Chester Himes (52 page)

Toward the end Chester had grown so frail, his contractures so terrible, that, forcing his arms down to bathe or dress him, even to take his blood pressure, Lesley feared she might break his bones. Who would have thought I'd wind up like this, a cabbage? he asked her. When she read to him reviews of his work, letters or copies of essays written by young admirers, tears came to his eyes. He cried often, those last months. Finally he stopped speaking. One morning instead of following her with his eyes he turned his head toward her, and Lesley understood that he could no longer see.

Late in May of 1974, Chester had entered University College Hospital in London for prostate and hernia surgery. Arthritis had become so bad, deterioration of his spinal column had so progressed, that even the physical effort of typing seemed too much for him. Two strokes had swept through his brain like thunderstorms, leaving wreckage and devastation behind. Now, following surgery, another occurred and, left side of his brain deprived of blood supply and oxygen, Chester fell into a brief coma, waking to find that he had lost further motor control. A string of visits to medical facilities would follow: that June to a Spanish clinic for hemorrhages, in September a return there, the following month a trip to the American Hospital in Paris, then in January another to Madrid for a checkup; in November 1976, following publication of
My Life of Absurdity
, a visit to New York's Presbyterian Hospital for tests and consultations. Chester's movement had become so restricted that Lesley feared leaving him alone. Nor was his mind often clear. His irritability, his irascibility, flew at the many walls closing in on him. Lesley wrote to his brother Joe that Chester was losing his memory, breaking into rages over the least upset. Chester himself not long before had written to Roslyn that he
could scarcely walk and that he feared his mind, like the use of his legs, was going. “I don't think I can continue,”
¹
he told his new editor at Doubleday, Larry Jordan, after seeing Jordan's editing of the manuscript of
My Life of Absurdity
. Whether from introspection brought on by his work on the autobiography or from an inwardness ushered in by declining health, Chester found his way toward voicing regrets. In a September letter to Roslyn he begged forgiveness for his bad behavior and lack of thoughtfulness.
²
Three months later he wrote her that he had been “an unmitigated pig” toward most women: “I was such a detestable person it makes me sick to write about myself…”
³

What concentration and resources of will he had left, Chester largely expended on finishing the second volume of the autobiography, stubbornly typing away at it with two fingers while Lesley, in another room, labored to make sense of and retype his pages. By spring of 1975 they had stitched together a first draft of the manuscript. That July, Chester and Lesley visited Chester's cousin Robert Thomas, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. Fall visitors to Spain included old friends Jean Miotte and Herb Gentry. A later visit, to Lesley's family in England (spring 1977) did not go well. Edgy and tense the whole time, Chester began ranting when Lesley's brother-in-law tousled her hair; on the third day he insisted they return to Spain.

Another project, Chester's proposed follow-up to 1971's collection
Black on Black
, finally saw light in 1982 when Lieu Commun published
Le Manteau de rêve. Black on Black
had brought together stories mostly from the thirties and forties, Chester's script for
Baby Sister
being the notable exception. This record of one soul's struggle against all the forces conspiring to cheapen and degrade it serves as a précis of Himes's eternal theme. In both form and theme, Milliken points out,
Baby Sister
is indeed quite close to Greek tragedy:

It is, at least in part, an exercise in awe before the phenomenon of human greatness, the classic tragic formula. It offers a protagonist who is larger than life, heroically intense, crushed by forces that are inexorable and irrational but also predictable and consistent. It has the stark simplicity of myth and the precise symmetry of ritual.
⁴

The scenario restricts itself to three days, each day culminating in an act of violence against Baby Sister. With this introduction to a familiar Himesland, the film's narrator sets the tone early on:

Only the
will
of the community can save her from the wolves. But the inhabitants of this community, restricted, exploited, prostituted, violated and violent, timid and vicious, living in their rat-ridden, hotbox, stinking flats, are either the hungry wolves themselves, or are struggling desperately to save themselves from the hungry wolves.
⁵

Le Manteau de rêve
completed the summing up of Himes's early work begun with the initial volume. Originally to be titled
Black on White
, it collected such stories as “Crazy in the Stir,” “The Ghost of Rufus Jones,” “Spanish Gin,” “The Snake,” “One Night in New Jersey,” “A Night of New Roses,” and “In the Rain.” The book was dedicated

To Lesley, my wife,

for her love, her patience,

her good humor and her solicitude.

To Mrs. Roslyn Targ,

my dear friend and my literary agent

who has believed in me all these years.

To Professor Michel Fabre,

for his friendship and assistance.

The book's cover (by Yves Besnier) depicts a white-bearded, pensive Himes sitting alone in a room of bare walls and tiled floor, cane in hand, overcoat draped across the back of the chair. He is well dressed in sweater and sharply creased slacks, good shoes, yet seems to be dissolving: part of the Crosshatch of the wicker chair's back shows through his body.

In these last years Himes's spirits and temperament careened back and forth from bravado to lamentation. One moment he had become in his own mind a social force to be reckoned with, a prophet for young blacks back in America, a hero for the cause; in the next he and
his books were forgotten, he said, beaten down by time's hammers or by disinterest, discarded, cast aside. He wrote to editor Larry Jordan that America was the “bad mother,” that all his life he'd been America's whipping boy, that he'd tried again and again, and against all reason, to force America to “forgive” him.
⁶
“His self-absorption had made it hard for him to imagine that most Americans had not heard of him,”
⁷
Fabre and Margolies note, though at another level of mind, given that he knew the fate of his books in the United States, he must also have known (this knowledge held suspended in contradiction) the truth of his situation.

