Chester Himes and Willa Thompson purchased third-class tickets and left from Newhaven for Dieppe on January 26, 1954. Both of them were dazed and uncommunicative by the time they switched trains and headed southward in France, Chester was glazed over because the Channel crossing had been bad, and, as usual, he was violently seasick. Outside of the hardships of the war in Europe, Willa had not known what it was to travel in this fashion and was unable to grasp the pace of the chaos that had swallowed her; she withdrew “into herself like a hurt animal.”
Chester had pulled off the boat ride to Mallorca by engaging World in an option ploy on the revised and completed Silver Altar. He asked them to reconsider the manuscript and to wire him $500. If they took the book, they could use that for the advance. If they rejected the book, then he agreed to have his account billed for the $500 and have that money taken from future royalties, such as the money owed him for the Third Generation paperback deal with New American Library. Chester hoped for a decision within two weeks. If the manuscript was declined, he and Willa could shop it around to other publishers.
They began their long journey through another country where “inexperienced and untraveled” Chester was unfamiliar with the language and with barely a $300 stipend to sustain them. Thankfully, the Spaniards proved entirely different from the racist Brits or the snobbish French. “I was taken up by the Spanish people because of my ignorance and my race,” Chester observed with gratitude. As vulnerable and flagging as he had been after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he knew, “I needed all the help I could get.”
From Barcelona they booked passage to the Balearic Islands. Arriving in Mallorca on January 28, they were greeted, impossibly it seemed, by wet snow. As soon as they found a hotel, Chester availed himself of a liquor store and exited clenching the necks of two bottles of brandy. After regrouping for a few days, they set out to find Calla San Vicente, which had been praised by William Haygood, Vandi’s ex-husband, for its beauty and bargain prices. This quaint town was on the extreme northeastern shore of the island, across from the Bay of Pollensa. To get there they wedged aboard an ancient, wood-burning, smoke-gurgling train, sitting alongside “tearful, sinister-looking” Mallorcans, for a trip that took the entirety of the day, complicated by the fact that Chester missed their connecting point. After an afternoon-long rain-soaked ride in a broken-down taxi, they found a bar blaring jazz and English people who helped them secure lodging. Fatigued by his journey, Chester settled that afternoon on a first-floor modern apartment in the lovely house Calla Madonna, owned by Dona Catalina Rotger Amengual. The apartment had brown floor tiles, knotty-pine beams, hot water, and an American toilet, all for 750 pesetas, or about twenty dollars a month.
Escaping London eased Chester’s feelings about the less than smashing response to his new novel. He hadn’t been in his new place a week when he admitted to friends that he had heard little of the book’s fate, “but the few New York reviews I’ve seen weren’t too good.” His dispirited attitude reflected the great expectations that he had for The Third Generation, though of course tempered by the reality of press responses in the past. And, unlike his other books, there was no uproar or outcry of negative criticism. No longer a young sensationalist who could shock or surprise, Chester was now a journeyman in a field crowded by writers of black American life. The New York Times complimented his “considerable power” and attempt to “achieve tragedy.” It continued, stating that “his searing book, with its terrible pathos of the oppressed set against each other, shows how increasingly firm a position he deserves among American novelists.” “Tragic power,” echoed the Chicago Tribune. In the Chicago Defender critic Gertrude Martin agreed with Chester’s fond ambition; he had written “his best novel to date.” The others said what it was impossible to have anticipated: that by sticking as closely as he had to his own story, he had written something which seemed not a template of black life but an implausible and unending series of disasters. “The most dangerous kind of ‘Momism,’ ” observed the Boston Globe, was at the center of the book, but its critic rebutted the never-ending “painful incidents” and “debaucheries” which seemed repetitious and failed to aid character development. The signal that he received loud and clear from these reviews was one he had at least considered before: his own life was completely absurd. Or, as the New York Times reviewer had said, “a less depressing book” would be “a more convincing one.”
Worse than plodding character development was what appeared to some of his later critics as a lack of authorial development. Blyden Jackson, a black professor at Fisk, would express disappointment with both Chester (“just an exercise in horror”) and Bill Smith’s novel South Street from that year, the difference between them being that with Chester “the lesion was always there.” But the condemnation was far from uniform, and Jackson, a kind of young George Schuyler with a PhD, unquestionably had the highest standards among the critics. Always a friendly reader of Chester’s, Howard University professor Arthur P. Davis would chart the movement from racial protest to the “problems and conflicts within the group itself” as a decisively important shift in black writers’ concerns. In fact, Chester had actually matured as a writer. He had published Cast the First Stone, a book he’d revised for more than ten years that ennobled not simply his experience, but all experience in prison. The Third Generation was even better, a compelling, artful tour de force of psychological revelation that bravely encountered the dissolution of his family. If it could have been said that his past was working against him, he had overcome it.
Still, he had no hit on his hands. By February the reality of the book’s underwhelming reception had dawned on his editor. The best Bill Targ could say about book sales was that they were “moving along not too badly.” Despite his company’s fondest hope, Chester’s The Third Generation, a book of considerable scope and power, would sell just 5146 copies in its first crucial six months. Chester had snorted to Ralph Ellison that he would outdo him; now he was eating those words. Chester took refuge in irony, blaming World’s “big vulgar” advertisements in thre New York Times. They had overpromoted him.
The unusually cold, rainy winter at Calla San Vicente was balanced by the extraordinary natural surroundings and the Spanish food that suited his tastes. Joined now to Willa, possessing a jointly written manuscript that had not been accepted by World and alchemized into the winning formula he had hoped for, and miserable at the dwindling fortunes of The Third Generation, Chester returned to the writing desk. He would need another book, another fish on the hook, to remain solvent. World had the collection of short stories Black Boogie Woogie, but it had already advanced him $500 on this book, which was unlikely to generate dramatic interest when it was scheduled to appear in the fall of 1954. The short story collection had been a gesture to his stature as a force in American writing, an assumption that, even now with four high-quality novels under his belt, was flimsy.
In February, Chester prepared a long treatment for Ebony on his travels in Paris and London and took a few jabs at Richard Wright. But the piece was too racy for the magazine. He settled in to drafting the screwball romance that had taken place with Vandi Haygood. He was still processing London’s palpable racial prejudice, and contrasting that gall with Mallorca’s similarly prejudiced colony of English-speaking settlers and its sizable “number of American lunatics . . . real lunatics, not play lunatics.” The effect was to unstopper his rage.
Chester was “furious” at whites “feigning outrage and indignation” at the sight of an interracial couple. The flip side of the enmity directed toward him from the Mallorcan Anglos was its psychic underbelly, the “sick envy” of psychic voyeurs imagining his and Willa’s “perpetual orgy.” The book would demolish the notion of white innocence or a white monopoly on rational behavior. “I was trying to express my astonishment at this attitude and say that white people who still regarded the American black, burdened with all their vices, sophistries, and shams of their white enslavers, as primitives with greater morality than themselves, were themselves idiots. Not only idiots in a cretin manner, but suffering from self-induced idiocy.” While he believed that, to an American, any description of nude black men and white women would automatically seem pornographic, Chester had already begun to draft “some of the most pornographic passages ever written” in his description of the sexual dynamics of his affair. “I doubt if this is going to be a particularly good book, but I’m going to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, in it in the hopes it might have a little sale and get me out of this barrel.” For once, Chester, who liked to put himself beside his protagonists, felt like he had the ending right.
