AFRO-AMERICAN PEOPLE’S NOVELIST
The new stroke in Spain left Chester feeling completely worn out, and it took even more time than before for recovery. After a long convalescence, he was requesting medical help from the American Hospital in Madrid for maladies that were serious and threatening. “I still suffer from my stroke all along my right side in addition to my hernia in my right groin, and my arthritis in left shoulder and chest,” he wrote to the staff physician. “I cough a lot and am continually in pain seemingly all over my body.” Meanwhile, a valetudinarian Chester was working on the second volume of his autobiography in what he felt was a drive against time.
In early 1973, Black on Black, the “admittedly chauvinistic” salvage of the collection of short work he had chucked into the Mediterranean in 1954 and for which Doubleday had paid only $3000, was published to minor notice. He tried to stir up interest and protect himself from obvious critiques in his preface. “You will conclude if you read them,” he wrote about these early short stories, “that BLACK PROTEST and BLACK HETEROSEXUALITY are my two chief obsessions.” Since most of the book was from an earlier era, he was cast as the antidote to the black militants, “no jive or rage; just real talk and real people.” Chester’s exceptional gift as a black novelist ultimately resided with his interior portrait of black life and black speech, the topic of his work when the white overlord was absent. The offbeat, funny, uncanny, always erotically charged scenes he created—between Bob and Ella Mae in If He Hollers Let Him Go; among Susie, Johnson and Play Safe, Lee and Luther in Lonely Crusade; and during the television-set delivery scene in Blind Man with a Pistol—all kept paramount the tapestry of ordinary organic black life, rich and fructifying on its own. By comparison, the less robust material in the short stories justified the “briefly noted” epigraph-length reviews, even if the screenplay Baby Sister was still fascinating.
Perhaps the brightest news of that year came from Chester’s older brother. Joe wrote to him in the summer, saying that he was scheduled for a cornea transplant on his less damaged eye, which might then restore his sight on the left. With the successful landing on the moon, technology seemed poised to remedy the most severe of injuries. After the surgery, in May 1973, Joe reported “substantially improved sight, not enough to read, but very useful improvement.” Joe’s first graft was not a success, but the next year, surgeons implanted a living graft and he reported, “I can see more than I have for over half a century.” Joe’s increased eyesight, after so many years, cheered Chester. Indeed, it seemed to reverse the great symbol of the downfall of his family.
Chester and Lesley came to the United States in the late fall of 1973 and they spent the holidays in Harlem and Durham, North Carolina, with his brothers. Eddie, a high-ranking mason and official with the service workers union, told Chester that his detective fictions had attained veracity, particularly Run Man Run, the story of the white cop on a murderous rampage. Joe had received an honorary doctorate of science degree at Ohio State in the football stadium where, forty-eight years earlier, Chester had helped pulled down the goalposts after the fall games. It was possible to accept some closure, some measure of redemption for the lives they had lived and what they had accomplished. Chester tried to return to active writing, now with the gambit that the detective fiction contained “the best of my writing and the best of my thinking and I am willing to stake my reputation on them.”
Pushing himself physically for a journey, Chester traveled to Germany to appear on an NAACP-sponsored “Black Literature Night” inaugural dinner in Stuttgart on February 11, 1974. There, a bearded Chester shared the dais with James Baldwin. Twenty years after the two men had first met each other through Richard Wright, they found mutual comfort side by side; their professional achievements and public stands were, in the end, self-sustaining. Baldwin was gracious and charming to him, a kindness to which the obviously ailing Chester responded warmly. Baldwin, fifteen years younger than Chester, would outlive him by barely three years.
Perhaps inspired by his brother’s medical gains, in July 1974 Chester went to London for a hernia and prostate operation. At first, the prospects seemed bright. “My health has improved (I hope) at great expense and I hope this will be my year. I am desperately trying to get part II of my autobiography finished for summer.” Chester would be at work on the volume until he eked it out at the tail end of 1976.
Chester, correctly it turned out, anticipated a turn in the reviews for the second volume: his praise as a pop star. He had tried, in mid-1974, to inch Doubleday into bringing out a collection of the eight Harlem detective stories. “The Harlem detective stories featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson is [sic] my biggest contribution to literature,” he wrote to Sandy Richardson. “I have been brainwashed into thinking otherwise by American book reviewers, which I know now and have always known was a mistake.” But getting Doubleday to take such action at this point in his American career was like turning an aircraft carrier around, and no offer was made to lasso the various copyrights and contracts and bring out the collection of detective fiction in a single volume as he had hoped.
