Chester Himes (37 page)

This is something of a new Himes for us, a man who seems at times, despite living in rank poverty and dejection, almost on the verge of weightlessness. Such was his concentration while writing that “Neither the pink mountains nor the swarms of flies in the dusty city could possibly be real, I thought. Only my book was real.”
¹¹
Distanced from America if not from the lands and grooves it had left on his soul, delivered by failure from further pretense of success in his writing, past the recall of censors internal or external, Himes wrote just what and as he wished, producing out of the bounds of this freedom the most carefully structured, closely controlled novel he would write. Milliken also avers to this transformation within Himes: “In his racist homeland he had been a borderline alcoholic, compulsively embracing the
degradation of menial jobs to eke out a precarious living; abroad, he was a completely functional, generally dead broke, moderately happy, working writer.”
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In an introduction for the novel's reissue written not long before his death, Himes again emphasized the novel's liberating qualities.

I was cleansed of envy and hate by writing about white Americans with satire and scorn … Writing this book not only purged me but made me strong. Forever afterwards, I have been shocked by the absurdity of racism. How more absurd could two people be than me and my white woman? My mind became free and highly creative and in the following eight years I wrote twelve books on the absurdity of racism and its effects on both black and white people … the only thing that stopped me from writing more about the innumerable instances of racism was a series of strokes.
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Naming
The Primitive
his favorite book, Himes told John Williams that he'd been able to achieve what he did with it only because in Majorca there were no distractions, physical, financial or otherwise, not even the distraction of expectations. He had written the book, he said, out of a completely free state of mind from beginning to end.
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Jesse Robinson, too, was his favorite character. To Michel Fabre in 1983 Himes admitted: “I put a lot of myself into him. I probably said everything I wanted to say in that novel,”
¹⁵
and much of what he said was about the repressive influences of his time, about moral conceptions that fail to fit the actual circumstances of lives, about national (and often willful) blindnesses.

In
The Primitive
I put a sexually-frustrated American woman and a racially-frustrated black American male together for a weekend in a New York apartment, and allowed them to soak in American bourbon. I got the result I was looking for: a nightmare of drunkenness, unbridled sexuality, and in the end, tragedy.

What I wanted to show is that American society has produced two radically new human types. One is the black American male.
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And the other was the white American woman, who, Himes held, has more freedom, better education, and far greater financial wherewithal than at any time in the past, yet is desperately unhappy, shunted aside in society's relentless pursuit of its goals, incomplete sexually, unloved and uncared for. Often she turns to the black man, who will care for her, without realizing that he too has been fatally wounded by society—that he is in fact dangerous, both to himself and others.

The Primitive
comes out of a particular time. Those visions of equality that drove American blacks in the forties, which Himes mirrored in
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
(and which he would pillage again for the satire of
Pinktoes)
, had passed, with little enough if any true gain; the civil-rights era had yet to begin. America's sense of omnipotence, of its manifest destiny and diehard
rightness
, had attained plaguelike proportions. Having single-handedly delivered the world from ruin, America could now go on about its simple, wholesome life as that world's curator, wizard, and watchdog. Anything that failed to fit the template of
rightness
was to be shoved under the rug, into the far corner of the closet, onto back lots. Hey, everyone lived like Ozzie and Harriet, right? America's full-time job became trying to live up to the misbegotten image it had of itself. Like Aristophanes' Socrates, America walked along so lost in its thoughts that it stumbled on every pothole. Because America was its ultimate product, that which all history had gathered toward, there was no longer any need for the past. And what else could the future be but a string of perfect, democratic,
simple
days like this one—here at home in America?

It was, in short, the beginning of the time we would live, as we do now, without allusion, without depth or history, paddling about on the surface of our lives and desires like water spiders, marooned in an eternal present.