Even as Chester was taking charge by letting himself go—a return to the energies that he had unloosed when writing If He Hollers Let Him Go—his sense of himself as a man of “firm position” among American novelists was crumbling. In mid-March Chester asked World to send Silver Altar to literary agent Virginia Rice, who had written Willa the year before asking to see it. In a week’s time, they received a note from Rice declining to even read the manuscript. His brother Joe wrote him that World was mishandling the publication of The Third Generation, in the same way as his previous publishers had, causing Chester to become convinced that World, like Doubleday and Knopf, did not represent him well.
He mailed a five-thousand-word letter to William Targ, unburdening himself of the fear that he had become persona non grata. “I don’t want you to lose your belief in me. And that is what I feel is happening,” he confided. With two seasons of peremptory rejections for Silver Altar following very promising leads, Chester had begun to conclude that he and Willa weren’t getting offers for it on account of his connection to the project. “What I’m worried about is having my name rejected, not my work.” He feared his name had been added to a blacklist—perhaps one reserved for black men who seduced white women. Jewish himself, Targ knew about Anglo prejudice, and told Chester part of what he wanted to hear, but he would have to accept a strong dose of paternalism with that cheering. “Everyone here believes in you and thinks of you as a Major writer. You may not have achieved major sales, but that does not alter the dimensions of your artistic stature,” Targ wrote, helping him to straighten his back. “Chin up, Chester. Everyone has problems,” he chided, “you are not being ignored, conspired against, victimized.”
Chester returned to his new novel, The End of a Primitive, a book that was as uncompromising as anything he had yet written. Confident only that he could swing a wrecking ball and was writing “one of the most profane, sacrilegious, uninhibited books on record,” he doubted whether it would ever be published. Convinced that such a book would hardly pass muster with the editors at World, he included a line in his manuscript to rally his spirits. “ ‘At least we niggers will have a chance to come into our own,’ ” his hero decides, “ ‘We’ll be the most uncouth sons of bitches of them all.’ ” The line would not be published until a second edition thirty-six years later.
The “uncouth” novel delivered the messy weekend affair between a black writer down on his luck and a modern white woman; it could perhaps be thought of as a postwar New York version of Light in August. But Chester hesitated to send the uncompromising outline of The End of a Primitive to Targ, presuming that a resumption of the sexually violent encounters between characters like Bob and Madge from If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Lee and Jackie Forks of Lonely Crusade would make people wince. He asked World for an additional advance, hoping to be kept afloat through the paperback sales of The Third Generation. Weybright of New American Library was no longer supportive, so Chester had little leverage at that firm. Already that winter he had urgently contacted his older brother Eddie in Harlem, putting the touch on him for $50. When Eddie sent the money to his younger brother with a note saying “every good soldier should stand on his own two feet,” Chester stopped writing until 1971.
At least part of him still held out hope that Silver Altar would win financial reward. World agreed to stake him and it sent $50 directly back to Eddie and $150 to Chester’s bank in Tangier, Morocco. It took until the end of May for the money to creep overseas. In the meantime, Chester started to describe his novel as having a “good deal of surrealism,” which for him meant a competition between the third-person narrative frame and his protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, along with dreams, flashbacks, and bursts of ditties, doggerel, and fabulist minstrel dialogue. He abandoned his naturalist concerns and lampooned and satirized American gadgetry, especially the new craze of television, and he used a talk-show chimpanzee to provide prophetic commentary about atomic bombs, Vice President Richard Nixon, Senator McCarthy, and the Cold War. However, in a book pulsating with eroticism, there wasn’t, finally, any sex.
Despite his knowing publishers’ restrictions on content, later made plain in the 1957 Supreme Court decision Roth v. United States, which excluded obscene material from First Amendment protection, Chester was enchanted by the idea that World would support a manuscript of profanity and sexual situations. He could draw a fair clue to their likely response from an incident in Puerto Pollensa, when, after a long night drinking and partying, Willa fell in the bathroom, dislocating her shoulder and giving herself two black eyes. Willa’s bruises were the source of local gossip, turning the couple into a cause célèbre in the off-season colony. To the “titillated” local “American idiots and the British die-hards,” Chester was a brutal pimp, cruelly beating his whore. To cope with the new predicament, he and Willa drank overproof homemade alcohol to the point where Willa was hallucinating and Chester was blacking out.
At the end of May 1954, Chester and Willa had to leave Puerto Pollensa as the expensive tourist season got under way. A local painter, Roche Minué, who disbelieved the scandals about them, suggested that they might live inexpensively in a village high in the mountains north of Palma, Mallorca’s capital. Minué, an old Spanish Loyalist and childhood friend of Federico García Lorca, favored this hamlet, Deya, so much that he wished to be buried there. Chester found a home that jutted from the rocks and faced the town’s main courtyard; the locals called it the House of Bleeding Jesus. Bleeding Jesus was affordable, but crumbling: the house oozed water between the floor tiles. Chester sealed himself against all distractions with Dexamyl and retreated to a backyard garden where he finished writing The End of a Primitive, the air redolent with the smell of the blooming lemon trees.
The ancient village was also home to the English writer and classicist Robert Graves. When he invited Chester and Willa over for drinks, a predictable scuffle occurred. Graves asked Chester what musical instrument he played and Chester, hearing in the question a typical racist dig, replied that he played the radio. “The Americans and the English always made a point out of reminding me that I was black, as though it were a stigma, which brought out the worst in me,” he reflected. Then Willa and Graves conducted a hushed conversation in German, and it became evident to both Chester and Willa that Graves was trying to take her to bed. “I caught him looking at me in that funny way that night we were at his house,” she recalled. Later that night, Chester angrily accused her of soliciting an affair. She feared he would become violent. He was also, in a sense, tiring of her and the toil her support required. If Willa could find “such rapport with men of her own race,” he berated her, “why use up me?” He was locked into a pattern where he pursued a woman with ardor, wore himself out trying to win her, and then reverted to jealous rage once she had committed.
Chester sent The End of a Primitive to Targ in two sections in the third week of June, anticipating that the manuscript would be at least slightly expurgated. Although the material was as controversial as Cast the First Stone, he wanted a speedy decision, since he was “practically begging in the streets.” By July Targ had read the entire novel. “If published it would bring down the roof on all of us,” he reasoned in words of crisp rejection. “It’s unthinkable for us, and I really wouldn’t know who to suggest as a prospect for it in this country. Even with expurgation.” Seeing Chester’s personal struggle a bit too plainly, Targ psychoanalyzed him: Chester was writing not art but for “personal catharsis.” Targ believed that only the Obelisk Press of Henry Miller, the bad-boy American writer who wrote about sex graphically and using four-letter words, would even consider it. The final comment in the letter signaled the end of Chester’s relationship with World. Regarding the manuscript, Targ informed him, “Let’s not confuse it with serious writing, such as The Third Generation. I’d been hoping you would adhere to that fine level of writing in your next book.” Vulnerable after he had written Targ the letter asking for support, Chester felt severely rejected and foolish for being vulnerable to Targ at all. But while he could not disentangle himself from World (or from any promising financial arrangement), Chester recognized that it was useless to remain a contracted author there if they were unable to support The End of a Primitive.
