Chester Himes (31 page)

His second, affording considerable prestige and making him with Richard Wright the most visible of black American expatriates, had been selected by Club Français du Livre. None of Wright's novels at that time had been so lauded, though
Native Son
would be, and many suggest, Chester among them, that this gave rise to a certain tension between the two novelists. Smith had interviewed Wright in 1945 and upon planning the move to Paris had consulted with him at length. He had his own small court at Café Tournon, but made a point of attending Wright's at the Monaco. Chester remembered Smith as a “pleasant-looking, brown-skinned young man who talked very rapidly in choppy, broken sentences.”
¹⁵

Four years before his death, in 1970 (two years before publication of
The Quality of Hurt)
, Smith's publication of
Return to Black America
consolidated his position abroad. A commercial failure in the States, the book attained celebrity in France as
L'Amérique noire
. It takes up again the themes of his fiction: rootlessness, urban poverty, interracial conflict, expatriate guilt. The expatriate, Smith writes therein, is “an eternal ‘foreigner' among eternal strangers,” words that
Chester well might have taken to heart. And yet, as Rimbaud writes: One does not escape.

Another important contact for Chester was Annie Brièrre, who not long after his arrival left a note at Chester's hotel asking if he might come to her house in Square du Roule to be interviewed for the newspaper
France-U.S.A
. When he complied, walking into the sort of apartment he'd always envisioned for the French aristocracy, he encountered “a big-boned woman in her fifties with the imposingly strong face and big nose of the old French.”
¹⁶
She in turn perceived “a finely chiseled face, bright eyes, the manners of a gentleman.”
¹⁷
Madame Brièrre became an occasional guide and dinner companion for Himes, later interceding as translator in a dispute with his publishers. In the published interview (December 1955) Brièrre cited
Lonely Crusade
as a powerful and gripping work while noting the directness of style, appealing structure, and human drama of
The Third Generation
. Addressing questions as to the novel's Freudian implications and autobiographical content, Himes remarked:

To me, that book is closer to
Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence. Our mother was fiercely ambitious for us. In order to make successes out of us, she made us study the violin for five years, which we thought was a complete waste of time. Any perceived weakness in us worried her. She wanted us to go out and conquer the world.

…even if many of the scenes in the novel are based on real occurrences, the things causing and linking them, as well as the dramatic climax, are completely imaginary.
¹⁸

To Brièrre's question as to why his protagonists, intelligent people all, seem enslaved by their passions, Himes responded: “I think this is typically American. We're still a young nation and we seldom think before we act.”
¹⁹
Not all white Americans hate blacks, he contends, but they do feel hostility toward people different from themselves: Catholics in the South, Asiatics in the West, elsewhere the Irish, or Jews.

One week in, Vandi arrived, cabling from the ship just before it docked that Chester should “COME QUICKLY: FOR YOU KNOW WHAT …”
²⁰
Almost everyone she met was enchanted “by her fair
complexion and magnificent shoulders and firm breasts which had always been unimpeded by bras, her light curly hair, but most of all perhaps by her knowing sensual grin.”
²¹
She and Chester made the rounds, to the Monaco and Deux Magots, to the Dome with the Malartics for breakfast, “to good restaurants and to bed.”
²²
The highlight of Vandi's visit for Chester came when complaints from a neighbor over the noisiness of their lovemaking caused them to be relocated to a more isolated back room. Chester's stock, he wrote, rose exceedingly.

By night the story was all over the American community in the Latin Quarter; no one had ever heard of a paying guest being put out of a hotel room in Paris for making love. In time it became something of a legend.
²³

Another encounter, one between Wright and James Baldwin that Himes witnessed, also became something of a legend, and throws the generational issue sharply into focus. Himes himself had little in common with the younger Baldwin. His unease around homosexuality was matched by Baldwin's toward left-wing activity; Baldwin, moreover, had reviewed
Lonely Crusade
unfavorably. But with Wright Baldwin had a long-standing relationship from which he had derived much support and inspiration, even if of late that relationship had begun to fall into disrepair. With publication of “Everybody's Protest Novel” in 1949, disrepair progressed to dismantling. Baldwin ended his discussion of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
in that essay with mention of
Native Son's
Bigger Thomas as Uncle Tom's descendant, “flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.”
²⁴
Wright took exception, on the day of publication calling Baldwin over to his table in the Brasserie Lipp.

