INFLICTING A WOUND UPON HIMSELF
By February 1948 Lonely Crusade was a certified flop. The hardcover sales petered out at thirty-five hundred copies and Chester’s greatest book was never considered for a paperback reprint edition because of the heavy pile of remaindered surplus. Lonely Crusade would pass quickly into obscurity, as if the book had not been written at all. And if Knopf did not deliberately sacrifice the book as Doubleday had If He Hollers Let Him Go, they did not overadvance authors whose books were not doing well. Chester earned only $1701.89 from book sales after Lonely Crusade had been out a month, not enough to recoup his initial $2000 advance. Before the end of 1947, Knopf accountants had started billing his Immortal Mammy advance for all fees and expenses against Lonely Crusade, which by then showed “a debit balance.” That December Knopf had docked him $123.78, reducing that month’s stipend to around $28. Even his agent, Lurton Blassingame, was surprised by the unusually harsh accounting practices. “Advances against royalties paid to finance the writing of a new work have never, in my experience, been subject to charges held over from a previous work,” Blassingame lobbied the publisher, requesting that Chester’s final money be remitted intact. The last $150 Immortal advance payment was paid in full at the end of March. Downcast about Lonely Crusade’s failing and feeling punished again by a publisher, Chester was hard-pressed and “needed support badly.”
But the more difficult task of writing was intolerable while he and Jean resided in a cramped apartment with the dandyish Caribbean bandleader Eddie Bonelli on Franklin Avenue in the Bronx. “It is a great self punishment,” Chester concluded about their comedown after leaving Welfare Island, “to write a book while living in a small room in someone else’s house.”
To relieve himself from the tiny room and the bleak disappointment connected to the reception of Lonely Crusade, Chester violated one of his better principles. In February he applied for two months’ residency at the artists’ colony at Yaddo. A billet there would not bring relief financially—all that Yaddo provided was room and board—and, since Jean would not be allowed to live with him there, he would still have to sell stories to contribute to their room rent. But he was hoping that intangibles like scenic beauty, prestige, and a crew of new backers could inspire him and prove therapeutic. The first small victory was to be admitted.
For the application he pitched Immortal Mammy, the story of the black girl in the all-white world that would feature the “psychological processes of an ‘exceptional’ member of an oppressed group.” He planned for the novel to be a semibiographical piece, probably drawn from some of the episodes attributed to the popular and beloved singer Billie Holiday, who was released from federal penitentiary after serving nine months for narcotics possession, and performed at Carnegie Hall that March. He considered using a first-person narrator and exploring the life of the blues singer using the environs of Cleveland, Los Angeles, and New York.
His friend Horace Cayton, supervisor of the Parkway Community House, tried to lift Chester up a bit, inviting him to Chicago to lecture in May. Chester was working up treatments of articles for the slick magazines and hoping that the new book “won’t take me long . . . when I get going.”
While struggling to draft Immortal Mammy and dealing with “a siege of virus X” shared with Jean, Chester renewed his political ties. He lent his talents that winter to Grant Reynolds, who had joined forces with union leader Asa Philip Randolph and created the Committee Against Jim Crow in the Military. In March, the committee started issuing press releases, threatening Gandhian civil disobedience against the Universal Military Training and Selective Service Acts being debated in Congress. At the beginning of April, Randolph and Reynolds conveyed their demands for desegregation to President Harry Truman and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Although ultimately successful, their spring of 1948 stand went against the growing anti-Communist hysteria that sought to quash all dissent to government policies.
Like the hero Lee Gordon in his novel Lonely Crusade, Chester shared that outspoken commitment to ending Jim Crow wherever it appeared. By April he was writing newspaper editors in Cleveland and Chicago to advance the Randolph–Reynolds campaign in favor of “mass civil disobedience” if segregation in the armed forces was not summarily abolished. To the movement he also contributed a short story, called “These People Never Die,” published in the Amsterdam News, about a courageous black draftee who accepts prison instead of serving as a “sugar boy” in the Jim Crow army. But while Chester was suggesting that prison was more dignified than stooping to federal law, he was growing increasingly doubtful of the existence of a public that wanted to read Immortal Mammy, the manuscript of which was due to Knopf on May 1. With the sales of Lonely Crusade what they were, Chester admitted that “I don’t have any great enthusiasm for another racial novel.”
What he also meant was that he was losing his taste for writing literature that engaged the politics of American social class, a true disappointment on account of two brilliant character portraits from Lonely Crusade. The New Leader’s reviewer, twenty-three-year-old James Baldwin, had immediately recognized Chester’s Luther McGregor as a nefarious and significant character in African American literature. Chester perhaps slightly mishandled Luther by repeatedly emphasizing his likeness to an ape. However, it is smooth-talking Luther McGregor who quotes the epic Signifying Monkey rhyme in its entirety, and thus introduces a syncretic version of African rural folk culture into an urban American setting. Luther also delivers the Hamlet-like “I is a nigger first” soliloquy, a moment when black fear and violent reprisal are transformed into twentieth-century ethnically rooted national citizenship.
Another prime distinction in Lonely Crusade was the portrait of Louis Foster, and the character, though drawn from Louis Bromfield, quite brilliantly and accurately modeled the beliefs of several powerful Americans whose oligarchic attitudes consistently not only imperiled civil rights and democracy in the United States but threatened to bring on atomic war and global catastrophe. Henry Luce, the propaganda-producing publisher of the newsmagazine Time, which was described in the 1940s and ’50s as “misinformation trimmed with insults,” and his friend, General Douglas MacArthur, who consistently defied President Truman and brought the United States to the brink of all-out war with China and the Soviet Union, were both eerily similar personalities to Foster. Chester was really the first black writer to wrestle onto the page a psychological portrait of a righteous plutocrat from the atomic bomb era.
