Unnamed in the Chicago Defender interview was the intellectual leader of the “blues school” of black postwar thought, E. Franklin Frazier. During the first week of January 1946, Chester convened “the upper IQ brackets” for a party: the Schomburg librarian Laurence Dunbar Reddick (who would also write the first serious biography of Martin Luther King Jr.), Horace Cayton, and Frazier, chairman of the sociology department at Howard University. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James probably also attended. Taken all together, it was an extraordinary informal convention of black humanists and social scientists.
Chester was finding distinctive import in the views of the fifty-one-year-old Frazier, whom he knew from Mollie and Henry’s. Born in 1894 and a University of Chicago graduate, Frazier had become the most celebrated black academic of his era, a gutsy infighter who confronted bigotry and injustice and published leading studies on the condition of the black family—books that innovatively tapped the work of novelists like Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes—all while achieving the highest honors and positions of leadership in spite of segregation. Wary of Frazier’s commitment to ordinary black people, his Howard University colleague Ralph Bunche called him a “crazy racialist.” Chester gravitated toward the commanding view of Frazier in one key area: the Negro family. Frazier believed that black Americans needed a firmly patriarchal family structure to compete for resources in the United States; and when he examined the past, he didn’t see one in evidence. As disgruntled as Chester, Frazier sensed that the situation of black Americans had not yet reached the threshold of even subordinate caste relations. “It is not a question of the Negro being all right in his place but rather that there is no place for the Negro,” Frazier wrote that year. The absence of patriarchal models was part of the “no place” problem.
This meeting with these intellectual heavies confirmed in early 1946 that Chester had secured a niche. He received $2000 in fat royalties from Doubleday in January, and then, after a minor delay, $2700 more came in March. Having accumulated within three months a sum equal to what he was used to living on for two years, Chester felt like this was the dawn of financial success. The reviews of If He Hollers Let Him Go continued to compliment him. Highbrow liberal magazines like New Republic treated him respectfully, even when pointing to the narrow range of the characters’ choices, between the hammer of “limited opportunities as a Negro” and the anvil of “suicidal . . . militancy.” Only one review, in the Cleveland Call and Post, mentioned that Chester had gone to prison, where his blemish became “the one clouded spot in the young writer’s life, an unfortunate experience indulged in by a youngster.” Walter White, smeared in If He Hollers (“If he asked me if I knew Walter Somebody-or-other I was subject to tell him to go to hell,” snaps the hero), quibbled a bit in the Chicago Defender before deciding Chester had made a “contribution to American literature and American racial thinking of no small distinction.”
Arthur P. Davis, a Howard University colleague of Frazier, called If He Hollers a “stout weapon” with a “powerful message.” Davis understood that the black middle class would reject the novel’s literary naturalism and its portrayal of unrefined blacks. But he believed in Chester’s vision, partly because a “writer like Himes, who has worked in the factories and the shipyards, knows the masses: he has seen the effects of discrimination, bad sanitation, and malnutrition in the shocking speech and low morals of these people and he puts down what he sees and hears. But he also puts down a whole lot more and that redeems the work for me.”
In the Communist-controlled organ of the National Negro Congress, the Congress View, New Yorker Ruth Jett mouthed the hoary Party line used against Native Son; while “powerful” the book had failed to “see the progress made in Negro-white relations through the progressive section of American labor.” Then an odd, minor miracle occurred. In the Communist Daily Worker, writer Eugene Gordon unreservedly praised the book, even though it had criticized the Communist wartime line that racial grievances should be subordinated for the sake of the war effort. “Communists should read the book, so that they may be reminded of much we forgot in the past period,” Gordon told the rank and file. If He Hollers would “shock” because, unknown to the Party faithful, “there is a hell of a lot of work to be done among the Negro and white masses.” A black Communist like Gordon was in a good position to critique Party politics in the months following the removal of leader Earl Browder, which was a time of “self-flagellation.” Curious about the Daily Worker endorsement, Richard Wright, who had had his own falling-out with the Communist Party, telephoned Chester to warn about “maneuvering.” But Himes hoped to harness the Communist energy to give the book a push. “The thing I have been trying to do is promote book sales,” he wrote, “since my company doesn’t seem to give a damn about it.”
After the remarkable season of reviews for If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester was right to feel slighted by Doubleday’s handling of the book. In 1945 and 1946 it skimped on his novel, which made the press uncomfortable, and went all out for Fannie Cook’s Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. Written by a white woman, what was obviously valuable about the book was its pointing to a “brighter future.” From the beginning of its advertising campaign to booksellers in January 1946, Doubleday deliberately seemed to contrast Chester’s book with Fannie Cook’s. The publisher ran a full-page advertisement dominated by a black maid, a representation of the main character, Honey. The text of the ad explained, “Mrs. Palmer’s Honey is a book which you can sell to any reader. It is an honest, intelligent novel, devoid of lynching, mixed love affairs, and profanity. Shunning the sensational, Fannie Cook has written a fine, sincere novel. . . .” Doubleday seemed to disparage If He Hollers by suggesting that blacks were too emotional to know with certainty whether or not they were being oppressed; the firm also dismissed Chester’s book as being without appeal to white readers. Bucklin Moon, the editor of both novels, made recommendations about the advertising campaigns but shared little of his decisions and strategies with Chester.
By February a storm had erupted that mimicked the jeering the New York Times initiated when Cook received the Carver Award. In an advertisement in Saturday Review of Literature, written to seem like the commentary on a published book review, Doubleday tried to temper the appearance of ill will, by emphasizing its credentials as publishers of black writers.
[Mrs. Palmer’s Honey] is a novel which has a social conscience, and yet is “devoid of lynchings, mixed love affairs, and profanity”; a novel which eases its points along with good reading rather than a series of sledge-hammer speeches punctuated by spit; a novel which was chosen only after we had considered books by Walter White, Arna Bontemps, Chester Himes, and many others.
Still shielding Cook’s white identity, the advertisement nonetheless manages to score all black authors as writing venomous and unworthy tracts. Jack Conroy, the white man who wrote They Seek a City with Arna Bontemps, was curiously spared inclusion. The circulation of these sullied mea culpas incensed Chester, who began his redress with his Doubleday editor. Bucklin Moon told Chester that he was imagining conspiracies and making “unreasonable” complaints. The two men would more or less fall out over the ads and the handling of If He Hollers. In desperation, Chester mailed a clipping of the ad to Ken McCormick, the editor in chief, protesting “the veiled references to my book and the use of my name” to market Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. McCormick reportedly responded with a ten-line telegram of apology.
The situation with Doubleday became ugly after Chester stormed the publisher’s Manhattan headquarters, armed with letters from Cleveland, North Carolina, and Los Angeles attesting to the fact that books were unavailable in markets where he would be sought out. Going upstairs, he griped to Hilda Simms, the beautiful star of the Broadway play Anna Lucasta, who also happened to be in the elevator. But Chester was overheard by a freelancer in advertising, who rushed ahead of him and alerted the staff. Chester was determined to be heard. He revealed his suspicion that a Doubleday editor or vice president had disrupted the print run, then he turned to McCormick himself. Chester accused him of appointing Buck Moon to preside over a “black corner” at Doubleday, a Jim Crow section that held books written by African Americans to a quota. Then, he insisted that “someone in the firm was against the book.” After a few minutes of “bad words,” he left the company president’s office, finished, in the near term, at Doubleday. “I believe conclusively that my book was sabotaged by some one in the company,” he wrote a few months later, still seething.
