Chester Himes (21 page)

Himes himself daydreamed of householding in Vermont. Because someday, you see, once this book was published, or the next one, and its brilliance became recognized—once the dice rolled and fell into place, they'd create, like the sweep of a magician's cape or a screen wipe in movies, an utterly new world. One in which he had choices. One in which he did more than simply react, pushed about on the board by exigencies of need, weakness, retreat. A world that
fit
.

Chester Himes could never accept the world as it was. Some would suggest that it may be this very quality, this combination of repudiation and willfulness, that goes to form the artistic temperament. The artist sets out to change the world and, if he is fortunate, ends up changing himself. Should he be not so fortunate, he may succeed only in bending world and self toward new intolerances, blurring and burring the borders till they slip and grind and cut ever deeper.

Awaiting publication, as he seemed always to be waiting for something, Chester felt himself diminished, worn down by possibilities, by his sense of what could be, as much as by the scramble of day-to-day life. Like Auden's striver,

looking down,

He saw the shadow of an Average Man

Attempting the Exceptional, and ran.
¹³

Letters to Van Vechten and others speak of Himes's uncertainties and confusion, express the dialogue he was carrying on with himself. He doesn't mind, he says, working at insignificant jobs (all that are available to him), but fears that doing so could derail him “into a lot of personal protests and humiliations which might stop the objective flow of my thoughts.”
¹⁴
In part this is the tread of noblesse oblige, sentiments Himes's mother would have understood. But it's also the typical artist's self-rationalization. Because he
can
do a thing, he feels somehow ordained to do it; devoting so much time to the activity, he
reassures himself that it must be important; and finally, since he is ordained, and since the activity is so important, he must protect and nurture it at all costs. He has to guard his talent, must not allow himself to be captured by the mundane.

Once this syllogism is in place, its heartbeat resounds everywhere. Knowing that family and friends react with consternation and embarrassment both to the vulgarity of his subject matter and to his exploitation of them in his fiction—most recently Jean's response to his portrait of Ruth in
Lonely Crusade
—and anticipating the reactions of readers to the general subject matter and homosexual love story of his prison novel, or of Communist Party affiliates to the discursions of
Lonely Crusade
, Himes again invokes the sanctity of his art. To pull back, to avoid this material, would be to belie his vision, to fail the all-important demands of his talent.

As I look back now I find that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) drive to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro's desire for respectability … It brought a lot of confusion to my own mind added to which was a great deal of pressure of a thousand kinds being exerted by friends and relatives and loved ones who were half ashamed of what I wrote, forgetting that it was what I wrote that made me what I was.
¹⁵

Or what he was that made what he wrote? And are these, in fact, discrete questions?

Over the years it is possible, perhaps even inevitable, for a man to shape himself by the language he uses; possibly there was never a writer who better demonstrates this.

Those same markers of exemption came up even at Van Vechten's and Hughes's urging Himes to apply at Yaddo. He feared, he wrote to Van Vechten, that others' viewpoints might influence or distract him—doing much to reaffirm his outlaw status. He needed to hold himself apart, felt that he had to: “I become confused and lose my point around other writers.”
¹⁶

One might also perceive in Himes's secretiveness and stealth the stamp of alcoholism, an identification that seems borne out by “Da-Da-Dee” with its limning of themes to be explored (all but exhausted)
in
The Primitive
. The addicted personality, having one great secret, invests all else with secrecy: shrouds or continuously reinvents its past; speaking of the same events, relates quite different accounts; makes its way through each moment, relationship, and day in a series of feints and misdirections. Ever evasive, fluid, it must not, cannot, be held.

That withdrawal initiated by Himes's retreat to the counterfeit frontier of Hugo's ranch continues into withdrawal from peers, marriage, and America itself. It's a renunciation, an apostasy, as definitive in its own way as that of castrati, and we watch as it takes form, moving from Chester's life to his art, from instinctive practice to articulate principle (though to what degree rationalized we will never know), echoing the great theme seemingly at the heart of so much fine American writing: the dialogue between solitude and community.

