Chester Himes (25 page)

Himes had little idea what he might work on while at Yaddo. He had proposed a novel titled
Immortal Mammy
, which at one time he described as being about an exceptional Negro woman living in the white world, though this well may have been the Hollywood novel he'd been talking up for some time. Eventually he settled to work on “Stool Pigeon,” the story of a prisoner who informs on others planning an
escape. As a result they are thwarted, but only after a diversionary fire destroys much of the prison, and in anger over the damage done his standing as much as that done the prison, the warden divulges the informer's name. Himes wavered between making his characters black or white. He must have been going through the same self-interrogation in his revisions of
Black Sheep
, which codified his own prison experience through the guise of a white man; may have been paralyzed to some degree by criticisms of his depiction of the racial divide in
Lonely Crusade;
and, as previously suggested, from this time began to reject what he'd come to believe an optimistic, unrealistic representation of racial commingling in favor of black and white America as discrete, parallel worlds.

“Stool Pigeon” had become a novel-in-progress (he claims to have written fifty pages of it at Yaddo) when Himes applied for a Guggenheim that fall and was passed over. The Rosenwald Foundation, to which he had also applied, shut down that year.

Himes was quite taken by Yaddo's gorgeously landscaped grounds, rose gardens, and buildings, but his experience there was otherwise wholly negative.
The way your life is ruined here in this one small corner of the world
, poet Constantine Cavafy wrote,
is the way it's ruined everywhere
.
⁵
Chester carried his own climate with him, nestled among shirts, neckties, toiletries, and undernourished manuscripts in his luggage. Alone in his room he sat poring over such assured mood elevators as Rimbaud's
A Season in Hell
(Louise Varèse's translation had appeared in 1945 from New Directions) and Faulkner's
Light in August
, which pivots on the racial ambiguity of its central character, Joe Christmas. Isolation, meant to give him time to work undistracted, served only to send Himes crashing further into himself, intensifying his fear and self-doubt, underscoring his sense of failure and throwing into sharp relief his alienation. Like his doppelgänger in the story “Da-Da-Dee,” Himes held himself apart from others, did little or no work, and spent much of his time drinking, sinking ever more deeply into despair and self-despite, becoming “something a little inhuman.”
⁶
All is gravity, pulling him relentlessly down, back to the earth:

His face was twisted to one side and down-pulled with weariness. His skin was greasy; his eyes deep-sunk and haggard. There were harsh, deep lines pulling down the edges of his mouth.
⁷

Meanwhile, the song at which he hums on his drunken way back from town bars to the colony Skidoo—for the song, like so much in his life, eludes him—never becomes the liberation through art that he hopes for, but remains only a loud wail of pain, filling his head with melancholy: “He felt as if nothing would ever matter again one way or another.”
⁸

Perhaps he was already sick when he went there, Himes wrote, and Yaddo just brought it out; he didn't know. “But I do know I was sick when I left.”
⁹
The sickness, or perhaps some lucidity wrought from it (“with an ice-cold clarity derived from two Benzedrine tablets and a half bottle of champagne”
¹⁰
), found voice that summer in the speech Himes delivered at the University of Chicago. He came at the invitation of the Chicago South Side Community Center, where his old friend Horace Cayton was director, and must have felt himself uniquely qualified to speak on “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the United States.” His speech met with dead silence from the largely white audience. Himes was thirty-nine, again a failure.

When I finished reading that paper nobody moved, nobody applauded, nobody ever said anything else to me. I was shocked. I stayed in Chicago a few days drinking, and then I was half-drunk all the rest of the time I was in Yaddo. That was the time I started getting blackouts, I was drinking so much. I would get up in the morning and go into town, which you weren't supposed to do, and by eleven o'clock, I was dead drunk.
¹¹

That this speech manages to be at once masterful self-analysis, uncompromising manifesto, and cry of despair is full measure of its strength.