In early April Chester heard from Yaddo administrator Elizabeth Ames that he had made the “guest list” for the coming season at the artists’ colony. Guests, as the admitted artists were termed, stayed for short stints in the spring and summer, typically six or eight weeks. Chester arrived by afternoon train at Saratoga Springs on May 10, 1948, and took a cab to the six-hundred-acre estate on Union Street, once the home of financier Spencer Trask and his wife, Sylvia. Yaddo featured gothic revival buildings, slender lakes, and lush sculpted grounds. The principal building was the Mansion, a hewn granite structure of twenty-seven rooms, closed when Chester first arrived. Artists had studios for their work and the writers too went out to ateliers every day. A heavy garage housed some of the studios and Chester had a bedroom in a two-story clapboard manor called West House. Elizabeth Ames’s office was in a stucco building called East House. A statue-lined rose garden covered what, in the early nineteenth century, had been slave quarters. The only uncomfortable part of the arrangement was that Saratoga Springs, New York, a resort famed for its racetrack and its mineral springs, was like Atlantic City, a Jim Crow town.
The nearly deaf, prominently leftist Ames was the original director of the artist’s colony and her vision guided the place for fifty years. When Chester met her, she had just left the hospital, having spent three weeks convalescing after an eye operation. Unsure of whether or not he would encounter racial prejudice, he tried to befriend Ames by gushing to her about Van Vechten, whom she knew. Although Ames was admired by her “colonists,” she was also punctilious and officious, a morally rigid woman who left typed admonitory notes for guests on the escritoire in the great hall, where they took their meals. Liberal, like the members of her admissions committee—Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and Newton Arvin—but averse to risk, Ames admitted that Negroes “should have come before” the racial barrier fell in 1941. Then, she had had to defy at least one Yaddo trustee who resigned when she and Arvin resolved to start admitting black artists. Ames tried to break segregation down by small, safe degrees.
In the first season of black guests, she confided to Malcolm Cowley that integration seemed to have spawned “one or two weird things,” likely a sobriquet for sex and drunkenness. One of her apparent responses was to henpeck black Yaddoites. On the grounds they were not to be overloud or create large phone bills; in Saratoga Springs, they were not to run up bar tabs or be in debt. She did not want them carousing drunkenly or lecherously, activities that reached legendary proportion among all who went to Yaddo. As one Yaddo researcher suspects, “the formal integration of Yaddo was subtly undermined by ‘well-intentioned’ inquiries about the behavior of African American guests.” Eventually Jim Crow Saratoga Springs made certain grudging exceptions. When asked specifically by Ames if he would object to Langston Hughes being served at the New Worden restaurant, proprietor Edward Sweeney relented, somewhat. “I do not object to Langston Hughes, the colored writer, coming in our bar as long as he is in the company of someone else from Yaddo.”
Not all black guests accepted Ames’s grooming. The year before Chester arrived, hard-drinking Horace Cayton had frightened Ames with his behavior. Even fifteen years later, Cayton’s loud escapades were clearly recalled. Despite Cayton’s genuine attraction to Yaddo, his requests for readmission were refused by Ames, who explained to Malcolm Cowley, “we have decided that an alcoholic is too sick a person to be invited to Yaddo.” She would be looking closely at Chester.
At first, Chester marveled at the new level of splendor. “It is an ideal place to work,” he bragged to Van Vechten about his room, which had four windows and a view of the manicured grounds. His basic needs were catered to. Guests could count on a buffet for breakfast and lunch packed in a black tin box at noon. Yaddo even had quiet hours—no visiting or public talking from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.—that were enforced. The dinners were grand jacket-and-tie affairs, known for the rich quality of the food and turning the guests into “beaming Sybarites waddling out from the groaning board,” in the words of the writer Eleanor Clark.
The retreat catered to both the already famous and young prodigies. Unknown Flannery O’Connor, a young, sheltered, “thirteenth century” Catholic girl from Georgia, arrived on June 1. Chester had prepared himself for elevated literary discussions with the Yaddo crowd, and he brought with him Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Faulkner’s Light in August, and a translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. But what O’Connor found with annoyance, and that Chester must have been amused by, was dining-room table banter about the latest vogue that kept Billie Holiday in the news: narcotics.
In Chester’s session the white wunderkind was twenty-six-year-old Patricia Highsmith, who awoke to a breakfast of liquor and biblical passages. Yaddo stimulated and deranged her; she was “a coiled Spring” and “happy like a battery chicken.” Slender and tall, the dark-haired Barnard graduate hailed from a Texas slaveholding family and consistently tried to tackle Chester on his own turf: evil and sexuality. Their rooms were across the hall from each other, and at the end of May they went into town, found Jimmy’s, a bar on Congress Street, and drank themselves into a stupor. Then Highsmith followed Chester into his room, where he attempted to consummate rather perfunctorily what seemed to be unfolding. When Chester tried to kiss her, Highsmith, free-spirited and sexually libertine during her eight weeks at Yaddo, withdrew. She camouflaged the episode of interracial hanky-panky by writing about it in German in her notebook, but it was vivid. As she wrote to him dryly after almost twenty years, “Maybe you remember me from Yaddo. Anyway, I remember you.”
