Chester Himes (33 page)

Increasingly desperate, striking out at every frustration, false exit, and blind alley, Himes resigned his membership in PEN when the organization declined to extend him an emergency loan, and withdrew cliency from New York agent Margot Johnson when she replied to his request for an advance with the observation that they were agents, not bankers. When in January Bill Targ wired $500, Himes and Willa promptly left for Majorca, bouncing restlessly from Palma, to Puerto de Pollensa a bit further along the coast, to Terreno in the southwest, Himes working all the while on
The End of a Primitive
.

I would get up at five, and by the time I had made coffee the first rays of the rising sun would strike our garden. I used the kitchen table for a desk and by the time the first peasants passed along the walk several feet below the embankment of our garden, humming the rising crescendo of the death song of the bullring, I would be typing happily … I wrote slowly, savoring each word, sometimes taking an hour to fashion one sentence to my liking. Sometimes leaning back in my seat and laughing hysterically at the sentence I had fashioned, getting as much satisfaction from the creation of this book as from an exquisite act of love. That was the first time in my life I enjoyed writing; before I had always written from compulsion … for once I was almost doing what I wanted to
with a story, without being influenced by the imagined reactions of editors, publishers, critics, readers, or anyone. By then I had reduced myself to the fundamental writer, and nothing else mattered. I wonder if I could have written like that if I had been a successful writer, or even living in a more pleasant house.
⁷

Reading this, one might well recall E. M. Forster's description of Greek poet Cavafy as “standing absolutely motionless at a slight right angle to the universe,” or Cavafy's own lines:

But we who serve Art,
sometimes with the mind's intensity,
can create—but of course only for a short time—
pleasure that seems almost physical.
⁸

In the early stages of writing
The End of a Primitive
Himes often strayed afield. He had reached a kind of abandon, lost in the emotional charge of his situation and language, an aura and a smell of sensuality emanating from him “like a miasma.”
⁹
It was always Willa who brought him around, urging him to gear down, pull back—especially in those passages verging on the pornographic. While the essence of any relationship between a black man and a white woman in the United States was sex, Himes felt, to describe which—the blackness of his skin and shanks, the thickness of his lips, the texture of his hair alongside pink nipples, white thighs, silky pubic hair—tends necessarily toward the pornographic, this was not the point of his book. For, heir to all the vices, sophistries, and shams of their white enslavers, American blacks, far from being primitives, were, as he had said before in his Chicago speech,

the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed, anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world. The American black is a new race of man; the only new race of man to come into being in modern time.
¹⁰

The financial crisis continued. World contracted for a book of stories to be titled
Black Boogie Woogie
, paying an $800 advance, but Himes grew disgusted with the stories when he read them and
withdrew the book; grandly, he reported throwing the manuscript into the sea. Brother Eddie back in New York responded to his frantic appeal with $50 and a stern sermon on the necessity of Chester's becoming responsible. Backed, he felt, into a corner, Himes wrote a bad check for passage money. He and Willa made their way to the supposed refuge of Arcachon only to find that the Malartics had sold the villa, then settled into a cheap hotel in Paris on rue de Buci. There Chester lived off small sums borrowed from friends and made rounds of publishers, Corêa, Gallimard, Albin Michel, trying to stir up fresh interest in his books.

Willa seems at this point to have fallen to nervous prostration, barely functional and host to a variety of ills. For days she would lie abed weeping. Increasingly Himes felt her a burden, and felt that he could not help her in any significant way; she was wholly unsuited, he decided, by background and temperament, to the temporizing life he led. The rejection of their book, atop extended sieges of poverty and ongoing uncertainty, these last everyday facts of black life, had proved shattering to a woman of her class, background and race. Unable to sustain any longer her desperation, Himes made use of the $1,000 advance for
The End of a Primitive
from New American Library to pack Willa off to America. Following a brief return to London, by February 1955 Himes himself was back in New York, lodged again at the Albert Hotel, his and Willa's affair dissolving in a slurry of melodramatic letters, mutual mistrust and accusations, abortive meetings. It is in Paris, with Himes saying farewell to Willa, that the first volume of the autobiography ends; with him booking passage to New York that the second volume begins.