Chester defended his book to Targ, stressing his determination to grow as writer and range beyond the thematic preoccupations and narrative style of The Third Generation. Denying that he wrote the novel to get over an affair, he decided that The End of a Primitive was “the best book written yet on the racio-sexual psychology” and a forerunner of a new kind of classic literature.
We Negro writers seem trapped by our own development, which does not happen to other U.S. writers such as Faulkner or French writers say such as Camus, or other Europeans such as Kafka. Take Wright for instance. Obviously he can’t repeat Native Son, he can’t write another autobiography, he can’t continue hammering the same approach to a many-faced problem. But he has established a precedent, and can’t break out of it. Of course, he could do like Langston Hughes, just keep changing the words to the same idea, but he wants to be a writer in the world. As do I.
Chester knew that the book’s sex scenes were mainly playful and not pornographic, and he presumed that the novel was dismissed because it exposed “the grim humorous attack on U.S. idiocy where it hurts the most.” However, he did not discard the manuscript, deciding “I like this book better than all the others I’ve done put together.” As if to make complete Chester’s degree of American estrangement, Yves Malartic wrote him from France saying he thought the book a masterpiece, even though he considered Chester’s gallivanting with Willa an ill-timed distraction. In subsequent years Chester would incorporate Targ’s “catharsis” jibe of The End of a Primitive, although he still considered it a groundbreaking, important book.
The house in Deya proved not merely uncomfortable, but impossible. Chester confronted the landlord over the dismal conditions, refusing to pay rent until they were fixed. The spirited disagreement went on to include other townspeople, nearly resulting in blows between Chester and the town bus driver, after which he and Willa hustled out of town. At the end of July, in Terrano, a suburb of Palma, they traded away their privacy to share the house of a mechanic, his wife, and four trysting daughters. Meanwhile, the situation at World deteriorated even further. Chester’s decision to have the seventy-three-year-old Carl Van Vechten write the introduction to his short story collection was part of the problem. Van Vechten thought the collected stories barely apprentice works and declined to discuss them at all, framing his remarks around Chester’s masterpiece, Lonely Crusade. The introduction was obviously a personal favor to Chester for a book Van Vechten didn’t think should be published. World took the position that Van Vechten’s introduction was of little use.
When the galleys of the short stories arrived in the middle of August, Chester was legitimately frustrated. On the one hand, the editorial staff at World called him a major writer, a man at the peak of his powers. Yet they were now interested in publishing only his early work and couldn’t find a place for his most stylistically complex and thematically daring ideas. Agreeing with Van Vechten, Chester finally wrote World awkwardly on August 23, “I must confess this bundle of amateurish manuscripts combined with these urgent queries have given me something of a shock.” He had turned against publishing the collection, which was heavily weighted with juvenilia. Targ was out of the office and the mail was slow in being rerouted. Every two weeks he received a letter from Donald Friede asking for his corrected galleys to get the book in production. Chester didn’t respond.
With the coming of fall, the French and English tourists left Mallorca, the German tourists arrived, and the rains returned. From their backyard, Chester and Willa had an excellent view of the Bay of Palma. One rainy afternoon Chester took the short story galleys, now called My People, My People, and chucked them into the sea. He didn’t want his name attached to these short stories, and he had lost his faith in World. By September 19, Targ mailed him a curt note, canceling the spring book and reminding Chester how much money he owed, and how many more copies of The Third Generation were being returned every day. A week later Targ reversed himself, however, admitting that the firm actually owed Chester money. After that, neither Chester nor World would trust the other again.
The trust between Chester and Willa suffered as well. His repudiation of My People, My People was impractical enough to frighten her. All Chester noticed was her change to him in attitude, “distraught and intent on throwing herself away.” Secretly she was trying to find a job to work her way back to the United States.
Deep in arrears, on September 11 he bounced a check for one hundred dollars from his Merchants Bank account to an English moneylender, F.G. Short and Sons. Chester and Willa slunk away from Mallorca hoping to regroup at Yves Malartic’s home in Arcachon, where their romance had blossomed. They headed to Barcelona and cleared French customs on September 20. When they arrived at Arcachon, they learned that Malartic had unexpectedly sold Villa Madiana. Added to that bad news, Maurice Nedeau of Corréa declined to publish The End of a Primitive. In the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and the demise of the colonial system, the timing for any critique of race relations was poor. Chester tried not to think about having accepted money for a collection that he had then judged was beneath his standards and literally threw away. He knew that World would take his gesture as betrayal and they would begin to accuse him of being unreliable or unable to shrug off his bitterness at racial injustice. Just before leaving Spain, he had put a typescript of The End of a Primitive in the mail to Victor Weybright at New American Library, begging for the novel to be published as a paperback original.
Refugees Chester and Willa took shelter with a friend of Yves Malartic named Dr. Thé; all that Chester had left to spend in Arcachon was his good name. He wrote a long imploring letter to Ben Zevin at World, pleading with him to take The End of a Primitive but, in the same missive, attacking World by sharing Van Vechten’s privately conveyed low estimate of the press and the short story collection, word for word. Deciding that “it’s better for me to stay alive, even in jail, than die forever,” Chester then bounced a check to Dr. Thé at the end of a week and limped to Paris, leaving his winter clothes and trunk behind since he and Willa could not afford to have it shipped. Arriving in the chilly, drizzly dawn in Paris, they trudged from Luxembourg Gardens to the Louvre and back, searching for a hotel, Chester carrying two suitcases and Willa lugging the typewriters, and trying to keep warm. Only late in the afternoon when Willa went in alone, could they secure a room at Hotel Jeanne d’Arc on Rue Buci. The French were drawing the color line in the metropolis to keep American tourists pleased.
Attempting to maneuver, Chester ran into Slim Sunday, a Nigerian musician and one of the characters from the Latin Quarter café scene, always dressed in black, who gave him the address of a pawnshop. Chester pawned Willa’s diamond engagement ring in a shop at Place de Clichy, before hurrying to another to unburden himself of his typewriter. With thirty dollars to his name, he dashed over to Yves Malartic for help on getting The End of a Primitive into the hands of a likely publisher. Chester and Malartic received an appointment at Gallimard, where Chester hoped for a quick decision. In a bad mood that showed, Chester gravely put The End of a Primitive in the hand of an editor as soon as Malartic made the introduction. “Himes, you’ll never be a French writer,” Malartic scolded him after this meeting. “A French writer gives his book to an editor and then takes hours to explain what his book is about so that by the time he’s finished explaining the editor doesn’t want to read it.”