Highsmith’s seeming dismissal of sex with Chester and, what’s more, a writer’s friendship, is curious. She was hatching the well-received novel Strangers on a Train, which became famous when turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. When Highsmith completed the important “raison d’être” murder scene in her novel that summer, she wrote in her diary, “I feel I have grown older, completely adult.” At Yaddo, Chester was the hands-down expert in crime and murder, but mainly Highsmith remembered him talking about his car. In the 1960s, after she had become comfortably wealthy and reviewed Chester’s novel Cotton Comes to Harlem for London’s Times Literary Supplement, Highsmith received a letter from Chester, asking what he never found out from the hallmate he drunkenly tried to seduce. “I was sitting here, wondering, when the postman brought your letter, how your life has brought you the intimate and detailed knowledge required to write such a realistic and living story.” Underneath Chester’s polite question was the thinly veiled accusation that, like many other writers, she had taken something from him without acknowledgment.
Another obvious tie between the two writers was Highsmith’s ache over her sexual preference. Chester had written a book on the subject: he had his prison manuscript with him, and he was, around this time, separating out the competing plot strands from the book. One part, “Stool Pigeon,” would deal with the prison fire and have a reptilian black preacher as its protagonist. The other story, “Yesterday Will Make You Cry,” would present “the boy’s development of homosexuality.” Highsmith should have been a natural comrade, but perhaps the simple fact is that a talented young white woman sowing her oats would be wary of a Negro ex-con from Cleveland, Knopf novelist or not.
Chester broke off from the excitement at West House and caught a train to be at the University of Chicago on May 18. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Forum, his evening lecture was advertised as “The Individual in Our Writing World,” but Chester was speaking nearly exclusively about “the dilemma of the Negro artist.” He had emphasized to a reporter in advance of the talk that Lonely Crusade “was more concerned with Lee Gordon’s search for the meaning of manhood than with any lengthy condemnation of prejudice as such.” He also quoted at length from Horace Cayton’s essay “Race Conflict in Modern Society.” From the stage Chester told his audience of postwar collegians that writing was about intellectual and emotional experience, and then, even more philosophically, that “the essential necessity of humanity is to find justification for existence. . . . We are maintained at our level of nobility by our incessant search for ourselves.” But the inner journey of self-definition led him to an abyss in terms of creativity. Ignoble himself, he had been “brutalized, restricted, degraded” and his “soul” was “pulverized by oppression.” As a result, he could not but succumb to “bitterness, fear, hatred, protest.” Chester supposed that an honest reflection by a black writer on the black way of life in the United States would “be like inflicting a wound upon himself.” The reward for integrity was being reviled.
He accused those of his peers who had achieved polite acclaim of “a trenchant sort of dishonesty, an elaborate and highly convincing technique of modern uncle-tomism,” and gave out some dazzling turns of logic which probably seemed like a con man’s spiel to everyone but Cayton: “Any American Negro’s racial experience, be they psychotic or not, are [sic] typical of all Negroes’ racial experience for the simple reason that the source is not the Negro but oppression.” The fact that he was right made him more doomed. As for the “guiltless” liberals in the audience, they were told bluntly that they “abhor . . . the revelations of Negroes’ personalities.” He insisted, making the crowd uncomfortable, “What sort of idiocy is it that reasons American Negroes don’t hate American whites?” He concluded that “the whole Negro race in America, as a result of centuries of oppression, is sick at soul.” Chester, who had fortified himself before he took the podium with champagne, topped off by capsules of the stimulant Benzedrine, noted sadly that “a dead silence” followed his remarks.
After attempting to forget his Chicago audience’s disbelief by way of binge drinking and philandering, Chester staggered back to Yaddo, where he continued the pageant of self-indulgence and self-pity. “Until the period of my visit expired,” he recalled, “I was drunk every day.” As he described himself to another writer in 1952, “although I might not be the wittiest person I do think of myself as being jolly, especially when I have had a great deal to drink, which is one of my favorite hobbies.” Others among Yaddo’s guests joined him in debauchery. During one evening spectacle a high-spirited female artist slapped a man down and then broke some of the Mansion’s windows. When Elizabeth Ames reflected upon the cohort whose eight-week stay ended in July, she confessed to Malcolm Cowley that “there has been a lot of very rowdy drinking.”
Chester conducted his heaviest drinking downtown, at Jimmy’s, which was a hangout for the Yaddo crowd, and at afterhours dives for the black cooks and waiters who worked in town, like Glenn Finley’s Blind Pig, where they served barbecue and Chester could drink until five in the morning. Chester described himself at the all-black joints as “a man going home after a shipwreck.” But recuperating at the bar with his kinfolk meant that the experience with the white artsy crowd was equivalent to drowning at sea. A sentence from his 1955 novel The Primitive (which punningly used Skidoo for Yaddo) uncovered his bewilderment and anger, “Some day he’d have to sit down and discover why he hated Skiddoo and all the artists there.”