Perhaps Himes would have taken to Robert Frost's “The Fear of God”:

Beware of coming too much to the surface,

And using for apparel what was meant

To be the curtain of the inmost soul.
¹⁷

As publication drew near, Knopf's publicity engines appeared to be pumping away. Interviews, appearances, and signings were arranged for Himes. Lawyers expressed concern at the possibility of libel action, believing that the novel's aircraft company president (actually patterned on Louis Bromfield) too closely resembled a real industrialist, but eventually cleared the novel. Richard Wright, now in Paris, was approached for a blurb; though he later wrote an introduction for the French edition, he seems to have declined at this time. Agent Lurton Blassingame used the honeymoon period to pry loose a new advance from Blanche Knopf, seemingly for a book,
Immortal Mammy
, to be based on Chester's Hollywood experiences.

In August, Chester and Jean left for a ten-day visit to Vermont. On September 7 Chester's father arrived from Cleveland to share the great day. Chester's balloon was up, winds favorable. Days tipping their bright yellow hats.

Then the crash.

His several personal reversals and rejections on publication day, Himes wrote, set the pattern for his novel's reception. They were staying
at the time in Jean's supervisor's flat on Welfare Island, and Himes got up early that morning to catch a ferry across to Manhattan, where he was to appear at Macy's at 8:30. The bookstore manager met him at the employee entrance, took him for coffee, and told him that the store had made the decision to stop sponsoring authors' appearances, believing it rang of favoritism and caused ill will. He was sorry the decision had come now, the manager told him, because he liked the book a great deal, believed that Himes had important things to say.

I had heard the exact phrases uttered by various editors so many times before that I understood. They had canceled my appearance. I shook hands warmly to show him there were no hard feelings—although if he believed that, he was an idiot—and hastened over to Bloomingdale's, on Fifty-ninth Street.
¹⁸

There the first clerk he encountered didn't know who he was and had never heard of his book. Again his appearance had been canceled with no notice.

He had planned to return to the island to pick up Jean and his father before his next booking, on Mary Margaret McBride's radio show, but now hadn't sufficient time. When he called Jean to ask her to meet him at the studio, she said she'd tried to reach him by phone at both Macy's and Bloomingdale's. The studio had called to cancel his interview. Crestfallen, Chester withdrew home (i.e., to their borrowed flat), then to Vermont to await reviews.

“After the publication of
Lonely Crusade,”
James Lundquist writes, “Himes found himself in a position that few other American novelists have occupied. He was being assaulted by communists, fascists, white racists, black racists, and practically every reviewer within those extremes.”
¹⁹

Attacks from the Communist press were voluble, as expected.
Mainstream
, the
Daily Worker
and
People's Voice
all ran negative reviews. Perhaps the most outspoken was Lloyd Brown's in
New Masses:
“I cannot recall ever having read a worse book on the Negro theme.”
²⁰
One ran a cartoon depicting Himes marching, white flag in hand, across the page. Not only had Himes abjured the party line of internal secession holding that blacks within the United States were a separate nation, he had satirized with characterizations drawn directly
from life the self-serving attentions of the party toward Negroes, and had called into question the whole notion of a progressive society.

Other publications closely associated with the labor movement took similar exception. The Jewish magazine
Commentary
in particular objected to anti-Semitic elements. In
The New Leader
a young James Baldwin, clumsily comparing Himes's novel to
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, held that while the novel was poorly written, it gave an accurate portrayal of how black Americans viewed their lives. Here Baldwin hit upon what, behind all the smoke, remains most important about
Lonely Crusade
. Like its predecessor, it aired black sentiments largely unspoken in public, any public, at the time.

