SOURCE: Himes, Chester, and Michel Fabre. “Chester Himes Direct.”¹ In Conversations with Chester Himes, edited by Fabre and Robert E. Jackson, pp. 125-42. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

[In the following interview, originally published in 1983 and translated from French by Fabre, Himes discusses topics such as the influence of his largely expatriate life on his writing, settings and themes in his stories, his interest in sexual psychology, and writers who have influenced his work.]

[Fabre]: When did you actually begin to write short stories? Did you begin when you started college, or only in the 1930s when you first began to be published?

[Himes]: No, I began writing short stories in the penitentiary. At first, it was a way of escaping from the environment I was living in, although I often wrote about the everyday experiences of the prisoners whose lives I shared.

In my early prison stories, I wrote about white characters. It made publication possible, or at least easier, in big magazines like Esquire. When I started writing in the U.S. in the early thirties, a black writer had a hard time getting published. For a long time no one realized that I was a Negro. I wrote about white men because their problems were the problems of convicts, no matter what color they were. They experienced the same emotions, whether they were black or white. I rendered the prison environment faithfully, something critics acknowledged years later.

Did you write exclusively about convicts?

No, I wrote a story about a football player, and another one about two detectives. It was only after I was released from prison that I started writing about other kinds of lives. You know, I didn't deliberately choose to write about Negro life. The war was a tremendous shock, psychologically, and its effect on combatants, civilians, even wives, became a theme for my stories.

In “Two Soldiers,” you show how the growth of a relationship between a black American and a white American results in a triumph of the spirit in the midst of battle.

Yes. I must confess it was a clumsy attempt at propaganda. But I needed the reconciliation between the two soldiers, even though it may've been too trite.

During the war, tragedy was an everyday experience, and the heightened emotions sometimes changed a person's feelings about things. The protagonist of “So Softly Smiling” wonders about the role Negroes might play in the war, about the possibility of national unity. The Negro ultimately realizes that his part is as important as that of a white American.

Was it to escape from the racial climate that you decided to move to Europe in 1953?

My desire to leave America probably resulted from a terrible humiliation I suffered in 1947. I had been invited to sign my novel, Lonely Crusade, and to be interviewed on the radio. At the last moment, everything was canceled without my being told. In this particular novel, I attempted to describe the constant, long-standing fear that lurks in the minds of American Negroes, along with the impact of Communism, of industrialization, of the war, of white women on black men, and the plight of black couples. There wasn't a single event in the story that hadn't actually happened. My characters were real people, living in familiar situations, but no one liked that novel. I ran into a wall of hatred. I wasn't able to leave the country at once, but promised myself I would as soon as I had enough money—which took another six years. I finally sailed to Europe in 1953.

How did you manage to live in Europe?

I had to move about during the first couple of years, while working on The Primitive. I went back to New York City for a while, but couldn't remain there. I left for Paris again in 1956.

I started writing detective novels in Paris, and For Love of Imabelle was published there in 1957. These novels were later published in the U.S. My earlier work was sociological fiction, generally autobiographical. It was called “protest fiction” by the critics. I had only handled the detective genre in a few stories.

In your thrillers, the black characters seem surprisingly unaware of social and racial problems.

When I describe life in Harlem, the people live in poverty and moral misery, but retain a capacity to enjoy every moment. Most of the characters are petty criminals or victims, and many of them have only a hazy perception of the oppression they suffer, or any understanding of the link between racism and economic exploitation. Of course, all of this is part of the fabric of their lives, and they aren't thinking about it. They're far too busy surviving.

Yet this isn't the case in all your novels and stories.

There are some differences. My domestic novels rarely deal with racism explicitly, except Blind Man with a Pistol. These books are really about ghetto hustlers getting around the law to make a living. They show how you can beat the law in ghetto situations, and the solutions are pretty simple, even mathematical.