One element of the discontentment was Chester’s realization about himself. In 1948, Chester wrote a moving short story based on the Saratoga Springs artists’ retreat. “Da-Da-Dee” took its title from an onomatopoetic transcription of Ella Fitzgerald scat-singing “I’ll Get By—As Long as I Have You.” The maudlin tale centered on Jethro, “a famous writer of two racial novels,” who has been invited to an artists’ colony to “work on a novel called Stool Pigeon.” The short story exposed two places of rot: first, the protagonist could no longer escape the fact that his life was governed by his race; second, drinking, the salve he used to endure the first problem, was destroying him. Forty-one-year-old Jethro scats and drinks in the all-black Saratoga Springs bars until he discovers “how much of the street was in himself and how much of himself was in the street.” In an epiphany, he realizes that “the street” was simply ordinary, low-ceilinged black life. Instead of nobly writing to resolve the race problem and to inspire individual triumph, a fitful Chester, revealing his innermost feelings later, in The Primitive, “felt more like just lying in the gutter and never getting up.”
To make matters worse, by June 8 he was broke. Chester pushed back from the bar long enough to dash down to New York, in a “desperate need to raise some money.” Predictably he went first to Carl Van Vechten. Chester claimed that he needed $100 to defray expenses before Jean started a new job as a recreational director for federally funded housing projects in New York on July 1. Van Vechten seems to have resisted being dunned, because the next day Chester wrote Blanche Knopf, telling her that Jean was “ill and our need urgent.” Confronted by “the bare and irreducible problem of expenses which I have been unable to relieve,” Chester requested $100 from his publisher, who was already heartily disinclined to advance him money. Blanche Knopf told him so on June 14: “This is a rather unusual request of yours, which I know you realize, in view of the advance paid on the next book and the bad position we too are in on Lonely Crusade.” But because Chester had invoked the helpless tragedy of his wife, Blanche Knopf was “of course sending your wife a check immediately.”
Chester returned to Yaddo and continued his sport. Befriending the Iowa mural painter Francis White, who used the term “atomalypse” to describe the contemporary geopolitical moment, Chester tried to reassert his pride by recommending White’s work in a letter to Knopf. But having failed to submit the Immortal Mammy manuscript, which he seems to have abandoned completely by the end of June, or to repay the money to Blanche Knopf, from roughly that point forward the firm considered his every communiqué importunate.
The disaffection that grew between Chester, prestigious publishers like Knopf, and the artistic circles Yaddo represented was apparently mutual. By the time he left Yaddo in July, Elizabeth Ames was not likely to invite him back. If she believed in the summer of 1948 that “a good many now here are mistakes,” she almost certainly counted Chester as one of the people who “have very not definite objectives in work.” Facing increasingly desperate circumstances in subsequent years, Chester would try to rejoin the guest list, but he would never be invited to revisit Saratoga Springs, which, more than anything, probably shaped his unflattering portraits of “Skiddoo” in 1955 and in his memoir in 1972.
Back in the Bronx, without a finished book and depressed, he edged toward ragged dissolution. His marriage to Jean had been brokered on his determined effort to appear masculine and in command, in spite of the vulnerabilities of his characters and his willingness to write about homosexuality. But he was too tattered and feeble to uphold the front of prowess and control any longer. Even Jean, whose past life and lack of erudition sometimes embarrassed him, “felt truly sorry for me then.”
A shriveled Chester sobered up at the end of the summer, when budget cuts eliminated Jean’s position. “The support of the family reverted to me, and I had to take my position as the man and the husband,” he reported in his memoir. The solution for their well-being was to work as off-season caretakers at summer resorts, and Chester cast about, placing an advertisement in the Times and facing a few anxious weeks of interviews. “If I can spend this winter in some isolated camp or summer colony or estate I will be able to come up next spring with another complete book,” he wrote Van Vechten, the strongest of his allies.
By October he at least knew where he would live for the following six months: Andover, New Jersey. Chester signed on as caretaker at Sussex Village, a former German American Bund parade ground and resort owned by Frank Bucino, a Hoboken real-estate broker. Chester thought Bucino, who claimed to be Frank Sinatra’s godfather, had seen Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar too many times. The one-eyed man certainly looked the part of a gangster, from his “voluptuous” wife to his street-fighting bodyguards and Lincoln Continental. Bucino paid $150 a month, the same as Chester’s literary advances, and he supplied plenty to eat and drink. With dogs for company and three upstairs rooms of their own in an old tavern, Chester and Jean agreed to look after thirty-six bungalows surrounding Clearwater Lake.
Even though the first month involved quite a bit of drudgery—such as painting and repairs—the Himeses wanted for little. The cozy, rustic life of walking in snow-filled woods suited them. He pored over novels like Hiram Haydn’s The Time Is Noon, John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run, and Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Horace Cayton visited for a week in December with his new wife, Ruby, whom he had just married on Yaddo’s grounds. Flamboyant but manic-depressive, Cayton had tried to get off alcohol the previous year, but when Chester met him in Chicago at the Creative Writing Forum he had returned to heavy drinking. Now Cayton was in free fall. Burly, but always dignified in manner, he had previously divorced two white women and was now with a former showgirl. This marriage wouldn’t last long and the visit was a drunken folly. After spending a week together Chester couldn’t recall a “moment of lucidity” with the Caytons, other than lengthy rambles from Horace about his sessions with psychiatrists. Then, instead of working on Immortal Mammy, Chester focused instead on preparing a stage adaptation of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Just before Christmas he had completed 140 pages, consisting of two acts and three scenes. In an unguardedly optimistic moment, he reflected that “I think in many ways [it] is better than the book.”
Chester would never find his métier with the stage, although he did write another play, Baby Sister, in 1961. While he sat out the fall and winter, he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship hoping to work on a book called An Uncle Tom You Never Knew, and he thought that if American audiences were so misinformed about the prison-house of race and class, that he might take upon himself, “an autobiographical novel til the time I went to prison.”
