Chester Himes (46 page)

His old agent Samuel French refused to release him until he paid $500 they claimed he owed them. For all his labors,
The Lunatic Fringe
had failed either to develop into a viable novel or to attract publishers' interest. He proved unable to resell rights to
The Primitive
and
Cast the First Stone
, as he had felt certain of doing. Gallimard, having advanced money on two books still unwritten—and having learned in the bargain that Himes had contracted with Plon for a detective novel—was growing impatient, and now said that he owed the firm some 13,000 francs. Himes replied with complaints that Gallimard had billed him unfairly for costs incurred by them, while he often had spent his own funds for publicity on the publisher's behalf. To Duhamel he penned a bitter, spiteful letter that much upset the editor.

Still, while recuperating, Himes had finished his new detective novel,
Back to Africa
, which as
Cotton Comes to Harlem
became for him something of a breakthrough novel.

Through it all, even if sometimes patchily, work continued. Besides
Run Man Run, All Shot Up, The Heat's On
, and
Cotton Comes to Harlem
, Himes wrote the film treatment “Blow Gabriel Blow” for Louis Dolivet and the script of a documentary on Harlem (this is before the collaboration with Gaisseau) for Pierre Lazareff, neither of which was filmed. While living across from the park at Les Buttes-Chaumont, in two months he rewrote
Mamie Mason
for Olympia Press. He may have written in whole or in part another script, “An American Negro in Black Africa,” that has been lost; in March of 1962, at any rate, he applied to the Association des Auteurs de Films for a copyright of that title. For some time, also, he was occupied in planning a multirecord history of jazz (which projected production costs prohibited taking any further) for Nicole Barclay, for whose company Richard Wright had begun writing liner notes late in life. And while in hospital, of course, Himes had begun, finishing soon thereafter,
Baby Sister
.

Whatever else he was, Chester Himes was visible:

Did Himes exaggerate his renown? “My name had become a byword,” he wrote. “I felt I had become more famous in Paris than any black American who had ever lived. Maybe I was right.”
³²
He was acclaimed, no doubt about it, and had been around the Latin Quarter long enough to have become a kind of sage to younger writers and artists, with Melvin Van Peebles, John A. Williams, poet Ted Joans, Cuban novelist Carlos Moore, Phil Lomax, and many others paying court. Still, Himes's manner is rarely less than hyperbolic; this is the man whose egocentricity allowed him to persuade himself, upon seeing Marcel Duhamel's new home, that it had been built with money
swindled from Gallimard's authors—chiefly from his own detective novels, one senses that he wants to say, though he comes short of doing so.

In the arts, if you stay around long enough, if you survive, eventually you get acknowledged, even if but grudgingly so: reviewers, journalists, and the reading public can go on stepping over you only so long. Himes found himself becoming a sage, idolized not for the work itself (which was always in some measure cast away, as he said) but for the ideas and attitudes the work expressed. Interviews and articles became plentiful.
L'Arche
wrote of Himes and anti-Semitism in the United States.
Adam
wrote of Himes and poverty in the ghettoes, the black man's compulsion for white women.
Nouvel Observateur
wrote of Himes and of integration versus race nationalism. This was the dialectic around which black intellectual life had revolved since the days of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Now, though, the urgency had become such that speaking of it was like reading from a paper set on fire. (In New York in July of 1962 Himes saw for himself the early, non-combative manifestations of the burgeoning civil-rights movement, from which he would draw for the protestors of
Blind Man with a Pistol
) Publication of
Une affaire de viol
in 1963 at the height of the Algerian War by a small leftist publisher famously sympathetic to the Algerian cause brought some notoriety, though much of this was secondary to the preface by novelist, feminist, and secretary of the Cannes Film Festival Christiane Rochfort, for the book was little read. Himes's account of the book's reception, Michel Fabre affirms, is grossly exaggerated: “To most French people who knew of him, he remained simply a writer of great detective stories.”
³³

In his memoirs, typically, in a matter of pages Himes turns away from delight at his Parisian fame to complaints that he never made money from his books in France.

The only French people who saw me were those who thought they could use me or get something out of me. I thought often of Duhamel; I have always thought he permitted French acquaintances to steal me blind but I do believe that every now and then he spoke up for me and said, “Enough's enough.”
³⁴

This manifest of the victim mentality echoes Himes in his Chicago speech: “the effects of oppression on the human personality.” Yet “It is not enough,” remember, “to say we are victims of a stupid myth. We must know the reasons for this stupid myth and what it does to us.”
³⁵
Like Malcolm, Himes believed that one urgent revolution had to be against the misshapen black psyche itself. The other revolution believed necessary, that of a violent delivery from white society, he would try to describe, and finally abandon, in
Plan B
.

The hopscotch game, the movings-about, remained as frantic as ever. There were trips with Lesley to Biot and Cannes, to Antibes for summer holiday, Chester's retreat in December 1963 to Saint-Laurent-du-Var near Nice to work on
Back to Africa
. Chester and Lesley moved together in January of 1964 to a new flat at 3, rue Bourbon-le-Chateau near the Buci market, where their neighbor was painter Jean Miotte—truly a world away from the three-room shack where Chester wrote much of
Lonely Crusade
, or from rooms at the Theresa Hotel and Hotel Rachou.

