Chester quit White Plains in February 1952, taking a room in a sprawling six-story apartment building on Convent Avenue in Harlem. From his window he could see the City College gates down the street and, when the sky was clear, the tip of the Empire State Building farther downtown. But reduced to a seven-dollar-a-week room in an unsavory crowded apartment where privacy was impossible, he was not impressed by the view.
In an untimely flourish, his old buddy Ralph Ellison delivered an inscribed copy of his just published novel, Invisible Man. Biding his time and living off his wife’s salary, Ellison had finished a career-defining masterpiece and his triumph was like a judgment against Chester. Touchy in his dealings with a friend turned rival, Chester concealed his separation from Jean, who would visit occasionally throughout the spring, and, concerning the book that would only be thought more significant with time, replied with polite banality: “Thanks greatly for the inscribed copy of your book. Jean and I are looking forward with much excitement to reading it. We feel confident it is a wonderful story.” Chester had admitted to Horace Cayton, who printed it in a Pittsburgh Courier column, that Ellison had written “the first allegorical Negro novel,” but the note was all he would ever write about a book that is routinely considered as the high mark of twentieth-century American fiction.
Instead of “beating that boy” with his now acclaimed friend and plotting further literary success of his own, Chester spent his time with Eddie Himes. His older brother now lived with his wife near Strivers Row. Less ambitious than either Joe Jr. or Chester and a product—“victim” might be a better word—of a thoroughly Jim Crow education, Eddie worked as a maître d’ at a New York restaurant. The brothers ate fried chicken and biscuits and watched professional wrestling on television, which in his brief life among the literati Chester had “always considered the prime pastime of morons.” But in the winter of 1952 the unhurried comfort felt good. It helped being around an older brother who couldn’t reject him, even if he barely knew him. “I’m like an animal,” Chester wrote later, “when I’m hurt and lonely I want to go off alone in my hole and lick my wounds.”
For Christmas of 1951 Carl Van Vechten had mailed him a “devastatingly penetrating” card, one that oddly mirrored Chester’s own troubles. The Negro, thought Van Vechten, was Harlequin, the acrobatic, black-masked clown of Italian Renaissance improvisational theater. Chester admitted that the assessment, comparing blacks of the western world with entertaining playthings, “hurt a little,” but the “thing to do is be what we must and make it pay whatever way it might.” Alone and putting off the scrounging for menial jobs he knew was inevitable, Chester squirreled away the hardest weeks of the winter at his typewriter. He told himself that the next novel, as deeply autobiographical as the prison manuscript, would make his literary reputation.
In April Margot Johnson reported the successful sale of the prison manuscript to Coward-McCann, for an advance of $1200. He believed that the book would be published under the title Debt of Time, but ultimately it would be called Cast the First Stone. Chester would finally publish the book he’d worked on for almost fifteen years. In 1998, Chester’s second wife, Lesley, would publish the uncut manuscript that he drafted as Yesterday Will Make You Cry. That three-section book includes a middle part, “Flood of Tears,” charting in detail Chester’s adolescence in St. Louis and Cleveland, discussing his arrests, anxiety concerning his sexual development, and Jean’s first marriage.
Yesterday Will Make You Cry and Cast the First Stone are quite similar, but Cast the First Stone benefits from the removal of the middle section, which slowed the narrative pace and slackened the development of the main character, Jimmy Monroe, in prison. Yesterday Will Make You Cry is considerably more sentimental and nearly apologetic. If, as Van Vechten told people, Coward-McCann insisted on changes to the manuscript they bought, those edits heightened and focused the dramatic tension and improved its quality. The other key difference is in the ending of the books: there’s a suicide in Cast the First Stone, but Duke Dido survives in Yesterday Will Make You Cry. Meanwhile, Chester used the excised material in the autobiographical novel about his family, The Third Generation. He completed a draft of the new project in that spring of 1952.
Selling the prison novel revitalized him. Feeling reconciled with his past and confident about his future meant one direction for a black man like Chester. He rekindled his romance with fiery Vandi Haygood. In the 1970s, he downplayed what having been awarded the advance money for Cast the First Stone meant: “the first thing I desired now that I had money was to sleep with a white woman,” he recollected. However, the classy Haygood always meant more to him than easy sex. Chester said as early as April that he would be traveling to Europe “with a friend” and, by the end of the summer, he was fantasizing about a permanent tie. It was difficult to separate Haygood’s value to him both as an individual intimately familiar with his professional life and her status as a white woman. He had described to others his first kiss with Vandi as “penetrating as the moment of conception.” Chester also believed that when their affair had begun, during the war, Haygood had fallen in love. Now that Vandi was divorced and had moved to New York, he had the opportunity to see whether their physical attraction had more depth.
After the Rosenwald Fund closed in 1948, Haygood had become an executive at the Institute of International Education, a private group with healthy ties to the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. The IIE promoted world peace through education and aided foreign students and scholars seeking access to American universities. Haygood orchestrated the foundation’s relations with governments and funding agencies.
Notwithstanding the IIE’s prestigious connections, there was an aura of scandal and political intrigue at the foundation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, liberal efforts toward racial amity and peaceful international relations faced cruel scrutiny and accusation as part of a supposed international Communist conspiracy. In 1948 IIE president Laurence Duggan was denounced as a Communist courier by the professional anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers. A short time later, Duggan was found dead on the sidewalk, apparently having fallen from his office window. Some prominent government officials believed he had been murdered.
In spite of its hazards, the world inhabited by Haygood was one of comfortable, upper-middle-class white privilege. In 1952, when Chester began seeing her regularly, Haygood’s office had just moved to the fifty-room Gould-Whitney-Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue, with solid-marble sinks and gold plumbing. Her home life was like work. Haygood’s fashionable apartment on E. Twenty-Second Street included the key to Gramercy Park, an exclusive gated garden.
Bucklin Moon came over to Vandi’s apartment during the summer and, after a legendary evening at the bottle, he confirmed Chester’s Doubleday nightmare by narrating the behind-the-scene circumstances hindering the publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go. He insisted to Chester, as the writer reported to Bill Targ, that “he did all he could for me, but there was little he could do.” In the process of divorcing his wife that year, and having been unceremoniously fired by Doubleday a few months earlier, Moon was battling for his own career and falling into severe depression. The threat of being denounced as a Communist hung over his head too. In the spring of 1953 he was fired from his next job, at Collier’s, after the magazine received threats from an advertising pressure group that charged Moon with being “subversive,” one of the Red Scare words for Communist. If Moon faced this kind of pressure, Chester’s portion might well be double.
Soon enough, the façade of settled life with Vandi Haygood began to mottle and blister. Haygood was brash and unpredictable and, according to Mollie Moon’s friend Polly Johnson, a “nymphomaniac.” To Chester, her keeping a black man meant an opportunity for a libidinal earthiness, to get vulgar without fear of losing her desirability or her standing. When the booze wore off and the allure of sex with a white society woman waned, he realized that Haygood was suspicious of his leaning on her financially and was “impatient for the money to start pouring in.” He also acquired one of her vices, the over-the-counter stimulant Dexamyl, which Vandi took faithfully to increase her productivity.
In desperation, during the summer Chester returned to the New Prospect Hotel in Sullivan County to serve as a bellhop and switchboard substitute. While there, he received a telegram from William Targ, who was now working at World Publishers. For $2000, that Cleveland-based press was acquiring the hulking manuscript Chester was calling The Cord; it would be published as The Third Generation. The book presented two formal problems: the crisis of patriarchal authority in an African American family at the bottom of a caste system, and the dilemma of sexual desire in a male child growing up in such a family. The Cord reproduced his life in consummate detail, smoothly moving from the birth of Chester’s character, Charles Taylor, in Lincoln, Missouri, to his childhood in Mississippi, fleshed out by sections featuring Pine Bluff and St. Louis and his brother’s blinding. The last third concluded with Charles Taylor’s young adulthood in Cleveland. However, the character based on Chester does not wind up in prison; instead, Charles Taylor’s family rescues him from downfall. Chester explained the disaster of the fictionalized marriage by imagining his parents’ wedding night and portraying Lillian, Estelle’s surrogate, as the victim of marital rape. After that, her color complex sets in. He emphasized the conjunction between traumatic moments of violence, death, and horror on the one hand and young Charles’s sensual growth away from his mother toward other sources of libidinal fulfillment. The novel shows the boy securing his erotic passion to substitutes for Lillian, light-skinned women who symbolically join violence, sexual attraction, and death. None of the mounting tragedies that occur in the narrative are connected to white oppression or economic deprivation. Chester resolved the drama by solemnly reuniting the nuclear family at the deathbed of the father and severing the “cord” between mother and son.