In late January 1949, Chester wanted to send his play to Margot Johnson, the same agent used by Willard Motley and Patricia Highsmith. Since the connection was through Van Vechten, he sent the script, which has since been lost, to his patron first. Van Vechten disliked the “smutty and profane” adaptation of If He Hollers, causing Chester to apologize and admit, “I got lost in the character and forgot about the stage.” But what was holding him back was his everlasting resistance to a world that did not have a place for a black artist who didn’t emphasize the value of assimilation. “What I have done will be repugnant to those Negroes who define their progress in terms of their similarity to upper class whites,” he wrote in justification of his ribald play. The real worry was Van Vechten’s dimming enthusiasm.
By March Chester learned that he had not received a Guggenheim. He was feeling pressure about the unwritten novel and his missed deadline with Knopf. “I know what I have to do” and “have it all in my head” were how he tried to persuade Van Vechten, saying it more to himself. No new writing had occurred since the play. All he knew was that “it will take a little time.” But the six months in New Jersey were up, and on April 2, 1949, Chester and Jean returned to their small room at Eddie Bonelli’s in the Bronx.
Instead of producing a new manuscript, Chester had actually been rewriting Black Sheep. Circumventing his agent and the wilting relationship at Knopf, on March 1 he had presented his latest version to editor Bill Raney at Rinehart. Raney had a reputation for giving contracts to incorrigible geniuses. He had been involved, toward the end, with the fight to have Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead published, and he left Rinehart in April for another job. Raney asked Chester to withdraw the book from Rinehart and resubmit it at his new employer, Henry Holt. Chester agreed.
Chester’s formidable coming-of-age novel Black Sheep never featured black main characters, probably because at the beginning of his career Chester had reasoned that success with American editors and audiences meant white protagonists. Notwithstanding the white cast, Chester had again broken convention and cut a path by writing about the misery and brutality of life inside prison. Chester’s novel combined the development of his protagonist’s homosexuality with a hard-boiled exposé of the penitentiary that had never appeared in an American novel. He was blazing a trail on two issues, but he elected not to blaze a third, on race relations.
Homosexuality was still taboo in the 1940s but a shift was under way. New studies by researchers like Indiana University sexologist Alfred Kinsey had appeared throughout the decade, greatly complicating the portrayal and range of what was considered “normal” male sexuality. By the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey would suggest that 37 percent of American men had had at least one homosexual experience. Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, with an adolescent gay protagonist and an adult gay transvestite as a key character, had been well received in 1948. Also published this year, and more graphic than Capote’s book, was Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, featuring the gay love life of an adult man. As arguments for tolerance and civility, other postwar novels about gay men tended to explore the theme tragically, like the novels about the cruelty of racism.
Chester’s first-person novel depicted a young man coming of age in prison under physically and emotionally grueling conditions. It concluded with the protagonist, Jimmy Monroe, demanding in a self-sacrificial gesture that he be charged with violating the prison regulation against “sex perversion,” forsaking an opportunity for a commuted sentence. Jimmy’s self-awareness occurs at this decisive moment: “I had done it to be a man. And if I had lost freedom by doing it, I’d never had freedom. . . . I had done a lot of time and I could do plenty more. But I couldn’t be a man later. I couldn’t wait.” Chester revealed much of his own story throughout; the last third of the book offered a candid sketch of his yearlong relationship with Prince Rico.
While Black Sheep was not precisely a “gay” novel, in that ultimately it did not have as its central concern Jimmy’s coming to terms with homosexual desire or even homosexual romance as its central plot, it was certainly a “queer” novel, a word used repeatedly throughout the book. Duke Dido, the character in love with Jimmy Monroe, explains “queer” when he tells Jimmy about Hollywood.
“Everyone else seems to think a lot of them are rather queer.”
“Queer? That’s a funny word.”
“I mean sexually.”
He looked at me strangely. “There’s really nothing lost when a physical change is made unless you feel that it’s wrong. It’s the feeling that it’s wrong that makes it queer.”
“How did you feel?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“It never came to that,” he said again. I didn’t know why I needed to be reassured so often.
“Do you think queerness in prison is right?” I pressed.
“That’s an odd question—” he began.
“Why is it odd?”
“Do you?” he countered.
“Not particularly so,” I said.
Provocative and searing, Black Sheep cautiously approached portraying sex acts. However, Jimmy was undeniably queer.
Chester’s instincts for survival were tearing him in different directions: toward what he was driven to narrate on the basis of the life that he knew and toward what he was told incessantly his audience wanted to hear. For the latter, he published “Journey Out of Fear” in June 1949 in the journal Tomorrow. In the essay, Chester revisited the experience of driving out to California, rifle in hand, buffeted by the slights of Jim Crow and expecting the worst from his white fellow citizens. He wrote that he and Jean, after living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, had overcome bitterness and fear and finally achieved “inclusion in the social and community life of the neighborhood.” He put in the buzzwords that might have come from the mouth of his Louis Foster, his Lonely Crusade plant owner. “Most important of all,” he concludes, “we lost all consciousness of race . . . and were welcomed not as Negroes but as individuals.” The final flourish signaled not real depth but dishonesty. “I managed to recapture a feeling I had left behind when I grew out of early childhood—the happy, secure feeling of being wanted.”
