Chester Himes (39 page)

Wright would die two years after publication of
The Long Dream
. Few besides Himes and Ollie Harrington realized how profoundly he was wrestling with depression and self-doubt in those final years. Always protective of Wright's stature when it was called into question and forever deferential to the older writer, Himes nonetheless during this time maintained his distance; or perhaps it was that both men did so, impelled in different directions by pride, temperament, and circumstance.

Himes's own confidence was assuaged by sale of
The Third Generation
to Librairie Plon's prestigious Feux Croisés, Chester politely asking for and receiving twice the advance ($150) first offered. Publication of
The Primitive
pended with Gallimard that February.

Nor were coffee-fueled mornings of work at the café unavailing. Having passed through multiple incarnations, his Majorca story “Spanish Gin” reached toward novel length as
The Lunatic Fringe
. The story would undergo further transformations before being abandoned. Himes was still working on it, under the title
It Rained
Five Days
, in mid-July after his return from the writers' colony at La Ciotat. He took it up again in October [1957], after signing with Gallimard for two further Harlem novels and fleeing again to Majorca. This time he tried to incorporate it, along with a story titled “The Pink Dress,” into a novel about his affair with Willa on which he'd been working off and on since 1954.

Those mornings at cafés were also given over to something radically different, though having clear antecedents in previous work. “From here the ‘Negro problem' in America seems very strange,” Himes wrote to Van Vechten, “and I don't think I'll ever be able to write about it seriously. It doesn't make sense any more on either side.”
⁶
Noting that the “old tired forms” for the black American writer did not fit any longer, and wanting perhaps more than anything else to avoid being typecast again in the Wrightlike role of protest writer,
⁷
Himes went for full-throated satire and sexual farce, equivalent in its way to those outrageous sessions of badinage held with Harrington and Company at Café Tournon.

From
The Primitive
he retrieved the figure of Harlem hostess Mamie, extracting also the comic voice that surfaced so strongly in that novel. (An early version of Mamie appeared in
Lonely Crusade
.) Again, as with
The Primitive
, he must have laughed aloud at the crazy, wild story he was telling. Just such freewheeling, wildly comic scenes, often but loosely strung together, will make up the Harlem novels; here it is almost as though the startling, stark images from Bob Jones's dreams in
If He Hollers
have been drained of their terror, bleached to pure comedy.

By April Himes, writing steadily, had over 120 pages completed even if, as he wrote Van Vechten, he still didn't know exactly what he was writing.
⁸
The book would be published both as
Mamie Mason
and as
Pinktoes
, and would become Himes's sole best-seller. First, though, like so many other Himes books, it staggered bewildered from publisher's office to publisher's office. Walter Freeman at NAL in turning it down nonetheless passed it along to James Silberman at Dial, who felt the portion he read too sketchy and undeveloped. Eventually the novel lodged at Maurice Girodias's Paris-based Olympia Press, brought out there, in English, in 1961, then by Plon, in French, in 1962. The question of rights became such a snarl of appeals and counterappeals and threats of litigation that at one point Himes asked the Authors'
Guild to assist him in figuring out just who truly controlled what rights. Eventually the novel was copublished in the States by Putnam and Stein & Day, each of whom had purchased rights independently.

In his letter to Van Vechten, Himes wrote:

At this time I feel as if there are billions of protons of intelligence (a new intelligence) floating about in the world and that sometime soon they are going to come together and form one great mass intelligence and from it everybody is going to be able to see at last what profound idiots we've always been. Because mankind can't keep on hating and fighting forever without knowing what they're hating and why they're fighting.
⁹

As Himes himself pointed out, this doesn't sound much like a man trying to write a funny book. But in fact it's in fair part a key to the new direction his work is taking, to the farce of
Pinktoes
, celebrating what profound idiots we've always been, and to the detective novels in which he would limn so exactly the absurdity of urban Negro life. One of the new tools Himes was perfecting was what magicians call misdirection, channeling the reader's attention away from the real activity: dissembling become art.