Despite the fireworks, it’s unlikely that Chester was making a bad situation worse. Even mild-mannered Arna Bontemps agreed with him, having already written several months previously that Doubleday “treated us like stepchildren” and that the powers in control there planned to sell “10,000 copies of this title—and no more!”
However, one element of Chester’s new prestige as a nationally reviewed novelist was the ability to hit back. On February 26, three weeks following the unflattering advertisement in Saturday Review, Chester had his druthers in the magazine. He insisted that If He Hollers Let Him Go presented “a tiny facet of the frustrations inherent in the lives of present day Americans” and the resulting “compulsive behavior.” Chester struck out against the public and his own publisher’s presumption that because he had the nerve to broach the issue of racial discord he had to be a civil rights problem-solver. He refused to back down about the raw materials in his book:
the only change I would consider would be to restore some of the passages that were deleted from the script for fear of offending the delicate sensitivities of the American public. . . . Certainly I would not attempt to offer a solution for the “Negro problem.” . . . Nor would I saddle an underprivileged, uneducated, poverty stricken, oppressed racial group with this responsibility (and I have nothing but antipathy for those who do).
Eight years later, Chester declared that the “New York Critics have never forgiven me” for this tart article, a most stinging cry against whites for black artistic freedom during the 1940s.
In the black press Chester was more easygoing. He sent a letter to Walter White, agreeing that black writers should construct Negro heroes such as Cook had done with her political volunteers in Mrs. Palmer’s Honey. Chester suggested that “the bitter cries of a suppressed people” was actually a stimulant for white bigots, a chemical that purged “the slovenliness from their ambitions and impels them to drive on to great white supremacy.” Since it was really black pain and torture that fueled white Americans’ strength, “there are very few white people, including most white liberals, who sincerely want to hear of Negro heroes,” he ventured. But he would keep pitching until something stuck. He told White, “However, if you give us a chance, we’ll get some Negro heroes in—I, personally will make you that promise.”
The solid reviews and the Doubleday mishandling left him in the gap between artistic notoriety and full-fledged success. He would learn eventually that part of his debut’s greatest value was its timing and its ability to cadge reviews at all, but his career might never have continued if Chester had known that this first book would remain his best-known novel in a long career. During its year and a half of hardcover sales, Doubleday sold 13,211 hardcovers. In 1949, the reprint rights were sold to New American Library for $5461, and they then sold, over two decades, more than 450,000 paperback copies. The book was translated into French by a man named Marcel Duhamel and published in 1949 by Albin Michel. Chester’s commitment to bringing the contemporary speech rhythm and experience of black urban life to print would have long-term impact. His hardcover sales were respectable and suggested that he might create at least a coterie following. The problem was that to cut that narrow slice he would have to top Richard Wright. Underscoring the growth he’d need to show to go beyond Wright’s achievements, Esquire brought out one of Chester’s stories that had likely been purchased in 1941, “The Something in a Colored Man.” The piece was a “coffin caper” story told in “jive” and set on L.A.’s Central Avenue. With the delayed appearance of this early work, Chester was regrettably back in national magazines as a stereotype of himself in prison learning to write.
There were also competitors vying to top Wright’s high mark of achievement. During the winter of 1945–1946, Chester was familiarly dropping by Wright’s house in the company of his buddy Ralph Ellison. As the three men gathered to “beat that boy”—Ellison’s preferred term for a discussion of race relations—Himes lapped up the chance to discuss literature, politics, and American race problems with brainy, courageous comrades.
Wright certainly was not slowing down. By March, he was putting in his passport application, determined to exchange Greenwich Village for the Latin Quarter, hoping that Paris would have the enchantment and wonder for him that it had had for Americans from the time of Benjamin Franklin. Wright had met Jean-Paul Sartre a year earlier when the guru of the existentialist philosophy arrived in New York. He had also taken up a literary correspondence with Gertrude Stein. In the subsequent year he had been building himself up on the existentialist movement, conferring with Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich, and in April he would consult with a visiting Albert Camus. But Wright downplayed all of the scurrying and parlaying to Chester, a subterfuge done partly because of political difficulties Wright anticipated around obtaining his passport. However, Chester also discerned another quality. Although they were the same age and Wright was generous, he sometimes acted bored with Chester.
One way that Wright seemed to put Chester in a notch below was by keeping “the important people to himself.” Nevertheless, in March 1946 Chester accompanied him on a trip that proved invaluable. The occasion was an appointment at the posh Central Park West apartment of the famously bucktoothed white cultural critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten. Now sixty-five, the foppish Van Vechten had introduced American audiences to Stravinsky’s symphonies, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, modern dance, and Gertrude Stein. Van Vechten had also done as much as anyone to trounce the barriers of racial apartheid in American social life. His special affinity for black people and jazz had begun during his student days at the University of Chicago, when he would crash all-black parties and be “invariably taken for a coon.” He called jazz music not the last hope or the best hope of America: “it is the only hope.” In New York he was known as “the undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life,” and as a good buddy of Langston Hughes, whom he helped to launch at the same time as Paul Robeson. When Chester met him, Van Vechten had started collecting manuscripts from African American writers and personally photographing as many black artists, singers, and published writers as he could get to pose. Wright’s papers would one day find their way into the collection Van Vechten established in James Weldon Johnson’s name at Yale.
Chester found the scene comic. Wright was uncomfortable around Van Vechten and masked his discomfort by being “pompous.” Wright’s artifice made Chester “hysterical” with laughter, and Van Vechten shared a few bemused glances with Chester in confidence. “Intrigued” by Himes and unable to forget his loud guffaws, Van Vechten opened the door to a warm, crucial friendship for Chester. He invited Chester back for his own series of photographs the next day; afterward, Van Vechten wrote to suggest that Chester, like Richard Wright and other black authors, send him manuscripts of his published novels for preservation at the Yale Library. In their discussions over the years, Chester would find the “calm and serene” older man a steadying force—even if Chester always catered to Van Vechten in soothing tones of fidelity.
Revisiting his promise to Walter White, Chester partnered with his brother Joe to deliver a short story about discrimination in the war industries called “The Boiling Point” in the pages of the Afro-American on March 9. Openly discriminated against at the war plants, the main character, Impetuous Brown, is sued for claiming discrimination, then bribed. On March 16, Chester returned to the New York Public Library on 135th Street where the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature was held and Laurence Reddick the librarian. Chester described his work on a panel with Carey McWilliams, the Los Angeles writer and labor lawyer. At the event Chester worked hard to generate support from liberals like McWilliams for his career beyond Clevelanders and racial uplifters.