When he got World’s telegram, he packed his bags and returned from upstate to New York City, ready to commit to Haygood as a breadwinner even as he also prepared to sail to France. He had written his Cleveland buddy Dan Levin, who was living in Paris on the GI Bill, for pointers on hotels and travel details. Chester also sent letters to Jean Chastel at his French publisher, Corréa, alerting him to his likely arrival in Paris and his hope to sell at least two new manuscripts.
The most important contact he renewed was with Richard Wright. In early October Chester broke the self-imposed silence, which he had thought necessary because of the career mishaps after Lonely Crusade was published. Chester thanked Wright for delivering the preface for the French edition of Lonely Crusade, which had praised the novel in grand language as “written with the most impeccable care” and creating “an indubitably genuine picture.” Chester explained the new U.S. nadir as the House and Senate committees investigating un-American activities unleashed their force, slicing away free speech and cracking down on labor unions and alternative political forums. A “vital center” wave of conformity swept the nation. As “the only one over whom they could exert no control,” and with “access to the public,” Chester thought that Wright’s intellectual leadership heaved “literary criticism and the liberal group” in the direction of justice. As for his own part in the public debate, Chester let Wright know that he was publishing the candid prison novel. “Maybe the boys can stand the truth about life in a state prison,” Himes sounded out, referring to his critics, “better than they can stand the truth about life in the prison of being Negro in America.” Wright encouraged him to try living overseas.
“Working hard” and “never happier,” Chester spent the fall of 1952 revising The Cord and preparing for the publication of Cast the First Stone. Initially scheduled for release in October, Cast the First Stone was pushed back to January 1953; The Cord would have to be delayed as well. But with one book nearly published and the other in production, these were minor hurdles. In November Chester noted rosily to Van Vechten that he and Haygood would “probably be married sometime next year.” He was seduced by a vision of long-lasting prosperity. None of his peers had pulled off what he was now assured to do: publish, within months of each other, two hefty novels of daring social critique—one ripping the cover off prison life in America and the other an unsparing portrait of intraracial and Oedipal conflict in a black family. Who would be able to deny that he was a marvelously successful novelist? Even sweeter, he was involved with an educated white woman living off Gramercy Park whose money he could accept without qualm—both because he wasn’t financially desperate and because she was a career woman in a socially esteemed profession. Notwithstanding the dip in quality of his publishers, which he could tell himself was due to the hard-hitting subject matter, he was as ambitious as he had ever been.
Proudly, he escorted Haygood to Van Vechten’s Central Park West home to see Carl’s photographs and original American paintings. Chester now confided to friends that he should have divorced Jean “a long time ago, right after Lonely Crusade was published.” Clingy, needy, and self-conscious, Jean had been unsuited to him: “Jean couldn’t bear the things I wrote nor the processes of my thoughts which caused me to write them.” She was appalled by Chester’s willingness to mine details from the most acute tragedies of their lives, the typical practice of even the most original of writers. In contrast, Haygood seemed like a veteran of literary and cultural combat who could stand all assaults. By the time The Cord was submitted to World at the end of November, Chester was writing fast again, back to The End of a Primitive, the novel he had begun after Yaddo that would reveal the sexual intimacies of an interracial couple. He was convinced that his finger was on the pulse and he could appeal to American tastes.
But at Christmas, always an important symbolic holiday for Chester because of his pleasant childhood memories, something began to teeter. Domestic tranquility had never been his strong suit, and Haygood was rambunctious and fractious. Chester always maintained that she was also having affairs. Whether or not that was true, his lurking suspicion was a blow to his ego. “I think Vandi hurt you dreadfully,” one of his closest confidantes later told him. So Chester left the apartment and on Christmas night, with the help of a bottle of King’s Ransom scotch, he drank himself under the table with Jean, who had returned from a stint in California, and was lodged a few blocks away on the West Side. Before he blacked out, he tussled with the police and his wife’s female roommate.
What ensued was a bad rift with Haygood. Within two days he telephoned Van Vechten asking to be hosted again, this time for cocktails, an attempt at an olive branch to Vandi. Van Vechten obliged them with a toast of mulled wine for New Year’s 1953. Chester and Haygood “really ‘went’ for” the rarefied treatment. Nevertheless, Chester’s personal life continued to unravel.
On the Sunday after the new year, he and Haygood threw a giddy celebratory party and invited Fanny and Ralph Ellison, now literary New York’s most sought-after black couple. Having secured on December 31 an advance of $500 from World for a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Black Boogie Woogie, Chester felt prosperous enough to socialize with Ellison. It had been five years.
The men’s mutual friend Horace Cayton was the other guest. Cayton’s life in New York was a cautionary tale. He had been sexually intimate with Vandi Haygood in Chicago, but had been living hand to mouth in Manhattan since 1949. Cayton’s world consisted of occasionally lecturing at City College, donating blood to buy cheap wine, writing a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, and checking himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. An alcoholic art collector, Cayton liked to store valuable works of art for safekeeping with friends like Vandi Haygood and Ralph Ellison. His friends were using terms like “magnificent ruin” and “tragic” to describe him. Doubt, regret, and despair were hallmarks of any conversation with him; nonetheless, regardless of his inner trial, he always retained his outer dignity. Chester identified quite strongly with Cayton, whose high-achieving parents had come out of Mississippi, who was about Eddie’s age, and who was inclined to deal with life’s anguish by quoting black minstrel Bert Williams.
By contrast Ralph Ellison was fond of quoting Aristotle, his personality and point of view on life in the United States now occasionally regal. By early 1953, Ellison had ended his radical days as New Masses editor and left-wing critic of American commercialism and racism. To Chester, after nearly ten years of acquaintance, Ellison was now something of a mirror opposite of his earlier image: hubristically youthful (to the point of even moving his birth year forward), invincible, and full of himself.
After the miracle year of reviews, Ellison was that week hearing rumblings that he would win the National Book Award for fiction. Even Life seemed to bow down and scrape, when in 1952 it had, through the energetic orchestration of Gordon Parks, featured Ellison’s novel photo-dramatized by Parks as “A Man Becomes Invisible.” Chester, fearing “atomalypse,” took this as a sign of Ellison’s complete identification with right-wing power or, at the very least, his willingness to be used by it. As he wrote to William Targ a year later, he understood the buildup of Ellison in the Luce press as less an endorsement of Invisible Man than a repudiation of Richard Wright. In March, Life’s sister magazine Time would in fact pit Ellison, whom they termed “an abler U.S. Negro novelist,” against Wright.
To Vandi Haygood, Ellison was a former needy Rosenwald applicant whom she had helped launch and who now had experienced great fortune with her nurturing and approval. She endorsed the new attitude that seemed to find unlimited possibility from American resources, and that did not dwell on racial conflict. She was also stimulated by famous, powerful men.
The small party of intimates was an awkward one, and it eventually caused Chester embarrassment. Ellison apparently bragged that he had been interviewed by Luce’s deputies at Time-Life prior to the Parks story. Cayton and Himes joked about his covenant with the kingmakers and took sly digs at Ellison for a public comment he had made that amounted to the claim that professional success had ended his personal experience with racial discrimination. “I have joined the human race,” Ellison reportedly said, referring to all that had been made possible on account of the accolades given his work. As Chester got further into his cups, he became morose and bombastic. He drunkenly bragged to Ellison that The Cord would be “great like Shakespeare,” and Ellison mocked him, repeating, “Great. Great.” Drunken or not, Chester believed by early 1953 that The Cord was “the best of all” his novels and would have been deeply offended by Ellison’s ridicule. Their new year’s discord set the stage for yet another portrait of Ellison in the novel Chester was working on, The Primitive. The rivalries climaxed when, after more rounds of drunken heckling, Chester shoved or threatened Haygood, depending upon the witness. Ellison maintained that Himes picked up a butcher’s cleaver and menaced Haygood, only subsiding when Ellison manhandled him. Himes and Ellison then verged on coming to blows, and Ellison liked to recall that Chester was “too chicken” to turn the weapon “on a man.” Cayton remembered that Chester “was mad and acting off his nut.”
Chester later called the squall between himself and Ellison “a private misunderstanding,” but the sad turn of affairs in their friendship emphasized the pinhead that successful black writers tinkering away at American social problems had to stand upon. Clannish competitiveness, envy, and the burden of being deemed the only one good enough for acceptance by whites would prevent the friendship from going further. There was a shorthand way of understanding everything taken together. After the bitter night, both Cayton and Ellison concluded that Himes overregarded the effect of racism on black people.
