Chester Himes (38 page)

Both are at the end of a chain of personal defeats, turned out of their dreams, their faith, their trust in others and in society, “both now ostracized from the only exciting life they had ever known, both starved for sexual fulfillment, lost and lonely, outcasts drifting together long after the passion had passed.”
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They become, in fact, mirrors for one another. Answering the door, Kriss sees:

This man before her, in the old trench coat she recognized immediately, was dead; hurt had settled so deep inside of him it had become a part of his metabolism. Not that he had changed so greatly in outward appearance … It was inside of him the light had gone out.
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Jesse sees in turn “no hint of the daredevil girl”
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he once knew but a woman grown dull, humorless, and respectable, illusions and youthful vigor long gone. It is their very despair, the sight of their own emptiness in the other's face, that draws them inexorably together. That first night they drink until they pass out. Much of the rest of the novel will be a stagger from binge to blackout to eruptions of violence.

Mirrors figure prominently. In the novel's early pages Jesse, after waking, surveys in the mirror his “trim, muscular body, the color of Manila paper, with the broad-shouldered proportions of a pugilist”
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; near book's end he attacks Kriss as much from rage at his own image and hers in mirrors as from any other incentive. Kriss can hardly pass a mirror without looking into it, as though to reassure herself of her existence. In one key passage Jesse dreams of being lost in a house of mirrors from which he escapes in horror only to find that the outside world's supposed normalcy appears to him even more grotesque and distorted.
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Kriss's self-destructive impulses spring out everywhere: in her abuse of alcohol and drugs, her promiscuity and continual playing off of people against one another, her verbal attacks on Jesse, her provocations of dangerous incidents. At one point she actually attempts suicide by swallowing sleeping pills but is too drunk to succeed or even to remember the attempt afterward.
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Jesse, of course, has his own self-destructive drive; and when the two of them meet again, it is as though each recognizes in the other, instantly, the instrument of his destruction. Night after night, Jesse lashes out in his sleep, shouting “I'll kill you!” At one point it comes to him in a flash: “This bitch wants me to kill her.”

Jesse and Kriss in a sense are social leftovers, ghosts who have lived past periods of idealism and hope into a world of everyday realities to which they can't accommodate themselves. Himes's many references to grand old days at Maud's emphasize this aspect, as does his inclusion of portraits of threadbare civil-rights leaders like Kriss's old lover Harold and magazine editor Walter Martin, loosely modeled on Horace Cayton and Ralph Ellison. His depictions of Harlem here, too—as a place full to bursting with life and all kinds of pleasures, some to be had cheaply, others at great price—are penned with a new, almost romantic wistfulness.

The Harlem of
The Primitive
, evoked with bittersweet nostalgia and a marvelous, completely original, laughter-filled lyricism, was to be Himes's major subject throughout the European phase of his writing career, carried through the long series of detective novels and on into
Pinktoes
. In his enchanted garden in Majorca Himes found within himself the gifts of a great humorous prose poet, whose destined and unique subject was to be Harlem, the great, crowded black metropolis, more a continuing explosion of human energy than a city. He was soon to win a whole new circle of readers, as the chronicler, the poet, of Harlem, Harlem seen as only Chester Himes could describe it.
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In her apartment far from that Harlem, Kriss sits watching the chimpanzee on the morning news show and
Zoo Parade
as Jesse dreams of a farm where pigs have the secret of producing sausage without being slaughtered but one pig rebels, refuses, and is led away, all the others shouting
Traitor!
behind him. At the breakfast table one morning, his publisher having turned down his latest for being just another protest novel and for its lack of “just plain animal fun,” Kriss having said when he first called her that she hoped this book was “nothing like the last thing you wrote … I'm tired of listening to you Negroes whining,” Jesse makes an announcement.
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“That's what I'll do!” Jesse said. “I'll write a book about chimpanzees.” Then hastened to ask, “There isn't any chimpanzee problem, is there?”

