Chester Himes (44 page)

The door was opened by “a not quite medium-built man with European features and caramel-colored skin, a dashing figure, in a matinée idol sort of way, his rakish features made even more handsome by several wicked scars lining his face.”
¹⁵
He'd caught Himes working, with the remains of a breakfast of caviar and toast nearby. Van Peebles thought him “a mind-boggling mixture of frail and ferocious.”
¹⁶
Each surprised to find the other black, the two men immediately got on, and were soon laughing so hard that Lesley called out from the next room to be sure all was well. In 1964 Van Peebles wrote the text for the Georges Wolinski comic of
La Reine des pommes
published first in the avant-garde magazine
Hari-Kiri
and later, by Editions du Square, as a stand-alone. Van Peebles also began a film scenario for
A Case of Rape
that went uncompleted. The following year, he won a prize from the French government allowing him to shoot his first feature-length film,
La Permission
. Earlier efforts had included
La Fête à Harlem
, about a raucous Harlem rent party attended by the Devil, who then can't find his way out. Van Peebles's
Sweet Sweetback Baaadass Song
was a commercial success in the U.S., though, believing it un-American, the selection committee refused to send it to Cannes; its maker was by this time a counterculture hero. Writing of Chester in 1996 to introduce the first of Payback Press's three-volume
The Harlem Cycle
, Van Peebles observed:

Chester was like that Flemish painter out of the dark ages, Brueghel the Elder. Brueghel called it like he saw it too. So unflinchingly in fact that doctors today, 400 years later, have been able to identify medieval maladies from studying the characters that he painted, diseases of which people weren't then aware. Chester saw America unflinchingly too—hilarious,
violent, absurd and unequal, especially unequal. All of the so-called “new” racial antagonism bursting to the surface in the streets of these United States (diseases people claim weren't even there) lay festering just below the pavement of Harlem in Chester's work years ago.
¹⁷

Writer and future TV producer Joe Hunter also met Himes about this time.

I first met Chester in Paris in '59. I had read
If He Hollers
and
Lonely Crusade
in Philadelphia. Bill Smith and I were close. He, Bill, had not gone to Paris yet. He was truly pissed off with me for telling him that Himes was writing the way Blacks were supposed to write, and that he (Smith) was a pale imitation of Hemingway. He and Richard Gibson wanted to write like “white” writers.

Smith went to Paris. While traveling in Europe, I stopped off in Paris to see him. He took me to the Café Tournon where I met Chester. When we looked at each other for the first time and shook hands, we both burst out laughing … as if we knew a secret about each other … I had never heard anyone laugh in that uproarious manner. It was as if we had known each other for years.

Richard Wright then appeared and Chester introduced us. I was curious to see how those two reacted to each other. Wright was urbane, and Chester was his raucous self. I became just as raucous and Smith and Wright kind of looked at each other. When I looked at Chester we both burst out laughing. And I thought, how weird, we're both thinking the same damn thing which was: Smith and Wright must be saying to themselves— “what a couple of real Harlem niggers.”
¹⁸

Now, upon his connection with Duhamel, Himes had money and, having signed with Gallimard for further books, reasonable expectation, at least for a time, of more. One of his first purchases was a used VW that immediately demanded as disproportionate an amount of his time as it takes up disproportionate space in the memoirs. Page after page fills with breakdown adventures, convalescent stays in mechanic shops,
letters to the VW factory, bills presented and paid, accounts of new pistons and engines and sheared lug bolts.

That June, Himes and Regine had barely cleared ownership of the auto (following a series of visits to government offices concerning import, licenses, taxes) and had barely cleared Paris on their way to Germany for a visit to Regine's family and Himes's literary agent in Stuttgart, when troubles began. They drove on, in literal stop motion, from garage to garage, at length making their way to Copenhagen for a visit with Timme Rosencrantz, a Danish jazz authority married to black singer Inez Cavanaugh, whom Himes had met in March back in Paris. Deciding that she liked Denmark, Regine prevailed on Himes to stay, which they did, taking a flat for the summer in Seeland, between Copenhagen and Helsingor. There Himes set himself the goal of ten pages a day and quickly completed his next detective novel, published second (as
The Real Cool Killers)
though written third. Ever the outsider and odd man out, outside of his work Himes found little to his satisfaction. Clean, ever civil Denmark displeased him fully as much as stern, regimented Germany; how far more tolerable he found Spain's many slow-moving, often maddening inefficiencies. He kept to himself and socialized with no one, complained bitterly of the continuous rain and wind, and became so furious at a Danish barber's miscutting of his hair that he shaved his head.