Ellison glossed over the quarrel toward the end of the month in a letter to Richard Wright. He didn’t mention that they had been at a party together, just that Chester was having a “riotous affair” with Haygood. “Recently with Horace Cayton present he became so insulting that I had to threaten to take his head off, after which he calmed down; but I am afraid he will never forgive me.” Ellison here overestimated what the alcohol-sodden episode meant to Chester, while at the same time he correctly perceived the dynamic of violence unfolding between Himes and Haygood. “It gives me real agony,” he concluded, “to see a man so much in the clutches of the furies.” When he discussed what happened with Cayton, Ellison blamed it on Chester being “jealous.” For Ellison’s part, he wrote off not merely Chester but the entire group of people he had known in conjunction with Wright in 1945.
Ellison’s new gravity would grant him the last word. Within a year, William Targ of World Publishers, a genuine believer in Chester’s talent, would request a blurb from Ellison for The Cord. “By far the most intense and compassionate probing of the psychological predicament of a middle-class Negro family yet written,” Ellison would judge the novel. That comment appeared in January 1954 in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review. Chester knew, however, that for Ellison, “psychological” was a code word meaning that the book was artistically undistinguished.
Haygood was the most convenient and vulnerable scapegoat for Chester’s torn pride. In the week following the party, he battered her to the point that a doctor was needed. Even though Chester lived during an era when many men publicly humiliated, verbally abused, and roughed up their girlfriends and wives, his smacking Haygood is one of his most disturbing encounters. At the height of the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, he published this account: “When she went to Chicago to visit some old lover after telling me she was going to Washington, D.C. on business, I hurt her seriously. Physically, I mean. I began slapping her when she admitted the truth and all the hurts of my life seemed to come up into me and I went into a trance and kept on slapping her compulsively until suddenly the sight of her swollen face jarred me back to sanity.”
One obvious source of his brutality was his insecurity that Haygood preferred other men. To make matters worse, he was also desperately in love with Vandi, who he thought was unworthy of complete trust. But the sight of this badly bruised white society woman revived the possibility of returning to prison and made him bolt to Bill Smith’s in Vermont. During his escape north, Chester’s father, Joseph, succumbed to kidney disease on January 16, 1953, in Oberlin. To fly to Ohio on short notice to bury his father, Chester had to eat his belligerence and fear and ask the one person he knew with ready cash to let him have the airfare: Vandi Haygood.
Cast the First Stone was published a few days after Joe Sr.’s death, on January 19. Himes’s least remembered novel emerged as he returned to Vermont, spending a few weeks walking off the amphetamine jitters of Dexamyl on the frozen country roads and helping Smith on his second book, a memoir called The Seeking. Cast the First Stone did not garner rave reviews, but it was respectfully treated and Chester was acknowledged as a serious artist. One paper called “rough hewn” Cast the First Stone “the toughest book of the year” and added that it “expertly captures the flavor of prison speech.” Chester should not have expected much more, writing candidly about incarceration and, as Gilbert Millstein discreetly observed in the New York Times, “relationships among men deprived of women.” One obvious relief was that no one could accuse him of tearing down the race. Although the Pittsburgh Courier reviewer thought that Chester’s portrait of Duke Dido was “perhaps one of the foulest creations in literature,” he, like his counterpart in the Chicago Defender, gave Chester credit for the agenda of prison reform. As usual, the book was ahead of its time and quite difficult for the audience to respond to, perhaps especially for those who grasped the autobiographical seed within the story. Chester had dared to take prison life seriously and to portray situational homosexuality as something beyond pathology and sin.
A typical comment that showed the misapprehension possible in reading the book came from Ralph Ellison, who reported on the contents of the book in his last letter to Richard Wright. Ashamed of the book and apparently by what it revealed about Himes’s past, Ellison understood it to be a basic admission of an inner homosexual conflict: “I am afraid it is not up to snuff. He writes mainly of homosexuality in prison but was unable to resolve it.” As the more tolerant critic Richard Gibson would write, their circle of literary people and leftists, black and white, was “decidedly homophobic in the 40s and 50s.” Chester’s willingness to broach the topic of homosexuality seems most strongly connected to his determination to confront the reality of lived experience, despite the penalty. Even though he was uncomfortable with its contents, he kept his files complete and never destroyed Rico’s love letter to him as he was leaving the London Prison Farm.
At Smith’s, Chester received the French edition of Lonely Crusade and several critical reviews from the French papers. Excited, he wandered the village looking for someone to translate them. On the last day of January World Publishers sent Bernard Schubert, his new literary agent, the remaining $2500 advance for The Third Generation and held out the possibility of $10,000 more when the paperback rights were sold. Meanwhile, Chester wrote his French publisher, Editions Corréa, trying to leverage 1 million francs (about $2000) for both Cast the First Stone and The Cord, so he could travel to Paris.
Chester booked a reservation on the boat Ile de France for April 3, after a flurry of letter writing. He happily received a report from Dan Levin at the Hotel Maurice, who suggested he room at 137 Boulevard St. Michel in the Latin Quarter. Fearing he would have document problems like Wright, he wrote to Ruth B. Shipley, the notorious director of the State Department’s passport division, who was known to use her bureau to punish outspoken government critics. In his letter, Chester admitted his felony conviction, showed the proof of the restoration of his citizenship, and included the New Masses review of Lonely Crusade, his anti-Communist credential. His letter crossed his passport in the post office on its way back to him. For a last step, Chester secured a set of records to study French language.
In the process of renewing ties to Wright, Chester would soon learn that Wright needed him. An expatriate since 1947, Wright had not been as dazzling since going overseas. He had failed to win a commanding audience for the 1949 film version of Native Son, which he bankrolled and in which he himself starred as Bigger Thomas.
What’s more, Wright was taking quite a few public lumps in France and again in the States at the hands of James Baldwin, a protégé. Wright had once recommended Baldwin, as he had Ralph Ellison, for fellowships and opened his home to him. But Baldwin, once launched, had completely dismissed the value of black literary realists like Wright, first in a 1949 essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” and then again in 1951 in “Many Thousands Gone.” Both of Baldwin’s essays were published by Partisan Review, the powerhouse journal of art and politics, which had also excerpted a chapter of Ellison’s Invisible Man. In 1953, USA, a magazine edited by the critic Lionel Trilling for distribution from U.S. embassies around the world, recirculated Baldwin’s article. In all of Baldwin’s critiques of Wright he could easily have inserted Chester’s name; in fact, he had begun the dismissal of black literary realism—in the process inventing the term “social realism,” a swipe at the Marxists—with his 1947 Lonely Crusade review. Baldwin’s critique of Wright and Himes would continue to influence until the shift away from the nonviolent civil rights movement to black power in the mid-1960s.
So the embattled Himes and Wright were natural allies. “I suppose you received the copy of Cast the First Stone,” Chester began a letter in early February. “I must say it has been very thoroughly stoned in the press here.” Sly and funny, he was endearing himself to Wright, whom he hadn’t seen in years but whose help he needed to move abroad. Still, his message also contained a note of frustration. As a result of the extraordinary work of Wright and Ellison (who had in fact won the National Book Award, on January 27), the standard for black literary success had shifted. If you did not receive dramatic praise from the New York Times, a heap of publicity from Henry Luce, and a cash payout from Book-of-the-Month Club, it was as if you hadn’t written a book. The Red Scare made the criticisms of segregation or imperial blundering un-American. Chester admitted to being a mortal. “I am stuck with having to write about what I know about, and prison happens to be (along with being a Negro) one of the subjects on which I am an authority, having been sent to prison when I was nineteen and kept there until I was twenty-six.” More pressing to him was the conversation he had not yet had with Wright, about the dismissal of his novel Lonely Crusade. “The critics beat it as if it was a snake and beat me as if I was a snake, and the Sams went along with their white folks as they always do, only when it comes to beating another Sam the Sams always try to outdo the white folks and quite often succeed.”
When Wright’s most ambitious novel, The Outsider, was published that March, he sent Chester a review copy. Chester took the time to read the book closely. He wrote back to Wright that the novel about the character Cross Damon, who repudiates ideology, conveyed a “really stupendous idea” and that, in the weeks after having been involved with act after act of violence toward his intimates, he was personally terrified to have such a tight identification with this socially isolated, homicidal existentialist hero: “I’m so goddamned close to that boy I don’t want to talk about it,” he confided. Wright believed in the outlaw as an important subject in fiction, and Chester, who had lived the outlaw life and survived the sentence, had something fundamentally in common with Wright’s fictional creations.