Richard accused me of having betrayed him, and not only him but all American Negroes by attacking the idea of protest literature … Richard thought that I was trying to destroy his
novel and his reputation; but it had not entered my mind that either of these
could
be destroyed, and certainly not by me.
²⁵

Nevertheless, just after that initial clash Baldwin began “Many Thousands Gone,” an essay twice as long as that which provoked Wright's anger, this one a sustained assault on
Native Son
and, more deeply, on its author's integrity. The quote above, in turn, comes from another long essay written following Wright's death, “Alas, Poor Richard,” in which Baldwin tried to parse the grammar of dissensions between Wright and himself. Here Baldwin offers up a haberdashery of complaints, some borrowed, some new: that Wright lives and behaves as if white, that he fails to comprehend jazz or to understand Africa, that he exaggerates his own importance, that he is hopelessly out of touch with current race problems back home, that he now bores the very younger writers who once revered him. (In “Many Thousands Gone” Baldwin had predicted with some accuracy that Wright would fall to repeating himself.) There's no doubt that personal elements had their place—both were proud, difficult, opinionated individuals—but the true quarrel, as James Campbell points out in his biography of Baldwin and again in
Interzone Paris
, strikes deeper, to the question of the writer's social and artistic responsibilities. Wright was a product of the proletarian thirties when being an intellectual meant being political, trailing behind him a lengthy history of engagement with social and left-wing causes, a history, too, of persecution for the same. Baldwin was by temperament far more the aesthete, Henry James to Wright's Dreiser, Chandler to his Hammett; his departure from the United States had been only in part to escape racial prejudice, in larger part to escape the grave necessity of being a “Negro novelist,” to pursue the chance to become a free artist.

The incident that Himes witnessed, which took place in late April or early May 1953 at Deux Magots, became a fulcrum in dismantling the Wright-Baldwin relationship. In his last public appearance, a speech given at the American Church in Paris on November 8, 1960, shortly before his death at the end of that month, Wright gave his account of the incident, in which he slyly drafted Himes as accomplice.

I must tell you that there existed between Chester Himes and me, on the one hand, and Balwin [sic], on the other, a certain tension stemming from our view of race relations. To us, the work of
Balwin seemed to carry a certain burden of apology for being a Negro and we always felt that between his sensitive sentences there were echoes of a kind of unmanly weeping. Now Chester Himes and I are of a different stamp. Himes is a naturalist and I'm something, no matter how crudely, of a psychologist. This tension between Balwin and me and Himes, until that evening, had never been mentioned or directly written about.
²⁶

As they sit on the terrace sipping beers, Himes, Wright, and Baldwin in the company of a white woman, Baldwin asks what the older novelist thought of “that article I wrote about you.” When Wright responds that he couldn't make much sense of it, Baldwin bristles.

He leaped to his feet, pointed his finger in my face and screamed:

“I'm going to destroy you! I'm going to destroy your reputation! You'll see!”
²⁷

Spurred on by the woman, Baldwin continues in such vein as Himes, excusing himself saying he can't take this, leaves, returning only after Baldwin is gone.

“That was horrible,” Himes sighed.

“Well, I guess it's better for it to be said openly than just thought of in private,” I said.

“But he said that in front of that white woman,” Chester Himes voiced the heart of his and my objection.

“That was the point,” I said.
²⁸

This is not, Campbell points out, a Baldwin that we easily recognize, not the Baldwin who wrote, referring to Wright, “For he and Chester were friends, they brought out the best in each other, and the atmosphere they created brought out the best in me.”
²⁹
Neither does one readily perceive Chester Himes walking away embarrassed from a good fight, or commenting afterward in such seeming naïveté on its racial aspect. Both accounts, Wright's and Himes's, were penned seven years or more after the fact, but it's most likely to the latter, Himes's, we should look for substance.