Meanwhile, on December 13, at about the time Himes and Willa were finishing their novel, just before they departed for Majorca,
The Third Generation
appeared from World.

One of the earliest reviews, from Edmund Fuller in the
Chicago Tribune Review of Books
, declared
The Third Generation
a strong addition to Himes's work, citing the novel for its tragic power while pointing out (an observation James Lundquist will echo twenty-two years later) that the book's structure and conception fail to bear up in strength to the general fine quality of its writing.
¹¹
Both the
New York Herald Tribune Review of Books
and the
Library Journal
agreed. Frederic Morton in the
first spoke of the novel as having “a strong if incoherent impact of its own,” Milton S. Byam in the latter admired the quality of writing while remarking that, close upon a strong beginning, the novel degenerated into little more than a series of crises.
¹²

The
Saturday Review of Literature
in the person of Martin Levin took to task the novel's excesses but held it to be nonetheless of great interest, as did an anonymous reviewer in the
San Francisco Chronicle
who spoke of the novel, despite its “dismal theme,” as “sincere” and affecting, with “much food for thought.”
¹³

Like Edmund Fuller, Riley Hughes found the surety of Himes's writing unmatched by his sense of structure. In
Catholic World
Hughes fixed on the novel's major flaw.

Through typing his story to a Freudian mother complex formula, ruthlessly applied, Mr. Himes removes his characters as far from the reader's sympathy as they are from convincing reality.
¹⁴

One might, while admiring the verity of that adjectival
ruthlessly applied
, exempt only the final phrase. Or perhaps not. Himes's remark that
The Third Generation
was his most dishonest book could be taken, and has been, to call into question the novel's ultimate realism. (On the other hand, he may have been referring to the utilization of autobiographical over fictional material.) There
is
something breathless and melodramatic, something of the brandished cloak, about the relentless crises confronting the Taylor family.

In the
New York Times
, John Brooks wrote:

Himes seems to have set out to grip the reader in a vise of despair by cumulative incident and detail. His searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists. But the impact is weakened by the introduction, in several cases, of chance misfortune unrelated to the characters or their ancestry, and the whole seems at times to lack a certain necessary measure of animal fun and human hope.
¹⁵

That phrase
animal fun
Himes will appropriate for the satirical discussion between Jesse Robinson and his editor in
The End of a
Primitive
, just as he scooped up phrases from a review of
Lonely Crusade
to fine effect in his Chicago speech.

“But surely you realize that that was satire—Rabelais was satirizing the humanist Renaissance—and certainly some of the best satire ever written … This—” tapping the manuscript neatly wrapped in brown paper on his desk—“is protest. It's vivid enough, but it's humorless. And there is too much bitterness and not enough just plain animal fun—”

“I wasn't writing about animals—”
¹⁶

In his Chicago speech Himes insisted that the American black lives always and inexorably with two forms of hate: he hates his oppressor and, living in constant fear of that hate being discovered, he “hates himself because of this fear.”
¹⁷
It's a point that John A. Williams emphasizes as a cornerstone of
The Third Generation
in his introduction to the 1989 Thunder's Mouth edition, calling the novel “a chilling study of racism absorbed from whites and utilized by its black victims to victimize others of their own race.” In this powerful, painful to read novel, he says, Himes “pulls aside the curtain—rips it down, in fact—on the class warfare within the black community.”
¹⁸

Still, despite the novel's considerable power, despite favorable reviews in important publications, and despite sale of paperback rights for an advance of $10,000 to NAL, who obviously believed
The Third Generation
capable of tapping into some ready market, sales were poor. By this time few expectations or illusions remained to Himes; he was aswim in quite different waters, thankful for whatever driftwood or flotsam he might grab hold of.

