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Chester Himes (1909-1984) |
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African-American author who was nearly fifty like Raymond Chandler when he started to write detective novels. Chester Himes, a predecessor to such writers as Ishmael Reed and Walter Mosley, created a violent and cynical picture of the black experience in America. Most of his books were set in Harlem, New York City. After 1953 Himes lived in Europe. I would sit in my room and become hysterical thinking about the wild, incredible story I was writing. But it was only for the French, I thought, and they would believe anything about Americans, black or white, if it was bad enough. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference. (from My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume II, New York, N.Y.: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1995, p. 109; first published in 1976) Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, into a middle-class academic black family. According to Himes, his father Joseph Sandy Himes was "born and raised in the tradition of the Southern Uncle Tom . . . [an] inherited slave mentality, which accepts the premise that white people know best". ('Chester Himes' by Stephen Soitos, in A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 2020, p. 480) Joseph became professor of metal trades and taught industrial skills at southern black colleges. The family later moved to Cleveland. Himes' mother, who had worked as a teacher, "looked white and felt that she should have been white." ('Chester Himes. Writer' by Ishmael Reed, in Black World, March 1972, p. 26) The marriage was unhappy and gradually disintegrated. After attending a high school in Cleveland, Himes entered in 1926 Ohio State University with the intention of studying medicine. However, he was expelled for taking fellow students to one of the gambling houses he frequented. Dropping out of society he then worked as an errand boy for the pimps and hustlers. His first wife, Jean Johnson, Himes met at a Cleveland sneak thief's opium party. After numerous encounters with the law, Himes was imprisoned in Ohio State Penitentiary (1928-36) for armed robbery of an elderly Cleveland Heights couple. The sentence was 25 years – Himes was just 19. "When I could see the end of my time inside I bought myself a typewriter and taught myself to touch typing. I'd been reading stories by Dashiell Hammett in Black Mask and I thought I could do them just as well. When my stories finally appeared, the other convicts thought exactly the same thing. There was nothing to it. All you had to do was tell it like it is." (Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly, 1985, p. 452) Learning the art of creative writing, Himes produced stories for black newspapers, and in 1934 Esquire magazine published one of his pieces, 'To What Red Hell,' an account of the devasting fire in the Penitentiary in 1930. He also sold stories to Coronet. After
his release Himes married Jean Lucinda Johnson in 1937. When they had
met, Jean had been seventeen; she was twenty-eight years old at the
time of the marriage. During Himes' long incarceration, she remained
devoted to him. For a period, Himes
worked in manual labour, digging ditches and dredging sewers, and was a
research assistant at the Cleveland Public Library, until he was hired
by the WPA's Federal Writers' Project (1938-41). He contributed briefly to Cleveland Daily News,
and moved to California where he continued writing while working in
various shipyards in Loas Angeles and San Francisco during WW II. Even with the sponsorship of Pulitzer
Prize-winner Louis Bromfield, Himes was unable to find a publisher for his novel Black Sheep. He was also rejected from Hollywood. Soon after securing a contract with Warner Brothers – Himes wrote the synopsis for The Magic Bow, about the Italian violinist Niccoló Paganini – Jack Warner fired him. In 1945,
Himes debuted with If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945),
a story of racism in the defense
industry. "We're a wonderful, goddamned race, I thought. Simpleminded,
generous, sympathetic sons of bitches. We're sorry for everybody but
ourselves, the worse the white folks treat us the more we love 'em." (from If He Hollers Let Him Go, London: Serpent's Tail, 1999, p. 7) Many
critics, in spite of the awkward prose, have considered this novel as
one of the author's best books. "The hero is race-mad," said David
Littlejohn, "almost to the point of hysteria, packed with dry high
explosive, waiting for the match." ('Himes, Chester (Bomar),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 643) It was followed by Lonely Crusade (1947) and The Third Generation (1954), the last novel Himes wrote in America
– both dealing with the impact of racial oppression. Cast the First Stone (1953), about prison life, drew on Himes' own experiences, but all the central characters are white. His publisher cut 250 pages from the original script of 650 pages. In the late 1940's, Himes was a protege of Richard Wright, who had
settled in Paris. Their backgrounds were completely different – Himes
came from middleclass and had attended university; Wright was the
son of sharecroppers and attended school sporadically, but during the
Depression they had shared a common experience. Tired of racism and leaving his wife, who had been
the breadwinner in the family, Himes moved to France in 1953 and later
to the south of Spain. Himes tells in his memoir, The Quality of Hurt (1972),
that one reason for his coming to Europe was that he came very close to
killing the white woman, Vandi Haygood, with whom he had lived. "I had