By October 1 the couple was back in Paris at the little hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur, where they learned of M. Rachou's death. Himes also learned that Duhamel was busily gathering testimonials for impending publication of
La Reine des pommes
, weaving into a tattersall such ringing phrases as “destined to become a classic” (
Mystère-Magazine
), “prodigious masterpiece” (Cocteau), and Jean Giono's declaration that he would “give all of Dos Passos and Fitzgerald for a few pages of Himes.” Fall in Paris was the season of literary awards, and it was for this that Duhamel prepared. Already, the buzz among café literati was formidable.

Himes meanwhile had gone to Majorca with Regine, just as he once fled there with Willa, to write the new books he'd contracted with Gallimard. He failed to find the tranquility he recalled and sought anew, complaining of endless distractions, Regine, the VW, of the cold weather and uncertain electric supply, of “the sea boiling like dirty
gray water striped with green”
¹⁹
and wind that howled and blew smoke back down the chimney. He worked erratically at a novel about his affair with Willa he'd begun in 1954, attempting at one point while there to incorporate “Spanish Gin” and a story he'd already written about Willa, “The Pink Dress,” into it. “Spanish Gin” of its own right made a bid for noveldom in
It Rained Five Days
, soon to be
The Lunatic Fringe
, a “white thriller”
²⁰
set in Spain for which Duhamel lacked enthusiasm when Himes pitched it to him and which he later rejected. Emotionally Himes was all over the place, as, apparently, was his writing.

In addition to Duhamel's rejection of
The Lunatic Fringe
, for which he had already drawn an advance, now Himes learned that NAL had rescinded its contract for the paperback of
Cast the First Stone
. He had received no income from the States that entire year. Nor could he place, anywhere,
A Case of Rape
. There were episodes of heavy drinking and of reckless driving. The whole of the dismal Spanish residence culminated in Regine's emergency appendectomy, Herr Fischer wiring money once Himes had exhausted what little he had left; following Regine's recuperation, the couple returned to Paris, moving into a hotel on rue Saint-André-des-Arts.

On the positive side, with publication of
La Reine des pommes
, Himes was on his way to becoming a celebrity. A publication party at Leroy Haynes's soul-food restaurant, with Himes and Regine, the Duhamels, Walter Coleman and Torun, and Ollie Harrington attending, momentarily darkened when a bristling Himes complained at everyone's speaking French, but Haynes finessed it. Himes learned in November, having resettled on the Côte d'Azur, that he was to receive the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière, being the first American, and the first black, to do so. A month before, he had signed with Gallimard for two new novels under titles provided by the publisher,
Tout pour plaire
(which would become
The Big Gold Dream)
and
Il pleut des coups durs (The Real Cool Killers)
. He had also spoken alongside Nikos Kazantzakis and Rebecca West at the thirtieth anniversary of Plon's Feux Croisés series. And he had bought a dog, an Irish setter pup named Mikey, soon a great comfort to him.

Himes, Regine, and Mikey didn't remain long in Paris. When Duhamel suggested that Himes write a thriller set in New York but without his detectives and offered an advance, and when within the
week Plon bought
Mamie Mason
for 50,000 francs, the trio departed for the Cote d'Azur, in June renting a flat in a villa in Vence with a view sweeping from the suburbs of Nice to the lighthouse at Antibes. They remained there fifteen months. Chester loved the Riviera, its constant sunlight and beauty, the easy society of those who lived there, the energy and liveliness of both landscape and people. That old phrase “the happiest days of my life” returns in his memory of the time. Often this is Chester's code that writing went well, and indeed writing, too, went extraordinarily well there, with Chester completing
Run Man Run
in record time, writing it straight out. It was from Vence that Himes traveled back to Paris to receive his award and to be celebrated in such papers as
Paris-Match
and
L'Observateur
, the Brussels
Le Soir
, and
La Tribune de Genève
. Even
Time
magazine got in the act with a piece titled “Amid the Alien Corn,” though this proved to be more about racism than it was about Himes.
Time
would feature him again in 1970 (“The Hard-Bitten Old Pro Who Wrote ‘Cotton' Cashes In”) after the success of the movie
Cotton Comes to Harlem
.