Highly cultured, long-winded Paris seemed the wrong place to be. Another overseas agent, Jean Rosenthal, wrote to him that she was unable to sell his books on account of the “puritan wave flowing around.” Over the next couple of days, Chester spotted Dick and Ellen Wright in their café but since the friendship had “cooled off mightily,” he said little beyond pleasantries. It was sad they had little to say to each other. In Ghana, Wright had acquired a serious illness that would be mistreated and contribute to his death six years later. Wright would soon be on his way to Bandung, Indonesia, and Chester, unknowingly, was headed back to the United States.
To keep them afloat while they tarried in Paris, Willa landed a job occasionally proofreading; they ate in their hotel room off Chester’s camping stove. When she wasn’t working Willa was drinking heavily to ease the pain of their circumstances (she remarked later, “I was an awful person in Paris”). She found it difficult to contribute to the household affairs. She and Chester took Dexamyl to work and phenobarbital to go to sleep, and both of them noticed blood in their urine, the effect of their too long use of the stimulant.
Struggling for survival, Chester began systematically berating all of the European literary agents who were supposed to have marketed The Third Generation or Cast the First Stone. Annoyed that Rosenthal had not attempted to sell Lonely Crusade to northern European countries, and pitched Cast the First Stone to “off-trail” publishers, Chester withdrew from the agency. He met with another agent, a woman named Jessie Boutelleau, and tried to persuade her that even though Albin Michel hadn’t taken The End of a Primitive, she was foolish to suppose that it would dismiss Cast the First Stone. Another Paris agent, “Dr.” Hoffman, working indirectly for World, claimed he had never even seen The Third Generation to take to publishers, which initiated a flurry of letters. “Sick at heart by all this mess,” Chester visited Gallimard’s offices in futile search of Marcel Duhamel, who had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go.
World’s president Ben Zevin contacted him then, stunned to have heard that Chester was accusing them of shabby treatment and giving him a precise accounting of the advances he had received from late September 1952 through July 1954. Chester’s books had earned the company $4,380.96, and he had been advanced $6,580.
Chester wrote again to New American Library’s Victor Weybright, beseeching him a second time to take The End of a Primitive. He also queried magazines for work to bring in cash but found his suggestions of profiling blacks in Paris like Charles Holland were considered “too specialized.” Chester summed up the fall to Carl Van Vechten: “things are now bad enough to start getting better.”
Toward the end of October, Marcel Duhamel returned to his Gallimard office. Chester discussed publishing Cast the First Stone, since it had had a good reader’s report. A hipster surrealist, Duhamel was friends with Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and Erskine Caldwell, and he knew the New York jazz scene. He proposed to Chester, who seemed “rather frail” and “not at all relaxed,” that he try to write for a crime-fiction series he was editing, La Série Noire. Duhamel wanted a “Negro detective story,” and he dangled $700 and the promise of an initial print run of 37,000 for Chester. In the meantime, Duhamel came through with a contract for The End of a Primitive and 20,000 francs, about $1000.
A few days later, Chester turned in a one-page outline for a novel about an American black man framed for the murder of a white woman in Paris. Duhamel and his assistants asked Chester to fill it in, making the lead character a piano player in a jazz club. But when he fleshed out the story with details after a week or so, which contained a Bud Powell–like musician riffing off Chopin and other characters marrying white women, Duhamel informed him that he was disappointed. Chester realized that Duhamel “wanted this Negro to be a clown.” He dropped the Paris story and suggested a new tale, “a detective story based in Harlem,” with “plenty of comedy” and “not too much white brutality.” Called It Rained Five Days, the novel would be held together by what Chester liked to describe as “real cops and robbers stuff.”
Meanwhile, Chester had good news from the United States. On November 2, Victor Weybright agreed to publish The End of a Primitive as a twenty-five-cent paperback original. While it seemed a defeat at the time, an acknowledgment that the novel wasn’t good enough to appear in hardcover, Chester’s work was pioneering a new style: the paperback original. The advance upon signing the contract was $1000, which Chester gladly snapped up. Seeming eager to bring out his work, New American Library also contracted to reissue Cast the First Stone as well as The Third Generation in paperback. At the publication of each book, Chester was guaranteed additional money.
With this advance, Chester paid some outstanding debts, retrieved his belongings from Arcachon, and covered the check he’d floated Dr. Thé. He still hoped to outrun the debt to F. G. Short in the flight from Palma. Setting aside the Harlem detective potboiler, he turned to a new project, a first-person account of his experiences in Paris, London, and Mallorca, “and how I managed to do this and similar experiences without being frightened, upset or panicked, and in fact enjoying it.” His next move was to buy a mildly resistant Willa a second-class ticket home on the Holland-America Line, leaving on December 1. The day she departed, over cognac in the train station, he told her “she shouldn’t think of it as separating.” He needed time alone in Paris to write and think things through, and she was heading “back to America to sell our book.”
In December, Chester was interviewed by Annie Brierre, a journalist and editor at the newspaper France-USA, who had been wanting to meet him since his first arrival in France. She questioned Chester about contemporary writers, especially William Styron, whom she had written about in Nouvelles Littéraires. Chester admitted that he wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest technicians of the American novel, even though Styron’s book Lie Down in Darkness had appeared to much acclaim. Closer to his new home in Paris, Styron had also written an editorial in favor of creative work and against hyperintellectual criticism to launch the new American expatriate magazine Paris Review. Chester’s page-long interview appeared in January 1955, by which time Brierre had read The Third Generation, a book she savored, “every paragraph of it, in every way.” She helped him get the book to Editions Plon for consideration, admired The End of a Primitive, and took him out for dinner in fashionable Montmartre.
After a conversation with Yves Malartic, Chester began to realize that he was wasting his time entreating French publishers to bring out translations of his work. The gist of it was that his books were too tragic and too intellectual. The French publishers wanted a Negro Harlequin, not a Negro Hamlet. Malartic confessed that in 1952, when he had written to Himes about the density of the narrative in Lonely Crusade, there was actually a battle going on at Editions Corréa (a struggle made obvious by the published cover). Maurice Nedeau was convinced that Malartic had removed the comedy from the book and had turned a story of hilarious shenanigans into a cheerless funeral. Duhamel’s translation of If He Hollers Let Him Go had in fact taken that book and transformed it into a “rough and funny story.” Indeed, when French critic Jean-Claude Brisville reviewed that translation, S’il braille lâche-le, in 1949 for La Nef, he had chastised Himes for failing to provide “an art strong enough that we can tell it apart from vulgar pastiche.” Arguably Brisville’s comment was better directed at Duhamel.
Imagining that he would shortly have at least $3000 from New American Library, Chester decided to revisit London. He hoped to sell British editions of his books in England, especially now since he had fired all of his foreign literary agents, and to get enough peace to finish the Duhamel-inspired crime story. More practically, life in Paris had increased its challenges without Willa as translator and white face. Despite visits to twenty-six rental agencies and fifty landlords, he was homeless again. Meanwhile service in the cafés had grown “insolent and hostile.” One time, Chester responded to slights by hurling a table full of crockery and glassware into the street.