Chester was either lying to himself or to others on his views of being black in America. If it later seemed to Chester that his autobiographical The Third Generation, a new novel he was working on in 1949, was “a subtly dishonest book, made dishonest deliberately,” then “Journey Out of Fear” marked the beginning of the deceit. He managed a similar kind of fake performance in a stilted boyhood morality tale set in the Deep South called “Mama’s Missionary Money,” which would be published in The Crisis that November, after Collier’s accepted and then rejected it.
Worse than being reduced to a writer who soft-pedaled the race problem was being reminded of what the world considered his labor was worth and the kind of labor which best suited him. Chester had salvaged himself from 1948 through mid-1949 with the caretaker job in New Jersey, which enabled him to appear like a competent husband in his marriage, so essential to his mind-set. For the next four years he would perform similar off-season custodial work on what he called the “Borscht circuit” in New York and New Jersey, resorts for Italians and Jews that were “like the Bronx set down in hot rural terrain.” When the seasonal jobs ended, Chester and Jean took refuge where they could in overcrowded New York, in the Bronx at Bonelli’s or in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. To make ends meet between the caretaker posts, he had to serve as a bellhop, porter, or janitor, where he was reminded how basely the white world considered black servant men.
In the spring of 1950, another caretaker assignment presented itself, for a Madison Avenue attorney who owned a Thoroughbred horse farm near Stamford, Connecticut. Chester and Jean had light duties, though they were required to cook, serve, and clean for their proprietors when the couple arrived with their personal maid and a gigot of mutton on the weekend. Otherwise, he and Jean had a Jeep, a sedan, unlimited gas, and food at their disposal. They could travel to New York City or head up to Vermont to visit Bill and Helen Smith, as they wished. “Life there was like something in a Hollywood film,” Chester recalled.
In June 1950 a still enthusiastic Bill Raney contacted Chester about making changes to the manuscript. Always ready to please, Chester accepted the recommendations, apparently removing Jimmy Monroe’s background story and orchestrating Duke Dido’s suicide. He simply needed a book contract.
Chester’s brother Joe, by then a tenured professor of sociology in North Carolina, provided the highlight of that summer: Chester gave a series of lectures and seminars in Durham at North Carolina College for Negroes. When Chester let it be known that he would be quitting the Stamford job to return to full-time writing, “there was a bit of unpleasantness.” “I was somewhat surprised,” mused Chester, that a wealthy Madison Avenue attorney “held such a low opinion of black writers.” Imagining a third successfully published, adult-theme novel with a high-end publisher, a feat that no other postwar black writer had accomplished in 1950, Chester was deluding himself. The conversation to terminate his and Jean’s employment brought him back down to earth.
At midcentury an African American could really be no closer to the ground in the United States than to live in the still acrimoniously segregated Southern states, with their offensive public signs and deadly customs, like the refusal of emergency medical care. And yet, Joe had gone on to a notable if not prominent career as a sociologist in the segregated college system. He and his wife, Estelle, lived walking distance from the campus in a comfortable stucco home with a Spanish-tile roof. The tidy black Durham neighborhoods, with well-kept bungalows full of the latest conveniences, seemed to epitomize the consequences of efficacious racial segregation. Many black Americans worked in the tobacco factory; others managed their own insurance company with a handsome three-story brick office in the downtown. They were as proud as whites of the heavy stone buildings on Duke University’s campus, despite not being able to attend college there, and blind Joe was treated courteously in nearby Chapel Hill, when he used the facilities at the state’s flagship university. A measure of public respect could be maintained if black North Carolinians subscribed to infinitesimal political gradualism.
Chester opened his public lectures with fire on Sunday, July 9, returning to his liberal politics stump speech from 1944, “Democracy Is for the Unafraid.” “Believers in democracy must have the courage to advocate equality of opportunity for all citizens,” he told the interracial audience, politely ruffling a few feathers. The next afternoon Chester spoke to an all-black college audience with the lecture “Lonely Crusade: The Composition and the Philosophy.” To inform his remarks, Chester had written publishing contacts, including Blanche Knopf, asking them point-blank whether there was a color bar among the mainstream publishers and editors. Invariably, each person responded with the “no good book goes unpublished” mantra, an axiom believed by some blacks but not by Chester.
Chester was particularly tickled to have his sessions featured in the pages of the local white dailies, the Durham Herald and Durham Sun, alongside coverage of the “test” discrimination case of Harold Epps, a black man who was trying to win admission to law school at the University of North Carolina. Chester noted that somber-looking Thurgood Marshall, whom he knew from Mollie Moon’s Harlem parties, was in Durham during the fortnight of lectures, before deciding to drop the Epps case. In his spare time in North Carolina, when Chester wasn’t visiting his mother’s relatives in the countryside and eating roast ham and potato salad, he worked on revisions of Black Sheep, rewriting to the specifications of Raney’s superior, the managing director at Holt, Ted Amussen. He mailed the draft to Raney from Durham, and received instructions to sign a book contract when he returned to New York.
Jean’s first visit as an adult to “the South land,” as she referred to the officially segregated region that many blacks avoided completely if possible, was not marred by any ugly incidents, although Jean petrified her sister-in-law Estelle by drinking from a “whites only” public water fountain. At the end of their stay, Chester and Jean took the night train northbound in good spirits and arrived in New York on Friday, July 21. They booked a room at the Theresa Hotel, “relieved” to have survived their Dixie visit. Readying themselves for the advance money from the book, he and Jean splurged on a case of Irish whiskey and called up friends to produce “a celebration memorable even in the Hotel Theresa.”