That January, having completed
Run Man Run
, Himes wrote most of a fourth detective novel
Imbroglio négro (All Shot Up)
. He also continued to work sporadically on
The Lunatic Fringe
. He was famous. And he had turned out an enormous amount of new work in a few short months. But things were hardly as idyllic as they seemed. Are they ever? he must have wondered. Doubts could never be folded and put away like linen. He'd had his taste of success before, just enough to know what it was like and just enough to make it seem likely, only to have it torn from him by circumstance. His distrust of publishers, too, was profound. Again and again they had cheated him, robbed him of his royalties and subsidiary rights, done hatchet jobs on his books. (Even with Gallimard there were future uglinesses.) Now Gold Medal had published
For Love of Imabelle
in a version so severely cut and scrambled that he thought it all but unrecognizable. To Malartic he wrote, “As my fame increases, my fate remains the same—broke, desperate, urgent and trying to work beyond the capabilities of my poor brain.”
²¹

Uneasiness came to a head with a visit from Regine's mother during which she and Himes were often at odds. Frau Fischer adamantly urged her daughter to return and finish her secretarial studies in Hamburg and, while Himes avowed to having no objection, he
strongly felt that he was being manipulated and said so. In one confrontation, perhaps fed by all his uncertainties, anxieties, and dissatisfactions, Himes's temper erupted, and he stalked from the house. Intending to discipline Mikey, he struck his own eye with a switch. Regine subsequently drove him, eye bandaged, to Guérin's La Ciotat, where he spent two weeks recovering (and where Mikey and the gardener's dog killed all Guérin's chickens) before returning, alone again, in April 1959, to Paris.

There Himes stayed at Hotel Welcome, seeing a great deal now of Lesley Packard as together they strolled along the Seine, visited galleries and cafés, or motored into the French countryside with Mikey and Lesley's Siamese cat Griot. Chester stayed briefly in Ollie Harrington's apartment while Ollie was away in Berlin, then sublet an apartment in the 14th arrondissement on the southeast corner of the city belonging to a co-worker of Lesley's at the
Herald Tribune
. Not long after the move, the VW was totaled in a crash on Boulevard Saint-Germain, affording Himes another exasperating encounter with French bureaucracy. From another of Lesley's friends Himes bought a 1934 Fiat roadster he named Jemima, later still, from friends' friends, an old Hillman.

The thriller spawned by his Horn & Hardart days in New York,
Run Man Run
, was published by Gallimard as
Dare Dare
. By mid-October he was coming into the home stretch on his latest Harlem novel,
Imbroglio negro (All Shot Up
, working title
Don't Play with Death)
, with its portrait of Harlem politician and closet homosexual Casper Holmes.

Himes first met Lesley on his return to Paris, and their relationship, for all his jealous nature and her own independence, for she was seeing others as well, developed rather quickly. She was, and remains, a remarkable woman, clear-sighted, practical, fiercely intelligent and capable, devoted. (“She would have had to be, to live with Chester all those years,” one hears in interviews.) At the time, she lived in an apartment on rue Grégoire de Tours and worked five to midnight at the
Herald Tribune
as photo librarian. On the very day they met, as she sat in Café de Tournon with William Gardner Smith, a photo of Chester had appeared on her desk consequent to his winning the Grand Prix. They decided to celebrate, made a night of it, and thereafter were often together. It was wonderful, Lesley recalls:

Yet I did not see how there could be a future because I was young, attractive, had a good job, in fact two jobs, and was very independent. And while I had no hang-ups, probably due to the very secure environment in which I'd been brought up, Chester was so loaded with anger and complex emotions, all of which surface in his writing.
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