The writer, Himes said there in Chicago, seeks an interpretation of the meaning of life from the sum of his experiences. That is what urges him, and allows him, to go on. When, as with the American Negro, his experiences have been brutal and relentlessly oppressive, he cannot avoid bitterness, fear and hatred. His inclination will be to draw dwarfish, misshapen characters in a life without apparent form or purpose. But he must not accept that.

Rejecting it, immediately he will be set upon by a host of personal, social and professional conflicts.

First he must struggle with himself, because telling the truth about his degradation will open old wounds
and
bring new agonies.

And when he manages against all odds to win through and tell the truth, his reward will be to be reviled by whites and blacks alike. There will be great temptation to submit to patterns set by centuries of oppression: to retrench, equivocate, compromise. He will be driven to rationalize that he must shed his racial consciousness and become merely a man among other men. But his instinct for truth will finally determine that he cannot free himself of racial consciousness simply because he cannot free himself of race.

This conflict resolved, he will next discover the many factors working in concert to stay his pen. The American public does not want to know: truthful novels by honest Negro writers aren't good business. And if by some chance this writer does find a publisher, he'll find also new swarms of preconception and prejudice. White liberals, who have mingled exclusively with financially successful, materially secure, educated blacks (these darker versions of white), are likely to regard anything outside the pale of their limited personal experience and comforting illusions as aberrant, deranged, even psychotic.

Should the writer through pain and perseverance manage to get his book written and into print, new struggles await him, perhaps the most disheartening and bitter of all. For he cannot expect the patronage and support of the Negro middle class. Rather must he be prepared for displays of hatred and antagonism from black leaders, black clergy, and the black press, from all those who wish in shame to hide their own battered, scarred souls. They do not want it known that they have been so badly injured for fear they will be taken out of the game.

To white America those same scars are not only reminders, but affronts as well. It is his guilt that keeps the oppressor outraged and unrelenting; he will go to any length to keep from confronting that guilt and the contradictions within himself.

Of course
American Negroes hate American whites, Himes said that warm day in Chicago; hating white people is one of the first reflexes black Americans develop as they begin to learn their place in
American society. They would not be human if they did not despise their oppressors.

It could not, he said, be otherwise. But the real question lies in asking how much a man must sacrifice of himself to this necessity of hate. The American Negro experiences hate doubly: he hates first his oppressor, and then, because he lives in constant fear of this hatred being discovered, hates himself because of this fear.

There can be no understanding of Negro experience, of Negro behavior or compulsion, of Negro sexual impulses, of Negro marital relations, of Negro crimes or Negro thought, until the impact of this fear upon the Negro personality is understood.

And if one divines in that personality elements of homicidal mania, lust for whites, paradoxical anti-Semitism, a pathetic sense of inferiority, arrogance, Uncle Tomism, hatred and fear and self-contempt, then these are the effects of oppression on the human spirit, the daily horrors and daily realities of the American Negro.

Yet, Himes said in conclusion, there is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a quality, a force, impregnable to all assault. Prejudice, oppression, even three hundred years of submission, cannot corrode or destroy it. Were it not for this quality the whole fiber and personality of Negroes would have been utterly destroyed, their white oppressors become drooling idiots, savage maniacs, raving beasts. It is the quality within all humans that cries out “I will live!”

By mid-June Himes was back in New York, living in a furnished room in the Bronx belonging to a black orchestra leader named Bonelli and borrowing money from Van Vechten and his old friend Dan Levin, for whose magazine
Crossroads
he'd written back in his WPA days. He was still trying to hum the song from “Da-Da-Dee,” and remembered Jean going with him to low-end bars and dives and taking him home when he became too drunk to make it on his own: “I suppose that was all anyone could have done.”
¹²
Then Jean's job, upon which they were wholly dependent, was eliminated.

A rare glimmer of good news came through from France, where a translation of
If He Hollers Let Him Go
was to come out in October. Himes himself during this period recast
Hollers
as a two-act play, sending it to Van Vechten for comment.