Before setting out for London, Chester visited Albin Michel, which had published If He Hollers Let Him Go, and learned that Wright had been correct about the duplicity of French publishers: the accounting practices at Albin Michel were so suspect that he himself was charged the full price for books he bought, even when they were on remainder. There were of course no royalties. He arrived in London on December 10 and went back to Hampstead, now to 45 Glenmore Road, a neighborhood of Africans, South Asians, and East Asians, and began contacting literary agents.
While he waited on agents and publishers, Chester looked up Wright’s friend George Padmore, a Trinidadian intellectual educated in the United States who had created the Kremlin’s Africa policy during the 1930s. Disgruntled by Soviet political waffling over directly fighting colonialism, Padmore had left the USSR for Germany in the mid-1930s, then been deported to London, where he founded a variety of African nationalist organizations. The mentor of Namdi Azikwe, Nigeria’s first president, and Kenyan first deputy Tom Mboya, as well as an inspiring figure to Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah, Padmore was the modern philosopher and political organizer of pan-Africanism. He was known in some circles as “the black Prometheus cursing the white Jupiter.”
Probably no writer attacked with more vitriol western colonial practices and Soviet manipulation in Africa. Padmore’s most recent book had been Africa: Britain’s Third Empire, and he would soon bring out a collection of essays called Pan-Africanism or Communism?, that, riding the wave of favorable views of the postwar United States, advocated an American-led Marshall Plan for Africa. Although both Padmore and Chester believed Communists were insufficiently concerned with black rights, Chester did not wish to be schooled in a new rhetoric of political awareness. Padmore was lecturing Chester about the achievement of Richard Wright, but Chester made the point that Wright had come to a dead end without an ideological absolute like Marxism or Christian humanism to anchor his defense of the poor. Even though an antiblack riot had occurred that November in London, the kind of topic of interest to both, the discussion with Padmore ended weakly and drove home the solitude that Chester had to accept.
But even the unsatisfying talks with Padmore were better than corresponding about the future with Willa. She was struggling in New York. Chester had imagined that Willa would have speedy success in selling Silver Altar. He banked on the magic of Willa’s white skin and erudition to tip the scales in their favor, but she was treated like an amateur running errands. Penniless and looking ill, Willa learned that publishers weren’t interested in their novel. Then, when she found Jean’s name in the telephone directory under “Mrs. Chester Himes,” she became disturbed. Chester had told her that he was divorced but now she knew he had lied. “Are you really divorced or just separated?” she wrote furiously to him in England. She’d had enough of New York. On Monday, December 13, Willa caught the bus to her aunt’s house in Brighton, Massachusetts, taking the manuscript with her and deciding to hand-deliver Silver Altar to Houghton Mifflin in Boston.
Deep fissures threatening their being together were on every line of the perhaps 300 pages of letters that they exchanged between December 1954 and July 1955. Willa wrote him on December 20, “I think your writing is a gift and it is more important than whether we are together or what happens to us individually, as long as you can keep on writing . . . that’s the only thing I know is right.” For Chester’s part, he had a fatalistic if plain assessment of what was under way: “We had each, from the first contact with America, gone back into our separate races.”
Chester preferred to see his returning Willa “home safe” as “the only valid achievement of my entire life.” Their novel itself presented the same “achievement”: a Smith College heroine returning to the security of America from decadent Europe. But, at bottom, Chester was attaching to Willa emotions that emanated from his incomplete emotional life with his mother, the woman he not only couldn’t make safe but could neither satisfy nor heartily repudiate.
While living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, desperate to sell the book, and mailing emotionally fraught letters, Chester and Willa fell out of sync. They wrote daily but received the garbled letters in batches, unable to respond to the shifting tide of emotions and rapidly changing circumstances. After the first glum note from Chester—“I am backing out quietly (as quietly as you will let me) and closing the door gently so as not to disturb anyone”—Willa flung back on January 5 that he was free to do with the manuscript whatever he pleased; Houghton Mifflin had also turned them down.
Giving up on London, Chester sailed for New York on January 15, 1955, aboard the Samaria, “broke, bitter, defeated” and “unbearably chagrined.” He tried to sustain his ego with a brief affair and didn’t write Willa from the boat. On January 25 his passport was stamped back into the United States and he checked in at the Albert Hotel. New York was the same as he had left it: the inconsiderate doormen declined to assist him with his trunk, and for two days it remained on the street. The day Chester docked in New York, Ken McCormick at Doubleday rejected Silver Altar. Chester needed a publisher and he was contacting a new agent, Kenneth Littauer, shopping books and short stories to publishers after his years at Collier’s. But Littauer wouldn’t get a manuscript until February because Willa had the wrong address, and then he would want major changes.
Willa had declined to meet Chester’s boat when he was scheduled to return. Their letters had remained accusatory, and she believed she would brave ridicule from “so many [of his] friends” described to a T in The End of a Primitive. She also played his game back to him: “I’d hate to have to compete with a wife and an ex-mistress.” When Willa did come from Massachusetts to visit him the last weekend in January, not even physical intimacy could reconcile them. “Everything is such a terrific strain,” she reasoned, while also taking him to task for inattentiveness, which signaled to her his having had affairs. He had mysteriously lost his leather-bound copy of The Third Generation; he had not written; he offered her cigarettes automatically, but Willa didn’t smoke. Gainfully employed as a receptionist in a physician’s office, she was of course in position to badger him: as usual, his finances had collapsed. Earning forty-eight dollars a week, Willa made a point of mailing a weekly stipend, tendering the patronizing relationship Chester always claimed to have abhorred. She also had learned enough with him about the business to believe she might survive as a writer. “It won’t be literature, of course,” she wrote to him about “the Luxembourg book,” “but it might be magazine material.”
Cagier by the day and disinclined to resume his old associations, Chester was rattled by Willa’s presumptive questions: “Have you heard from anyone, about your EOAP [End of a Primitive], Weybright, have you seen [the] Ellisons? Or Carlo?” Willa had difficulty imagining that Chester—sober and with four published and well-received books and a manuscript at press and another under consideration—would not be fêted by his New York circle of Carl Van Vechten, Ralph Ellison, and Horace Cayton, as well as editors and agents. And although Chester maintained that his stay in New York in 1955 was one of unending embarrassed humiliation and isolation, he and Willa seem to have met at least with Fanny Ellison, perhaps conducting ambassadorial duty without her husband, Ralph. Willa was impressed by the finely educated, professionally accomplished wife of the famous writer. “I liked Fanny the best tho of anyone woman we’ve met anywhere together, the most intelligent & the kindest,” she told him. Two years after his contretemps with Ralph Ellison, tempers had cooled and Chester had much to report about life in France, England, and Spain; the Ellisons themselves would move to Europe in the fall of 1955, for two years in Rome. Desiring pizzazz and contact with his cosmopolitan, celebrated friends, Willa pressed him for more than “making love to her as long as physically possible.” “We might be able to go out together at sometime with the Ellisons,” she suggested before packing her grip for one winter weekend, “or anywhere with Music where it’s nice.”