But anything can keep you afloat if you grab it hard enough and hold on, and that was Himes's lifeline: that sense of his work, that all this had been
for
something. Very little is needed to destroy a man, Artaud wrote; he needs only the conviction that his work is useless—against all intimations of which Chester now pitched his final struggle, wrestling the angels of history.

In his poem “In Memory of Joe Brainard” Frank Bidart speaks of

the remnant of a vast, oceanic

bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)

and goes on:

In the end, the plague that full swift runs by

took you, broke you;—

in the end, could not

take you, did not break you—
⁸

That vast, oceanic bruise, Chester knew well. He spent his life trying to understand it, giving himself over to doubt, passion, the madness of art, and if, in the end, of the three it was doubt that surfaced most surely, that doubt was not directed toward the work itself, the worth and value of which Himes rarely doubted, but toward the question of whether the work, so contrary, so sideways, so long in contempt of the larger society, would be allowed to endure. To Lesley in the final days he said:

Would you … keep my books alive? I don't want to feel that I have lived without having accomplished something that's going to be
remembered and I don't want to leave this world a common shade and I do so hope that my books will be read and that people will remember me.
⁹

The world is taken from us, as it was given, by degrees. We learn to close doors knowing we'll not come back to these rooms again. People, faculties, memories go away from us, and only slowly, with time, do we realize they are gone; only then do we begin to miss them. However he presumes to do so, a man can never sum up his life, as Chester tried to do, at the end; rather, he is summed up by it. But if he is a thoughtful man, a writer, Reed's mystical detective, he has the privilege of being able to record the forces at work upon him both from within and without. In
My Life of Absurdity
Chester wrote:

I travelled through Europe trying desperately to find a life into which I would fit; and my determination stemmed from my desire to succeed without America …

I never found a place where I even began to fit[.]
¹⁰

The bruise would not fade, the bad mother would not be left. Yet Chester Himes had long ago determined, like his stand-in Brightlights in the story “Prison Mass,” that he would pass through life no common shade. In one of his last works, “Island of Hallucinations,” intended as a sequel to
The Long Dream
, Chester's friend Richard Wright addressed through an amanuensis the loss of racial history and the necessity of witnessing:

“Fish,” Ned said, “our race has no memory. Each generation lives as though no one has lived before it. What my father learned from his living died with him … You can't blame your father if he died and left you poor; maybe he had no chance to control the economic forces that shaped his destiny. But, dammit, we can blame our fathers for dying and leaving us ignorant of what they encountered in life, what they felt about it. Now, Fish, it is to try to establish that continuity of experience that makes me talk to you like this.”
¹¹

 

Chester would not leave those who came after him ignorant. His life, his work, would be a record.
I am a man, Jupiter
, he said to his jailers—addressing himself as much as the others. He was, Milliken writes, “a man in the business of making verbal scale models of the world as he has known it, felt it, and lived it … a constructor of elaborate extended metaphors designed to guide readers into his own unique and private realm of experience.”
¹²
And so he has left this amazing many-volumed record of what it was like, from his perspective, to live in his time, a record of encounters and collisions. He did not choose racism as his subject, but

he drove deeper into the subject than anyone ever had before. He recorded what happens to a man when his humanity is questioned, the rage that explodes within him, the doubts that follow, and the fears, and the awful temptation to yield, to embrace degradation.
¹³

In April 1976, four months after a final version of
My Life of Absurdity
reached Doubleday, at Jean Miotte's suggestion Chester and he began a series of conversations intended to become a book but Chester, unable to concentrate and exhausted by the effort, soon gave up. He was fiddling about with the contents of
Black on White
, but even correspondence had become too much for him; at one point he began a letter to Larry Jordan only to apologize that he would have to let Lesley finish it for him. Stephen Milliken sent copies of his book on Himes's work, which appeared that year and of which Chester thought highly; James Lundquist's study also came out. Chatham Bookseller had begun republishing his older novels and planned an edition of
The End of a Primitive
, but in 1978 wrote that it was bankrupt. Chester was pleased with Yves Malartic's translation and editing of the autobiography into a single volume for publication by Gallimard. French editions of
Cast the First Stone
and of A
Case of Rape
in a new translation were due that fall. That fall as well, in October, a film crew came to Moraira to make a TV documentary on Himes. In November his divorce from Jean was final; later that month he and Lesley traveled to England to marry.

In May 1980 Chester and Lesley flew again to the United States. Tests at the Mason Clinic in Seattle confirmed what they had been
told in Paris and Marseilles: the left side of Chester's brain was virtually destroyed and there would be further, inevitable decline; neither medication nor treatment of any sort could counteract this. While on this visit Chester was given a party by the staff of
The Black Scholar
and much fussed over by Bay Area writers. Ishmael Reed wrote of the visit:

Though disabled by a series of strokes, Chester Himes and his devoted wife, Lesley, managed to visit the United States for the last time in the summer of 1980. Writer Floyd Salas and I greeted them at the airport with flowers. He was celebrated by the Northern California literary community. He didn't talk very much, but the wit and the mischief were still there. I remember the gleam in his eyes, that which Carl Van Vechten captured in one of his portraits of Himes, when Lesley recounted how he'd recently run into trouble with Spanish courts for engaging members of the police force in a gun battle. He'd mistaken them for burglars. “It was the kind of gun you'd shoot an elephant with,” Lesley said. Bad contracts with publishers had left Himes in need of funds during his last years. As a nominator for a foundation with billions at its disposal, I tried to obtain a grant for Chester. Instead, the money went to members of the permanent graduate school that's done so much to turn American poetry into gibberish and alienate the average reader and student from verse. Unlike Himes's friend, the intellectually daring and political hot potato Richard Wright, who died under mysterious circumstances surrounded by enemies, Himes managed to survive his critics and to see the country that hurt him so honor him, however belatedly.
¹⁴