Stoyan Christowe in
Atlantic Monthly
echoed Baldwin's observation, relating contemporary Negro literature to the previous generation's novels of immigrants fighting to escape prejudice and establish their place in society. At the same time he acknowledged Himes's dissection of deeper, more insidious rifts:

Chester Himes' new novel is a study of the American Negro, a brave and courageous probing into the Negro psyche. His diagnosis reveals a racial malady for which there is no immediate remedy.
²¹

Himes will quote brilliantly from Christowe in his impending speech at the University of Chicago, taking the reviewer's words and making them forever his own.

The
New York Times Book Review's
Nash K. Burger spoke well of Himes's abilities as a serious writer in both his novels.
Lonely Crusade
is a novel of fear, he wrote, of the fear ever present in the mind of a Negro living in a white man's America, yet because of the novel's complexity and Himes's skill,

Lee Gordon's lonely crusade to put down his feeling of fear and isolation becomes only an exaggeration of every man's struggle to find himself and his place in the world.

While also noting its anti-Semitism, Burger warned that the novel, like its protagonist's life, might be too tough for some readers, its incidents “presented as bluntly as they happened.”
²²

Arthur Burke's review for
The Crisis
lauded Himes's gift for characterization with favorable comparisons to Dickens and his talent for psychological analysis with mention of George Eliot, and perceived his theme as essentially a pathology of race.

The New Yorker
wrote that “Mr. Himes considers this problem intelligently and convincingly; regrettably, though, he seems to think that an ugly narrative is necessarily a powerful one.”
²³

The
New Republic's
John Farrelly found the story “much too extended and repetitious” and its protagonist “not so much … an individual as a catalogue of the Negro's emotional distortions.”
²⁴

Eric L. McKitrick in
Saturday Review of Literature
, while generally praising the novel, identified its chief weakness as a lack of focus resulting from the novel's attempt, in its analysis of the racial question from every conceivable angle, to be too many things at once. He also felt the protagonist's instability and lack of mooring made him unsympathetic.
²⁵

Fellow novelist Arna Bontemps reviewed the novel for the
New York Herald Tribune
, stating that Himes had produced “an even more provocative book this time.” He celebrated Himes's engagement with depicting “the struggles of individuals who find themselves occupying newly won ground and trying to make the personal adjustments the task requires,” but took exception, in true socially progressive, proletariat fashion, to Himes's emphasis on pathology.

Certainly this is not exactly the mood in which to work for any kind of progress, and those who look to
Lonely Crusade
for a chart are likely to turn away sour.
²⁶

Earlier we've seen Langston Hughes's similar charge in a letter to Blanche Knopf declining to provide a blurb:

Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly, which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them.
²⁷

In short, many of the criticisms were familiar ones—Himes's reliance on melodrama and violence, for instance, or his failure to provide any proper racial model—and some of them new, such as
censure of the book's confused thematic structure and extended philosophical dialogues, or complaints that the author's outlook was, on the one hand, too limited, and on the other, too encompassing.

Just as he overstated the unfavorableness of reviews (some in fact were quite good), Himes ever afterward simplified these criticisms, rendering the whole experience down to a conspiracy marshaled by Communists and complicity supported, in a kind of collaborationist Vichy of the mind, by Negro peers and the literary establishment. Thirty years later he'd still be arguing with reviewers.

His “improbable” characters were drawn from life, he said: Luther based on a criminal he had known in prison, the monstrous industrialist Foster on Louis Bromfield, party members on those he'd known in California.

I think that many of the critics on the big weekly reviews disliked most the characterization of the industrialist Foster, who in my book called President Roosevelt “a cripple bastard, with a cripple bastard's sense of spite.” I had heard those words spoken in a Cleveland, Ohio, country club. Maybe the critics had heard them too—maybe that was what they most disliked, my audacity in repeating them … I think that what the great body of Americans most disliked was the fact I came too close to the truth. Reactionaries hate the truth and the world's rulers fear it; but it embarrasses the liberals, perhaps because they can't do anything about it.
²⁸