By February Chester and Willa began to have satisfying times together. They turned to the bedroom to try to resolve the disconsolate, anxious letters they had been exchanging since she left Paris. “Darling, thank you for this last weekend. It was really the nicest time I have ever had with you. The most secure, the most beautiful, the most reassuring. It is so wonderful to be sure. I never have before, of us. I am now,” she cooed. He had fallen back onto the relationship and the result was unique devotion from Willa. Chester reckoned that he enjoyed “her white tiny body, her small shrinking breasts, her wild tuft of pubic hair, her strong gripping thighs, and the little spasm she would have at orgasm.” She now had a pet name for his penis, “booney,” a gesture so out of character for her she wrote asking him “are you shocked that I type such a word?”
While she made pleasurable sex possible, her mental and cultural endowments were the principal sources of intrigue for Chester, who never seems to have strayed too far from trying to provide the exoticism that he believed white women desired. Willa also proved useful by sending barbiturate pills in the mail, joking, “My, what a problem we have!” and observing that she now needed higher doses to remain alert.
They kept after agent Ken Littauer and tried rewriting sections of Silver Altar. When they finally met with Littauer, Chester was asked to conduct his part of the conversation through an open door, from another room, while Willa sat in the only available space in the agent’s cramped office. During the conversation, Littauer reminisced about the “blackface” stories of the South Carolinian writer Octavus Roy Cohen. Then he suggested Chester title a story “Panther Boy.” Chester concluded that the agent was rudely trying to humiliate him. Throughout the winter Chester and Willa worked up promotional material for New American Library’s publication of The End of a Primitive; they also revised Silver Altar again, transforming the humorless, insipid manuscript from first person to third person and producing the copies necessary for agents and publishers. This latest draft seemed bent on heavy-handedly making the broken-leg heroine a saint, and even introduced a medical doctor who returns the protagonist to the United States, explaining Helen to herself. “God loved Eve. She was his first Woman. . . . He sent her out through the gateway of Eden into the world only when he was certain that she was fully equipped to cope with all the difficulties that life on earth presented.” The novel’s last line was “He said simply, as God had said, ‘Go now . . .’ ” Showing weariness at their romance, Chester relieved himself of Willa in their novel by sanctifying and ennobling her but, in the end, casting her out.
Willa spent a few afternoons scouting apartments near Boston Common, then floated the idea of his moving to Boston, even though she was earning an education about active New England prejudice in the face of laws explicitly forbidding racial discrimination. If they tried to live together in New York they would starve and if he moved to Boston they ran the risk of defamation. “People, Americans, don’t like scandals. . . . It would be foolish to mess things up now with the book so near to completion and money just around the corner because we did something foolish,” Willa cautioned. In New York they were invited to have dinner with Walter Freeman, a New American Library editor, and his wife, until Chester let it slip that Willa was not his spouse but his “fiancée”; after that Mrs. Freeman steadily postponed the dinner, a tactic Willa understood. “Very few white women will accept in their homes a mixed couple, especially engaged,” she explained, presenting the durable facts of life.
Her thoughts about the future with Chester were made more poignant when she also had moments to marvel at his talent. She showed the manuscript in the winter to her aunt Margaret, an English teacher, who went through the clean draft, separating Willa’s sections from Chester’s and highlighting his passages as examples of “magnificent” writing. Willa had moments when she exulted in him. “It is the first time I have seen you so, completely assured and mentally and physically completely at ease and strong and certain, as if you knew just where you were going and why and how you were going to get there. You looked strong, darling, in all ways.”
But after a couple of months in America—Willa rooming with snobbish relatives—Chester’s appeal began to lose some of its glow. The interruption to their daily lives as a couple and the new burden of conducting an interracial relationship in America worked to reduce Willa’s empathy for the racism that Chester faced. Even the weekends she spent with him in New York did not alter her voicing a typical white liberal belief: the race problem would go away on its own.
In one of her most revealing letters on race in America, she mailed a gently worded reproof. Chester was a “little bit wrong” when he had previously opined that “intellectual negroes” were preoccupied by segregation and racism. Willa’s point of view was limited mainly to Boston, where she worked in the Back Bay office of Dr. Henry Marble and bunked at her aunt’s house in a white upper-crust neighborhood. However, she seemed to share the conclusion of Ellison and Cayton in their drunken argument with Chester in January 1953. Willa had become certain that many black writers and thinkers were not the “least bit interested in the race problem, or even aware of it.”
For her counsel to Chester she claimed a venerable source of authority: a silent “old colored chauffeur.” The man was in his sixties, and had been at work for Dr. Marble for thirty years. He suffered from heart disease and, according to Willa, couldn’t “work hard anymore.” Willa was moved particularly by the white-haired man’s outer appearance of quiet dignity and self-respect. She assured Chester that her black patient looked like an academic, was “certainly not uneducated,” and was “well-read.” She observed that when the office became chaotic, the old chauffeur, the “quietest person I have ever seen,” had the capacity to revive her and lend an air of tranquility, using only his grave taciturnity. Confident that the man was nearing death, Willa felt more than relief when he was around: she felt “how good it is to be alive.” Because he relieved her of anxiety and tension, Willa decided that “I don’t think he’s aware of color at all.”
Chester could glimpse what he would be in Willa’s eyes in fifteen years—what his older brother was already, and what his father had been. They were servants to white people, best liked when completely silent, necessary to shore up white peoples’ feelings of generosity and humanity, and to make them feel serene. And Willa saw race first: a literate, docile chauffeur was the intellectual equivalent to the man she had lived with and who had been a publishing black writer for twenty years. The portrait she had drawn was singularly dismaying.
For her part, Willa was sorely disappointed by Chester’s cavalier sexual mores. He had told her that they were in their final stage of full sexual expression; as they aged further, Chester believed their sex lives might end badly if they hadn’t found a compatible partner. He supported his case by referring to novels he enjoyed, like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a tale of a married couple’s misadventure set in North Africa and replete with sexual liaisons and doom. Once, when Willa made a brief weekend visit to New York, he casually announced that he had tried to have a prostitute come to his rooms, but she had been too expensive. He fended off Willa’s obvious displeasure flippantly; Chester only desired “to be with a woman.” Then he turned the question around, saying, “What’s the difference between masturbating and being with a prostitute?” Willa did not agree and thought he lacked “self-discipline,” which, when it came to fidelity, he regularly dismissed as an antique element of old-time Boston morality.
During another visit, on March 29, Willa’s worst fears were proved. While Willa was in the bathroom, Jean Himes entered Chester’s room and quickly departed, passing Willa in the hall. “Can you imagine how I felt coming to see you,” she wailed, “and then to have your wife walk in, when supposedly you were divorced?” Fanny Ellison had forewarned Willa about the woman with whom Chester had begun his adult life, “a very attractive intelligent person who has had a rough time and who is most likely still very much in love.” The effects of the encounter were predictably devastating. In May, after six weeks of an emotional roller coaster, Willa confessed, “I never believed it possible that a man could shatter me so.” She told him that they should end their relationship.
Chester’s reaction—“furious and hurt because I had been absolutely honest”—was not exclusively self-serving. The day before the romance with Willa suffered its deathblow, he had written to Carl Van Vechten with some glee, “I am hoping to get married again when finally I get together the loose ends of my life, and as a consequence I am what is coyly known as ‘secretly engaged.’ ” Chief among the “loose ends” preventing marriage to Willa was the missing divorce from Jean.