Chester had written in his Saturday Review article that the only criticism he would accept from the self-appointed apostles of black writing would be in the area of technique. This was untrue; he took the criticisms of political content to heart. In the novel he was writing during the period when If He Hollers Let Him Go was garnering reviews, Chester looked fondly at the CIO and organizations like its Political Action Committee as broad solutions to racial and economic injustice (as his competitor Fannie Cook had). Chester kept the self-searching quest cited in his original Rosenwald fellowship application in his new book, but he redirected its punch by nodding toward these two groups (without naming either) as a means to destroy segregation in heavy industry. The hero of the book would be a union organizer, an intellectual whose job was to educate and unionize black industrial workers. The novel would itself explore the abundant tension facing a black intellectual, from interactions with black Southern migrants at work, union bosses, politicos like the Communists, and in the bedroom with his spouse. Chester had darts to throw at every category, but he was not anti-Communist. He still believed that, in terms of political freedom for blacks, “citizens of the communist-dominated socialist state of the U.S.S.R. have come closest.” Chester’s hero, now called Lee Gordon, would combine the aims of the CIO and its Political Action Committee, and also come to terms with the Communist Party. Using the revolutionary martyr he had described in his “Negro Martyrs Are Needed” program, the novel concluded with the evolution of the left-wing political movement, consisting of labor, Communists, and blacks. Chester’s approach to the political scene was widely shared by many Americans, indicated by the groundswell that would later coalesce behind the alternative political candidate for president in 1947–1948, former vice president Henry A. Wallace.
Despite his difficulties at Doubleday, Chester felt potent as a writer and in good spirits. He roared into the new novel, sometimes pulling forty pages from the typewriter in a day. On the side, he worked on a review of Ann Petry’s first book, The Street, a naturalistic treatment of a black woman’s downfall in Harlem. Chester applauded almost everything about that book, save its retinue of black men who abused and exploited black women and refused to support their families. If he believed himself committed to the male duties neglected by Petry’s characters, racist New York made some of them impossible. Despite the cash windfall he’d drawn, he remained unable to rent a decent apartment in New York.
Out of sorts and tired of looking for a place in crowded, segregated New York, Chester and Jean decided upon a sabbatical in California, this time to the northern part of the state, where her brother owned property. They bought a Mercury Coupe and, because the Klan was active and lynchings were surging, a .303 Savage rifle for “security.” Shouldering the firearm was done for the same reason “other Negroes own long-bladed knives,” Chester joked, half serious. After a final colloquy with Wright, who would sail for Paris on May 1, and a hurried telephone call to Ralph Ellison, Chester left New York with Jean about April 18, coasting comfortably along America’s first cross-country national road, the Lincoln Highway.
Their route would take them through Ohio. In Cleveland Chester checked on his father; invited his brother Joe Jr. and his wife, Estelle, to spend a portion of the summer in California with them; and chatted with Ruth Seid. Ruth was now famous, having won a $10,000 literary prize from Harper’s at the beginning of the year for her unsparing novel The Wasteland. When they talked, Ruth mentioned that she disliked the lesbian scene in If He Hollers Let Him Go; Chester blamed the cuts to the book and told her to get the original manuscript from Wright, which probably would have rankled her further. But he looked in vain in the shops for If He Hollers.
Before leaving Ohio, he and Jean went to Malabar Farm. He wanted badly to prove to Louis Bromfield that, after five years, he was more than capable of handling his career himself. The experience backfired. Bromfield hustled them in through the front door of the Big House and offered them neither seats nor refreshment, seeming unimpressed that his former servant had won a Rosenwald fellowship and achieved national reviews and good sales for his novel. Instead, only Bromfield sat down, “chatted with us then took us back to the kitchen to meet the help and let us out the back door.”
Bromfield had prepared them for the rest of journey. After the Himeses left Illinois and until they got to California, they found “no place” where they could “sit down to a table and have a meal.” During the thirty hours of driving that it took between Denver and Reno, Nevada, they would not be able to purchase any food at all. Unsurprised by mean bigotry in the United States during the 1940s, even Chester found it difficult to endure “brutal and vicious . . . American race prejudice in the North.” When he wrote Van Vechten, he was noting the wisdom of Wright’s exodus: “I hope to be following him within a year.”
Chester and Jean reached California at the end of April. They drove over to Oakland for Jean’s older brother, Hugo Johnson, a forty-five-year-old noncommissioned officer who had served more than half of his life in the Navy. He was working in San Francisco as chief of the shore patrol at the Embarcadero. With Jean’s blunt, muscular, and humorless brother, they drove 350 miles to a ranch in Milford, California, arriving on May 7. Johnson owned a ten-thousand-acre farm, most of it barren, between the dried-out, ten-mile-wide Honey Lake and the six-thousand-foot peaks of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada.
Although they rented their place from a black man, Hugo Johnson’s tenants had left when they learned a Negro couple were coming to spend the summer there. A malnourished, lewd squatter family had taken the opportunity to camp out in the dilapidated two-story house that served as the main dwelling, a hovel so unseemly that Chester repaired and painted another building on the property, a “modern version of a sharecropper’s shanty,” for living quarters. He and Jean lived in a three-room shack, sitting fifty yards from the road, and separated from the tottering main house by a grove of fruit trees. And although he and Hugo hunted a deer that summer, Chester used the rifle mainly to shoot rattlesnakes coming out of hibernation. In the pristine Sierra wilderness in the shack besieged by rats, lizards, and snakes, Himes would put in some of the finest writing days of his career. He recalled, “I remember that summer as one of the most pleasant of our life.”
Despite the travails at Doubleday imperiling his young career, his editor, Bucklin Moon, was telling the black American public in the pages of Negro Digest that the publishing climate for black-themed books was fantastic. Happy about such progress, Moon acknowledged that ten years earlier “no publisher would have touched” a book as “bitter” and “explosive” as If He Hollers Let Him Go and praised Chester for having “power and rare insight.” But Moon continued to defend Doubleday and white liberalism. He insisted that the only negative sentiment against Chester’s book was “from a Negro who felt that writers like Richard Wright and Chester Himes . . . were setting back race relations fifty years!”
Chester couldn’t have disagreed more. In the first week of June he wrote Doubleday requesting “a better relationship with them or a release.” His hope now went out to Carl Van Vechten, who had a keen friendship with publisher Blanche Knopf. He wanted Knopf to buy out the Doubleday contract and pay him an additional $500. He admitted that he was “a spendthrift,” and the car and the trip had already consumed all the royalties received to date. Alert to the books that Van Vechten had written with gay themes, Chester introduced his three-part prison story, calling it partly “a homo-sexual love story.” The book was now called Yesterday Will Make You Cry. Thinking that the “homo-sexual story seems to have killed it,” Chester mailed the manuscript. Van Vechten, working on an introduction for Gertrude Stein’s new book, took the time to read it and became a permanent supporter and fan of Chester’s, the Howells to his Dunbar. Meanwhile, the pictures that Van Vechten had taken of Chester earlier that year had been forwarded to California. Chester disliked the photographer’s prettying touch, preferring the “blemishes, marks, scars, and lines of the face to show, even at the risk of appearing like a thug.”
A week later, Chester wrote Ken McCormick at Doubleday, seeking to draw further royalties. The reply shocked him. Claiming an accounting error, McCormick wrote that Chester owed the company more than one thousand dollars. Sensing mistreatment, Chester asked formally to be released from the contract for his new book and McCormick reputedly sent him a long saga about Doubleday’s attempts to sign black authors and place black books. But they assented, and three weeks into June, Doubleday agreed to release Chester if he repaid about two thousand dollars (and, ultimately, if he purchased 2400 remaindered copies). He was beginning a long career of what he perceived as métayage to publishers, a relationship where, as he saw it, he was mysteriously overadvanced and then ever tied to his publisher until someone bought his debt, shackling him to a new boss.