But the stories portray an increasing number of ordinary characters who appear alongside the criminals and detectives, and those characters help fashion a kind of human comedy, a picture of ghetto people and the circumstances of their lives.

There are many different characters in the short stories: a decent black couple in “One Night in New Jersey,” delinquents and murderers in the prison stories. Each one has his own emotional makeup, his own past, his own worries. At the same time, the action in a short story focuses upon a central consciousness.

The realism is mostly emotional, and what matters is how the evolution of a character within a situation makes him more violent because his environment is so unpredictable.

Do you think your personality changed because of your living in Europe?

Of course. Here a Negro becomes a human being. There's nothing grotesque about a black man meeting a white woman here. There's nothing unnatural about it. This isn't the case in the United States.

Racism became a big problem for me in 1940, when I found I was barred from most of the employment I could find. Segregation hadn't really affected me until then, but it became tangible. I felt I could actually see racism. It colored everything. My first wife was a beautiful black woman, but I was never able to provide the kind of life for her I wanted because we were only Negroes. We separated after fourteen years.

The stories you wrote around that time often deal with characters who have identity problems. I'm thinking particularly of “Dirty Deceivers.”

White society has always wanted black people to feel uncomfortable. There's nothing strange about a Negro whose features and color are close to the white man's trying to pass for white, even if it drives him insane. At the same time, Negroes used to living in constant fear have always found solace in drug addiction.

Has your living in France played an important role in your career?

Only to some extent. I was known in the United States before I left in 1953, and If He Hollers had sold well. But I remained a “Negro writer”; in other words something marginal in the mind of the public; a not quite respectable writer for reasons that had nothing to do with morals. The only Negro writer at the time who enjoyed any status as an “American writer” was Richard Wright. He was recognized as such, but I wasn't, nor were many others.

Later, my detective stories sold well in the United States, but they weren't considered important enough to be reviewed.

Don't you think this is a question of literary genre?

Possibly, but to be a black man, and a writer of detective fiction, amounted to a double handicap in America when I started writing in that genre.

Things have changed now. Detective fiction is being taught in universities. I was glad that Professor Edward Margolies wrote about my novels, along with those of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett [in Which Way Did He Go: The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross MacDonald. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982]. This is where they belong. Blacks are now treated equally with whites, just like detective fiction is being treated equally with so-called legitimate fiction. Dostoyevsky and Agatha Christie have each written about crime in their own ways.

You seem to enjoy writing about the most unbridled kind of violence in your thrillers. Don't you also like to depict thieves, quacks, con men, and such?

Of course I do. That's why there're so many black pimps, religious quacks, con men who deceive white people lusting for black bodies, and petty thieves in my Harlem novels. Especially in For Love of Imabelle and Back to Africa [Cotton Comes to Harlem]. I deal with religious charlatans, fake sisters of mercy, nuns in disguise, with the lost souls who join the Muslims or the supporters of Daddy Grace and Father Divine. Charlatans are found mostly in religion, or in the pseudo-political “Back to Africa” movements.

Did you live in Harlem for very long?

No, I didn't. Only a few months at a time. Just long enough to absorb its atmosphere, although it keeps changing, mostly in terms of fashion, slang, and what is or isn't hip.

I've sometimes been reproached for providing an exaggerated picture, revelling in the depiction of cults and con men, for instance. You only have to go there to realize that reality is often stranger than fiction. At any rate, I don't try to paint an exaggerated, exotic picture.

I really became familiar with the Harlem underworld in the midfifties, when I was broke and alone in New York City. I got to know its geography, its secret places. What I learned about the black bourgeoisie, I learned in the forties when I was staying with cousins of mine, whose lifestyle I depicted in Pinktoes.

I put the slang, the daily routine, and complex human relationships of Harlem into my detective novels, which I prefer to call “domestic novels” for that reason. This is a world of pimps and prostitutes who don't worry about racism, injustice, or social equality. They're just concerned with survival. It may have been because my head was buzzing with so many problems that I enjoyed their company so much.