Irving Howe characterized this rearrangement of the social furniture in “Mass Society and Post-modern Fiction”:

By mass society we mean a relatively comfortable, half welfare and half garrison society in which the population grows passive, indifferent, and atomized; in which traditional loyalties, ties, and associations become lax and dissolve entirely; in which coherent publics based on definitive interests and opinions gradually
fall apart; and in which man becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the products, diversions, and values that he absorbs.
¹⁷

As often as not, that eternal present came to us, as did “the products, diversions and values” of our society, by way of the TVs that had so suddenly become a part of our families. These were windows from our furnished cells onto the public reality, windows through which we perceived those lives we did not, could not, have; and in their endless chatter, like babbling old aunts desperate to keep our attention, increasingly they would say anything, just
anything
, wearing down the line between the actual and presumed, the real and imagined, news and entertainment.

“The Life of Riley” premiered in 1949, “Ozzie and Harriet” in 1952. Both offered up the day-to-day small crises and triumphs of families clearly intended to be just like ours. Our own life was being re-created, recast, reformed, on that screen—and somehow validated.

The life, that is, of a new white middle class whose father went off to work regularly, whose mother in starched dresses cooked hams and baked cookies, whose children dreamed of acceptance by peers, high-school dances, and having their own cars.

TV was the ultimate funhouse mirror. In it, the ordinary could become huge, overwhelming, monstrous. The misshapen dwarf, looking in, saw himself become tall and straight.

So does TV become an integral part of
The Primitive
, character, chorus and oracle all in one, underlining the characters' loneliness and utter isolation. The TV Jesse and Kriss watch obsessively (it is always on) is their window to the world. Its stream of comedy, chatter and “current events” comprises their knowledge of what takes place in the world beyond their tightly circumscribed lives, this room, the absurd tragedy whose downward spiral they are riding out. When Jesse's trial and conviction for the murder of Kriss is announced on TV,
before it takes place
, by the morning news show host's sidekick chimpanzee, this not only perfectly complements the novel's structure, in which perception and delirium have interpenetrated to such extent that one can no longer be picked out from the other, it brilliantly illuminates the novel's themes of isolation and divestment.

“Saw it start to, saw it had to, saw it happen,” Archibald MacLeish wrote in
JB
of the witness of a traffic accident standing helplessly by. The reader of
The Primitive
has much the same experience. Starting off with the daily waking of Kristina Cummings, then of Jesse Robinson, the novel initially moves back and forth between them, its tempo increasing as they approach one another, come together and together begin circling ever closer, downward, towards their fate. As Kriss and Jesse submerge themselves in nonstop drinking and desperate, increasingly violent sex, barriers between the internal and external, the real and imagined, give way. They grow more and more confused as to the sequence of events, what they have dreamed or remembered and what has actually occurred, whether it is day or night, how much time has passed. Himes's careful writing bears the reader directly and fully into that confusion, culminating in a blackout for the reader much like Jesse's own. We are deeply confused as to what has gone on, what is real. Like Jesse we come into the clearing of the novel's final pages unable to remember, unaware almost until that final phone call what has happened.

Milliken points up the novel's dramatic structure, arguing quite convincingly that its structure in fact mirrors that of a play in three acts with four scenes to each act. Like the text itself, with which Himes plunges the reader into the bleak and bleary physicality of his characters' lives, this structure gives the novel an immediacy of effect, a sense of lives being lived or directly witnessed, while at the same time underlining its affinity to classic tragedy: tragedy here, though, of a demotic, diminished, denatured sort.

In
Chapter 1
, in her downtown apartment on Twenty-first Street near Gramercy Park, Kriss wakes to an empty bed, the alarm of her gold-plated Swiss clock “curdling the silence.”
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She is terrified, as she is each morning, at finding herself again alone. Thirty-seven years old, married for years to a homosexual (one of many efforts to bridge that aloneness), she has slept, by latest count, with 187 men.