Feeling some remorse over his behavior at the New Year’s party, Chester also tried to rendezvous with Horace Cayton. Knowing that Chester considered the dramatic fight at the party Haygood’s fault, Cayton now claimed he would avoid his “strange and strained” relationship to Haygood in the short term. He was, however, happy to have “a few things clear” with Chester because their friendship was “something I would pay a price for.” But Cayton insisted on one point that angered Chester. Racism “does not explain everything. . . . The reality of change is upon us. It calls for the development of a new kind of person—one who is not licking his wounds but is in someway aiding and encouraging change.” Chester would settle with him in The Primitive.
Chester repaired the love affair with Haygood by March 24, when he returned to New York and settled at her apartment. He bought a new wardrobe, splurged on an Abercrombie and Fitch kerosene stove to cook with in French hotel rooms, and retrieved electronics parts and copies of The Outsider for Wright. Despite the hurried week of activity, he still managed to reach the boiling point again with Haygood, breaking his own toe in an attempt to kick her the day before his ship sailed. He would leave the United States from a room at the Albert Hotel, encumbered by one trunk and a couple of pieces of luggage, his swollen foot in a felt slipper.
Chester boarded the Ile de France on April 3, 1953, an overcast and cold day. But things brightened considerably when William Targ sent a bottle of champagne to Chester’s third-class cabin. Then, editor James Putnam, who had labeled him an Uncle Tom and who was now the secretary of the PEN Center for writers, appeared aboard and introduced him to his ex-wife, “stylish, nice-looking” Marion Putnam. A noted sculptress born in 1905, Marion Putnam had grown up in New York, the daughter of a patron of experimental musicians, and her statuesque good looks and worldliness appealed to Chester. If the relationship with Haygood had fizzled, perhaps the new freedom on the other side of the Atlantic would bring into view wealthy sophisticates like Putnam, a woman who was sometimes invited to the White House.
During the crossing Chester had moments of deep reflection, especially on the dissolution of his marriage. He imagined he would remain abroad a few months while his money lasted, and he paused over the gravity of this new choice. Attempting to recover from seasickness in the room he shared with an Austrian violinist, Chester encountered a slight, terrified woman in the lower berths. Frightened, she clung to a hallway until he escorted her to her room. Later, on deck, he exchanged introductions with Willa Thompson, a divorcée from Boston who had attended Smith College. Now the tables had turned. Heaving over the side with seasickness, Chester needed help and Willa, having made fourteen voyages, consoled him.
Thompson led Chester boldly into the exclusive second-class cabins, with better food and top-shelf drinks. While Chester had been living on the prison farm in Ohio, Willa Thompson had been winning literary prizes at her high school in Brighton, Massachusetts. A direct descendant of John Hancock, she surprised him with her frank conversation, confiding the harrowing details of her life and her reason for the voyage. She had impulsively married a Luxembourg dentist while studying abroad in 1936, been unprepared for the trauma of sexual relations, and then she had become pregnant rapidly and regularly. Thompson’s “fidelity to sexual detail” when discussing her married life shocked Chester “to the core.” But an innocent-looking white woman chatting about sex also aroused him.
Willa’s tale was the stuff of fiction. During the war, she had sheltered downed Allied airmen and had been beaten and persecuted by her husband, a Nazi sympathizer, as a result. She left for the United States and brought a lawsuit, winning custody of two of her daughters after a scandalous 1946 trial. Unhappy with the outcome, she reconciled with her husband in Luxembourg, had another child and, after another rift, was threatened with confinement at a mental institution. She had retreated again to America and was now headed back overseas to renew her custodial fight.
Thin and dowdy, the thirty-seven-year-old Willa Thompson had survived the hardships of the war in Europe and lost a stillborn child. At forty-three, Chester conveyed the air of a more youthful person. However, Thompson was sprightly, easily literary, and from the New England upper class, at a postwar moment when it seemed as if America’s elites had something to offer the world. And she was working on a novel. She told him that Edwin Seaver, an editor and the former director of the League of American Writers, the hard-left literary group that had closed in 1943, had offered to help her tidy up her book for publication; she had balked at giving him $500 for the job. Already she’d been featured in Time magazine and had received requests from literary agents to see her manuscript. Chester decided that “assured, distinguished” Willa was “the best of American society.”
Ile de France docked at Le Havre on April 8 and late the next day Chester made his way by boat train to Paris, expecting to meet Richard Wright and his translator Yves Malartic at the station. Chester had written to Malartic that “if things work out as I hope, I shall stay a long time.” Paris was the literary and intellectual capital of the West and, absent the aggravating custom of racial segregation, an attraction for blacks for many decades.
The infantry veterans among the latest crop of American novelists, like William Styron, Norman Mailer, and James Jones, were making Paris an expatriate hub. Chester’s gamble to take his book advance and live in Paris for a season or two was a canny business move. It was not far-fetched at all to think that with some good connections to publishers, artists like Marion Putnam, and the literati, a far more successful career was available for Chester in Paris than in New York. All he needed was to hit the ground running before his finances gave out, to get a couple of good breaks.
Because of a mix-up at the train station with Wright and Malartic, Chester spent his first night on a small side street in a loud tourist hotel. The next morning Richard Wright found him, banged on the door, and ushered him to a nearby café for coffee and croissants. Chester relocated to the Hôtel de Scandinavie, 27 Rue de la Tournon, steps from the Luxembourg Garden. Toward the Seine, Boulevard St.-Germain was lined with cafés, nightclubs, boutiques, and medieval ruins, a friendly, cosmopolitan environment that reminded jazzy Parisians of the strip of New York’s Fifty-Second Street centered around the interracial club Café Society. Paris was still recovering from the war, but the lines for necessities like meat, milk, and wine were offset for Americans by the inexpensiveness of the city. Rooms with “eau courante” (running water) were available for as little as thirty cents. Chester paid $1.37 a night at his hotel.
Wright hustled him over to Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookstore, to display the copies of The Outsider that Chester had carried in his luggage. Two days later, Sunday, April 12, Wright hosted him more properly for lunch at his apartment at 14 Rue M.-le-Prince. Oliver Harrington, a Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist whom Chester had known from Mollie Moon’s, joined the group. Chester noticed that Richard Wright’s wife, Ellen, had transformed her style entirely. She had “gone completely French,” dyeing her hair blond, cutting it short, and becoming thin. Playful Harrington, well-known for his close association with the Communist Party, and who had in turn grown stout, asked for Chester’s help in securing a publisher to bring out a book of cartoons. Seeing other black writers and creative artists maintaining full lives abroad was inspirational.
Chester experienced the Paris of American tourist legend: balmy weather, chestnut trees in bloom, crowded cafés, and bookstalls and fishermen along the quays of the Seine. The customary pattern began with one of the Wrights wakening him for breakfast; then he toured the city or developed contacts such as he could. He dined with his translator Yves Malartic, whose authors included Upton Sinclair and John O’Hara, and endured the barbed wit of the French intellectual crowd. Overcharged for his daily necessities by shop owners, Chester noted the graffiti chalked on the walls throughout the Latin Quarter: “U.S. Go Home.” When he broached the subject, people would embarrassedly tell him that they didn’t mean him. After all, he wasn’t “really American,” which surprisingly doubled his feeling of rejection.
Predictably, he was preoccupied with sex. European women were reputed to have thoroughly modern sexual mores and to be fascinated by black men, some of them even possessing an “immoderate curiosity.” Chester was disappointed. “I don’t know exactly what I expected to get in Paris but whatever it was, I didn’t get it.” The well-known fleshpots on Place Pigalle had all the sensuality of a female locker room or public lavatory; the sex shows in Montmartre were gimmicky “tourist traps.” He described it all as “exceedingly dull.”
As it did to many Americans, classic Paris appealed to him: the Seine, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and the sidewalk cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés, Deux Magots in particular. His favorite person early on was Ruth Phillips, a black woman who worked at the U.S. embassy. She allowed him to purchase duty-free cigarettes and alcohol there and, when he made a pass at her, “could say no and mean it with [such] good humor.” Ruth was involved with another man, but she and Chester flirted eagerly.
A bustling and confident Richard Wright dominated the American café colony. His helm for loud discussions of creative writing, the race problem in its global dimensions, and communism was the Café Monaco, just down the street from his house. At the café, Chester, who owed Wright money and gratitude for his support, was inevitably tagged as Wright’s ally. But hanging out with him presented a dilemma. Chester was drawn to Wright equally for his success and his intelligent dramatization of the racial conflict and the western condition. However, Wright lacked the charm and savoir faire of a man like Ralph Ellison, even if he managed his success with less haughtiness.