In October, having advertised himself in newspapers as an experienced caretaker, Himes took on duties as overseer at a dormant lakefront resort in Newton, New Jersey. He and Jean occupied a three-room apartment over a tavern; Chester was to look after the cottages, grounds, and the owner's three dogs while attending to such repairs as were needed. Otherwise he spent his time writing, drafting the dramatic version of
Hollers
, and possibly beginning
The Third Generation
. The resort's owners, Frank and Elinor Bucino, visited on weekends. Frank, “a small dark Italian with a bad eye,”
¹³
Himes characterized as a Little Caesar type. Supposedly Frank Sinatra's godfather, he was accompanied everywhere by a tall, blond Swede who, Chester said, “looked almost exactly like a fictional bodyguard and killer called Sure in one of my
Esquire
short stories, 'Strictly Business.'”
¹⁴
Bucino had bought the resort, previously used as a training camp and parade ground for the German-American Bund, at government auction. Jean and Chester remained throughout the winter, until the resort crew arrived that spring, receiving a hundred and fifty dollars a month plus expenses. They took long walks in the snow, gathered watercress for salads from the woods by the lake, drove the ancient Mack firetruck that was their emergency transportation about the countryside as though it were a modern Jaguar sports car. That December, Horace and Ruby Cayton came for a weeklong visit.

From
The Primitive:

It had been pleasant there among the empty houses, far from the hurts of modern city life. No condescensions and denunciations, no venomous intrigues and shattering infidelities, no Negro problem and bright shining world of race relations with all its attendant excitement and despair …

His duties had been light, raking leaves, a few minor repairs, and nothing after the snow came in late November … He and Becky had a car to use, a lovely cottage with central heating, a fireplace and plenty of wood. And there had been a little terrier, owned by one of the proprietors, that had stayed with them; and in the cellar a hogshead of homemade wine that tasted a little like muscatel but was dry and very strong, which they had drunk all winter. It was full of dead gnats and had to be
strained, but on occasion, to show off his ruggedness, he drank it with the dead gnats floating about in the glass. “Ah laks marinated gnats,” he would say.
¹⁵

While at the resort, Chester turned away from race literature in favor of books such as
Butterfield 8, What Makes Sammy Run?
, and
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
He was pleased to have uninterrupted, undistracted time to write and seemed on the way to recovering his spirits. But the new year brought new disappointments. He learned that he'd been passed over for a Guggenheim. Van Vechten didn't like his play. Blanche Knopf turned down the latest rewrite of
Black Sheep
. Chester's writing, and Chester with it, foundered anew.

By March Chester and Jean were back in their furnished room in the Bronx. That summer Chester worked briefly as a bellhop at the New Prospects Hotel in the Catskills, leaving after a bout with ptomaine poisoning. He next found employment as warehouseman at the New York Museum of Science and Industry, and in October turned caretaker again at a summer camp in Ware, Massachusetts. He remained in Ware until February before returning to New York, where he stayed with friends in Brooklyn before signing on as caretaker again, this time at the Stamford, Connecticut, farm of a New York theatrical lawyer named Halperin.

The farm, once used to breed and train horses, was extraordinarily beautiful, with acres of rolling lawns and vivid green grass, well-appointed stables, and a huge red barn. Chester and Jean lived in the servant's house. They had a jeep at their disposal and often fished in the well-stocked lake. There were, again, dogs to care for—a pair of shepherds and their three offspring—as well as poultry. Chester's duties were minimal: mowing and minor repairs, and helping Jean serve dinner on weekends when the family came to the farm.

Chester's relation of one incident at the farm appears in
The Quality of Hurt
after earlier being appropriated for
The Primitive
. Halperin liked to sit around and talk over farm affairs—about which, Chester notes, neither of them knew anything. Halperin had recently installed two dozen pullets, whose eggs (because, as it turned out, the hens were being fed pig mash) came out soft-shelled and deformed.