Chester Himes (22 page)

Or as Marlon Brando shortly (1954) will respond in
The Wild One
to the question What are you rebelling against: “What have you got?”

In addition to its airing of social identity (“issues and attitudes that hitherto had been left to smolder unrecognized by the public at large,” as Fabre and Margolies have it
²⁹
) and its introduction of the theme of black anti-Semitism so much with us today,
Lonely Crusade's
importance lies in its limning of Negro resentment over their exploitation by Communist “champions,” and in its insistence on black America as pathological.

This theme of psychopathology, implicit in
If He Hollers
, central to
The Primitive
, ontological in the Harlem cycle, will be picked up most
explicitly in Himes's address at Chicago that summer. An important aspect emerges in
Lonely Crusade
with Lee Gordon's argument that, kept down so long (one recalls Jack London's vision of fascism as a boot heel stamping on a human face—forever), the Negro is unable to envision anything else, unable to take advantage of what opportunities do exist for him—and so must be given, at the outset, special consideration. This principle, which in recent years we've come to call affirmative action (and which as this book is written has begun disappearing), is another form of Himes's complaint that slaves were “given their freedom” without also being given the means to support themselves. Ideally an affront to democracy, in reality it's bent all too facilely to justification for continuance of mechanisms of oppression—and it flew in the face of the Negro elite's principles of self-elevation.

Himes returned to this point in his 1970 interview with John Williams:

But I know why the black people disliked the book—because they're doing the same thing now that I said at that time was necessary. I had the black protagonist, Lee Gordon, a CIO organizer, say that the black man in America needed more than just a superficial state of equality; he needed special consideration because he was so far behind. That you can't just throw him out there and say, “Give Negroes rights,” because it wouldn't work that way. And so this is what most of the black writers had against it; in saying that, of course, by pleading for special privileges for the black people I was calling them inferior.
³⁰

Beneath the bluster, though, predictably, typically, Himes was wounded. His pain is ever the egotist's pain: all or nothing. And so a verbal formula we come to know well clicks into place in his discussion in
The Quality of Hurt
of his second novel's reception.

Of all the hurts which I had suffered before—my brother's accident, my own accident, being kicked out of college, my parents' divorce, my term in prison, and my racial hell on the West Coast—and which I have suffered since, the rejection of
Lonely Crusade
hurt me most.
³¹

From this rejection arises another familiar lamentation as well, hinging on a single word. He had poured his heart and mind into this book, Himes said—

I had attempted to be completely fair. I had written what I thought was a story of the fear that inhabits the minds of all blacks who live in America, and the various impacts on this fear precipitated by communism, industrialism, unionism, the war, white women, and marriage within the race.
³²

—but people did not want to know the truth.
Truth
becomes a rosary he fingers while speaking. Often in professionally difficult times (and Chester had few other) he took refuge in asserting that, whatever his failings as a writer, he was engaged in something more substantial than mere storytelling, these games of literature; he perceived himself to be in the purest sense witnessing, to be setting down truth, gospel,
word
.

Certainly Himes exaggerated both reviewers' hostility to his second novel and his own response to their criticisms. Finally, though, he wasn't far off the mark. The book sold poorly, perhaps four thousand copies. “For the next five years I couldn't write,” he'd later announce.
³³
Again hyperbole: he'd continue to work on his prison novel, and would write
The Third Generation
. But he was drifting ever further from any mainstream of literary activity. Never again would he be able to envision for himself, as he had done heretofore, any authentic position in American letters: the breakthrough book, recognition, induction by acclaim. Henceforth he'd remain ever the outsider, half proud of his alienation, half galled at it.

At midpoint in
Lonely Crusade
, union organizer Lee Gordon sits with the newspaper on the bus to work, reading of growing racial tensions within the city.