The first of those detective novels lay just around the corner. Meanwhile, seeking relief from the strain of keeping
Mamie Mason
lighthearted, Himes had undertaken another project, drafting a story of American blacks in the Latin Quarter on trial for the supposed rape of a white woman who had been one of the men's lovers. This was blatantly a
romanà clef
with representations of himself, Ollie Harrington, William Gardner Smith, Baldwin, and Wright. And it would sum up the story of his affair with Willa in much the same way he had codified his affair with Vandi in
The Primitive
. Passing through various avatars, at one point conceived as “a long, Dostoevskian work, possibly consisting of several volumes,”
¹⁰
this was eventually published as
Une Affaire de viol
, or
A Case of Rape
.

To Himes's many distractions that spring—the disillusion he had brought with him from America, his all but constant lack of funds, seeming disinterest among publishers in new books, thoughts of Vandi's death, the emotional aftermath of the end of his three years with Willa—was added the fact that he had fallen in love again,
with, this time, a young German girl, Regine Fischer. Looking up drunkenly one day in Café Tournon to see her longish nose and widish mouth, dark blond hair pulled so severely into a ponytail that she had “a sweaty, surprised look,” he had impulsively asked her to attend a party with him the following night, little suspecting that she was one of Ollie Harrington's many women.
¹¹

Regine was a drama student who, while pretending to be much more worldly than she in fact was, nonetheless by his own admission taught the much older, much experienced Himes a great deal about mutuality in sex. She introduced him to other things as well, escorting Himes to movies and plays in an attempt to introduce him to the French culture he largely ignored, even encouraging him to enroll in daily classes at the Alliance Française. When he had doubts about the detective novel he was writing, she rushed to reassure him of the book's validity.

How it is, it is no great book, but it isn't bad or cheap. Why should it be cheap? Just because these people don't have great social ambitions? Jackson certainly takes his Imabelle for as important as Lee Gordon his place in the world. The world is full of people and they are different. Your job is to make them convincing and true. In one of your letters you wrote that you would cut throats, eat spit, and live in sewers for the one you love. Make it the same for Jackson.
¹²

From the first Himes was touched by her silly childlike grin, by the dress she had borrowed, three sizes too large, to wear to that first party, by her curious mix of forthrightness and shyness. Though in
My Life of Absurdity
his portrayal of Regine (whom he calls therein Marlene) verges sometimes on caricature, other times on the perverse, obviously he felt great tenderness for her. He also gave serious thought to marrying her, making his first inquiries about the possibility of a divorce, first directly to Jean, then to an attorney, at this time. What is perhaps of greatest interest is that the pages concerning Regine are saturated with sex. Himes writes of sex here as nowhere else in the memoirs with great frankness and physicality: his powerful attraction to her, the germ of violence always in their sex, the smell and sharp ache of bodies overused.

In early June Himes set his world in order, as was his wont, by organizing his wardrobe.

I packed my three suits—gray herringbone tweed suit from Brooks Brothers, blue nylon from Klein's and beige gabardine from Kolmar Marcus—along with my gray Burberry overcoat into my black horsehide suitcase, slipped my fourteen-carat gold tie clasp—which had cost me thirty dollars in a pawnshop on Columbus Avenue—into my side coat pocket
¹³

and deposited it at the state-run pawnshop on rue des Francs-Bourgeois, adding the nine thousand francs he received to five thousand Ellen Wright had given him, and struck out for Daniel Guérin's writers' colony at La Ciotat. The gargantuan trunk he left for safekeeping in Yves Malartic's basement. The fabulous alcohol stove, kitchen and dining utensils went into storage at Ollie Harrington's. Regine saw him off at the Gare de Lyon.

Himes passed his stay at La Ciotat largely in seclusion working on
Mamie Mason
, and by mid-July was back in Paris. He and Regine settled first into her apartment on rue Mazarine, then in September moved to the Hotel Rachou on Rue Gît-le-Coeur. This haven for impoverished international travelers, later known as “the Beat hotel” for putting up in fair succession a straggle of writers such as Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, and Brion Gysin, was tucked onto a Left Bank side street just around the corner from the Place Saint-Michel. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno describes it evocatively in his study of American writers in Paris,
The Continual Pilgrimage
.