Chester held on to the relationship both because he wanted to end the romance on his terms and Willa made him feel important and wanted. Throughout April they Scotch-taped the torn love affair. Everything of course was contingent upon a speedy exit from the United States. “I would like to go somewhere small and cheap and live quietly, with you,” Willa wrote to him. “I think it would be a good idea for you to straighten out your own marital affairs too, though. Especially if you do ever have any actual intention of marrying me.” She kept after this point, adding, “I am not going to pretend to be your wife, when you are all ready married.”
For Willa, Chester’s having led her to believe that he was divorced was the key prevarication preventing their harmony and success. She concluded that the reason they were having problems with Ken Littauer was that she had passed herself off as Mrs. Himes—thus she was “a liar,” and subsequently unworthy of his “respect and friendship.”
Chester considered Littauer a racist and the other book industry operatives would seem like that to him too. After a minor success finagling a reprint contract with Berkley Books, Chester ran head-on into “gratuitous insolence” from one of his old publishers. He had written Blanche Knopf a brisk business note asking for a royalty statement and received an overly blunt reply from one of her staff. “You have not received a statement from this title,” William Koshland began, “because not only does the book have a sizable debit balance but also because royalties resulting from actual sales have not been enough to warrant reporting to you.” Among Knopf legal staff Chester acquired the nickname “General Himes” for the useless “running battle” he was engaged in that year to regain the rights to Lonely Crusade.
Later in the spring he informed Willa that he had landed a menial job, a task that his girlfriend approved of so “that you finally have some money.” He pressured an advance out from Berkley and wound up with $100 at the end of May, hardly enough to dent a bill for $806 he’d gotten from the Internal Revenue Service.
Then he lost more ground. Chester was forced to change the title of his new book from The End of a Primitive to The Primitive. The intellectual difference in the title was extraordinary, and in fact reversed the meaning of the book: from the black man escaping the stereotype of primitivism—his western burden—by murdering the white woman, to a black man becoming an animal through the act of murder. However, commercial transactions were no place for the nuances of philosophy. “The title,” New American Library informed him, “simply will not register on the newsstands—and that is where about eighty percent of our sales will be.” Chester would not recoup his advance and start receiving additional royalties until 100,000 paperbacks were sold. He consented to the title change. That same week he lost the promised job, so he was glad to have beseeched NAL’s Walter Freeman for another $100 to stay afloat. At the end of May, however, he returned to desperate measures: Chester wanted to persuade Doubleday to bring out a clothbound edition of The Primitive first. He would hold on to the idea and continue to try to place the book with other hardcover publishers, like Random House and Dial Press, but this effect would succeed only in slowing the appearance of the book: completed in 1954, it would not debut—still in paperback—until 1956.
Although Chester had pulled the plug on his foreign literary agents for lack of effort (erroneously, it turned out), in New York he was having no success on his own. He had also battered the doors of every publisher and agent on Madison Avenue, so he turned once more to Lurton Blassingame. In Chester’s conciliatory note to his former agent, there were four opening paragraphs before he could write, “If you will accept my apology for my own inconsiderateness and feel we can work together again, I will be grateful if you accept me as a client.” Chester enclosed four short stories and two sketches. Two of them, “Spanish Gin,” and “Boomerang,” he had submitted to Esquire that year and had received the endorsement from the fiction editor, only to be rejected later by publisher Arnold Gingrich. Another, “The Snake,” had been passed over by a publication called Manhunt and “That Summer in Bed” was new. Chester informed Blassingame that he intended to use a European locale—France, England, Mallorca—in some future works, and that he hoped to yoke together a collection of short stories. He also added the Lloyd Brown review of Lonely Crusade from New Masses to the folder of manuscripts, to demonstrate “that I have been anti-communist from the beginning.” Charming and insistent when he wanted something, Chester successfully got Blassingame to work on his behalf.
He broached the idea to Willa about living together in New York over the summer, but she refused to share his room of “horror” at the Albert Hotel, contaminated as it was for her by memories of Jean Himes. After repairing the relationship somewhat, Chester still menaced Willa over the telephone, perhaps inebriated and certainly maudlin. “What are you trying to do, threaten me?” she growled. “We should have stayed busted up the first time, in April,” she wrote him. In another letter, she counseled, “Don’t get a divorce on my account, because I don’t want ever to marry anyone again. If I live with you again, I would like to do so openly, under my own married name.” Willa had decided she would no longer “pretend.” But the relationship had finally fully unwound. By mid June, Willa had bought a ticket to Luxembourg and was focused on her children. “If we’re through, then let’s be entirely through. No regrets or lingerings in memory.” Feeling as if his presence would disconcert her aunt and uncle, she requested his absence when she boarded the ship for Europe.
Like other women in Chester’s life, Willa did not wish to become fodder for his literary workshop. She asked him to return all of her letters, which she planned to destroy: “I would not like to have very intense sincere emotions that I have poured out to you, my love in words, used in another book.” Chester held on to the letters, perhaps thinking of how little else he had that June, the prospects for publishing The Silver Altar as dim as ever, but also knowing their value in case of future legal claims.
With Willa gone he turned his attention to Vandi Haygood, who seems not to have known that Chester was in town that spring. He telephoned her for the personal items he had cached at her apartment before sailing for Europe in 1953—oddly enough, a kind of trousseau: linens, his mother’s silver, and scrapbooks of his career. During the call, Haygood apparently let slip out, “Oh shit, I do so want to see you but he’ll be here all weekend.” Then she recovered, “I’ll tell you what to do. Call me in the middle of next week and come to dinner.” Chester didn’t wait until the dinner and on July 13 picked up everything from Haygood’s maid except for the scrapbooks. A day later, he phoned her office. In hushed tones the secretary told him that forty-year-old Vandi Haygood was dead, apparently from complications connected to taking Dexamyl. The headline in the Baltimore Afro-American was “Mrs. Haygood Dies in NYC: Aided Many Young, Struggling Writers.” Chester had reason now to be paranoid. He had a manuscript at press in which a character like Vandi Haygood in every conceivable way was killed at the novel’s conclusion by a man like Chester.
Chester pulled himself together for a welcome reprieve at Carl Van Vechten’s on the Saturday night after Haygood’s passing. There he met the West Indian literary sensation George Lamming, whose novel The Castle of My Skin was a coming-of-age experience set in Barbados written with an elegance, racial pride, and sophisticated technique that showed the successful completion of a thorough apprenticeship to James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Lamming, an intellectually serious man, was also completing a travel memoir called The Emigrants about black diasporic experiences, especially in London. The long afternoon and evening at Van Vechten’s included drinks, a photo session, and dinner. Chester enjoyed the young Bajan’s company enough to take him up to Harlem, to the Red Rooster for drinks, after which, with difficulty, Chester stumbled back downtown to his hotel.
The next week and with the help of Annie Brierre, the French journalist, he succeeded in landing The Third Generation with Editions Plon for its series Feux Croisés (Crossfire), a collection of French translations of foreign writers. Two weeks later Van Vechten had delivered two bottles of vodka for Chester’s birthday; Chester drank both of them with tonic, “and the next morning I woke up with a hangover suitable for all disappointments.” He was still trawling through Vandi’s death and Willa’s departure.