In her apartment, situated as it was on the first floor rear, entombed by the concrete cliffs of other buildings, as remote from the sounds of voices and traffic on the street as the crown of Everest, a veritable dungeon where the light of day penetrated only for a few brief hours in the late afternoon when she was
seldom there, this sense of being alone was almost complete; not only shut off from people, from others of the species, but shut off from time, from seasons, from distance, from life—all life, dog life, cat life, cockroach life—shut off from eternity. It was like waking in a grave.
¹⁹

Or in a cave, in which, following her daily ritual of Dexamyl, barbiturates, and alcohol, she sits allowing the TV's flickering firelight to fill the empty spaces, watching a talk show featuring a host named Gloucester and a chimpanzee who predicts the news. Cassandra, Greek chorus, Lear's Fool, newscaster, comic sidekick, image of the primitive within us all, the chimpanzee predicts, along with Jesse's murder of Kriss, such news as Eisenhower's 1952 election as president (“thereby giving Senator McCarthy a mandate to rid the nation of its mentality”), Nixon's 1952 speech justifying the source of his campaign contributions, and the Supreme Court's 1954 decision for desegregation.
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In
Chapter 2
, Jesse Robinson wakes, like Bob Jones of
If He Hollers
, from dreams that provide a nightmarish mirror image of his waking life: he was falling through the ice while skating, none of those around him taking notice. Jesse is separated from his wife, rapidly running through the $500 a publisher has advanced as option on his novel
I Was Looking for a Street
. Jesse drinks a water glass full of gin and goes back to sleep. New dreams suggest the degree of his isolation and a plenty from which he is excluded (he is sitting at a banquet table between two empty spaces), violence (on the parking lot outside the banquet hall two men are beating one another horribly), lost youth and love (he is seventeen years old and kissing for the first time).

Jesse lives on the borderland between the real and unreal, life and the imagined, the civilized and savage. This failed writer is a portrait, Milliken says,

not so much of Himes himself, the man he believed he had really been, but rather of the man he believed he might easily have become had the sequence of misfortunes that overwhelmed him been just a little bit worse, if the screws had been tightened, ever so slightly, just a few notches more.
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* * *

Many details of Jesse's background, his stints as caretaker and arrest for sideswiping a white lady's car, his apartment on Convent Avenue, his separation from wife Becky, are taken directly from Himes's own life; several of these recountings reappear almost verbatim in the memoirs.

Jesse is a man who wants, more than anything else, and desperately, to
understand
, a man who is coming to believe that he never will, that those principles of and around which he has formed his life—reason, independence, self-realization, the arts, faith in social progress—are but illusions. He will never see or know Vanzetti's “serene white light of a reasonable world.”

No matter how much he drank, whatever he did to deaden his thoughts, there was this part of his mind that never became numb, never relaxed. It was always tense, hypersensitive, uncertain, probing—
there must he some goddamned reason for this, for that
. It had started with the publication of his second book, five years before …
Some goddamned reason for all the hate, the animosity, the gratuitous ill will
—for all the processed American idiocy, ripened artificially like canned cheese.

….

“Jesse Robinson,” he said in a voice of utter futility. “Jesse Robinson. There must be some simple thing in this goddamn life that you don't know. Some little thing. Something every other bastard born knows but you.” After a moment, without being aware that he had moved, he found himself in the window looking down across the flats of Harlem … like sharp-angled waves of dirt water in the early sun, moving just enough to form a blurred distortion. “Every other nigger in this whole town but you.”
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As
Chapter 2
ends, Jesse, having had several drinks, steps outdoors and, not knowing where to go once there, with no particular destination or purpose in mind or in life, heads for the cheap movie houses on Forty-second Street.
Chapter 3
picks up Kriss at work, in
Chapter 4
Jesse calls for the date that makes up
Chapter 5
, and in
Chapter 6
(its opening sentence the same as the first of the book: “The gold-plated Swiss clock on the nightstand whirred softly, curdling the
silence of the small dark room”)
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Jesse and Kriss wake together in her bed.