By the time of the discussions to leave Doubleday, Chester had a rough draft of three hundred pages of his new novel about the union organizer, what he thought was about two-thirds of the book. His agent, Lurton Blassingame, and Knopf conferred in mid-July. Knopf awaited the manuscript before making a final decision. Now the pages came more slowly to Chester “as it nears the end.” Four weeks after that, in early August, he had a completed draft of a new novel. He was scared that the book might be rejected by Knopf as amateurish, even as he felt the emotional loss connected to completing a massive project
Weakened by “absolute exhaustion,” he suffered extremely when news reached him of his father’s costly operation in a Cleveland hospital, followed by the death of his puppy, hit by a car. The anxieties about the new book and the personal traumas came pouring out in a message to Van Vechten: “Few things that ever happened to me hurt me so, not even when I was sentenced to twenty years in prison,” he wrote from the lodge in the Sierras. Ostensibly about his dog, the message was referring to his anxiety about all of his writing. Badly needing affirmation, Chester airmailed the newly finished manuscript to Van Vechten to provide a “general evaluation.” Van Vechten read the long manuscript and sent back a letter of reassurance. Van Vechten’s main caution was for the future; he noticed that, like Ernest Hemingway, Himes was using the same “quick-tempered but charming” protagonists. But the writer whose novel Nigger Heaven had stirred controversy during the Harlem Renaissance deemed Lonely Crusade, as the book had been renamed, “tremendous and powerful.”
In another serious misfortune, Hugo Johnson had an accident in August, fully disabling the Mercury Coupe. Chester and Hugo searched futilely at the local Ford dealer for parts to repair the vehicle. When they returned home, Jean was missing. After searching by torchlight, they found Jean three miles away from the ranch, stumbling and sobbing in the desert. Chester assumed the worst: that she had been raped. But Jean had not been assaulted; she was distraught after reading the manuscript of Lonely Crusade. Jean believed that she served as the model for Ruth, the wife of the protagonist Lee Gordon, a character who “felt a sense of inferiority because her skin was brown.” In the novel, Chester has Ruth smearing white powder on her face after concluding that her husband is having an affair with a white woman. Ruth’s feet of clay were on much greater display in her depiction as a manipulative social climber, whose appearance called to mind “that beaten, whorish look of so many other Negro women.” Few wives would not have been disturbed by the neurotic, unappealing character resembling themselves physically and written by their husbands. Hugo calmed his sister by reminding her that the next bus out of Susanville, the nearest town, wasn’t for another twelve hours. As before in New York, Jean went home to Chester. But she “hated” the novel. Jean was right to perceive that the depiction of Ruth was a more direct severing of their tie. Chester would only ever go as far as admitting, “I often wondered if I had drawn a true picture of which I was not consciously aware.” Chester would dedicate the book to Hugo.
Jean’s outcry was a suitable finale to the summer. With the car destroyed, the Himeses had no way to get provisions and had to surrender California. In September Chester sent the manuscript off to Blassingame, who then delivered it to Knopf on October 7, 1946. Chester and Jean took a bus to Reno and then a train to New York. They checked in at the Theresa Hotel, the Harlem crossroads, on October 14.
Chester and Jean reconciled in the midst of interesting a better publisher for his next book. Again Chester appeared on the verge of significant achievement. As Ebony magazine described him that year, he was “no great shakes as a success story,” yet “a good prospect” to become one. To fulfill that hopeful mandate meant continuing to live in style. By mid-October Chester had secured quarters in Wading River, Long Island, about seventy-five miles from Manhattan. The Himeses lived on the second floor in a small four-room carriage house on a nine-acre beachfront estate owned by Columbia University neurologist Frank Safford. Safford had the estate set up as a writers’ colony during the summer, usually hosting the New Yorker staff. The Saffords’ large wooden home, occupied by a caretaker, sat near the beach, and a wooded hillside was stippled with small cottages. Except for when the Saffords, a family of five, came out for Christmas 1946, Chester and Jean passed the fall by themselves, with the sea and the small upper-crust town of Wading River, where the white residents were “too well-heeled and secure to worry about a black couple in their neighborhood.” He sounded confident in a message to Langston Hughes about their new lodging, where he could put the “finishing touches” on his book.
The staff at Alfred A. Knopf was impressed by what he had done. Knopf reader Clinton Simpson understood immediately that Himes had written something of an existentialist novel, since it used Marxist material and economic critiques, alongside modern concerns about sexuality and unconscious drives, concluding with hard-fought personal affirmations of liberty and choice. Himes’s protagonist was considered to have “become a free man in a sense that he is finally free of the fear which has oppressed him all his life.” Knopf’s Milton Rugoff noted that the “raw and fiery” book compared favorably with Wright’s Native Son and carried real depth: “sheer intensity of feeling” and “the heartbreaking effect of constant defeat, and fear that can be dissolved only by violence.” Knopf agreed to publish the book and it took an option for an exclusive look at his next. As Simpson had written when he encouraged Knopf to take on the project, “He doesn’t strike me as likely ever to write best sellers, but he might become, if he is not already, one of the finest Negro novelists.” Chester signed the contract on November 6, 1946.
Boutique-size, patrician Knopf, the firm founded in 1915 by the married business partners Blanche and Alfred A. Knopf, was for Chester a bright improvement over Doubleday. Then in her early fifties, Blanche Knopf typically vetted and edited the fiction list of about one hundred titles per year. Van Vechten and the influential journalist H. L. Mencken were two of her closest friends. She had, through Van Vechten, published Langston Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and she worked with other hard-boiled writers to whom Chester was or would be compared, such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Like her editorial team, Blanche Knopf believed that Chester was writing “one of the most dramatic and striking stories of Negro life.”
His old colleagues learned of his good news. Bucklin Moon was admitting now, in the pages of New Republic, that “southern liberals” and “a great many white readers in the North” hadn’t been ready for Chester’s first book. Convinced that Himes was at least a budding star, Moon considered it a milestone to have worked with Chester, the new master of the “psychological lynching.”
Despite signing the new contract, money remained a problem. After Doubleday had been repaid to release him from his contract, he had only a few hundred dollars up front, and a monthly allotment from Knopf of perhaps one hundred dollars to last through the winter. Chester hatched a new plan. He returned to the Julius Rosenwald Fund, hoping to follow Wright out of the United States. Chester knew that having a contract with Knopf would help, but his project was dreamy and lacking strong purpose. He wanted to “travel abroad for a year—England, France, Russia, India, and China—to broaden my knowledge of the cultures of the world, and thereby add depth and objectivity to my potential contribution towards a better world.” As he had since his experience on the Cleveland Writers’ Project, Chester sought reprieve from “the immediate influence of American racial oppression.” During Christmas he hoped to pitch the travel idea to William Haygood, Vandi’s husband, who had returned home from the Army to resume his work at the Rosenwald Fund.