Did you write at all when you were living in Harlem?

No, I don't remember what I did. I was really staying at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village, not residing in Harlem.

Have you written most of your work outside the United States?

A lot. I kept writing wherever I was staying because I had to publish in order to survive after I left the United States. I began “Spanish Gin” in a little Spanish fishing harbor called Puerto Pollensa, on the island of Mallorca where I lived in the fifties. At the time, I drank heavily, and this may explain the madness of that weird, fantastic story. I've even written in Mexico. I revised Back to Africa in the little village of Sisal, where the natives were still living much as they had three centuries ago. There were no comforts there, except a single telephone, and not a single automobile in the village.

I am surprised you're so concerned with comfort.

Nowadays, at my ripe age, I need some comfort, or what everyone else in Europe considers indispensable: electricity, heating, running water, a clean house.

Did you really stop writing after the second volume of your autobiography?

Yes, for all practical purposes. Because of my health.

Do you usually write a story a long time after the incidents or events which inspired it, or do you make use of recent occurrences in your life?

In the fifties, I wrote quickly to make a living, and any topic or theme was fair game. I wrote three stories, “The Snake,” “A Night in New Jersey,” and “Spanish Gin” during that time, and only the last one was based on recent events. The other two were based on events that had taken place in the mid-forties.

When is writing the easiest for you?

It's hard to tell. Sometimes I write with greater ease because I'm boiling with outrage at something. Writing helps me to settle accounts at times like that. Other times I write best when I'm most hard-pressed, when I have to make money quickly. That's the way I wrote the first five detective novels for Série noire. What I was writing seemed to mirror my mood. I was continually looking for a place I could call home, and a kind of life that would suit me. When I found the right place, and some happiness, as I did in the sixties near Aixen-Provence, I found it more difficult to write for some reason.

What's your writing routine?

I like to get up early, have a big breakfast, and work at one stretch until it's time for lunch. If the mail is good, I generally go on with my writing. If it's bad, my mind is disturbed for the rest of the day. I have nearly always typed my manuscripts, without consulting any reference books or dictionaries. In my hotel room in Paris I only needed cigarettes, a bottle of scotch, and occasionally a good dish of meat and vegetables cooking on the burner behind me. Writing's always whetted my appetite.

How much realism do you put in your stories, and how much is imagination?

I hardly remember myself. I wouldn't be able to tell you whether such-and-such a character in my prison novel really existed, but I distinctly remember details, atmosphere, a railing and a gate, a street corner, a section of sky seen from a barred window, or the jingling of the warden's keys. It becomes blurred as the years go by. My characters are mostly composites. I borrow a detail here, a detail there, using a chance encounter or something that impressed me. For instance, in A Case of Rape, the black painter who walked the streets of Paris with a snow-white Borzoi dog is real, as is the same man painting his hotel room white, except for black footprints reaching up to the ceiling. He was called Bertel.

Did you imagine the bizarre episodes of “Spanish Gin”?

This story seems utterly fantastic and crazy, but it had its origin in a party that actually took place in Puerto de Pollensa in 1955. Willa and I had been invited by a homosexual couple, who lived in a superb villa with a terrace overlooking the bay. Bob was born to a wealthy Boston family, and Mog was a fair-haired German boy, a fitting aryan type, whose opinions had caused him to be fired from his job at the U.S. Embassy, where he was teaching literature. We were at the end of a long literary discussion which had just turned sour. I went out to the restroom, and upon my return I found Bob lying on the floor. Mog had accused him of flirting with Willa, and had knocked him out. Of course, we'd been drinking a lot of Tom Collinses with cheap Spanish gin. So much so I passed out myself, for part of the afternoon.

Then we tried to play Monopoly. By nightfall, I became totally engrossed in the bosom of a guest who was feeding our host's cat caviar, while Willa cast angry glances at me. Things didn't go any further because Willa and I went back to our place, soused and wet because we accidentally walked into the ocean.