The festivities were premature. A hungover Chester went to the Holt office to sign his contract on the twenty-fifth, and learned that he had nothing to sign. Blaming Amussen, Bill Raney returned Black Sheep, declining to publish it. The rejection was a body blow. His wind knocked out of him, Chester clutched his rejected manuscript and, late in the season when the editors were on vacation, prepared himself to interest someone else in the story. In the downstairs lobby he regrouped and telephoned Margot Johnson, the agent he had been putting off for months. She had just sold Motley’s Knock on Any Door to Hollywood for $65,000; the film would star Humphrey Bogart. Johnson agreed to represent him and would submit the prison manuscript, now under the title Yesterday Will Make You Cry. She discussed the possibility of film rights. But nothing happened for four long months. Her first success came when she sold the foreign rights of Lonely Crusade (apparently released by Lurton Blassingame) to the French publisher Editions Corréa on December 23.
Facing collapse, Chester and Jean gathered their luggage and retreated to Westford, Vermont, to Bill Smith, who had bought a ten-room hilltop dream house on 150 acres with an eastern view of the Green Mountains. The impressive brick residence had been featured in a March 1948 Ebony article, “Shangri-La in Vermont.” Whether on account of his career setbacks or his friend’s obviously flush circumstances, Chester could no longer conceal his bitter feelings of resentment and defeat. He directed his hostility at Jean. While he treated Bill’s spouse, Helen, honorifically, toward Jean he was so rude as to catch the notice and disapproval of his hosts. Even the Smith children noted with discomfort Chester’s abusiveness.
The unhappy Himeses went to Brooklyn again, then found a caretaker post in Craryville, New York. From October 1950 through the end of March 1951, Chester and Jean braved the weather and watched over a golf course, kept madmen in automobiles off the frozen lake, and drove around the country club in a DeSoto Town and Country. Chester was now toying with an autobiographical novel of his childhood years; at the same time, another novel began to take shape, one he had been “fooling around” with “a long time” called The End of a Primitive.
On November 28, five days after Thanksgiving, a hurricane lashed the northeast and caused $400 million worth of damage. Provisioned with yet another case of Irish whiskey, Chester and Jean hunkered down in a bungalow by the lake and, in the process of drinking the liquor, made such a robust fire in the chimney that they set the floor aflame and had to be rescued by fire trucks racing over downed power lines.
Chester mellowed after that, sipping from a basement cache of wine, and regained his stamina. By March he had written three hundred pages of the childhood novel. The fact that Chester was thinking about the two books, with different aims, at the same time was remarkable. The supposedly autobiographical novel The Third Generation, his “deliberately dishonest” book, was untrue to his life because he stressed the Oedipus complex—the sexual undertones in his relationship with his mother. In the era of the Kinsey Report and the broad popularity of psychoanalysis, he believed his audience wanted that condition. But in the other manuscript, The End of a Primitive, he would carry out the work begun in If He Hollers Let Him Go and intemperately scorch liberal beliefs about progressive race relations.
Once the Craryville job was over, he and Jean relocated to “pleasant” Bridgeport, Connecticut, easy driving to Manhattan and with a socialist mayor. With a portion of their saved winter salary they bought a used Plymouth sedan. At the beginning of the month, Chester got a speeding ticket, so he was nervous about the police. In the cool mornings, Chester would drive to a park near the seashore and sit in the car, listening to the lapping of the waves, and writing in the backseat with the typewriter on his knees. At the beginning of April, the firm of G. P. Putnam informed his agent Margot Johnson that it was turning down Yesterday Will Make You Cry. The comments were similar to those made in 1941: the novel was well written but too grim and it had too much homosexual content.
Toting around the unpublishable Yesterday Will Make You Cry manuscript seemed to invite having all of his work discounted. At a literary cocktail party in New York, rare for Chester, World Publishers’ editor James Putnam told him that the early chapters of The Third Generation were impossible to believe on account of the improbable emphasis on black pride. As a Negro, Chester was wrong to emphasize dishonor as a problem, lectured Putnam. “You could be as much of an Uncle Tom as any Negro,” Putnam told him. Expressing strong resistance to such slights seemed unwise.
As the prison manuscript was rejected over and over again, Chester grew angrier with Knopf, whom he began to consider his real enemy, because he had written Black Sheep and large chunks of The Third Generation, works they had shown no interest in. In June 1951 he approached them incautiously, asking relief from the contractual option clause and demanding to be held responsible only for the Immortal Mammy advance he had been paid in 1947 and 1948. “Legally I am only indebted to you for the $2,000,” he snarled in a letter, trying to invalidate the entire contract after he had drunkenly ignored the May 1948 submission date, and had conveniently forgotten the money Blanche Knopf personally conveyed to Jean on his behalf a month later. Chester was burning another bridge.
The downturn in literary success was compounded by the day-to-day indignity he faced. He couldn’t support a family; he couldn’t find a place to live; he couldn’t secure regular work commensurate with his skills. And even on the occasional payday when advance money came through, the Stork Club in Manhattan or a fancy Saratoga Springs restaurant would still reject him. Editors and agents seemed willfully to ignore the uphill struggle of a black person trying to make a living as a novelist—especially one who exposed difficult American topics—and one who was completely barred from high-paying magazines and offered only the most basic, boilerplate literary contracts when they were offered at all. It was not possible to find decent, affordable lodging in the cities where the book business was conducted, effectively network with the publishers and editors, or pick up temporary work at colleges and universities, even though these institutions were mushrooming with demobilized GIs. He felt jammed by the expectation that he should write a novel filled with platitudes extolling democracy and liberalism in the style of Fannie Cook. He refused.
