Chester Himes (30 page)

In familiar contradictory manner Himes's impressions of Paris are difficult to hold on to, a sandwich thick with indignation, enormous changes that didn't take, a succession of affairs, the relief of new work, his unremitting sense of alienation, and bitterness recollected in quite unWordsworthian intranquility.

Written twenty years after the fact, Himes's comments regarding Paris in what James Campbell calls that “catalogue of misogyny, grievance and self-aggrandizement,”
⁵
The Quality of Hurt
, are largely negative—
carping
, Michel Fabre says of them. Himes didn't like the bistros. The good restaurants were too expensive and the inexpensive ones were bad. He was overcharged everywhere. The naked women in Place Pigalle were just naked women, Montmartre's world-famous racy shows nothing more than tourist traps, the sexuality dull and unimpressive. He'd seen it all before. There were too many Cadillacs and too many hard, hurried American women along the Champs-Elysées, too many walls scribbled with U.S. GO HOME.

His evocations in an unpublished piece written for
Ebony
in 1954 are rather different in tone:

I found Paris very pleasant in April; the chestnut trees were in bloom, the weather was balmy, the cafés crowded along St. Germain, the students out in all their many-national glory on Saint Michel, the book stalls on the
quais
, fishermen on the Seine … I had brought an alcohol stove from America and I cooked my breakfast in my room, the good smell of Nescafé and
jambon
and
oeufs brouillés
permeating the waxed corridors, watering the mouths of hungry lovers and early-rising clerks.
⁶

In correspondence with Michel Fabre near the end of his life, Himes turned a clearer eye toward understanding what Paris had represented for him.

For me France was the opportunity to write without the barriers imposed by race, politics, my state of health, finances, or my appearance…

In Paris, I found many ways to feed myself without disastrous effects. I gathered throwaway scraps in the markets, old bread, stale wine, and hotel proprietors let me live in rooms until I could afford to pay. Girls contributed love and sometimes encouragement, and I was permitted to use all public reference sources. France did not support me; it let me live and grow strong enough to concentrate on my work, which was writing … I became famous. My detective stories, along with other books published in France, sold to other countries. Eventually my books were picked up by the U.S.
⁷

It's been said of Hemingway that for each book he required a new woman. In his first years abroad, before settling into life with Lesley, Chester became involved with several women one after another. (And we might question that preposition: sometimes the affairs overlapped or coincided.) Vandi visited him in Paris as anticipated, remaining for a week. He met a young German girl, Regine Fischer, at a party and, after a period of displaying her photo on his writing desk, took up housekeeping with her, even traveled to Germany to meet her family. One of the earliest mentions of an autobiography, in a letter to Van Vechten, considers structuring the narrative of his European experience around his relationships with Willa, Regine, and Lesley.

I would like very much to write this account of my years in Europe as a straight autobiography in three books; each book about my life with a woman, all three completely different; the first an American socialite (Boston-Smith college etc.), married, divorced, three daughters; the second an infantile, immature, very crazy German in her twenties; the third English, good family, in her thirties, a member of the right people.
⁸

It's only in the relationships men manage that they live at all, Robert Creeley suggests. Chester's alienation had to do only in part and circumstantially with prison, with expatriation to alien cultures,
even, finally, with being black; his estrangement was far more profound. And like many loners, many who feel they never belong
wherever
they find themselves, Himes needed a woman, that single, close, intense relationship, to help define and ground him.

Willa was the first of Himes's women in this new, European life—even before he reached Europe. In
The Quality of Hurt
he called her Alva, and the book ends, two hundred pages after their first meeting, with their final farewell. There's something of the feel here of Hemingway's lyrical ending to
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Something, too, of Chandler's in
The Long Goodbye
. “On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double scotches. They didn't do me any good.”

We stood very close on the platform and she kept turning to hide her face from the strangers all about us because she was crying. When the conductors blew their whistles for all aboard I took Alva in my arms and kissed her and it seemed to open the floodgates for I had to lift her onto the train. She stood in the open coach door, dangerously, perilously, waving frantically, desperately, until the train had turned the bend way up the track and passed from sight, although I doubted if she could have seen me through her tears.

I went across to a bar on rue Saint-Lazare and had a couple of Cognacs. Suddenly I found myself crying like a baby. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Frenchmen at the bar turned to stare at me.
⁹

Willa's story, as she told it and as Himes (with asides by turns sympathetic and cynical) repeated it, was a timeless one of youth and innocence overcome by guile. Of good family, she had, aged eighteen, met at Bryn Mawr a Dutch exchange student who courted her mercilessly and, upon inviting her to his home, so preyed upon her naïveté as to force her into marriage, whereupon he demanded of her family her inheritance and over the following years, with the collaboration of his own family, held her virtual captive. Once when she got away, obtaining a divorce in the United States (which, alas, Holland did not recognize), he used the youngest of their daughters as hostage to persuade her to return. Her first breakdown had occurred during the war; now she was returning from the United States where she had
fled following her third breakdown to keep him from institutionalizing her.

Willa's pain Chester perceived right away; it swept over him. She had been hurt terribly by life, just as he had. Hurt by her husband, hurt by his family and the “strange, cruel country where she had gone to live,”
¹⁰
hurt by her own family, whose busy lives had made them indifferent to hers. Hurt, too, by her own inabilities and inactions. Did Chester perceive the parallel here as well? Certainly he identified with her. And he sensed from the first—when she seized him in a corridor as he passed, crying “Don't leave me! Please don't leave me!”—that she was more than a little disturbed. Always “a sucker for the sentimental,”
¹¹
he listened to the tale of her progressive degradation. But goodness does for the knight only so long.