So he labored on, but with increasing difficulty, even after the modest physical improvement from his surgery. By the end of 1974, Chester was at work “desperately” trying to make the publisher’s deadline for volume two of the autobiography. Also concerned about releasing Une Affaire de viol in English, he asked Michel Fabre, a professor of American literature at the Sorbonne, who had written the first comprehensive biography of Richard Wright, to help translate it. “I have great hopes for this little book,” Chester confessed to the French scholar. Then Chester’s rheumatoid arthritis acted up so badly he couldn’t stand up straight. To compound matters, his Spanish bank temporarily refused to let him withdraw $40,000 of his money, starting a flurry of letters of complaint to the U.S. embassy. Mixed in, there were occasional moments of good news, such as when Ishmael Reed sent him a message, noting that he had published an article in popular urban magazines giving credit to “Gravedigger [sic] and Coffin Ed for being seminal ideas for my two occult detectives.”
My Life of Absurdity contained at least one instance of calculated revenge. Chester alleged, apparently because of an emphasis in articles by John Williams during the 1960s on Chester’s frailty, that the younger man was a frivolous opportunist. Williams, understandably upset, stopped speaking to Himes. After Chester’s death, when Williams was asked privately about his relationship with Chester, he praised Chester’s writing and reflected on their camaraderie—that is, after he had warned Chester about homosexual-seeming overtures and excessive gophering, “punk shit.”
But Chester’s sniping at friends occurred in the context of his own diminishing lucidity. By 1976 he had found that “my mind is getting very erratic.” Concentration was a problem too. After he had submitted his draft of the second volume of the autobiography to his publisher, he was beyond physical exhaustion. “My health has deteriorated so completely I need help of all kinds and at all times.” When Jean replied to another request for divorce from Chester, there was a note of pity for how much he was suffering. Chester deflected her concern, just noting, “My sins are catching up to me.” That same year he wrote miserably to Marcel Duhamel, “I will probably be dead soon but things will go on the same.”
His friends continued to support his work in the United States. At a New York party in October 1976, attended by William Demby, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, Steve Cannon, and Quincy Troupe, Ishmael Reed asked a white professor named Edward Margolies why he had dismissed Chester’s detective fiction as “potboilers.” Satisfied by Margolies’s beating a hasty retreat, Reed wrote Chester, “How does it feel to see your critics eat crow in your lifetime.” It felt good to Chester, but the physical collapse that John Williams had been writing of since the mid-1960s opened the door to being haunted by other feelings. Chester and Lesley trooped back to New York in November for the publication of My Life of Absurdity. Before he made the trip, he wrote to his brother Joe, with The Third Generation and his memoirs and their representation of his family in the back of his mind, “I hope that I haven’t offended you by my ‘literature.’ ”
In a country swarming with discotheques and the latest fitness craze, My Life of Absurdity’s reviewers wrote about Chester as the creator of a detective series, not as a pioneer choosing a sometimes stylish, sometimes desperate self-exile to resolve the dilemma of racial and social injustice. Even so, Chester was now receiving the most serious praise of his lifetime and in the best places. The Los Angeles Times declared that “taken together, the two volumes are a satisfying, fascinating work by an important novelist.” Chester was now considered a man who had written the detective series “very successfully,” won prizes, and made popular movies. In one of the most thoughtful, generous, and incisive examinations of his work, the novelist Al Young tackled the autobiography for the New York Times Book Review. Young’s review was a turnabout play, since he had had a 1972 review of The Quality of Hurt changed by a “knuckleheaded” editor, without his consent, to be realigned with Nathan Huggins’s blast. Reminding readers that the first volume was “a singularly poignant autobiography,” Young then agreeably dealt with the second part: “The controlled intensity and lucid sense of focus that distinguished the earlier volume are missing. But this lack is more than made up for by the sheer passion, thoroughness and candor with which [Himes] writes about and, at the same time, deromanticizes the artistic expatriate life in which outrage, loneliness and frivolity abound.”
My Life of Absurdity opens with unforgettable chapters showing Chester polishing the stainless steel fixtures of a Times Square cafeteria and saying “I got you beat now, motherfuckers,” to New American Library editors in an elevator. The heart of the book was his journey with Regine in the ignoble Volkswagen lemon. He changes style then and moves in an intertextual direction, pioneered by Reed (whom he had directly queried about his method in Mumbo Jumbo), mixing portions of mildly emended letters to Carl Van Vechten and Lesley to flesh out the narrative of café life in Europe between roughly 1956 and 1970. He illustrated some pages with photographs of his mother and father and his early life, followed by photos of his life abroad with his white girlfriends. The book was out in the world only a few months when Chester learned that Marcel Duhamel, thought by Chester to be the honest man among the thieves at Gallimard, died suddenly of a heart attack. Mortality was at his doorstep.