After this, Chester would not hesitate to—or apologize for attempting to—shake loose money and dodge repayment without scruple, to play the ends against the middle, in a nonstop sparring with agents, editors, and book company presidents. Some professionals considered the approach merely guile but to others it was criminally dishonest. With Lurton Blassingame and now Margot Johnson, he would press for money from his agent personally, loans that were to be “against Advances.” Once the debts were piled up high and no book was sold, Chester would dart to another agent and try to wheedle money out of her or him. It was not personal. He was desperate.
Chester decided to bet his chips on selling The Third Generation, but he and Jean’s money gave out in July, forcing them to sell the Plymouth to finance a return to New York, where Jean could find a job. The day Chester tried to sell the automobile, when Jean had gone for interviews, a Bridgeport traffic cop arrested him for denting the fender of the car of one of the town’s blue bloods, on her say-so, and without any other witnesses. After thirty-six hours behind bars Chester reached Jean’s younger brother Andrew in Baltimore, who wired $100 bail to the jail. By then, however, Chester had been transferred to the county prison, awaiting a trial that was then delayed a week. It took Jean twelve hours of tearful haggling and beseeching jailers, wardens, judges and court clerks, to retrieve her brother’s money to have her husband released. They left immediately for New York, and once they got out of the train station there, Chester tore up the summons and never looked back.
He re-created the episode in both the 1955 novel The Primitive and his 1972 memoir. Being incarcerated again was deeply threatening.
That incident shook me. It wasn’t that it hurt so much. Nor was I surprised. I believed that the American white man—in fact all Americans, black or white—was capable of anything. It was just that it stirred up my anxiety, which had gradually settled down somewhat. It scrambled the continuity of my memories, probably of my thoughts also. That is practically the last thing I remember about the United States in such vivid detail.
The conversation in Stamford when he planned to leave custodial work and found out precisely his employer’s measure of him as a human being, followed by his arrest and jailing for a traffic offense, signaled that he might not quite escape the black dives in Cleveland or Saratoga Springs after all.
So Jean took over as the leader. They regrouped in a room in the northern Bronx until she accepted a residential job as a recreational director at the New York State Women’s Reformatory near Mt. Kisco, about an hour north of the city. Following his wife in December 1951, Chester rented a bedroom in nearby White Plains. His landlady, a proud, flinty woman who reminded him of his mother, kept him on his toes and her house chilly. Jean visited him for a day and a half each weekend and paid the tab. Chester was helpless and furious at being helpless. Chester applied for work at Reader’s Digest, presenting himself at the magazine’s White Plains offices with all the charm, youthfulness, and bonhomie that he could muster. “Of course,” he learned, “they had no suitable opening for a person of my capabilities.” But Chester was hungry, not idealistic: he yielded to a job in the mailroom, where he remained until he proved incapable of mastering the technique to make metal stencils. He was fired before Christmas.
During the holidays in White Plains, with its flourishing black middle class (including Gordon Parks, the photographer for Life magazine), Chester began slowly “to lose confidence in myself.” Jean’s job claimed her time and energy, while he shared the boardinghouse with a young woman whose cheap clothes and hairdo seemed to reflect his own spreading poverty. Knopf kept mailing letters to get what he didn’t have: the $1000 used to buy out his contract from Doubleday, and then the $1000 advance for Immortal Mammy, upon which he had lived during the revision of Lonely Crusade.
A glimmer of hope came by way of a letter from France, from a man who had begun translating Lonely Crusade into a French edition to be called La Croisade de Lee Gordon. Yves Malartic was concerned that he was misperceiving black language, so he wrote Chester: “I believe the book is not some sort of an exciting sexy thriller written in a queer language which would have the ‘flavor of american negroes idiom’(?!) and which should be translated into rough popular French.” For his perception and solicitation, Malartic won a friend. Chester wrote back, “Please, by all means, follow your first impulse and do the translation on the highest intellectual level.” For that fidelity, Malartic would earn Chester’s “undying gratitude.”
Malartic’s sense that he was dealing with a masterwork, one with profound insight into the human condition, might have been the only thing standing between Chester and psychological collapse. For his next move, Chester became the “day porter”—the janitor—at the White Plains YMCA. Three months of swinging a mop and pushing a broom, cleaning showers and latrines, togged in coveralls and cap, seemed to confirm his lowest estimate of himself. It was as if he had returned to the top bunk in an Ohio cell block. Bewildered, he no longer worked at his marriage. Too proud to take the humiliation of being marginally supported by Jean, he drank and lashed out. When they squabbled over household affairs he told her she was just a correctional officer, title or not. He blamed her for their difficult circumstances and when he couldn’t blame her, he repudiated her with silence.
It is unclear whether Jean was an active or passive partner in the ending of their fifteen-year marriage. By June 1952 Chester would confide to Malartic, “My wife and I have been separated for about six months—we should have been divorced years ago.” In his memoir he was more prosaic and less precise about the timing of their breakup: “Jean stopped coming to visit me and to support me and I was faced with the necessity of having to support myself.” Still gripped by the puritanical views of his parents, Chester believed that his sins—“pride and arrogance”—had betokened his fall. And if Jean was the correctional officer, he was once again the prisoner, yearning for freedom.