At Thanksgiving weekend, a recently wedded Fanny and Ralph Ellison shared the carriage house, delighting in “the good food, the marvelous talk, the long walk on the beach and in the woods.” Chester was pleased to spend time with Ellison, who had become more opinionated since Wright left the United States. Before the couple arrived, Chester wrote to Ellison asking to borrow “Lenin’s Principles of Marxism or any of Lenin’s discussions on dialectical materialism in pamphlet or booklet form.” Ellison almost certainly shared the materials, which then made their way into Chester’s novel, in the form of speeches and lectures between principal characters. Ellison also brought Bucklin Moon’s New Republic article touting the strength of If He Hollers Let Him Go.
Chester and Ellison hunted and drank and, by and large, the outing was pleasant and affectionate. Ellison had spent a good portion of the previous spring and summer camped out in a cabin in Quogue, southeast of Wading River, and he was working on a new topic, different from the bitter novel of a downed black airman that he had shared with Chester in the fall of 1944. However, their more intense discussions now had an increasingly competitive edge. Thirty-seven-year-old Chester and the thirty-three-year-old Ellison tussled over who was most politically astute, who best understood the nature of black life in America, which literary techniques and literary masters were the most important, and who was capable of surpassing the achievement of Richard Wright.
By 1946, Ellison was becoming a sought-after cultural analyst of growing importance. He had reached his largest national audience in Saturday Review that summer, and that fall he was drafting an essay for Survey Graphic, slated to appear side by side with Chester’s older academic friends E. Franklin Frazier and Sterling Brown. Ellison believed that the tradition of white American writing, from Herman Melville to Ernest Hemingway, created empty shadows of black people and this practice had hallowed out the country’s democratic ideals. Taking the view that black people were completely healthy when properly recognized, Ellison was distancing himself from his black friends who were fully committed to the idea that racism had damaged and made black people—men in particular—fearful. Speaking more like a college professor—he had given lectures at Bennington that fall—Ellison now sharply critiqued Horace Cayton’s pet idea of a “fear-hate-fear” complex operating in the mind of black men. During a meeting that summer, he pointed out to Cayton that while he had accurately determined “certain general aspects of Negro personality,” he “underplay[ed] the subjective element,” which was completely necessary to understand individual black people as well as a work of art.
Instead of the problem of fear, Ellison valued “the blues,” for him an artistic kit that solved a variety of life’s dilemmas, in a manner similar to the way that Albert Camus was pushing for “the absurd” in his Myth of Sisyphus, “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation.” Ellison thought that the musical art form emanating from the Mississippi Delta had the capacity to “transcend” the “jagged grain” of experience “not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” And while Richard Wright himself had been suspicious of Ellison’s concept of “the blues” as an explanatory device to unpack Wright’s memoir Black Boy, Ellison in turn rejected the Earl Conrad creation of the “blues school,” which Cayton had echoed in a column.
In the discussion with Chester, Ellison, who had been raised, for the most part, by a single mother, insisted that the black family had a matriarchal cast. Although this was one of E. Franklin Frazier’s points, Chester was disgusted that his erudite friend would so easily concede what was then considered an admission of the immorality of black women or the uncivilized nature of black people. Chester accurately reproduced Ellison’s arguments in Lonely Crusade. The point was to show Ellison’s arrogance and embarrass him, the hector who “for three hours” propounded “learnedly and vehemently that the Negro family unit was matriarchal.” Chester wrote in the novel, “It was like tearing the heart out of reason to learn of the Negro scholar who not only was convinced, himself, of his own inferiority, but went to great scholastic lengths to prove why it was so.” To Chester, black matriarchy and black women’s white-collar financial success were prime evidence of general African American dishonor under segregation. If winning a place among white elites meant admitting base facts about black people, Chester would remain the outsider.
Although the diverging styles of the two writers, the composer and the counterpuncher, did not ruin the weekend—one that the Ellisons pleasurably recalled as “one of our best times”—Ralph and Fanny could also be prickly, such as when a book they had lent that week wasn’t returned promptly. Jean, gracious and glamorous in dealings with Fanny, yet another black professional woman with an advanced degree from a white university, tried to smooth it over, sending a note: “Hope it didn’t cause any troubles or apologies.” Not long after the encounter with Ellison, Chester lost interest in discussing his work with anyone during composition. “I am intolerant of all opinions but my own and do not want to hear any others and am greatly disturbed and distracted by them,” he decided.
For Chester, the period from Thanksgiving to well after Christmas was an occasion for toil, “long and steadily without a day’s letup,” to correct his manuscript. There were also a couple of occasions of pathos. On December 21, Chester’s first cousin Gerald Wiggins walked up to his girlfriend, Mattie Muldrew, while she waited for a Cleveland streetcar and gunned her down. He then fled a short distance to a parked car and turned the weapon on himself. Gerald died and Mattie survived. Somehow Joseph Senior’s hospital bill from his emergency surgery wound up with Chester, a whopping $977. The basic rationale of his Rosenwald application, “I want to go to Europe so I can see America better,” did not appropriately distinguish him. One dramatic difference between his applications of 1943 and 1946 was in his support team, now all white: UCLA sociologist Leonard Bloom, English novelist Jack Aistrop, Carl Van Vechten, Carey McWilliams, and Blanche Knopf. Though considerable, the support could lift up the underwhelming project only so far. “I wish that I could have been more convincing,” lamented Chester to William Haygood.
Chester resubmitted the revised manuscript to Knopf in sections, beginning with a 425-page batch on January 13, 1947, and delivering all the pages not long after. The final report on Lonely Crusade came back to him on February 10. Knopf’s in-house reviewers applauded his efforts. “Himes has done everything we could expect,” they decided, “in smoothing out and tightening this manuscript.” Now, after having yielded to the process of writing and revising for two years, Chester was face-to-face with himself. He awaited the galley proofs “experiencing a sense of letdown, tired and broke and wish to hell I was out in California with a coupla thousand bucks.” Chester recognized by then how badly he desired respectability, but he also realized that “the circle of restraint” weakened him as a writer. As for what he had accomplished, he was hopeful but circumspect. The novel had run to 540 manuscript pages, and Chester knew it was an opus at least; perhaps it was a masterpiece, a life’s work.
Once the manuscript was off, Chester and Jean returned from Wading River and again billeted at the twelve-story Theresa Hotel, the “Waldorf of Harlem.” Despite its nickname, the costly hotel was drab, run-down, and gloomy inside, a crumbling edifice of segregation that exploited black Americans who had no first-class options. At the Theresa he comported himself as a sport and started putting himself in a deep financial hole. Combined with the flashy intemperance he’d acquired as a Cleveland dandy, Chester also succumbed to bouts of heavy drinking to bridge the gaps between major projects. Soon strapped for cash, Chester had started to tinker with his prison novel, hoping that Knopf might also take that book. Then he drew on his “secret understanding” with Richard Wright, who had returned from France that month. Wright picked up the telephone and Chester got $500 in a few hours from the Authors League. On February 1, the Himeses settled into better rooms at 421 W. 147th Street, in the artsy Hamilton Heights neighborhood, between Convent and St. Nicholas Avenues.
