work he's vowed to concentrate upon. Willa in turn sees in Himes, one supposes, or somehow manages to attach to him, a stability, balance, a leveling horizon; perhaps also, in his role as professional writer, in his dress and faultless manners, in his outward calm demeanor, a quality of wisdom.

Behind, America, a quiet, smiling man with darkness in his eyes, stood ashore watching Himes's departure with (as Joan Didion would write in quite another context) the look of a man who all his life has followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow. Always, here, this irresolvable mix: staid optimism and a sense of dread so acute that
both national and personal life are driven to extreme commitments. To live on this shore, one had to split oneself into parts, hold contradictory notions. Forever half bright promise, half madness, America was. Always going on about the future, always on its
way
somewhere, never looking back. Excused all sorts of things.

Chester arrived in Paris on April 10, 1953, one week after departing New York. Wright, Yves Malartic, and old friend Dan Levin had come early to Gare Saint Lazare to meet the wrong train; speaking very little French and that badly, Himes took a cab to Wright's where, fuming, he was turned away by a monstrous concierge; he returned to the station, at length engaged a second cab, and made his way to Hotel Delavigne where, as it turns out, Wright had booked a room for him. The two finally met the next morning for breakfast at Wright's favorite haunt, Café Monaco.

Dick expected a gathering of our soul brother compatriots, all of whom knew I was to arrive the night before, but not one of them appeared, an eccentricity which I was later to learn was the natural reaction of the envious and jealous American blacks who lived in Paris—or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter. They did not want any arriving brother to get the idea they thought he was important.
²

Himes had been preparing himself for that breakfast for some time. There was nothing to keep him in the United States any longer. Mother and father were dead, wife Jean was on her own, the only supporter he had left in publishing was Bill Targ, who would do his best for
The Third Generation
. Himes had been bouncing back and forth rootlessly from boarding house to hotel room to Vandi's apartment or Bill Smith's home in Vermont. He'd been talking for some time in a wavery, aimless manner about going to Europe. And now the form of this talk began to take on substance as Himes convinced himself that random currents were a stream. If he were not chance's coconspirator, he was certainly its accomplice. Just as he wrote by intuition, he lived by it, finding his way into and sometimes through thickets, taking counsel from the entrails of circumstance.

Europe, then. Only lack of money held him back, and when Targ informed him that New American Library was buying reprint rights
to
The Third Generation
for $10,000, half this sum being immediately available, that final door sprang open. Chester booked passage on the
Ile de France
and began putting his affairs in order. He exchanged a flurry of intelligence-gathering letters with Levin, Malartic, and Wright. He bought a Linguaphone French course, or borrowed one from Vandi, and sat in grim determination listening through his self-admitted tone-deafness and repeating phrases “with a parrotlike inaccuracy.”
³

Chester was to bring Wright two reams of 20-pound bond paper and six complimentary copies of his new Harper's novel,
The Outsider
. In his letters Wright praised Paris's quality of life and cheap living and suggested things Chester should bring along: American toilet articles, drip-dry clothing, an American can opener, an alcohol stove for cooking in his room. He also told Chester that he'd just written a preface for the French edition of
Lonely Crusade
. Dan Levin added tips of his own, telling Chester about the Hotel Delavigne, run by a retired U.S. army officer and his French wife, where he'd always be able to get a room.

When issuance of his passport took longer than expected, Himes grew fearful. Perhaps his prison record had come to light. Or, worse yet, his past association with Communists. The McCarran Internal Security Act had been in force since 1950, gathering momentum all the time, leaving muddy bootprints at the Constitution's door. Himes sent off a copy of the document restoring full citizenship to him following his prison term, along with copies of disparaging reviews of
Lonely Crusade
from the Communist press. Whether or not such concerns caused delay is moot; he received his passport.

A week before departure Himes moved into the Albert Hotel. He picked up his advance for
The Third Generation
from agent Margot Johnson, exchanged most of it for traveler's checks after paying his passage at the French Line offices on South Street, and took Vandi out to dinner. He bought the ugly nylon shirts Wright advised, a pair of wingtip Oxfords, and, from Abercrombie & Fitch (not knowing that in the Latin Quarter alcohol stoves sold for just a few francs), a fifty-dollar two-burner alcohol stove. He packed the big green wardrobe trunk full as a stuffed turkey and sent it ahead. His last night he planned to spend with Vandi, but a fight broke out, leaving Chester with a broken toe, a cold from sitting with his foot in a basin of water, and new bitterness.

It was no small thing to leave the United States at the age of forty-three, he wrote.
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No small thing at all, even when this most important choice in Chester's life was made, like so many others, in—one cannot say impulsive fashion, for that would imply a certain passion, an engagement. In, then, an oddly distracted, offhand,
diffident
fashion.