I don't know why I decided to cook kidneys in the kitchen when we came home. I was doing this when I heard a great crash in the bathroom. I found Willa lying on the tile floor. She'd broken her collarbone and, as she fell, hit her temple on the bathtub. She was so drunk that she'd tried to step out of her dress and her foot had gotten caught in it. She had a black eye for a long time, and people thought I'd hit her. We were so drunk, and it was all so crazy, that I didn't have to exaggerate much to create an utterly crazy story.

What about your prison stories?

Just open Cast the First Stone and you'll realize what kind of material I found in the penitentiary. This is one of my most autobiographical novels, although the publishers cut a lot out of it. But most of the events I used happened to the tough guys I found in jail, rather than to myself.

Did you live in the South for a long time? You describe it well in “The Snake.”

That story isn't set in the South. I explain in my autobiography how I spent a couple of months on a ranch belonging to my brother-in-law in California near the Nevada border. I was then working on Lonely Crusade. The ranch had little in the way of comforts, and the area was almost deserted. We had to fight an invasion of rats first, and then rattlesnakes came out in the spring. I shot the first one as it came across the yard.

A neighbor told me that we had to burn its body, otherwise the female would come in search of her mate, so I did. That very evening another snake came by, and it crept beneath Jean's naked legs as she was resting in the hammock. It seemed to me that it took forever to crawl by. I struck it with a spade as it was reaching the tool shed. It stood up and bit the handle with such violence that it made a dent in it and broke a fang. I struck it dead, hitting like mad, cutting it into small fragments. Later I shot half a dozen other snakes. From then on, every time we left the house, I felt compelled to search it for fear a snake would be in there.

Has actual experience ever matched the power of your imagination?

One particular case is the fire that destroyed part of the Ohio penitentiary and claimed 360 victims. I used it as the basis for “To What Red Hell.”

The only other case I remember concerns a character in the story, “Strictly Business.” My hero was a gangster, a tall, blonde bodyguard of Swedish origin. I met him when I was looking for work in the 1940s, and asked Frank Bucino, a little one-eyed Italian, for work. He always went around with this tall, blonde, Swede bodyguard.

Bucino had transformed a training camp for the German American Bund into a summer camp, with cottages and trailers. My wife and I worked there, and we lived in the old Bund tavern, on the first floor, with three dogs. We had a Mack truck that I drove at breakneck speed. I wrote about all this in the story, “A Night in New Jersey.”

Which is your favorite character, among all you've created?

It's certainly Jesse Robinson, in The Primitive. I put a lot of myself into him. I probably said everything I wanted to say in that novel, but it caused a great deal of trouble between me and the publisher. I had to intervene repeatedly with my editors to restore things they'd cut out. They found the novel too daring, too risky, too obscene, and cut quite a bit out of it without my permission. The French translation is closer to the original because Yves Malartic made it from the original typescript.

What did you attempt to prove in The Primitive?

This was an attempt, and I believe a successful one, to depict the repressive influences in our time, and our attempt to reconcile the community values of Christian religion with the economic ethics of capitalism. We cling to moral conceptions that don't fit the circumstances of our lives.

It was the same in France a hundred years ago. Zola's Nana said more, in my opinion, about the sexual frustration and impotence of the ruling class in France, than about the desires of a prostitute. Zola was dealing with the national stupidity of his time.

In The Primitive, I put a sexually-frustrated American woman and a racially-frustrated black American male together for a weekend in a New York apartment, and allowed them to soak in American bourbon. I got the result I was looking for: a nightmare of drunkenness, unbridled sexuality, and in the end, tragedy.

What I wanted to show is that American society has produced two radically new human types. One is the black American male. Although powerless and small in numbers, he can serve as a political catalyst. The other type, the white American woman, has developed into something beyond our imagination.