To address more directly their economic predicament, Jean took a job as recreational director for Girls Camp, a residential facility on Welfare Island, off Manhattan, where delinquent girls were detained before trial in the youth court, and, if necessary, treated with psychiatric therapy. The teenage Billie Holiday had been confined there in the late 1920s. Jean was the consummate professional in this demanding job and, again, she impressed her colleagues and supervisors and made friends. Feeling pinched and his ego bruised, Chester started casting about for more money. Rashly, he asked Lurton Blassingame, his agent, to pursue a book contract for the prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry with Knopf. When Van Vechten found out, he scolded Chester for behaving like an amateur. “No publisher is likely to be interested in two books at once,” he counseled. Besides, the topic of that novel hadn’t changed from when it had been rejected years earlier. To be published at all, reminded a loyal Van Vechten, it needed “some preparation and explanation in the right quarters before it is read.” Shifting gears, Chester pressed his agent to return to Knopf with a new proposal, Immortal Mammy, a novel about a black woman raised in a white neighborhood as the exceptional black child.
Chester worked hard drafting the outline for this next project and staying abreast of new material on race relations, for instance through the winter issue of Survey Graphic. When edited by Alain Locke twenty-three years earlier, Survey had inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance. Now, Thomas Sancton, a provocative young crusading journalist from New Orleans, was continuing the special-issue tradition. Chester was tickled by the “artistic flow of language” and logic in Sancton’s essay, and by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s “blunt attack.” He also learned that the article Ellison had been working hard on for that issue, later published as “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” had been rejected.
Chester, on the other hand, was feeling quite well liked across racial lines. His friend William Haygood told him to drop by the New Yorker Hotel on March 13 to talk about art and fellowships; a few days later, Van Vechten had a group to his home for a small photography exhibit, as well as a piano recital by black critic George Schuyler’s talented daughter Phillipa.
Then Blanche Knopf offered a contract for Immortal Mammy. Blassingame requested a $2000 advance, with $350 on signing and the rest paid out in monthly installments. This was an improvement beyond the $500 advance that Chester seems to have received for Lonely Crusade. Chester thought the terms of the contract could be improved and he debated whether or not he ought to sign it, not knowing how well Lonely Crusade might do and after the bad experience of indebtedness with Doubleday. He rushed off a letter to Haygood, trying to sniff out his chances for the Rosenwald fellowship, which would not be announced until May. Haygood wired him to accept the Knopf contract.
He did. On April 30 Knopf sent out the paperwork and he returned it to them on May 5. If Lonely Crusade did well, perhaps he could go into hibernation again and spend the demanding twelve-hour days writing another strong work. But Chester’s exceptional work habits in 1946 would be battered by the difficulties of his life. After finishing proofs of the galleys, which had arrived in late May, he found himself needing to get away from New York as well as from the burden of the image of himself he had concocted, the hard-drinking, candid black cynic. “We simply must get away from here,” he confessed to Van Vechten, “both for morale and health.”
Chester and Jean escaped Manhattan in early June, taking off for several days to Westford, Vermont, to the home of his friends from Los Angeles Helen and Bill Smith. Agreeing with Chester’s assessment of the corrosive dimension of race relations in Los Angeles, the Smiths had moved to Vermont in October. Eight months later the Smiths weren’t quite sure that they had not made a tragic mistake; initially they had considered relocating to Haiti. Vermont had won out because of the access to Boston and New York, its legendary history as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the easy route to Canada. Bill Smith was “riding out another recurrence of doubt and depression” about his abode and his career when Chester and Jean arrived. He had submitted the manuscript of a book called God Is for White Folks to publishers under the pseudonym Will Thomas and been told, in essence, that he belonged to a lesser breed of humanity. One editor had replied, “I do not see a very promising future for a writer who would probably continue to base his writings upon Negro more than human situations and problems.” In Smith’s kitchen, he and Chester consoled each other over pipes filled with marijuana.
Chester returned to New York after a week, to strategize his way forward with Carl Van Vechten, who recommended that he try a brief stay at the writers’ colony at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. At first, Chester rejected the idea but Van Vechten took the additional step of broaching the matter with Langston Hughes, the first African American invited to Yaddo. “You know: give us the answers!” Van Vechten rattled to Hughes. However Hughes, who had done no less for Chester than he had for so many other black writers, was growing increasingly unsure about his Cleveland homeboy. “I expect by now that Yaddo has perhaps filled its quota for the coming summer,” Hughes replied accurately, but brusquely. Three months later, Hughes would turn down Blanche Knopf directly when she asked him to endorse Chester’s new book. “Most of the people in it just do not seem to me to have good sense or be in their right minds, they behave so badly which makes it difficult to care very much what happens to any of them,” he explained. Chester was now fully in the process of exchanging racial bases of support, as his recommendation letters for the Rosenwald fellowship indicated. He would cater to the tastes of the white vanguard more so than the franchise among black Americans.
Blanche Knopf also thought it imperative that Chester receive an endorsement from Richard Wright. Chester sent the galleys to Wright, working at one of the Safford cottages in Wading River and pondering a return to France. Wright responded warmly with a statement to the publisher on June 5. Noting the plot’s concern with the internal decision making of the American Communist Party, Wright initially understood Lonely Crusade as exclusively a novel of politics. “What he has to say will take the Communist Party of America twenty-five years to answer,” he fired off in praise.
At first, Chester was pleased by “this fine statement,” since he understood how central Communist politics were to Wright’s life and work. But then Carl Van Vechten threw a party and invited Chester, Wright, Blanche Knopf, and the latest black writer of national note, Willard Motley, whose novel about an Italian American juvenile delinquent, Knock on Any Door, became a best seller. About Chester’s age, dapper, and self-controlled, Motley seemed to have the world in his hands that June; the reviews of his naturalistically drawn Chicago were strongly positive. Despite its being a story of reform school, slums, pederasty, and petty crime, Motley’s book was being described as “beautifully written.” The apparent secret of Motley’s likable book was that, like Chester’s best Esquire stories, it had no central African American characters.
Chester spent his time huddled with Wright and his new business partner, the bob-wearing, chain-smoking aesthete Blanche Knopf. His book was scheduled for September publication. Chester begged Wright to revise his comment on Lonely Crusade, to one that emphasized “marital conflict and the Jewish-Negro angle.” Actually, he wanted Wright to recommend the book not only for more than its critique of communism, but for its “literary merit.” Not wishing to seem ungrateful, Chester added pleasantly that if Wright demurred, “it will in no way affect my great admiration for you and your achievement.” He was also remembering his unrepaid Authors League loan. Wright supplied another blurb in ten days:
Chester Himes’ Lonely Crusade chalks up another significant literary victory for Negro prose expression in America. His hard, biting, functional style reveals the truth about a marital situation never before depicted in novels of Negro life. Lee Gordon’s tense and tragic search for integrity cuts deeper into our consciousness than piles of academic volumes of sociology and psychology. Himes stands in the front ranks of literary truth-tellers in our nation.
Long live Chester Himes!
This statement represented approval, as well as being an act of friendship, but the groove was definitely narrow. Wright had succeeded because he was bright and worked hard, but he liked to fit friends into categories, which was perhaps the somewhat mechanical way that he understood the world. Chester, an ex-convict, served Wright as an example of a person who had transformed from the apotheosis of sin to civilized reform. But Wright would never consider him an artist.