“Not that I know of,” Kriss said. “All of those I've seen—most at the zoo—seem well satisfied.”

“I guess you're right at that,” Jesse said. “I've never heard of a chimpanzee being lynched for raping a white woman and so far none have been cited as communists.”
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In a pivotal scene, suave uptown editor Walter Martin at the end of a long course of drinking and dispute over “the Negro problem” pulls a knife on Jesse after telling him that he has to join the human race. Jesse's response is that he's been an ape too long.
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Any synopsis or other reductive discourse, turned on a book as complex and multilayered as
The Primitive
, can but hint, finally, at the novel's richness of character and reference, its essential textures, its suspensions of argument, metaphor, and image—in short, its rewards for the casual and the careful reader. Pointing out that each, according to personal taste and predilection, might just as easily be construed as strength, Milliken runs down what he believes to be the novel's weaknesses: its constant shifts in tone, its cloying density, that the narrator intrudes, often gratuitously, with philosophizing, that the structure is too worked over, too symmetrical, stylized to the point of obtrusive artificiality. Yet Himes, Milliken believes, here succeeds, as he failed to do with Charles Taylor in
The Third Generation
or Jimmy Monroe in
Cast the First Stone
, in transforming Jesse Robinson from self-reflection to novelistic creation. This, the least dependent of the early novels on external, autobiographical interest, nonetheless has been forged into an effective vehicle for Himes's deepest, most personal insights into the human condition.

The Primitive
is, finally, a novel of great humor, of comedy both high and low and of considerable horror, strands of comedy and horror so interwoven as often to be indistinguishable one from another, and thereby profoundly unsettling. Here is Jesse chasing the tiny dog that has terrorized him from the novel's early pages.

He pursued, and got in another good lick before he slipped again and knocked over the white marble statue of a nude, that blocked
the passage. He made a desperate lunge and caught the statue before it hit the floor, breaking its fall, then fell on top of it. He got up bruised and shaken and restored it to the table. “Good thing you're not in Georgia, son,” he told himself. “Open and shut case of rape.”
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From which slapstick, Himes can veer in a breath to such as the novel's concluding death scene.

He dreamed horribly of running naked across endless glaciers and awakened seven minutes later, deathly chilled, without being aware he had dreamed. “Damn, Kriss, aren't you cold, baby?” he asked. She didn't reply. He got up and slammed the window shut with a bang, then sat on the edge of the bed and poured a glass of wine. His teeth chattered against the rim of the glass … “You know, Kriss baby, you can be a very unpleasant bitch,” he said angrily, and as his rage began to ride added, “You're going to get yourself good and fucked up someday.” Then, prodded by her continued silence, he turned on her furiously, saying, “And whether you like it or not I'm—” His voice stopped short when he clutched her naked white shoulders. Her ice-cold flesh burned his hands.

His next action of which he was aware occurred two and a half minutes later. He was kneeling on the bed, astride her naked body, trying to make her breathe by means of artificial respiration; and seeing his tears dripping on the purple-lipped knife wound over her heart, thought she was beginning to bleed again. He felt such a fury of frustration he began beating her senselessly about the face and shoulders, cursing in a sobbing voice, “Breathe, Goddamit, breathe!”
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It is only in the relationships we manage that we exist at all. Excluded from many common human relationships, self-exiled from others, Jesse and Kriss form a relationship that both know instinctively is the only relationship that remains possible to them, a relationship that leaves one dead and the other just as effectively destroyed, but a relationship—an existence, however desperate, however brief—nonetheless.

In Paris anew, lugging his old self heavily along on his back like that oversize trunk, wearing it like his “second skin” of brown and black tweed jacket and charcoal brown slacks, Himes continued his underground life, “weird, grotesque, a drunken Walpurgisnacht.”
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Barrels of drink went down him. Obsessively he picked up any woman he could find who would consent to go along with him, students, prostitutes; it was only necessary that they come within earshot, sit at the next table, meet his eyes. His temper flared at the slightest provocation or none at all: at some imagined slight or mere glance. In isolation he grew paranoid, certain that others intended him physical harm, and took to carrying both a knife and a crescent wrench wrapped with machinist's tape everywhere he went. He was purging America from his mind, he said, but destroying himself in the bargain.