After two days I just wanted to lay her and have it done with. I had said all I had to say about her husband and I was sick and tired of hearing about him.

….

My broken toe hurt, barring me from dancing, and I felt stuck with Alva when I could have found prettier and more amenable women.

….

Emotions between black men and white women are erratic, like a brush fire in a high wind. For a time they burn brightly, burning everything in their path; but they are subject to skip over green patches or turn abruptly about and flicker out on the ashes of what they have previously burned.
¹²

Nevertheless, the romantic shipboard
va-et-vient
continued. When they parted at Le Havre, Chester wasn't at all certain that he wanted to see her again. Self-knowledge is a bitter vegetable one doesn't plan on eating but can't leave alone, pushing it about on the plate. Filled with tenderness for Willa, Himes knows that he has been used, and that he has allowed it; he knows that only chance and despair have brought them together, and that, for all his loneliness and hers, this match is an impossible one.

I am completely blinded to my own welfare if there is a damsel in distress—and she doesn't really have to be a damsel, or even in real distress for that matter, just as long as I believe it.

….

I must confess here that where women are concerned I have always been an ass.
¹³

He thought he was leaving American white women behind, only to find one waiting for him there in the ship's corridor. His entire European experience would be of just such complexity. Fleeing the United States, he carried it everywhere with him, and finally found a way to confront it again in his books; running from his weaknesses, he learned to patch them together into a curious kind of strength. The decision to go to Europe had been as much an act of acquiescence as of volition, an acceptance of tides pulling at him, floodwaters bearing him up, sum of a hundred small cuts, pressures, guy lines. So it was with much else in Himes's life, including his affairs with women.

Himes's touchdown in Paris that first time was brief. He settled into an unassuming room in the Hotel Scandinavie on rue Tournon, made the acquaintance of Ollie Harrington, creator of the Bootsie cartoons and a central figure, perhaps
the
central figure, among expatriate American blacks, met young novelist William Gardner Smith, dined with Yves and Yvonne Malartic at the Deux Magots on St. Germain-des-Prés. It was mostly cold and rainy that April. When he could, he sat outside Café Monaco soaking up sunlight. And he spent time with Richard and Ellen Wright.

Always a champion of Wright, Himes nonetheless found himself dismayed at the couple's middle-class behavior: pretension, creature comforts, self-satisfaction, and self-absorption. Richard seemed too narrowly intent on status. He spent a fussy hour discussing with a bookshop owner how his new book might best be displayed, bridled at all criticism or any perceived slight, reigned like a ringmaster over the circus of literati and expatriate blacks at Café Monaco. Ellen chattered away about the bother and expense of having her hair dyed blond. Outspoken critic of the black middle class that Himes was, this rankled. It resounded, too, against his self-image as a writer. Himes
knew that he, like all other black American writers, existed in, and largely because of, the shadow cast by Richard Wright. Wright was mentor and example to an entire generation of novelists—the father who had to be slain, as James Baldwin baldly put it. Another important point, one often overlooked, is that the years lost to prison and the disorders of his life had delayed Himes's debut as a novelist, making him something of a late bloomer, and delayed as well, in the manner of alcoholics, his emotional development, in effect protracting his adolescence so that, despite his chronological age, he was, effectively, a young writer.

At the tag end of one running defense of Wright in
The Quality of Hurt
, in documenting his first Paris leave-taking, Himes seems to be speaking as much of Wright and of himself as he is of the source of his negative impressions of Paris camaraderie. This comes, remember, from the man who all but single-handedly champions Wright's later return to
Native Son
-like material, and who had himself just written
The Third Generation
. As often the case, it's difficult to surmise the degree of Himes's self-awareness here.

I wanted to get away and live a different life. At times my soul brothers embarrassed me, bragging about their scars, their poor upbringing, and their unhappy childhood, to get some sympathy and some white pussy and money, too, if they could. It was a new variety of Uncle-Toming, a modern version.
¹⁴

Some element of this ritual stand against the father, and certainly Chester's innate contrariety, may help account for his attraction to William Gardner Smith. Seventeen years younger than Himes, Smith represents the expatriate urge in pure form: unlike most others, he
remained
abroad once there, dying in France in 1974, taking some pain all the while to become a part of his new society; and he seems to have found in expatriation the liberation that eluded others. Smith had been posted to Germany in 1945 while enlisted; following a stint at Temple University and a stay at Yaddo, he returned to Europe, this time to Paris, where he lived, with two years out as minister of information in Ghana and one brief trip to the States, until his death. Having worked as a journalist from age eighteen, upon relocation to Europe he continued such work, writing a column for the Pittsburgh
Courier
, the paper in
which Ollie Harrington's Bootsie cartoons appeared, and serving as desk editor for a French news agency.

Smith's first novel,
Last of the Conquerors
, the story of the love between a black GI and a German girl, in which Smith suggested that the U.S. Army treated Nazis better than it did its own black infantrymen, came out when he was twenty years old. In 1950 he published the nonpolitical
Anger at Innocence
, another love story, this time between a middle-aged married man and a young pickpocket.
South Street
followed four years later and was a modest commercial success; set in the Philadelphia of Smith's youth, its themes are black militancy and, again, interracial love. Almost ten years passed before publication of
The Stone Face
. Telling of a black expatriate's gradual awakening to racial oppression in France after having fled such in his own country, the book evidences a mature, truthful and balanced view of racism. Smith, like Himes in his Chicago speech, makes the point that oppression dehumanizes the oppressor every bit as much as it does the oppressed; his expatriate blacks feel guilt at sidestepping the struggle; at book's end the protagonist is poised to return home, there best to fight the stone face of racism. Smith's last is a fine, completely unknown novel.