Of the thirteen categories assigned French hotels, the Rachou establishment, with its forty-two rooms, was at the bottom. The paint peeled from gray walls, the windows were perpetually glazed with a brownish sheen inside and out, the room furnishings were minimal—a sagging bed, a table, a single wooden chair; a small, often stained cold-water sink … Because of the ancient wiring, only a single forty-watt bulb was allowed for illumination in each room; if another appliance such as a tape recorder or radio was used, the light had to be turned out. On each stair landing was
a Turkish toilet, with torn newspaper hanging from a hook for use as toilet paper.
¹⁴

There Himes and Regine kept house of a sort, shepherding his last few thousand francs, preparing meals on his alcohol stove (cabbage and potatoes, or dog meat cooked with leeks to kill the odor when things got really bad), making love for recreation and reassurance more than from passion, Regine primping at the “vomit-colored hair” she had dyed while Himes was at La Ciotat.
¹⁵
Regine went off to her acting classes, “or wherever she was,” four nights a week and often remained out till dawn.
¹⁶
Chester typed away at the final manuscript for
Mamie Mason
, wrote letters of panicked appeal to American and French publishers to request return of partial manuscripts, beg further advances, or demand new royalty statements, passed time with friends such as William Gardner Smith or Walter Coleman and his beautiful new Swedish lover Torun on the terrace at the Tournon. Living “with a little German tramp”
¹⁷
who he realized would bring disapproval from older, more conventional friends like the Malartics and Wrights or Annie Brièrre, he avoided them all. Nor were such misgivings expressed only reflectively, in terms of others. Again and again Himes told himself that Regine looked with her dyed hair like “a whore in Les Halles,” remarked the ungainliness of her greasy face, silly smile, and pimples, said that he had taken from a brother a woman he didn't really want and was just “waiting for a chance to get away from her,” wondered “What kind of girl have I got myself tied up with?”
¹⁸
In one abandoned passage from a draft of the memoirs he wrote that this “unripe Fräulein” had for him the advantage of being young and available and the best he could do, elsewhere remarking how exciting the affair was, how it boosted his confidence and made him feel important.
¹⁹
Before meeting her, Himes wrote, he had been “running around and drinking so much I was becoming impotent again and headed for a nervous breakdown.”
²⁰

Often, as Fabre and Margolies point out, when Himes focused on Regine he perceived her only as a reflection or aspect of himself, what she could do for him, what she represented to him, while failing utterly to see what a troubled young woman she was. He wrote at some length
of her courage, her brave affairs, her exercise of will in adopting a country not her own, overlooking blatant patterns of self-destructive behavior, her emotional lability, or just what those contradictions in her character he found so fetching might signify. And in fact Regine emerges from all Himes's passages and pages about her as curiously faceless, a catalog of tics and emotional stammers indicating to us little more than the impress of her instability, her youth and youthful bravado. Slight evidence exists that in daily life Himes understood her any less superficially, or made much of an attempt to do so.

There were happier moments, or moments at least less grim. Joe and Estelle, in Paris for a conference, joined Chester for dinner; he saw Ralph Ellison (Himes looked, Ellison said, as tortured as ever) at Wright's; he attended a conference of Negro writers and intellectuals at the Sorbonne. But by September finances had declined to such point that Regine sold the collection of beautifully bound books her father had given her and Himes pawned the only thing of real value he possessed, his typewriter. Things had gone shakily between them of late, with many violently verbal confrontations, when to further burden the situation Regine failed her final exams at the Vieux Colombier drama school. The day after she learned this, following yet another confrontation in which Himes ordered her out of the apartment, Regine swallowed his bottleful of Nembutal. Himes took her to the American Hospital where after an hour's wait he was approached by the night supervisor and told “with the irate disapproval and extreme outrage which only a slavery-minded old-fashioned American white woman could feel” that Regine would recover.
²¹
The suicide attempt, Himes decided, expressed Regine's terror at the thought of losing him, and now, “for good or bad,” he was hers.
²²