One forever wonders what might have happened had Himes's books been published with proper timeliness,
The Third Generation
, for instance, a decade later, in the midst of the civil rights movement; or
The Primitive
not in oblivious 1956 but in, say, 1986, when an audience, one responding to work by such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, existed. But Chester was always there at the station too early, taking the train alone.

The Third Generation
is, as the title might suggest, an historical novel rather in the manner that
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
are historical novels: exacting portraits of a lost time. Ostensibly it deals
with the disintegration of one family, a disintegration deriving as much as anything from that internal racism indicated by Williams. As Edward Margolies notes in
Native Sons
,

On the surface, rank bigotry seldom intrudes as the direct cause of their sufferings; they appear to be defeated by their own incapacities, weaknesses, blindness, and obsessions. But Himes makes clear that in order to understand them, one must understand the generations that preceded them, black and white: they are doomed not simply by their own psychic drives but by the history that created them and forced them into self-destructive channels. They are as much the victims of a value system they implicitly accept (and which indeed flows in their bloodstreams) as are men like Bigger Thomas who rebel against the social order.
¹⁹

Joe Himes insisted that this racial aspect of his brother's novel was overplayed, blown out of proportion like the story of his, Joe's, blinding, because of the fascination it had for readers. Admitting that reading Chester “disturbs me too much,” Joe recalled the family dynamics in more directly economic terms.

I don't think there was any degree of love, passion and devotion between them … They were married in the sense that there was a certain religious obligation about it. There were children. There was respectability. All this made for stability in the family.
²⁰

That stability disappears, in the novel as in life, with the father's loss of his professorship. Once he has stopped teaching, Fess's life becomes a long, sure glide downward. Mother Lillian's decline is little less catastrophic, the hysteria forever hovering about her blooming, with her husband's failure, into insanity.

Stephen Milliken suggests that
The Third Generation
be read as prequel to
Cast the First Stone (Yesterday Will Make You Cry)
, this novel in one sense completing the latter, presenting formative years that explain the protagonist's presence in prison.
The Third Generation
, Milliken writes, is Himes's least contrived, most fluid work, developing organically from characters who move “towards fates that they must
both invent and discover.”
²¹
He also elicits the parallel to
Sons and Lovers
in the manner in which its central conflict between plebeian father and aristocratic mother becomes displaced to a struggle between mother and son.

The novel is structured about a series of traumatic scenes much as Himes patterned
Lonely Crusade
around an aggregate of dialogues and
If He Hollers
around Bob Jones's nightly dreams. Here, though, the structure is much looser—disjunctive and associative rather than programmatic, in this respect prefiguring the vivid though often but marginally connected chains of imagery and incident that take the place of traditional narrative in the Harlem novels. Most of the novel's traumatic scenes result in one way or another from the elemental struggle at the novel's heart, that between the mother for domination and her son for freedom and personal identity. In the mother abstraction takes place, an arbitrary handful of traits gradually supplanting all others and calcifying into madness. Though greatly drawn to his mother's dreamy, unnatural way, her flights of fancy, her denials of reality, her escapes, the son does in the end avoid them and achieve a qualified redemption.

The elementality of that struggle translates to a kind of aggrandizement, so that for all their specificity, and for all the innate smallness of their lives, the characters take on a certain grandness, becoming as Milliken says “creatures of epic, of romance, of allegory.”
²²
Contributing to this is the very real presence in the novel of Lillian's righteous, chastising god, as well as a cosmic malevolence that “seems to stalk the Taylor family, inflicting crippling accidents upon them, blinding them to every possibility of tenderness, turning their loves to bitterness and hate.”
²³
Father Fess Taylor with his bitter pride also is presented in mythic aspect, as a man once afire, a man once illuminated from within. Hephaestus, limping after the fall.