In Wright, Chester sometimes observed a man who couldn’t quite handle the wheel of an automobile, who overpaid for his clothes and still didn’t look well attired. Chester was a suave dresser and a keen bargainer, as well as a raconteur with flair in the idiom of cotton row or a street-corner crap game. Up close in France, Chester could perceive that his panache was lost on Wright, who regarded his friend’s criminal past as less a problem of circumstance and teenage impetuousness than that of a man committed to a life of “wild and raging fury.” Chester took the assessment to mean that Wright also believed him a man of “adventure without responsibilities.” To top it off, Wright had a fairly crude sense of humor and took pleasure in speculation on the sex lives of others, perhaps especially of Chester’s.
At times Wright’s friendliness seemed calculated. Chester began to suspect that Wright’s grandiose show of friendship, reeling him into the café every morning, was the tactic of a competitor, preoccupying his time so that Chester would be shut off from the real literary tastemakers. Chester made a few publishers’ parties, one for Henry Miller at Corréa’s office near Place de l’Odéon, and another with the art set on Ile de la Cité. But he had no French and he didn’t apprehend the rhythm of the packed gatherings where people gorged themselves on champagne, canapés, and caviar. Once, when Wright invited him to a literary reception, he abandoned Chester in the crowd; it wasn’t until many days later that he learned that Wright himself had been throwing the party for Simone de Beauvoir. Sadly, Chester always questioned Wright’s basic motives, even when Wright jockeyed on his behalf.
Nevertheless, Chester followed Wright to the “gossipy little” Café Monaco. While everyone proclaimed the wonders of the cafés, the pleasures of being acknowledged as writers, and the freedom to sleep with white women and have no thought of gangs beating them up, Chester initially considered the black retinue surrounding Wright “a lost and unhappy lot” with whom communication was strained. Of course Chester perceived something slightly infuriating about being the author of two well-received novels, with a brand-new book out, and another on the way, while getting lumped with the other black scribblers, some without any talent at all, and some entirely unproved. Chester disliked the softness of this new generation of blacks abroad, quite different from the soldiers, artists, and entertainers who had preceded them in the 1920s. The new group, “bragging about their scars, their poor upbringing, and their unhappy childhood” embarrassed him; he thought of their antics as new form of Uncle Tomming, exploiting deprivation for sympathy.
Of course a few of the men withstood his scrutiny. Ollie Harrington, in the process of making a tactical retreat that would take him eventually to live behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin, embodied charm, storytelling prowess, success in romantic affairs, and a determination to live up to his leftist convictions. Chester liked a young black painter from Baltimore named Walter Coleman, who seemed, in his love life, to be living out the pages of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Between Coleman and a group of blacks who had worked at the Liberian embassy, Chester was well supplied with scotch and bourbon during his first weeks.
Most pleased to meet Chester was young William Gardner Smith, who had lavishly praised Chester’s writing in the black academic journal Phylon. Since they both lived on the same street as the Café Tournon, Chester got to know Smith, who had landed a job translating French into English at a news agency. Dashing, chipper, and a bit full of himself, Smith maintained himself at the café, a hangout for Jewish refugees, with an interracial circle of admirers, a “smaller, less wide-eyed” group than the loungers at Wright’s Monaco, but which, Chester had noticed, was “perhaps better informed.” Smith had just had his second novel, Anger at Innocence, a book with a white cast, selected by a French book club; his third novel, South Street, would be out before the end of 1954. He spoke French well, and he relaxed in the evenings over drinks at the Tournon.
Probably reflecting on some of Smith’s misadventures later in the decade, Chester wanted it known that he judged Smith a man whose “most outstanding characteristic” was “youth and a naïveté.” But in their circle of black writers, Smith was known for his appreciation of the blues. He was also temperamentally a bit like Chester, a survivor of South Philadelphia’s deadly street-gang battles who then turned in the direction of radical protest against racial discrimination. Presuming Chester to have money, that April Smith successfully persuaded Chester to spring for an evening’s entertainment at the Roundhouse to see sultry Eartha Kitt, a protégée of the dancer Katherine Dunham, who would have a hit French record “C’est si Bon” that year. Smith, who had served in the occupation army in Germany, and Ollie Harrington were always on the lookout for girls. They were welcomed by northern Europeans and other Americans; the French girls typically shunned them—a palpable attitude of dissatisfaction with Americans.
Chester had barely settled in when Vandi Haygood arrived at the first-rate Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Happy to turn the tables, she telegraphed him, COME QUICKLY: FOR YOU KNOW WHAT . . . If Chester had wanted a white woman as an obvious sign of his wealth and literary success, then Haygood was equally keen to announce herself abroad as a libertine by showily consuming a black lover. In the City of Light they cavorted like young lovers, “more affectionate than we had been at any time.” One evening Himes and Haygood were very nearly thrown out of Hôtel de Scandinavie for playing blues records and “being as discreet as customary in bed.” The episode became a minor legend in the quarter. When they weren’t in bed, they toured the city in a manner he would never duplicate. They had expensive dinners at La Tour d’Argent, La Méditerranée, Maxim’s, and Chope Danton, to the envy of the black regulars at the dingy cafés.
After two weeks in Paris, Chester was invited to a Sunday afternoon reception hosted by Marion Putnam, and asked to bring his friend Richard Wright. Chester spent the morning at Wright’s apartment, hanging out and listening to blues records, until Wright got a knock at the door. In came a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduate working for the State Department and the FBI named G. David Schine. Schine assisted Roy Cohn, the chief leg man and interrogator for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, since January the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations and Red Scare architect. Schine and Cohn were harassing America’s European embassies that spring, blacklisting writers and books in embassy libraries that critiqued any aspect of the American way of life, which was for them de facto evidence of a Communist conspiracy. Schine had pressured Marion Putnam to locate Wright.
Schine demanded from Wright a statement about a State Department employee, whom Schine was trying to expose as a former member of the Chicago Communist John Reed Club. Wright spurned the request peremptorily, going as far as denying his own membership in the club, which was already public knowledge. The young inquisitor was nonplussed; in spite of Chester’s presence, he bragged that he could wrench and humiliate Wright, in the manner that the committee had succeeded in forcing Langston Hughes to recant his pro-socialist work just a few weeks before. But Richard Wright scoffed at Schine and ordered him out, telling Chester, “That stupid son of a bitch thinks he can threaten me.”
After Schine left the apartment, the telephone rang. It was the twenty-eight-year-old literary critic and Harlem writer James Baldwin asking for a loan. Although Wright had a reputation for frugality, he agreed and at 5:00 P.M. he and Himes went to the Deux Magots terrace, to a table spilling onto the sidewalk.
Chester claimed never to have met him before, the “small, intense young man of great excitability,” whom he had probably already crossed paths with at Connie’s restaurant in 1945. Often destitute, Baldwin was a sharply intelligent ragamuffin who enjoyed significant prestige in New York’s literary circles, only rivaled by Ralph Ellison. Baldwin understood Wright as nearly an institution, beyond the pale of criticism, and an abundant resource. Wright was used to fielding Baldwin’s requests, even as Wright was surprised by the tenacity of Baldwin’s scalding criticisms. Once, in December 1951, at a meeting of the black activist group Franco-American Fellowship, Wright had reprimanded Baldwin for having an “Uncle Tom attitude,” and a shouting match had erupted. Now Baldwin excitedly told Wright that he was expecting any day the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, after eight years of work. The novel reveals a tormented relationship between a black father and his son, a book that Baldwin believed exceeded Wright’s artistic achievement.
For the most part, Baldwin found it “embarrassing” to be considered Wright’s friend, and he understood Wright’s work as Manichean, monochromatic, and wooden. He looked for avenues to assert his difference from Wright, and almost certainly because most French and American whites presumed that the men and their writings were so similar. However, none of this stood in the way of Baldwin’s asking Wright for money. As he told people in the United States about his on-and-off contretemps with Wright, “We’re perfectly pleasant to each other.”