always believed that to defend my life or my honor I would kill a white
man without a second thought. But when I discovered that this applied
to white women too, I was profoundly shaken. Because by then, white women were all I had left." (The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume I, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972, p. 4) In Paris Himes lived with his German girlfriend at Mme. Rachou's
flophouse on Rue Git-le-Coeur – the place also attracted a number of
painters, musicians and writers, among them Allen Ginsberg, Gregory
Corso and William Burroughs. The Primitive (1955)
was an autobiographical work and related a love affair of a black
failed author and a white woman executive. In 1957 Himes was invited by
Marcel Duhamel,
the editor of Gallimard's 'La Serie Noire,' and the French translator
of If He Hollers Let Him Go,
to write a detective novels for the French. Himes had read Dashiell
Hammett and set out to do something similar. These novels became an
instant success
and established his reputation as one of the most original talents of
hard
boiled detective fiction. Himes was taken more
seriously in France and Germany than in the US, where his books were
marketed as
commercial
"sex and violence" stories. Moveover, he was misleadingly compared with
Mickey Spillane. Both are masters of tough style, but Spillane's corrupt world
of sex, violence, and doom, has little to do with Himes' absurdism, social conscience and
mordant humour. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Himes's famous characters, made their first appearance in For Love of Imabelle (1957). Coffin Ed's face is disfigured by thrown acid in the first of the novels, Grave Digger has an oversized frame; they live next door to each other in Queens. Johnson has a short temper (his white counterpart is Dirty Harry). Their police work is hilariously brutal: they shoot people and have their own methods to extract confessions – Coffin Ed and Grave Digger don't pretend to be any better than they are. In the series of eight novels Himes created an imaginary cityscape of Harlem, which served as carnivalistic background for commentaries on race and class in both black and white worlds. He used often a simultaneous time frame, in which parallel stories take place at the same moment. The fractured plots pitched white against black and black against black in an absurd comedy of racism and poverty. "And I thought I was writing realism," Himes confessed in his autobiography My Life of Absurdity (1976).
"It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and
absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot
tell the difference." In Cotton Comes to Harlem (1964)
thieves steal from thieves as everyone runs after a bale of cotton, a
hiding place for a large sum of money. Humoristic dialogue, based on
vernacular, becomes bitter in the last novels – society is on the brink
of collapse. In Plan B. (1983) the detectives are no longer
able to keep peace in Harlem when black revolution catapults the
community into total upheaval. Blind Man with a Pistol
(1969), which has a shock ending, was the last in the series. "As
though the warning had been for him, the blind man upped with his
pistol and shot at the big white man the second time. The big white man
leaped straight up in the air as though a firecracker had exploded in
his ass-hole." Grave Digger says after the shootout: "It's out of hand,
boss." (Blind Man with a Pistol, London: Allison & Busby, 1986, pp. 194-195) Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones
appeared also on screen. Cotton Comes to Harlem
(1970), directed by Ossie Davis, and starring Godfrey Cambridge,
Raymond St Jacques, and Calvin Lockhart, was described by Vincent
Canby as "a conventional white movie that employs some terrible white
stereotypes of black life. . . . the audience, as far as I could tell,
was simply disappointed that crime did not pay." ('Ossie Davis's 'Cotton Comes to Harlem' by Vincent Canby, The New York Times, June 11, 1970) In A Rage in Harlem
(1991), starring Gregory Hines, Danny Glover and Forest Whitaker,
Cincinnati's urban tenement area doubled for Harlem. "Earnest attempt
to recreate author Chester Himes' 1950s Harlem milieu doesn't quite
come together in spite of some good perforances." (Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide: 2015 Edition: The Modern Era, edited by Leonard Maltin, New York: Signet, 2014, p. 1150) Himes was awarded in 1958 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and
Columbus Foundation award in 1982. His was married twice, the second
time with Lesley Packard, a white librarian. During much of the 1970s
Himes was ill. On his travels – he lived in Spain – Himes usually took
with him a Siamese
cat, named Griot. After Griot died, Himes had a cat named Devos. His
major work in the 1970s was a two-volume autobiography, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years and My Life as Absurdity.
Himes died in Moravia, Spain, on November 12, 1984. "The only time I
was happy," he once said, "was while writing these strange, violent,
unreal stories." ('Chester Himes,' in 100 Most Popular African American Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies by Bernard A. Drew, 2007, p. 149) Cast the Fist Stone was reissued in 1998 under the title Yesterday Will Make You Cry, in the form Himes first wrote the novel. The protagonist is a white young man, Jimmy Monroe, who hates his family, society, himself, and the repressive penal system "with orders to whip a convict's head as long as his head would last."
Selected writings:
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