Soon afterward Lurton Blassingame, handling some of his short stories, scored a hit and got Esquire to accept “The Snake.” Chester felt that Esquire, now a wealthy, established magazine, owed him since he had been involved in its early years. He telephoned editor Arnold Gingrich to ask for decisions on several other short stories and then he told Blassingame his theories of persecution. What Chester seemed unable to recognize was that he obliterated professional relationships when he squeezed through barely ajar doors in the publishing world, perhaps particularly with whites who believed they were doing him a favor to begin with, or risking their reputations by involving themselves with him. In the Esquire case, it would be several years before the magazine actually published this short story bought that June of 1955. Gingrich, responding to Chester’s letters over the next year, would respond with comments like “I can’t make a commitment at this time as we’re having terrific troubles with inventory. . . . But at least I’ll make an effort to try to shove the story forward.” By the time “The Snake” appeared, in October 1959, Gingrich considered Chester pushy and ungrateful.
Working with him on The Primitive at New American Library was Walter Freeman, who positioned himself as a strong supporter of Chester’s oeuvre: “I have found it a pleasure to work on Cast the First Stone because I greatly admire the book. The same is true of the present manuscript. Since we have become friends I have found my work even more gratifying.” But in September when the galleys were prepared, shortly after Dial passed on doing a hardcover, Chester felt he had been deceived. He asked to see the original manuscript and was dismayed to find commentary from five editors in different colors, none of which had been shown to him for approval. He was fighting the same battle he had prior to the publication of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Freeman defended the firm, saying “practically every change was made from the viewpoint of censorship,” and he was willing to restore “almost all of the deletions to which you object.” But the corrections seemed ridiculous to Chester. The editors had removed references to the popular novelist Kathleen Winsor and jokes about Quakers, and he was now being asked to supply permissions to quote single lines of dialogue from Ziegfeld Follies stage shows.
To Freeman’s request to revise the manuscript, Chester thundered he would seek legal redress if the version of the book published differed from “the one version, the only version” he was returning with green pencil marks restoring his exact language. Then, between outrage and acquiescence, he accepted Freeman’s invitation to lunch.
That week bold Jet magazine published the pictures from the funeral of a Chicago eighth grader named Emmett Till. The child had whistled at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, not so far from where Chester had lived as a boy, and he had been shot and had his eye gouged out as punishment. Till had then been submerged in the local river for three days with a cotton gin fan weighing him down. Six hundred thousand people viewed his swollen, mutilated body during the funeral proceedings because his mother kept the casket open and allowed it to be photographed. “I am innately sad, a dreamer, a very lazy lonely dreamer who wishes the world were a paradise and life but an opium dream,” Chester consoled himself, considering the state of American life and what needed to change for him to live there contentedly.
The dam burst by the end of September: he had to find work or be thrown out of his room. Everything, including his typewriter, was pawned. “The only jobs in New York available to a black writer without recommendations or connections were the menial jobs available to all transients and bums. Which is what I was, I suppose,” he estimated. Joseph Sr., who had described his weariness of life’s torture, by saying “hell is hell,” had faced a similar downfall in his midforties. Chester joined the pool of men on Chambers Street looking for a day’s work washing dishes or wringing a mop. He became a roving afterhours janitor for the Horn and Hardart Automat Cafeteria chain, eventually winding up as permanent staff at the branch on Thirty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. He polished stainless steel and mopped from nine in the evening until six the next morning. He did not merit the sympathy of a letter-writing Willa at all because he got to eat as much as he could hold: three quarts of orange juice in a sitting, dozens of raw eggs, feasts of steak, and whole chickens. Wolfing the food made him feel better and there were other payoffs as well. “I was storing up all the imagination and observations and absurdities which were destined to make my Harlem novels so widely read,” he recounted. Of course Chester needed only to observe himself to recognize a detail of absurdity: on August 15 Berkley Books had brought out its mass-market paperback edition of If He Hollers Let Him Go, and he could have seen his book for sale at busy newsstands throughout New York while he weaved through crowds on his way to his custodian’s job. Berkley had ninety days to pay out the rest of the advance, so he wouldn’t get all of his money until mid-November.
Willa sent him a chatty note from Rotterdam, with her usual backhanded compliment. “One thing I learned from you is how to live on nothing, darling.” Indeed she would return to Paris, somewhat comfortably, by September with a job as the director’s assistant at the American Hospital, “way out” in the suburb of Neuilly. By then all reminders of Willa were unsatisfactory.
The problem for Chester was, actually, living on nothing. About a year after the fact, the final disposition of the empty check to Short caught up with him. He would have the judgment summarily passed against him on October 30, at which time the First District Manhattan Municipal Court could take action by garnishing his wages. He had no means to resist the suit, and had in fact been in correspondence with Milton Cooper, Short’s New York attorney, throughout the year. Chester had problems with not only NAL’s The Primitive but also Coward-McCann, which he had asked for a royalty statement and a paperback publication timetable. Of course, there had been no royalties from Cast the First Stone and no plans for a reprint edition with New American Library. After his letter, the accounting department contacted him for payment because “current earnings have not covered the purchases.” Chester was publishing books that almost never earned royalties whatsoever.
By November 9 the final galleys of The Primitive were ready and Chester was counting down for Berkley to pay him the rest of his paperback advance. It took another four weeks and the assistance of a legal-aid attorney before Berkley issued him a check for $900. “I felt I had to get out of the U.S. and get out fast if I ever wanted to write again,” he wrote reflectively, “because it has been rough and I am getting too old to take it like that anymore.” Forty-six-year-old Chester would collect his money and secure the first ticket on a boat to France.
The only shipping line operating in December was booked solid, so he waited for a cancellation while he took care of renewing his passport. He bargained in the Bronx for a coat and splurged on a tweed blazer and charcoal brown slacks, to buttress his self-esteem for another trip to New American Library to pick up copies of The Third Generation. NAL had kept World’s hardback cover art for the novel, but they did remove the “cheap, tenement-like effect of the background.” Reinforcing his desire to leave New York, when he stopped by the automat for farewell chow with the other janitors, a drunken white policeman came upon the men, pistol drawn, and accused them of stealing his car. Chester flashed his passport, with its youthful clean-shaven picture of him wearing a tie spotted with Nefertiti cameos, and was allowed to escape from the menacing lawman. When he telephoned the shipping line on December 13 at 9:30 P.M., he learned that there had been a cancellation on SS Ryndum out of Hoboken. The boat would sail at midnight. He packed his gear, checked out of the Albert Hotel, wedged the big trunk into a cab, and headed for the New Jersey pier. Walking hard and feeling proud, he was the last person up the gangplank.
Chester would never again work or reside in the United States. When he thought about the exodus, the final flight from friends, enemies, lovers, critics, and publishers, he knew that his reasons for getting out were simple enough. He left America “just to stay alive.” The flip side of the coin was what he told Constance Webb: if he didn’t leave he would kill someone.