Over drinks they began to argue. Probably because Chester was present, Wright demanded an account for the criticisms of Native Son that Baldwin had published in Partisan Review, and would soon republish in his own book of essays. Chester, unaware of the backstory behind their feud, soon recognized the intense psychic energy each man invested in the dispute, which for Wright’s part was almost certainly an acknowledgment of how genuinely gifted he believed Baldwin was. “As I listened to them talk,” Chester remembered, he was surprised to discern “an exciting kind of relationship.” Wright enjoyed needling Baldwin (as he had once needled Ralph Ellison), but as the conversation reached deep water, Himes had every reason to understand, however slowly, that he was not just a witness to the conflict, but Wright’s codefendant, another writer whose work had been dismissed by Baldwin. Baldwin’s “Many Thousands Gone” claims that the “presupposition” of If He Hollers Let Him Go was exactly the same as second-rate “problem” literature: “black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.” Part of the difficulty Chester would encounter in having his forthcoming novel The Third Generation translated and issued by Parisian publishers was because of the influence of Baldwin’s critique of “protest” writing about American racial conditions, shared widely by elite American writers and critics.
As the debate wore on, Chester was embarrassed to see Marion Putnam and her clique of artists approaching them. The newcomers sided with Baldwin, who was persuasive, a native New Yorker like Putnam, and seemed the underdog. When the argument proved to have a gravitas imperceptible to the others at first, Putnam and her associates left. As Wright and Baldwin hammered away at each other, Chester grasped the real underlying tension when Baldwin stammered “the sons must slay the fathers.” Baldwin would use the same term to describe Wright when he died: “my ally, my witness, and, alas!, my father.” The debate had traveled from cultural politics—even their own livelihoods—onto a more intimate ground. Wright and Baldwin had each figuratively slain their fathers, in their books Black Boy and Go Tell It on the Mountain, respectively; now Baldwin was taking aim at a living man. Chester, who had lost his own father three months earlier, was unique in not having the triumph over a father or father figure as a core component of his fiction. While he was in fact inserting the father-son complex in The Third Generation, he did not attribute much explanatory power to it. As a boy and as a man, Chester had witnessed his father in weakness and strength, as a real person struggling, loving, and sometimes succeeding, in a manner that his black literary peers simply had not experienced. Wright had not had an adult relationship with his father; Baldwin, Ellison, and William Gardner Smith had each been the outside child in a second marriage, never knowing their biological fathers. When Baldwin delivered his cry, a slightly drunken Chester Himes thought he had “taken leave of his senses.”
The three switched venues, moving down Boulevard St.-Germain to the bluesy Rhumière Martinique. Baldwin tried then to persuade Wright to accept his famous highbrow critiques, since he had “written my book and you haven’t allowed any other black writer anything to write about.” Himes drank and Baldwin continued to argue that to advance the artistry of black writers, Wright’s achievement had to be torn down. Chester left them at one in the morning, the dispute showing no sign of easing. Chester made a joke out of the encounter. Since Baldwin had tied him and Wright together in “Many Thousands Gone,” for many weeks afterward, Chester teased Wright about “our boy” and “your son.” Since Baldwin bit the black hand that literally fed him, Chester wickedly renamed his book Go Shit on the Mountain.
More fun for Chester than the art-versus-politics debate was to resume friendship with E. Franklin Frazier, the esteemed academic, and his wife, Marie. Living in Paris as the “chief of the Tensions Project” at the Applied Social Science division of UNESCO, Frazier was working on The Black Bourgeoisie, a scorching critique of the black middle class that would enlarge his reputation. His wife, Marie, was a fan of Chester; coincidentally, she had just finished Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and concluded “it lacks force.” After he gave Marie a draft of The Third Generation, she was ecstatic. “Wonderful to see you again and more wonderful to know you are still hitting the ball hard! Keep it up.”
Ben Zevin, the president of World Publishers, and his wife checked in at Hôtel Meurice later in April, and asked Chester to introduce them to Richard Wright. They all went out to dinner at La Méditerranée, where the staff lined the pavement in two columns between Wright’s car and the entrance in greeting. Zevin reminded Wright of their acquaintance (he had printed Black Boy during the war after Harper and Brothers had reached its paper-rationing quota) and didn’t want to be humbled by the revered black writer. Himes found himself having to run interference, after Zevin and Wright began to disagree over the responsibility of the black artist and the white liberal. But the meeting with Zevin in Paris boded well in terms of what the company might do for Chester’s new book. “The Cord is a hell of a book, our best novel,” Chester would hear from his publisher, still using the working title, in the next weeks. “We shall promote it accordingly,” Zevin promised again at Leroy Haynes’s soul food restaurant in Pigalle. After Ellen Wright, who worked as a literary agent, sold Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Zevin, Chester engaged her to arrange the French publishing of his two recent novels, as well as a short story collection. He learned from Richard Wright, though, that he was unlikely to make a living off French publishers. “Get all you can for an advance,” Wright prophetically told him, on the way to a black-market money changer one afternoon. “That’s all you’ll ever get.”
After three weeks and a batch of correspondence, Willa Thompson arrived from Luxembourg, looking almost sexy to Chester, murmuring that she loved him and, quite penniless, that she needed him too. While her vulnerability inspired strong feelings of devotion, there were early mishaps connected to his complicated and intense feelings for Vandi Haygood, who had just left. Chester’s pals, especially Wright, didn’t know how to treat the new woman: an interlude? girlfriend? financial prop? Willa’s formal bearing, her ill-fitting clothes, and plain looks didn’t help matters. During the course of the weeks they were together she learned of—but kept to herself—the amorous nature of Haygood’s visit. Two years later she would describe that tidbit of information as “soul shattering,” but she did not permit it to affect her developing feelings for Chester.
Boisterous and prying, Richard Wright entertained the two of them, from the initial, uncomfortable pickup at the train station to an uncomfortable dinner at the apartment with Ellen at the beginning of May. Chester believed that Wright was self-conscious—“inferior and ill at ease”—around well-bred Americans and “furious with himself” for feeling small. The response was a kind of ricochet-shot viciousness. Chester’s apparent ease at attracting the devoted attention of white women from elite American colleges who were not merely flaunting sexual taboo was intimidating to Wright. Ellen Wright, the Jewish daughter of working-class immigrants, who was probably as insecure as her husband, was rude. “Dick would have been ok if we’d met him alone on a café terrace,” thought Chester’s new girlfriend, but “his wife is rather evil.”
Willa’s combination of innocence, disciplined restraint, and courageousness also reminded Chester of his own reserved, willowy, and educated mother, Estelle. Which was unfortunate. Instead of making the break that overseas travel allowed, Chester latched on deeply to a chimera of American talent and wholesomeness from which he would extract himself only with difficulty. Three years later, he would reach a point where, reflecting on what had happened with Willa, he could write, “I have the kind of racial attitude, in general, which needs guidance.” This was an admission of being lost at sea. What’s more, after Willa revealed that she had been repeatedly institutionalized, he approached the relationship that would consume the next three years “as though she were my patient and I were her nurse.” An old taunt of the Cleveland pimps—“Get a white woman and go from Cadillacs to cotton sacks”—was appropriate to his situation.
After the unpleasant dinner with the Wrights, Chester could understand that the tensions that emerged over the competition for black success in Paris were not so different from those in New York. One afternoon at Wright’s apartment, Daniel Guérin, whom Chester once described as “the rich, French leftist authority on the brother,” offered to host Chester at his artists’ colony at La Ciotat on the Côte d’Azur. Chester declined, thinking it would be better to “get out from under the wing of the Wrights and act independently.”
The need for this was evident, especially after one weekend with Ellen at a suburban château of a couple whom he knew slightly. French intellectuals there hounded Ellen, questioning her husband’s abilities as a writer, and in terms more snide and belittling than Baldwin had used. Chester was not Wright’s acolyte, but he understood the influence of Americans in France and the implications for himself. “Richard Wright is a great man and a great writer,” he defensively told the crowded room at the mansion. Even though Chester believed Wright would be “foolish” to return to the United States, as a writer he hoped not to be trapped by a French public that adored him only as much as it could use his work to push the United States’s massive influence and power out of France. Chafing against the role of Wright’s protector, Chester had also observed elements “too subtle and complicated for explanation” that “reflected negatively on my stature as a writer and created hazards in the sale and publication of my work.” The subtle tensions by the end of April had started many tears in the friendship. Wright would leave for Ghana on the same day that Chester left Paris, and the two men would never regain the camaraderie of the earlier years.