A Negro had cut a white worker's throat in a dice game at another of the aircraft companies and was being held without bail; and a white woman in a shipyard had accused a Negro worker of raping her.
¹

Not only does this directly echo Bob Jones's predicament in
If He Hollers
, it's also a deliberate recapitulation of
Chapter 9
of
this
book in which Lee sits on a bus reading the transcript of a rape case, one of a number of parallels laid into the book, brick on brick. The transcript in turn prefigures
A Case of Rape
. Even the strain of racial murders initially meant to be central to
If He Hollers
and there abandoned reemerges here in Lester McKinley's scheming to kill exploitative capitalist Foster, and in Luther McGregor's murder of a corrupt deputy sheriff. Throughout his career Chester would go back again and again to the same wells, carrying different buckets.

These echoes of
If He Hollers
point up the diptych nature of the novels. Though
Lonely Crusade
is twice the length of
If He Hollers
, the novels in many respects are alike in purpose and scope, both exploring the social milieu of wartime Los Angeles. Twins, we're told, often complete sentences for one another.
If He Hollers
gives voice to one twin's bald, unreasoning fear and fury;
Crusade
is the other twin's struggle to argue their case calmly, logically.

Lonely Crusade
was published on October 8, 1947, twenty-three months after publication of
If He Hollers
. Set in the spring of 1943 in
wartime Los Angeles and spanning fifty days, it is Himes's most ambitious and outward-directed novel, judged by Fabre and Margolies a “rich, complex, yet ultimately unsuccessful book.”
²
Gilbert Muller thinks it “one of the most radical novels about the structures of American domination and about California life as a symptom of the corrupt power of both capitalism and communism.”
³
Stephen Milliken has this estimation:

The prose style of
Lonely Crusade
is, in many passages, much more brilliant, containing some of Himes's most successful efforts at “fine writing,” and in its ultimate effects this long novel is a much more deeply disturbing book, but in immediate impact it is distinctly less powerful than
If He Hollers Let Him Go
. It is, of all of Himes's books, the one that comes closest to failure, due to the sheer abundance of things packed into it … But it is also Himes's supreme effort as novelist, thinker, propagandist, and crusader[.]
⁴

Milliken's final catalog of nouns speaks strongly to the novel's fundamental problems. For not only is it a programmed work, malleable fiction patted into shape about rigid forms of discourse, it's also, in all-things-to-all-men manner, heroically inclusive. Swept into its purview are unionism and labor relations, the Communist Party, a panoply of wartime sentiments, black rage and impotence, the sprawl of the new urban landscape, black-white sexuality, the social role of media, the nature and abuse of political power, black anti-Semitism, and much else. Milliken underscores the burden of information carried by the novel in noting its resemblance to historical fiction, passages in which Himes, though writing what is ostensibly a contemporary novel, takes advantage of set pieces to unload baskets of background data. Abandoning the limited scope and classically tragic structure of
If He Hollers
with its choruslike dreams, Himes forsakes as well that novel's simple power and intensity. The new novel is a sprawl—a sprawl as problem-ridden as those new, burgeoning cities, and just as filled with energy and fascination.

The primary problem lies with the novel's schematic, contrived structure, one providing (Milliken again) “a platform for extensive editorializing, none of it entirely gratuitous, though much is
seemingly contradictory.”
⁵
Throughout we hear machinery grinding and occasionally groaning backstage as Himes bends the story toward scenes and confrontations having more to do with exigencies of his various arguments than with considerations of similitude or internal consistency. Feet hitting marks blocked by the play's director, characters are drained of life. They become flat; simple counters of meaning, signifiers, allegorical, costumes too long at arm and leg, too stiff, inappropriate to their station or role, colors poorly matched.

