The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer

How wonderful to be brilliant without genius, like Broadway. How wonderful to have a generous audience and to know the audience so well, those strangers who love to be worked over. And what a dull and dreadful thing to be a genius without an audience, to begin in boldness and end in disappointment, resentment annulled if at all by hope for posterity, like Melville, who left “Billy Budd” in a trunk. A fair question: What if “Moby-Dick” had sold well, what if the critics hadn’t said, essentially, Oh, no, Herman, not another book about the sea?

Chester Himes wrote 23 books, novels and autobiography, starting with “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” one of the great novels of Los Angeles, and ending with a series of detective novels about Harlem, which brought him a little fame, a little money and some peace.

What if Himes, a genius, had been loved and paid well from the start? He would have become something like Norman Mailer, a scandalous novelist and social critic, building an audience, working unevenly, but always with the confidence that someone was listening, and writing books that mattered in their time, for their time. A man who deserved to be happier would have been happier. One can play with paradox and say that what he should be remembered for is precisely the work that he produced as a result of the history that deformed him, but this is cruel.

James Sallis’ new biography, “Chester Himes: A Life,” deserves three reviews, one for its story of an American life, a story about race that, as Himes would have it, is also about life and family, without race; one for Sallis’ fair analysis of Himes’ work, setting a context for his triumphs and his misses; and then the last review, to praise without reserve a book every young writer should be given before starting out, as a warning. As a book about the difficulty of writing, which is about a man who wrote because in no other sphere was he free, this biography is at its strongest. Sallis is painfully attuned to Himes as a patron saint of the life of writing not in step with his time, who may be world-historical but who also might not, because of history’s crushing weight. That Himes finally achieved some fame with a series of detective novels is not what he wanted.

He began in the same environment as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice but 60 years earlier, among the early bourgeoisie around Negro colleges in the South. His father, Joseph Sandy Himes, taught metal trades and made jewelry. His mother, Estelle Bomar, saw in his father a future college dean, but they came of age as the Jim Crow laws tightened, and Joseph Sandy lacked ambition. He was dark with blue eyes; she was an octoroon, one-eighth Negro, therefore legally black. She was well-educated for her time and a pianist. They moved around the South, until the defining tragedy of Chester’s childhood, a school chemistry experiment in which Chester’s brother was blinded. Chester was unfairly blamed.

The family moved north for medical care, and his parents were reduced to sponging off relatives. Working in a hotel, Chester fell down an elevator shaft and, with a pitiful settlement, but state disability money, Chester went to Ohio State, where he wandered from school into crime. After disappointing everyone who believed in him, he was sent to prison in 1928, at age 19, for 25 years. He was a reader, and then he got a typewriter and he was writer. He sold fiction from prison. He sold a story to Esquire, “Crazy In Stir” under his prison number, 59623.

In his seventh year in prison a fire killed 300 inmates, which brought attention to conditions, and Chester was paroled. He continued to write short stories and essays. He got married. He moved to California. He was a published magazine writer, and Hollywood was where published magazine writers, made good money. He wrote story analyses for Warner Brothers and might have been hired as a writer, but Jack Warner said, “I don’t want any niggers on my lot.” For a time he was the butler to Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the literary stars of his day.

Himes looked for civilian defense plant work. “It wasn’t being refused employment in the plants so much.... It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job.... As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, ‘I can talk.’ It shook me .... Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear.... I had served seven and a half years in prison ... and still I was entire, complete, functional ... and I was not bitter.... I was thirty-one when I went to Los Angeles and thirty-five and shattered when I left to go to New York. I had become afraid.”

Out of all of this, in 1944, he wrote his masterpiece, “If He Hollers Let Him Go.” Marked in the forgotten classification of the protest novel, the book failed in the dismal way of something that enters the market with promise and a few good reviews and then quickly falls off, with enough hope at the start to make the verdict all the more crushing. Bob Jones, the book’s narrator, is the pure expression of the idea of faith and hope that Himes, in “Pinktoes’, one of his last books, simultaneously mocked and worshipped. Without his faith he’d have no disappointment. “If He Hollers” never entered the canon as Richard Wright’s “Native Son” did, because Bigger Thomas, rapist and murderer, is a titillating brute, while Bob Jones is an articulate man struggling through a difficult week. Bigger Thomas could never express one of Jones’ central epiphanies, that “[r]eactionaries hate the truth and the world’s rulers fear it; but it embarrasses the liberals, perhaps because they can’t do anything about it.”

With this serving also as Himes’ motto, he was doomed to cultural isolation. He wrote three more badly received books in America. He even spent a short season at Yaddo, the literary retreat in upstate New York, where the writer across the hall was Patricia Highsmith, herself doomed to parenthetical condescension because she worked in the margins.

Exhausted and broke, he moved to Paris. Expecting a warm welcome from the community of expatriate black intellectuals, among them Wright and James Baldwin, Himes was kept in his most familiar place: on the margins.

In 1957, Maurice Duhamel, the French translator of “If He Hollers” and now the editor of Gallimard’s “La Serie Noire,” which published hard-boiled crime books, approached Himes to write for him. Himes was originally resistant to lowering his art to a cheap genre, but Duhamel convinced him with a decent advance out of his own pocket and a one paragraph formula for a crime novel, which Sallis quotes and which Himes followed to the fame and fortune that evaded his higher art. “Get an idea,” he was told. “Start with action, somebody does something, always action in detail ... don’t worry about it making sense. That’s for the end. Give me 220 typed pages.”

He wrote drunk, unsure of what he was doing, consoling himself that the book was only for the French and that his reputation, or what he thought his reputation should be, was safe from slumming. In his memoirs, he wrote, “My mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought.”

With “A Rage in Harlem,” Himes buried the protest novel. As Sallis notes, freed from the restrictions of the literary novel, from the presumption of serious purpose and possessed of the genre’s “emphasis on suspicion, violence and fear,” Himes’ detective heroes, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, could pursue action, sex and capricious brutality, all with a sense of morbidly sarcastic humor forbidden the literary novel. If, as Harold Bloom says, “All bad poetry is unfailingly sentimental,” then Himes achieved his original dream with the thrown-away crime book, written in opposition to a mawkish celebration of the human spirit or even to the notion of a degraded human spirit with something beautiful at its core. Nothing is held as an ideal except, perhaps, hope.

The Harlem crime books are not simply standard policiers in blackface. Using fractured time, simultaneous action, fragmented anecdotes, strings of brilliant paragraphs followed by odd ruminative jokes meant for himself as much as for the reader, Himes did not use the books to repeat a successful formula. The world of his crime books breaks down. By the end of the series, Plan B, all of the futile violence leads to an apocalypse.

The Harlem books have all of his energy, but Duhamel’s caution to stay in action rescued Himes from the kind of muttering in the dark that sabotaged “Pinktoes,” which, with its obscurely hilarious orgies between the white and black leaders of the integration movement, would have been a better book without its carapace of broken pride born of speaking to an empty room.

Sallis has no illusion that Himes is uniformly wonderful, and this is the great strength of his book and the reason all young writers should be forced to read it, even if they don’t like Himes and can’t be convinced that thye should. As many times as Sallis quotes Himes, he also cites from an extensive collection of stringent observations on the moral cost of the writer’s life. The most frightening, because the most true, belongs to Frederick Exley, “The malaise of writing-and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise-is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman.”

In 1972, Himes returned triumphantly to America, celebrated. His final years were what you’d expect from a hard life. He died in Spain in 1984.

While in Los Angeles he planned a novel or a screenplay about Hollywood, to be called “Immortal Mammy.”

Count the death of that idea among the lost treasures of the world.