On May 11, Chester and Willa arrived at Malartic’s exquisite and enchanting retreat in the fishing village of Arcachon, between Bordeaux and Biarritz. A stucco villa with a bedroom and living room facing the street, as well as a kitchen tacked on in the back garden, made Villa Madiana a cozy pied-à-terre. Willa and Chester found that, away from the “hard hurried contest of sexuality” in Paris, they could wander the seashore hand in hand, build a fire, and drink champagne, and, as special guests of Malartic, be treated amiably by the villagers. They spent time learning to sail and reading to each other on the beach. In circling back to this infatuation with Willa, Chester found himself the object of envy: as worldly Ruth Phillips promised him a carton of cigarettes, she wrote him coyly, “It must be wonderful to be in the country with nothing to do but rest, relax and make love. I really must try it sometime.”
Willa was more apprehensive. She had never lived with a creative artist before and found the rhythms of work and life a bit hard to catch. “I think Mr. Himes is also happy. I don’t know. I can’t be sure,” she wrote an acquaintance. One way that they accommodated each other’s rhythms was popping pills together. Chester used the sedative Amobarbital in addition to the Dexamyl, although Willa disliked the sensation of having her hands fall asleep, feeling cold and numb, and her loss of appetite when the drug took their blood pressure down. They would both have trouble sleeping, as Chester had already experienced in Vermont.
For his part, he was satisfied with the relationship. To him, early on, it was a European fling, made better since Willa’s native language was English and she could translate French. “I am living here with the wife of a Luxembourg dentist who is writing a rather interesting book . . . hoping that her husband doesn’t come down here and shoot me,” he joked to Van Vechten. Willa’s poverty cut two ways too. Unlike Vandi Haygood, the American businesswoman of affairs whose appetites came first, Willa brought to the table her bearing, polish, education, and upbringing. She was not sexually hungry like Haygood and, since she was dependent on Chester’s money, seemed materially content.
At Arcachon, Chester awaited the return of the galleys of The Cord from World. He steadied himself by reading Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, an activity that he likened to writing a book in and of itself. He admitted that he was puzzling a bit on the new book he had under way, the story of the affair with a white woman. Still wanting Wright as a friend, Chester admitted in a letter to him the agony of his composing process, confessing, “I’ve made so many false starts on this book of mine I’m going to begin all over and come in another door.” The new direction would take him to use a first-person narrator and telescope the action into a single weekend.
But the book of his ruptured family life and the misery of the black middle class required completion. Chester locked himself into the villa’s library at a rolltop desk one morning to finish the final chapter, which he rewrote completely. Chester telegraphed Bill Targ to make sure World waited for the return of Chester’s galleys and did not proceed to press while he worked to resolve the plot “in one dramatic incident.” In the finale Chester completely left the field of autobiography, having the hero Charles Taylor’s father stabbed to death in a gin mill and Charles preparing to leave for the South to make amends with the girl he got pregnant. Regrettably, in spite of the fine overall quality of the material, the final upturned ending was abrupt and not entirely convincing. Chester had tried to resolve his story with a Freudian gloss on the family dynamic in a sensational manner, such as Ellison had already accused Chester of doing crudely with Marx and Lenin in Lonely Crusade. Chester had “hopes” of The Cord “doing fairly well,” since he had been promised a paperback contract of $10,000, but his core talent as a writer was his willingness to tread uphill against the mountain of orthodox opinion, not conform to it.
But more than a melodramatic ending shaped the novel’s future. Highbrow black American writers in 1953 and 1954 would not fare very well in the wake of Ellison’s Invisible Man, and there were several underacknowledged books: John Killens’s Youngblood, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, Ann Petry’s The Narrows, and, at least in James Baldwin’s opinion, Go Tell It on the Mountain. These major contributions to American literature barely dented the surface of public perception, evidence of an embarrassment of riches, but a setback personally for those creative writers.
On May 25, two weeks after he had arrived at Arcachon, he mailed Targ, the editor in chief at World, the ending of the The Cord, writing, “I got what I wanted.” Overall, the autobiographical novel was quite possibly his finest and most intense piece of fiction. Before the end of June, Targ forwarded the corrected proofs and read the concluding chapter approvingly, “with great interest and satisfaction.” The press had made some minor deletions at the end of the book, in places where Chester had graphically described his hero’s sex relations with a scarred moll operating a gambling dive. Targ said that while they would surmount censorship for the initial publication, the appearance of obvious “sexual matters” might greatly curtail the possibilities of paperback sales, Chester’s new bread and butter. Always wanting to make a lavish gesture to a woman he had deliberately wounded, he dedicated the book to Jean.
At the end of June 1953, Chester was euphoric again. He was confident about this long project begun in 1949, his most extended piece of writing. World was betting heavily on the book, preparing considerable publicity, and anticipating its selection by a book club, as had launched both Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy. The affair with Willa took on a kind of grace, not incidentally because she made it easy. Chester described her as a gallant sidekick, if without much personality: “courageous, uncomplaining, adaptable, and congenial.” By the time the page proofs went back, Chester was trying out his love story between white Kriss and black Ken. The garishly sentimental “extreme hurt” of the passage when Ken “asked Kriss how she could do this to him, be unfaithful, when ‘we’re engaged’ ” convinced Thompson that he had been in love with Haygood. But the dawning success of the new book helped her affair with Chester seem worth an investment of emotion in spite of evidence for real doubt.
In early July they had to leave Arcachon and they considered the warm and inexpensive Spanish Mediterranean islands. But because the British publisher Falcon Press now owed him money and because Chester believed that his $2500 advance from World for The Cord was a replenishing lodestone, they decided to go to London. Regrouping briefly in Paris, they bumped into an acidly direct William Gardner Smith on the street. Like the Wrights, Smith insulted Thompson by looking her up and down and remarking, “Oh, there are lots of American white women around the Latin Quarter.” Despite the snub, Chester and Willa accepted Smith’s list of contacts in London. Chester also withdrew his books from Ellen Wright’s agency and had her return his short story collection to World.
After a rough Channel crossing, he and Thompson arrived at Victoria Station late on the evening of July 7. At a telephone booth where he looked up numbers for a hotel, Chester’s portmanteau with their passports, money, and address book was stolen. After the bellman refused him at the Wilton Hotel, they spent the night in a fourth-floor walkup on Vauxhall Bridge Road, delighted to find a place with a clean bed after their moneyless, identityless trial. But their ordeal wasn’t over. A man attempted to follow Willa into the hall bathroom and Chester had to raise a ruckus to stop him. It took several fingers of Haig & Haig to put them to sleep. It was the inauspicious beginning of a most inauspicious sojourn.
After receiving a letter of endorsement from the office of his English agent Innes Rose, Chester and Willa went to the housing agencies in London to secure a flat for a three-month stay. What he found was supremely discouraging. “Race prejudice is about the same here as in American cities like New York,” Chester discovered when he went to find a house. The British practice was to write “No Col” on the advertising cards if the landlords refused black patrons outright. Housing agents liked to describe him as “slightly colored” and sometimes it took several days for a landlord to discern the fact that Chester was black. They finally passed an interview with a widow on Randolph Crescent and secured a four-room basement apartment in her four-story town house. With its bedroom, office, windowless galley kitchen, and sitting room filled with furniture they were implored never to use, the flat was gloomy and, at the peak of summer, ice cold. The sunken bedroom window opened on to the chained ash cans standing sentinel above them at street level. They had one bright spot: their passports were miraculously found in Hyde Park.
The overcast, damp, and chilly English summer tempered his ebullience; inside the house they had to spend a pound per day on coal to heat the rooms. Having realized that Chester was black, his landlady wanted him to move and began making it uncomfortable for them, despite the lengthy contracts he had signed and the advance money paid. Hugely disappointed by the city, he took in his first and only tourist attraction, a boat tour on the Thames to see the Tower of London, a “drab, walled prison” such as he had known from the inside. But he returned his corrected page proofs to World on July 14, feeling like a man with soaring prospects.
After the middle of July, Chester and Willa moved to a second-story flat on Glenmore Road in Hampstead, close to the Belsize Park tube station. The house was owned by the Galewska sisters, two elderly Polish Jews who accepted foreign boarders in their house. In the first weeks in the new neighborhood they walked Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill, and Regent’s Park, and took measure of the many libraries on Antrim Road, Finch Road, and Keats’ Grove, where Chester was unable to locate “a single volume by an American Negro.” Food at the street-corner stalls and markets was abundant and cheap. But Chester’s real pastime was the quick ride to Leicester Square to hit up the American Express office, hoping for word of literary favor from America.