After the hot months spent readying the novel to appear, Chester and Jean moved to Welfare Island, at first to a studio apartment, and then for three weeks in a two-room flat. The apartments were salvaged out of an old, condemned eighty-one-room mansion, renovated by the city and large, but still indelicate. Chester and Jean lived on the side of the island that faced Queens, enjoying the cool evenings and the relative quiet. Welfare Island was accessible only by ferry. Defending the choice of his hard-to-get-to residence, Chester stammered to Van Vechten, “Honestly, it is rather nice.”
By August Chester’s other supporters came through for him. Horace Cayton told Knopf that Lonely Crusade rivaled A Passage to India and that it was “a great work of art.” Carl Van Vechten surpassed everybody in applause, declaring “this novel boasts such power of expression and such subtlety of treatment, the author possesses so sensitive a command of character and incident the culmination is so reasonably magnificent, that I, for one, am not afraid to call this book great.” Chester was wooed by competing book publishers: William Targ, a writer for the Cleveland News, and Ben Zevin, the president of World Publishers, also located in Cleveland, took Chester and Jean to the Algonquin Hotel, the watering hole of the New Yorker staff and writer John O’Hara, for lunch. An interview with the New York Times went so well that Chester allowed himself to say that he retained “happy memories” of the South. If they slightly misrepresented him on that point, when Chester said that his favorite writers were Wright and Faulkner, whose bizarre accounts of twined black and white life gave him hope, they had it correct. In a piece in the newsmagazine Newsweek, which appeared a week before publication, he found himself lauded as “among the most promising of younger negro writers,” and his book “brilliantly introspective” and “forthright and compassionate.” Negro Digest contracted to run the third chapter of the novel, which revealed the early years of Ruth and Lee Gordon’s marriage and exposed the Communist shift away from protesting against racial discrimination, in its December issue. Meanwhile, a mended Joseph Sr. traveled from Cleveland to be with Chester on the triumphant publication day in New York. All the signals indicated that enduring commercial and critical success was at hand.
An array of publicity ventures had been arranged in advance by Knopf, in contrast to the Doubleday scrambling and errors. On Sunday, September 7, 1947, Chester recorded a segment for the WCBS program This Is New York, to be broadcast a week later. Early Monday morning, Chester was scheduled to appear at Macy’s bookstore for a pep talk with booksellers. For that afternoon Knopf publicity director William Cole also scheduled a live WNBC radio interview with the fashionable Mary Margaret McBride to coincide with the book’s release.
But on Monday morning, a warm day with a sprinkling of clouds, the best laid plans began to unravel. This Is New York went ahead with their broadcast, despite their promise to air later. McBride’s secretary heard the interview at 9:15 A.M. and angrily telephoned Cole, canceling the afternoon program, because their contract to exclusively launch the book had been violated. Then, even though Chester was on the early ferry to Manhattan, the boat broke down, delaying him by forty-five minutes. When he arrived at Macy’s at ten o’clock, his audience of book clerks was already hard at work. He collared a few from the fiction department, but rushed back to the Seventy-Ninth Street dock to get Jean and his father for the McBride interview. Another ferry ride later he arrived and Jean told him the appointment had been canceled, kindling a desperate “fustle and bustle.” Chester felt bad and showed it. Joseph Himes tried to console his youngest child, who had known so much anguish and grief. “Remember, son, New York is not the only city that has skyscrapers,” he sputtered. “We have one on the new Union Station in Cleveland.”
After this opening fumble, there were some minor recoveries, courtesy of his friends. In the Amsterdam News, Constance Curtis approved of his “tightly constructed . . . good novel.” For the New York Herald Tribune, Arna Bontemps reviewed the book he thought a bit long, deciding that “the story has power” and provides “excitement quite out of the ordinary.” In Atlanta, reviewer Marian Sims, who liked the book particularly well for its attacks against Communists, thought that Himes had imbued it with the “terrible and tragic ring of authenticity.” Another fan, John Farrelly at New Republic, gave Chester his due: “The victim is the classic modern hero; undefined, pervasive fear, emotional and physical insecurity, sexual neuroses, the abnegation of beliefs, the loss of values, a general cynicism and brutality; these are universal disasters.” Farrelly agreed with Chester’s skepticism about “the healing aspects of an equality which is as much a problem for the white man as the Negro.”
However, one of the dissenting reviews injured him personally. Willard Motley wrote him “regretfully,” five days before publication, to warn Chester that he would review the book for the Chicago Sun. “I didn’t like Lonely Crusade,” he began, “I react violently to it—my ideas and opinions are so different from yours.” Repudiated by a writer who described expertly the meanness of the modern city and its destructiveness to human beings, Chester wasn’t sure how to respond. He had regaled Motley’s Knock on Any Door and identified personally with the story of choirboy Nick Romano’s trip to the electric chair, calling the book “wonderful.” As Nick gets his taste of life behind bars in the boys’ reformatory, Motley explored the world of cruising gay men exploiting children and teens in the slums. Chester knew of few other published books that put a contextual perspective on the “degenerate” episodes of his own life, books lifting him out of isolation and providing language to unpack his own complex experience in prison. Before reading Motley’s review, Chester tried to patch up their differences in a letter. While he did “regret exceedingly” Motley’s dislike of Lonely Crusade, he wanted to keep him as a friend: “Please do not feel that I would ever have you do otherwise than be honest to yourself.”
But then the Chicago Sun piece appeared. Borderline calumny, Motley’s review was a series of oversimplifications, which worked quite well in the pithy format of a newspaper. In a critique that refused to distinguish between the novelist and his chief character and ignored the novel’s sophisticated political dimensions, Motley decided that since Lee Gordon was a graduate of UCLA, he would have shared the experiences of its star black athletes: “We learn early that Lee hates all white people (at least men) though he must have met some decent men of different color in the University of California at Los Angeles. Kennie Washington, All American football player, and Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodger first basemen, did.”
Himes had clumsily but directly responded to Motley’s chief critique at the end of the book. Bright and perceptive in the midst of his own doom, Lee decides that “some white people must have been his friends right down the line from slavery. All of them could not have been his hateful enemies.” Motley’s suggestions that Lee Gordon’s life “pivot[s] on race or nationality” and “through bitterness or pride he turns his back on the people as a whole” made Chester consider the review “a vicious personal attack.” He never spoke to Motley again.
Even though some black college graduates out of Chicago thought Motley was “closer to the ofays than he was to the Brothers,” this review demonstrated what was at stake for the middle class. (Motley’s uncle Archibald, a celebrated painter, had famously done a series of portraits extolling light-skinned black beauty at the expense of darker-skinned women.) In the pages of Ebony, where he had been celebrated a short time before, Chester found personal slander: “Gordon—and his creator Himes—are infected with a psychosis that distorts their thinking and influences their every action.” In New York’s The People’s Voice he received the same diagnosis, but this time from the black left, which was also solidly middle-class, educated, biracial, and married across the color line. “It has been rumored that this novel is largely autobiographical. If this is true, then Himes should repair to the nearest clinic before writing another novel. For he is a mighty sick man.” These critiques showed the unwillingness of African Americans with public voices to push loudly against racism or to prick the weaknesses of postwar white liberalism. Timid black reviewers convinced themselves that they were risking black progress by mounting vigorous critiques a year before American armed forces were formally desegregated. Nor were they comfortable in admitting to personal feelings of enmity toward whites, a standing taboo for the black professional class. So they assailed Chester as neurotic.