Nor does Lee Gordon himself, as protagonist, escape such manipulation. Passive throughout—so passive, in fact, that he comes perilously close to losing the reader's sympathy—Lee undergoes in the book's final pages what is effectively a metempsychosis and emerges as savior, communal soul, carrier of the universal banner. For all Himes's push-and-pull, the reader is hard put to accept this miraculous transformation. Eminently convincing as failed lover and as victim, Milliken remarks, Lee Gordon proves an unsatisfactory crusader; we never latch on to any core of faith that might sustain him, and little foundation is laid for character traits counter to his prevailing negativism.
⁶
Bernard W. Bell in
The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition
agrees:

Unfortunately, Himes's handling of Lee Gordon's deep-seated conviction of the basic inferiority of black people and the abrupt, spiritual transformation that results in his redemptive heroic death for the cause of unionism at the end of the novel violate the formal integrity of the narrative, and are more melodramatic than naturalistic.
⁷

Gilbert Muller takes exception to this reading, insisting that, while some critics find Lee's shift from reaction to action too sudden,

It is more appropriate to assert that Gordon, as a thinking being, has been attempting to comprehend his behavior through the fifty days of narrative constituting
Lonely Crusade
and that, with Abe Rosenberg's help (and also Smitty's allegiance), he is now prepared to act. The conversion of Meursault in Camus's
The Stranger
to a posture of existential rebellion is also abrupt but based on an unfolding recognition of the oppressive essence of
his condition. Like Meursault, Lee Gordon seizes his existence and embraces the gestures and actions of rebellion on the day of the union rally.
⁸

James Lundquist in turn calls attention to several structural problems. Lester McKinley's elaborate plot to murder Foster, so carefully set up, simply evaporates. Ruth, though given such seeming importance, never comes fully to life. There are too many characters and too many points of view to develop any of them fully. This is nonetheless a powerful novel, Lundquist concludes, reminding us that sudden turns of plot and character, as well as melodramatic developments, are signature Himes. Other of Himes's strengths, among them his realistic reproduction of speech patterns and creation of intensely physical settings, redeem the flow of ideas and keep them from becoming mere abstract chatter, Lundquist feels. The novel has, too, rare value as social history, shot through with images of a city in transition, evoking the physical presence and atmosphere of the war plants, documenting the mood of workers making good wages for the first time in their lives and worrying what will become of them at war's end, offering insights into the relationship between unionization and communist activities: all stations in that peculiar mix of purpose and apocalypse in the air at the time.

The Avalon streetcar was crowded with servicemen and workers, all in the uniform of their participation—the navy's blue woolen and the workers' blue denim, the army's khaki and the workers' tan.

Soldiers for democracy, for an eighty-dollar check or death on some distant isle; the home front and the battle-front; relief clients of yesterday and of tomorrow too—who knows? Lee Gordon asked himself as he shouldered down the aisle. But soldiers today—important, necessary, expendable.
⁹

Protagonist Lee Gordon is as deeply conflicted, as
cloven
, as Bob Jones. Both fill “Negro first” jobs in wartime industry, Bob as leadman worker, Lee as union organizer. Both are educated, racially preoccupied, inhabited at one and the same time by deep feelings of inferiority and a profound sense of outrage. Where Bob simply reacts, responding
emotionally to slights and demeaning situations, Lee has learned (at least on one level, the outward) to distance himself from his instincts, to stand apart from them by means of intellectualization, rationalization, analysis. Like Bob, Lee in the course of the novel is manipulated and used by everyone: white union officials, Communists, white women, workers with their own agendas, his bosses, what Pynchon called the whole sick crew. Bob is a victim; Lee begins as “the happiest man in the world”
¹⁰
and, after spending most of the novel learning to be a victim, chooses to become a special
kind
of victim, a martyr. Until this moment of existential choice, Lee's character remains labile, tenuous, transitional. By turns he appears passive, fearful, insecure, headstrong, honest with others, deeply dishonest with self and wife, his insubstantiality perhaps best symbolized in the habitual response he makes to challenge or revelation: “Well—yes.” “No one man could be as contradictory as Lee Gordon seems,” Smitty thinks at one point.
¹¹