William Targ’s letter of July 27 rendered unwelcome news. Chester could forget the Book-of-the-Month Club, with its guaranteed sales and literary stardom. “I think they are off their rockers, but what can we do?” his editor consoled him. Over the next several weeks the Literary Guild and the Book Find Club would also turn The Cord down. Donald Friede, one of World’s most experienced editors, wrote to get him over his disappointment. “The book you have now in print—in galleys, at least—is an excellent realization of the complex story you wanted to tell. And I read it with real enthusiasm.” Feeling that The Cord was “close to being a major achievement,” Friede looked ahead “to working with you on future books.” With so much of the novel set in Mississippi, World sent galleys on to William Faulkner, hoping for some kind of miracle endorsement. The press never heard back.
Downcast and unsure of himself, Chester confessed his private view of race relations in the United States and his experience in the publishing industry to his editor. A key incident for Chester was the photo-dramatization of Invisible Man by Gordon Parks, which, as he explained to Bill Targ in his developing paranoia, was an aggressive undermining of Richard Wright’s prominence.
The situation which now exists in the US critical world, I believe, is something like this: There seems to be a sort of unspoken agreement, at this stage to keep the Negro author in his place, to keep another from getting out of control, becoming successful and world famous. One might say the reception of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man disproves this. I don’t think so. I know it to be a fact that the guiding source in rallying support to Ralph’s book was the Time-Life clique. Gordon Parks, a Negro photographer on Life staff, who had been assigned to cover NATO in Paris for a couple of years, sold his editors on the idea of building up Ralph to beat Dick down. I know that Ralph was interviewed secretly and at great length by the top echelon of Time-Life, and they were satisfied by his comments on Dick. After which they assigned Parks to do a twelve-page picture story of the book at unlimited expense, and Time assigned a woman reporter to stick with Ralph for several weeks and do a profile for Time. Parks spent thousands of dollars having the sets built and photographing scenes for his story. In the meantime Time-Life exerted influence on as many other critics as they could. In the end only a couple of pages of the picture story were used and I don’t recall whether the profile was published or not; for by that time it had become known that Ralph’s book would receive the publisher’s award.
All of this, I feel, was done more against Dick than for Ralph. Of course, I could be very much wrong; but Time-Life knew of Dick’s forthcoming book, and knew the contents.
Now, all of this, I feel, is part of a vast propaganda campaign to silence Negro voices raised in protest, and to relegate the Negro to a place of unimportance in the literary world.
I believe it is going to be very difficult to rally support to The Cord. In their attempts to disparage books by Negro writers, the criticism can be vicious, brutal, and merciless and will resort to bald faced lies to make their point. You have probably already sampled some of this in the reports from [Book-of-the-Month Club].
Friendless in an overtly racist metropolis, in a nation conducting a “limited engagement” in Kenya that Chester thought was closer to mass lynching, and disappointed by the literary news from America, he tightened himself further to Willa Thompson. Since June, Chester had been courting Bill Targ to interest him in Willa’s manuscript, which was called Silver Altar. After Targ gave some of Willa’s chapters to Donald Friede to read, he rejected the book in July. At the beginning of August, Chester committed himself to helping Willa revise the book for resubmission at World and he won the firm’s approval to consider freshly revised chapters. Even though Friede had been unimpressed by Willa Thompson’s writing, he wrote Chester approvingly, “I shall look forward to seeing what you do with it.” A novel concerned with the flight and fall of its heroine, Helen, from a Swiss ski resort to a gothic French chalet and her evil husband, Marcel, the manuscript seemed to combine draughts of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith, and Catholic anti-Communist pamphlets. Chester’s imaginative contribution could be seen chiefly in the graphic portrait of the unpleasant sexual consummation, a climactic scene that they shuffled around until fitting it in at the manuscript’s conclusion.
By the middle of August, he received news that he had been advanced another $500 from World for The Cord. He also tried to interest Donald Friede, editor of the anthology New World Writing, in a short story he’d recently finished, “The Snake.” Friede turned it down, but the creation of this story, set in the summer of 1946 with Jean, shows Chester having doubts about his relationship with Willa, as his thoughts returned to his life before Lonely Crusade.
On the lookout for problems down the road, Chester made a semiformal contract with Willa and secured a half-interest in the sales of her book. Then the two got to work in earnest. She drafted in a sitting room downstairs; he rewrote in the upstairs kitchen. As he worked, Chester felt a surge of pity for Willa. The story of the young American married to a sadistic European whose domination was underwritten by medieval European cultural traditions caused Chester to conclude “a nice, healthy, wholesome, innocent, and rich American white girl is as vulnerable on the Continent of Europe as a American black girl in the white South.” The image that came to him was of the girl crushed under the wagon wheels at Alcorn. As he made his way through his lover’s book, he found her enticing prose “hurt me as I had been hurt then.”
Chester was spending emotional coin he could not spare. He had been forewarned that he needed to get out of London by November, before the genuinely foul weather set in, but instead he had worked hard from August, typing and retyping, he claimed, fifteen hundred pages. Early in September he went to the posh Dorchester Hotel to meet with New American Library paperback publisher Victor Weybright. Weybright had influenced World to change the title of The Cord to The Third Generation, a decision demonstrating the company’s explicit choice that the book would sell better as a tale of black misery than as one of Freudian tragedy. It also emphasized the influence that the secondary paperback market could have on the original hardcover book run. In avuncular fashion, Weybright tried to impress Chester by talking of his own wartime journalism to advance social equality in England for black troops. He also asked about Chester’s finances and plans, offering to pay out the full sum of the reprint advance. Chester hinted that he had another novel on deck, about a white woman in Europe. Weybright walked him to the elevator, telling him he would boost Cast the First Stone to its English publisher. Chester shielded completely the fact that he was living with Willa, fearing that it would offend the sensibilities of a white man.
The next month was disheartening. Early in October, World turned down the revised, coauthored two chapters of Silver Altar. “None of the readers recommends it for publication,” Targ wrote him with apparent sympathy. Chester decided to regroup and complete a full manuscript before abandoning hope. As if on cue, as soon as that first rejection appeared, the August $500 advance petered out, and the three-month British visas Chester and Willa had been granted expired. On October 5 he spent five pounds to get an “aliens registration certificate,” allowing them to extend their stay in London through January 7, 1954. Aided by the Dexamyl tablets, his mind started racing and the keys of his Remington portable clicking. He wrote Targ to appeal to Weybright, who had agreed to $10,000 for paperback rights to The Third Generation, but a “most reluctant” Targ considered the appeal presumptuous and unwise. Then Chester thought the novel should come out simultaneously in Braille. Soon it would be necessary to purchase a load of coal to fuel them through the winter; chilly August and September would be tolerable by comparison. London now struck Chester as “big, ugly, smoky and dismal.”
In October he received the advertisement running in Publishers Weekly, two pages featuring the book jacket. In it a black man resembling Jackie Robinson in shirt sleeves and tie brooded over a desk while a defiant-looking, full-figured woman, imperceptibly black save for her ample mouth, held on to two brown boys in a doorway. The circumstance of the environment looked bleak, despite the clothes. Chester may have imagined that he had surmounted the problem of racial profiling as an artist, but World still thought that to publish the book it must emphasize both sex titillation and black despair. Always preferring the spartan Knopf cover of Lonely Crusade above his others, Chester described the jacket as being in “the most awful bad taste possible for adult human beings to achieve.” The advertisement featuring the book cover would run in the New York Times Book Review the day after publication. Thousands of miles from the place where his professional career was unfolding, he began to psychologically distance himself from his effort of the last five years. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed and cooking up all the other black magic I know to make this venture a success,” he wrote to Targ, as bravely as he could.
In the second week of December Chester and Willa finished their joint novel of 520 pages, and sent it back again to World. Chester began howling for money to anyone who would hear him. They spurned his request at the PEN Center, so he resigned. Margot Johnson stood up to him and refused to send anything, so he withdrew his “account,” as he termed his unpublished work, from her agency. Finally Innes Rose, the London agent, agreed to advance twenty pounds to handle the couple’s manuscript Silver Altar, which he had never seen.
Chester was in an odd place. Even to friends like Van Vechten, he did not want to admit that he and Willa were living together, apparently hoping not to embarrass himself in case of a future reunion with Haygood, and also cautious about letting anyone know the real depth of his interracial tie. He admitted to Van Vechten that he hoped his new book with Willa would “repay me well for all my effort,” important now that the cupboard was truly bare. Unsure of how to pay for the next load of coal, they were miserable and “too damn cold to bathe in the heatless bathroom.” Facing the expiration of their visas, Chester led a panicky rendezvous to the Home Office on January 7, where they were allowed one more additional month. Eight days later, World released $500. With Silver Altar no closer to finding publication, and no better prospects, Chester and Willa scampered away from London for the Spanish island of Mallorca.