Further to the left, he was declared insufficiently working-class. The Socialist Workers Party sheet The Militant, ridiculed Chester as “a Negro intellectual,” which meant being bourgeois. “He does not know the worker, and least of all the Negro worker,” the article charged. “Mr. Himes has fought with his typewriter alone in his room.”
The newly reorganized U.S. Communist Party took a turn. Chester had written bon mots such as “It was not that the Communist Party lacked integrity; it simply did not recognize it.” Lloyd Brown, a new African American reviewer for New Masses, was assigned Chester’s book, which was probably the most detailed fictional exploration of blacks in the Communist Party. He promptly called it a “literary lynching” and then decided, “I cannot recall ever having read a worse book on the Negro theme.”
These were what the Cleveland Press’s Emerson Price had in mind when he noted that “extreme leftists” had delivered a “really serious beating” to the novel and made “grave charges” against Chester personally. So Chester’s ground became ever more narrow, when the highbrow press belittled him both as a middlebrow hack and as a heretic to the faith of postwar American antiracist zeitgeist. Atlantic Monthly reviewer Stoyan Christowe offered this memorable quote: “Hatred reeks through his pages like yellow bile.” Honest about the attitude of an audience wanting to see discontent smoothed over, Forum derided the book because it was “bound to stir up animosity rather than sympathetic understanding.” In the highly charged Red Scare political atmosphere of loyalty oaths and Communist purges, Lonely Crusade was opposed for spearing the hypocrisy of two warring, unequal sides.
If his portrait of whites like the aircraft company executive Louis Foster and Jackie Forks, the Communist dilettante, maligned the middle class, Chester had not so much made a sharp critique of the left as he had exposed some of its social world, and particularly the roles of blacks and Jews in it. But the big question of black industrial employment after the Second World War—enfolding the key issues of migration, home ownership, and college education connected to the GI Bill—would wind up defining much of the second half of twentieth-century American domestic politics. Chester dramatized the barriers in practice and thought that prevented the integration of the labor force in heavy industry and caused the emergence of the ghetto as the central locale of black urban life.
As he had done two years before with If He Hollers Let Him Go, he attempted to direct the novel’s reception, a rare duty presumed by a black novelist for their own work. When Milton Klonsky, the reviewer for Commentary, dismissed the novel with “Such writing, no matter how well intentioned, and the graffiti in the men’s rooms are part of the same debased culture,” Chester took the time to rebut him in Klonsky’s own magazine. In a March 1948 letter to Commentary’s editor, Chester blamed the graffiti comment on Klonsky’s “sub conscious disturbances,” and his “prejudices.” Believing himself “fulsomely condemned” by “learned colored people” like black critic J. Saunders Redding, he addressed Redding in his own column in the Afro-American. He insisted that one fictional character “is one colored person, not all colored people” and “Lee Gordon is presented as mentally ill. The author does not imply that all colored people are mentally ill.”
Amid the messy reviews Chester was also losing a friend, Ralph Ellison, who saw in Himes’s career an example of what not to do. Like a seminarian, Ellison had once committed himself to the Communist Party. Later, feeling more at home with the ideas of the midcentury critic Kenneth Burke, he moved to the philosophy of art and literary technique. He disproved of Chester’s freewheeling compositional style, which in Lonely Crusade involved the addition of material from the press, oral poetry heard in bars, the problems that his brother Joe and cousin Henry had written about, and what seemed to Ellison the transmutation of whole portions of the Lenin pamphlets he himself had supplied to Chester. Ellison faulted his buddy for making Communist arguments seem frivolous.
Ellison could not, however, get around the fact that Lonely Crusade was the most important novel written by an African American in the seven years since Native Son. So he chatted the book up with his white friends, feeling them out while making up his own mind. He had been excited to recommend the book to his main patron, Ida Guggenheimer, a wealthy sponsor of the Communist Party. Now he was sour. “For the most part I didn’t like it, especially not his attempts at political criticism,” Ellison decided a year after publication. He described the novel as “unclear” and worse, called Himes’s “motives questionable” for publishing the book. Guggenheimer, to whom the novel Invisible Man would be dedicated, agreed with his estimate, judging Lonely Crusade “very poor stuff.” A friend Ellison cherished, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and college professor who also wrote for The New Yorker, dismissed Himes as well. Hyman was just getting around to reading If He Hollers and wrote Ellison to levy the negative verdict: “I read the old Himes book, just about the time the new one came out and didn’t think it came to much.” Hyman would be the prime critical voice in Ellison’s ear as he wrote Invisible Man.
A few months later and in a move that signified the impossibility of Ellison’s ever sharing intimacy again with Himes, he tore the book apart in a letter to Richard Wright. “Personally I was disappointed,” he began. “I found it dishonest in its pseudo-intellectuality, and as false as Cayton’s ‘fear-hate-fear complex’ in its psychology.” For Ellison, Himes made tawdry intellectual and artistic missteps and then dared to tell people he had written a best seller. Ellison had been told by a Knopf editor that although the publisher “eagerly put money behind the book it laid an egg.”
At the end of 1947, Chester called Ellison about a holiday party and sent a Christmas card, but Ellison had written him off as a “mixed-up guy” and an opportunist. And while Earl Conrad believed that Ellison, Cayton, Wright, and Himes all had the personality of Bigger Thomas, for Ellison the joke was on Himes. Cocky and feeling superior, Ellison mused about Chester’s wounded feelings. “Could he fear that I might put him in my book?” he noted to Wright before making a Native Son reference. “If so, he should forget it; you put him in a book seven years ago.”
Chester Himes always maintained that the overall response to Lonely Crusade ruined his literary reputation in the United States. “It was then that I decided to leave the United States forever if I got the chance. . . . I felt like a man without a country, which in fact I was.” Certainly it was true that some former allies were now pointing to him as fearful, vindictive, and ignorant. But Chester held on to his desire to write the stories that had both come out of his prison past and relied upon what he had learned in California—his critique of the evolution of racism in the United States and the creation of the modern integrated industrial workforce. Unlike Wright’s Native Son, which produced a Communist defense attorney to deliver the work’s lacerating social critique, or Ann Petry’s The Street, which needed its narrator and a series of male villains to make plain the argument of the racist urban environment of the North, or Motley’s Knock on Any Door, which reproduced Wright’s courtroom melodrama and made explicit the environment-as-culprit theme, Chester had relied upon a dramatic narrative lodged in concrete historical circumstances to identify the contesting pressures wrecking the mass movement for peaceful social transformation. He exposed all comers, from the black family under segregation to the autocratic ultrapatriots, and the quixotic left-wing movement itself. None of his characters were improbable cutouts. But even more significant than crafting the book’s uncompromising, smart originality, Chester had exposed the crisis of industrial work as the postwar national woe. “I will never change on the book,” he wrote five years later about Lonely Crusade, “with all its faults it still tells the truth as I saw it then and see it now.”