It was a fantastic location with the market at one end of the block and a clear view of St. Germain-des-Prés on the other side, with a small park just beneath the windows—Place de Fürstenburg. But the difficulty was one had to climb seven flights of stairs to get to it … It had a big, ornate bath with many mirrors inside the door, then a medium-size bar, behind which was the stove and sink for washing up and in front of which was a large expanse of living room with a window and a big dining-room table built around the central beam; beyond was the open chimney with a long settee in front, then stairs that climbed to a bedroom upstairs with large double doors opening onto a large railed balcony which held six or eight chairs with a clear view of the nearby park and St. Germain-des-Prés at the end of rue de I'Abbaye.
³⁶

Chester and Jean Miotte often came across one another in the St. Germain-des-Prés, and began spending time together at one another's apartments. They had first met the year before, 1962, at the Café Old Navy, when Chester and Lesley were living at the Hotel de Seine. Miotte's wife, like Lesley, worked at
Time-Life;
it was Miotte who found the apartment for them, having lived in the building since 1959.
These two artists of a different sort would go on visiting and corresponding over the years. On one of the visits, for which Chester met Miotte at the Harbor of Valencia in his Jaguar, they engaged in a series of conversations of which Miotte kept a record, later transcribing them into the dialogue
Miotte-Himes
, published by SMI/L'art se reconte in 1977. There was also talk of a proposed ballet,
Angels in Harlem
, for which Miotte would design sets, and for which Chester drew up a scenario. Miotte believes that both Chester's comedy and the sheer force of his personality shining through, his deep and abiding anger, tend to obscure the work's intense tragedy. He remembers going into the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue and asking for the newest Chester Himes book and no one there knowing who Chester was. He remembers Chester smiling and laughing with friends, not at all a difficult man, though he kept his reserve among people he didn't know. Of course he was upon occasion bitter at the reception of his books, Miotte says—how could he not be?—but for all that always charming, intelligent, spiritual and open-minded. Even in later years, after a number of strokes and through heavy pain, Chester went on producing strong work, Miotte says; we must admire that. Miotte last saw his old friend during one of the final visits to Paris when he pushed Chester in his wheelchair across the Luxembourg Gardens to Montparnasse to dine at La Coupole.

The lease on the rue Bourbon-le-Château apartment having expired, Lesley moved to another on rue d'Assas while Chester withdrew to the Palais Ravage in Cannes to work on
Blind Man with a Pistol
From there he soon wrote to complain of pedestrian progress. The book was coming along but would not come alive. He had little notion where it was headed, worried that he had lost control. Whatever he did, the story refused to “swing” the way he wanted it to do.
³⁷
There was no sense of style, his pacing was off.
³⁸
Old doubts swarmed up, that eternal horror of the creative artist before bare canvas or page, the suspicion that,
this time
, he won't be able to bring it off, the magic won't return to him, he hasn't a clue. Autumn weather wore on Himes, underscoring his isolation, uncertainties and self-interrogations. To make matters worse, the Colemans' marriage was breaking up before his eyes.

Following a trip to New York to resolve problems with
Pinktoes
, to be published that year (1965), Chester moved in with Lesley at the apartment on rue d'Assas. In New York he learned that Bill Targ
was about to marry literary agent Roslyn Seigel. In Paris he bought a Jaguar.

Chester and Lesley had vacationed that June in Greece. In October Lesley gave up her job at
Time-Life
and the couple drove in the new Jag to Denmark, where they lived for some months near Copenhagen. Chester first began writing about his early European experiences while here. By February he and Lesley had grown weary of the harsh winter and (to Chester's thinking) the equally harsh Danish character. Mid-March, before proceeding on to Aix-en-Provence, they were Daniel Guérin's guests at La Ciotat, no longer an artists' colony but again Guérin's private residence; here Chester began his autobiography in earnest.

They removed then, in July, to Aix-en-Provence, to a farmhouse near Saint-Hippolyte at Venelles, outside Aix on the route to Manosque where Jean Giono lived. Chester loved the seclusion, lack of distraction, and easygoing pace, loved even having visitors. He was increasingly troubled by arthritis, however, and lacking in energy. He puttered about the farm, retired early, worked sporadically at the autobiography and piecemeal at novels or other projects. From the congested manuscript of
Plan B
he worried out “Tang” and “Prediction” for publication as short stories.

Beset for years by dental problems, and mistrusting French dentists as he mistrusted Danish barbers, in May Chester flew to New York to have dentures made. While there, at the insistence of Samuel Goldwyn, who had bought the book the previous year, Himes wrote a treatment for
Cotton Comes to Harlem
that was nonetheless rejected. Lesley joined him in mid-June, after which they returned to Venelles, briefly since the farm had been sold, then sublet a friend's Paris flat in the 5th arrondissement at 21, rue de I'Estrapade, close to the market on rue Mouffetard and just off tourist-thronged Place de le Contrescarpe.