He was also wrongly despairing at having missed the admiration of both the reading public and his intimates. Instead his reputation was climbing. Critics were saying that he had written four “classic” books before leaving the United States. In fact, full-length critical studies by James Lunquist and Stephen Milliken were at hand. Chester feared missteps, nonetheless. “I should not have written autobiography. It seems to have embarrassed everyone,” he moaned in a letter to Rosalyn Targ in 1977. Some of the resentment toward the book should have been anticipated, since he made casual, belittling remarks about friends like John Williams and Walter Coleman that he declined to make about other writers or publishers powerful enough to hurt his reputation. Walter Coleman, who had housed Chester regularly in the 1950s and ’60s and enabled him to retreat from Paris, wrote Chester that he was free to write whatever he liked, fiction or nonfiction, so long as he spelled his name right. “I’ve made a lot of enemies,” he told Chester, “but I’m still fucking with everybody.” Generously, Walter uplifted his older friend, regardless of his continuing to publish: “You have already made a big contribution to the human race.”
Chester tried to keep going. Raunchy Players magazine published five pages of his autobiography early in 1977, but by fall he would come to grips with the change of life, “sex doesn’t delight me anymore.”
That summer, he had feared illness would overtake him and that Jean, as his wife, would have legal right to his copyrights. He sued for divorce in a Paris court. Jean, living in Chicago and the well-regarded director of city recreation programs, and Chester became officially divorced on May 2, 1978. He and Lesley were married soon after. Chester remained depressed, mostly because of his ill health. Lesley wrote Joe that “his moral being is not so great and he feels very bad about not being able to do more around the house, studio, etc.” They decided to sell the house in Spain, and retire in either Brazil or the United States, where they might have medical care nearby and Chester could be more comfortable.
To do so, by early 1980, Chester and Lesley were hoping to settle in California and have a single-level house. They visited the Bay Area in the spring, and were regally treated by Ishmael Reed and others belonging to the Before Columbus Foundation. Chester had roughly $50,000 in savings, and with the combination of a strong sale of the Moraira house and a few royalties, he could relocate and live his final years in modest contentment. Joe would counter their dream by describing the situation in 1980, known for the resurgence of the right in American politics and vigorous race-baiting, as “things are a mess here and getting worse.”
That September Chester and Lesley seemed to have a buyer for their small villa, a British Petroleum consultant, who settled on a purchase price of £53,800. Then a global recession shocked the stock market, and the consultant backed out of the deal. The window on spending his final years in California closed firmly. Over seventy years old, Chester spent most of his time in bed now and labored to put on his clothes. He often used a wheelchair to get around, since he couldn’t walk farther than the living room. That had its own risks, as he learned one afternoon when they had car trouble and Lesley had set him up in the chair on the side of the road. The wheels turned and he tumbled onto the ground, although Chester smiled about the mishap when she helped him back into the chair. His doctors were really surprised he could maneuver himself at all. But most difficult of all, as Lesley wrote to Joe, “his memory is terrible.” Unable to attend even to correspondence, Chester found the idea of writing in his studio insufferable. Lesley felt the need to look into where he should be buried and proposed having him cremated and flown to Paris. “Depressing . . . but has to be thought of,” she wrote wearily to Joe.
The Before Columbus Foundation, Ishmael Reed’s brainchild, bestowed on Chester the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1982. Reed undoubtedly warmed Chester’s heart more than he could have known by informing him that the American director Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make a film of Lonely Crusade. Perhaps the novel awaited rediscovery by another generation. For Chester, the physical end was near. By 1983 he was totally bedridden and listless. Roz Targ visited and confirmed the inevitable: “It saddened me enormously to see Chester looking so wan but there is a certain look in his eyes which shows his indomitable spirit.” Joe wrote his younger brother in August 1984, asking whether Chester wanted to send his papers to the place that Joe had made arrangements for his own documents of a professional life, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, where Lesley thoughtfully agreed to deposit them. Lesley’s friends, however, commented on the hurtful and bitter remarks that she had begun using as commonplaces, as she wore down under the strain of caretaking. While not perfect, Lesley had cared dutifully for Chester and she would continue to handle Chester’s literary affairs on her own for decades after his death. On Monday, November 13, 1984, Chester died in the early afternoon in Moraira, where he was buried.
As soon as he heard the news, John Williams wrote to Lesley with a sincere and heartfelt eulogy. He had refused to speak or write to Chester after the chiseling knives in My Life of Absurdity. As much as anyone, Williams had felt the contradictory generosity and wrath of Chester’s great gifts, his spirited realism from the bottom that defied fear and always cut hard enough to draw blood. But Williams saluted him appropriately: “When Chester was Chester I loved him.”