I needed women desperately, not just for sex but safety, to help me control my temper. And I needed women to help restore my ego, which had taken such a beating in New York. I needed women to comfort me, to wait on me, to cook for me, to keep house for me, to talk to me, to assure me that I was not alone. And I needed English-speaking women to translate for me as much as to make love to me for I couldn't speak the language.
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Need so acute and all-embracing, of course, might better be called by some other name.

He was staying at the Hotel Royer-Collard in the Latin Quarter. At first Willa, infrequently, visited, but both had come to realize soon upon Himes's return that the bond once so strong between them had
dissolved. Only passion, their sexual craving for one another, trailed on. And over time, as Himes began making bitter accusations, Willa withdrew, further underscoring his isolation. Here, as in so many aspects of Himes's life, the biographer, sorting his notecards, attributing motive and design in retrospect, proceeds at peril. Just why did Himes commit this great mistake of returning to the States? Much as, looking back, one educes a line of development from the protest and autobiographical novels through the farce of
Pinktoes
to the freewheeling parodic comedy of the Harlem novels, as though the author at some level had thought all this through, one imposes patterns a posteriori on the eventual materials of life. Surely the sole reason Himes had for returning was to discover what had become of the bond between Willa and himself, to salvage what he could of the relationship or else put it to rest. Yet one knows that for Himes decisions were often impulsive, made in acquiescence to influences buffeting him along in some particular direction, or taken in sudden, existential leaps. Fighter pilots are taught when caught up in complex, potentially paralyzing situations just to do
something, anything
, that might trigger a new chain of events. It's a tactic Himes understood.

Still, all was hardly unadulterated blight and despair. Ollie Harrington's Café Tournon circle had supplanted Wright's at the Monaco as expatriate central. Locals and tourists alike flocked to watch Ollie, looking “like Spencer Tracy in
Cannery Row
, painted brown,”
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reign over his pickup band of social comics, storytellers, and hardscrabble intellectuals, men without countries all. These included the painters Herb Gentry, Berthel and Larry Potter, journalist Frank Van Bracken, who was Paris correspondent for
Ebony
, mathematician Josh Leslie, Ish Kelley (model for Fishbelly in Wright's
The Long Dream)
, and William Gardner Smith's old friend and fellow Philadelphian novelist/newsman Richard Gibson. Wright often dropped by after lunch to play pinball. Himes quickly became with Bill Smith and Walter Coleman a central figure. After spending mornings writing in the Café au Dé part or one of many others along Boulevard Saint-Michel, Chester would have lunch in his room—sharing both lunch and bed with a woman, if one could be found—then settle in for afternoons at the Tournon, he and Bill Smith and Ollie swapping eights and casting off dirty dozens as they vied to outdo one another in improvisations that straggled on long into the evening.

Wright's stock had declined appreciably among younger black writers. He was, for one thing, secure both financially and in reputation, long past struggles they still faced daily, all of which aroused jealousies and animosity. He seemed, moreover, blind to the Algerian problem that had divided all Paris along intellectual faultlines. And he was in fact, both by virtue of having lived abroad so long and of his middle-class aspirations, out of touch with contemporary black life, a fact underscored with publication of
The Long Dream
and subsequent attacks on both book and author. “He writes as if nothing had changed since he grew up in Mississippi,”
Time
reported
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, echoing wife Ellen's reservations about the novel's recidivist nature. As James Baldwin described these years:

He had managed to estrange himself from all the younger American Negro writers in Paris … Gone were the days when he had only to enter a café to be greeted with the American Negro equivalent of
“cher maître”
(“Hey, Richard, how you making it, my man? Sit down and tell me something.”), to be seated at a table, while all the bright faces turned toward him. The brightest faces were now turned from him.
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