Then we hurried to the Deux Magots and found Baldwin waiting for us at a table on the terrace across from the Eglise Saint-Germain. I was somewhat surprised to find Baldwin a small, intense young man of great excitability. Dick sat down in lordly fashion and started right off needling Baldwin, who defended himself with such intensity that he stammered, his body trembled and his face quivered. I sat and looked from one to the other, Dick playing the fat cat and forcing Baldwin into the role of the quivering mouse. It wasn't particularly funny, but then Dick wasn't a funny man … Dick accused Baldwin of showing his gratitude for all he had done for him by his scurrilous attacks. Baldwin defended himself by saying that Dick had written his story and hadn't left him, or any other American black writer, anything to write about. I confess at this point they lost me.
³⁰

Quite an extraordinary conflict, that from which the ever quarrelsome Chester Himes emerges the calm, rational voice. Yet so universal are the precepts highlighted by this dispute—differing attitudes toward race relations, generational conflicts, questions of the artist's social positioning—and so well known the contretemps, that John A. Williams includes a fictionalized version of it in his chronicle-novel of this century's black literary and political life,
The Man Who Cried I Am
, a book of which Himes said: “Williams has written very accurately, I think, about the Wright who lived in Paris, grappling with complex problems and unethical people.”
³¹
Williams's account gives us something of the feel of the encounter's mythic importance to the black intellectual as well perhaps as, through filters of time and fiction, something of its essence.

Young writer Dawes has called asking expatriate novelist Harry to meet him; he wants to borrow money. Another writer, Max, is having dinner with Harry and his wife and goes along. He's got his nerve, wife Charlotte says to Harry, after all the rotten things he's been writing about you. They meet at a café and, in addition to slipping him the requested money, Harry buys dinner for Dawes. Over coffee he asks Dawes why he's been attacking him.

Dawes's voice broke from him high-pitched and sharp. “It's the duty of a son to destroy his father.” Max watched Harry recoil.
Harry then looked Max full in the face; his face, Max observed, was at once a puzzle, flooded with understanding and rejection of that understanding.

Gruffly Harry said, “What in the hell are you talking about? I'm not
your
father.”

Dawes loosed an exasperated gasp that sounded like a hiss. “Harry, well, if you don't
know
—you're the father of all contemporary Negro writers. We can't go beyond you until you're
destroyed”

Cautiously Harry said, “You're crazy, man. You've been hungry too long.” But Max noticed a sudden gleam rise in his eyes and then slowly fall. Dawes finished his coffee in Harry's lingering silence. “Really,” Dawes said. “As soon as I can, I'll pay you back. I've got a couple of pieces on desks in the States right now.”

“I hope they're accepted,” Harry said. “But aren't you working on a novel?”

“I've just finished it.”
³²

Leaving, Harry asks Max if “these young guys” actually think of him as being the father of Negro writers.

“Yes,” Max answered, remembering how eager he had been to meet and talk to Harry ten years ago at Wading River. “We've been thinking it a long time.”

“We?” Harry laughed. “You trying to destroy me, too?”

Max laughed.

“No shuck?”

“No shuck,” Max said. “You've been away too long or you'd know you're the father.”
³³

Williams's indirect portrait of Wright and the Wright-Himes relationship is quite a fine one. Weary of France, Harry tells Max he is trapped. He can't return to the States because of his Communist past; England will not give him a permanent visa; and Spain, since he has written critically of what Franco wrought, turns him away at the border. Max notes that Harry remains the darling of French intellectuals, however, and, feeling always a certain distance, an exclusion, that “Harry's friends were very much like his books: they
were not for lending; they were his. He had bought or written them, and he wasn't going to let them get out of his sight—or be shared.”
³⁴