Why?

She's better educated, better off financially, and enjoys more freedom than women have at any other period in history. Yet she's the most unhappy, and sexually incomplete creature ever produced, because she isn't loved or cared for. In The Primitive, I exaggerated the situation slightly, and showed how modern woman is the victim of a dangerous delusion that every person of color is a primitive. In fact, the new Negro is a psychological hybrid, the result of the vulgar and depraved compulsions of our culture. The white woman doesn't appreciate how dangerous this has made him.

Your novels very often deal with the black man-white woman relationship. Is this a personal obsession?

I think this is related to one of Western culture's strongest themes. In our culture, the white male both places the white woman on a pedestal and victimizes her. Just the way the black man is victimized. This makes them natural allies. Their mutual attraction derives, in part, from a subconscious wish to break taboos. The black man, also wants to possess the white woman sexually as a form of revenge against his white oppressor. In spite of this, the black man is capable of giving the white woman a kind of love she can find nowhere else. This is what I attempted to show in A Case of Rape and The Primitive.

The Primitive is indeed one of the best depictions I know of sexual psychology.

I may have been a pioneer in this kind of exploration. Whether or not I wrote it as a personal catharsis is irrelevant. There's a lot of violence in this novel, and a frightening struggle between sexes and races, but I also incorporated tremendous compassion for the anguish these two characters suffer.

The novel shows a white woman's desperate quest for love among those she believes are primitives. She's looking for the kind of admiration that twentieth-century American culture denies her, but she fails to understand that the man she seeks it from is an extremely complex personality, which is why the affair ends so tragically.

Yes. Jesse Robinson can't help gradually coming to hate her. What do you hate most yourself?

Racism and what it has done to me. The paranoid delusion that I've been placed on earth simply to be the victim of humiliation.

Do you read many treatises on psychology, psychoanalysis, or sociology?

I never do that, nor do I suggest psychoanalytical motivations for the crimes committed in my domestic novels. The motives for crime are simple: money, fear, hatred, jealousy—motives I know from personal experience.

Does a life of crime ever appeal to you?

Real crime sickens me. I think criminals deserve to be punished.

Why are there so few female criminals in your novels?

I never really thought about it, but it's probably because I have a different image of women. I know there are real female murderers, but I don't like writing about violent women. There's only one female murderer in my detective novels, and that's Iris in Back to Africa [Cotton Comes to Harlem]. Billie only kills to help the detectives in For Love of Imabelle. There are women who experience violent emotions in my other books, such as Kriss in The Primitive, who'd like to kill Jesse, but none of these characters is what you'd think of as a professional killer.

What do you think of the political use of violence? Have you ever read Franz Fanon?

No, I never read him, but I was told he alluded to some of my work in his book, Black Skin, White Masks. I've often spoken about political violence, but I merely acknowledge that it exists, I don't tell people to go out and do it.

You know what I see out there in the real world? Instead of organizing a well-structured political movement capable of efficient action, the Black Panthers waste their time playing “cops and robbers.” And the American press, which likes nothing more than to titillate its readers with stories about crime, has undercut the Panthers' revolutionary potential. If the black masses ever thought that the Panthers might improve their lives, they know better now. The opportunists of both races are manipulating the Panthers for their own purposes.

Is that what you intended to show in Blind Man with a Pistol?

Yes, the Panthers, and other nationalist movements like the Black Muslims. I started another thriller, called Plan B, which is about a large-scale black rebellion led by a black subversive organization, but I didn't quite finish it. In it, the man who secretly sends weapons to blacks finds his plan wrecked because black people don't have the political maturity needed to band together into an effective force. Instead of waiting for an organization to form, each one of them begins shooting white people for his own personal reasons.

This is because of a lack of solidarity?

Yes, a lack of black solidarity.

When did you work on this novel?

In 1967, when I was living in the South of France and here in Alicante. It grew out of a story called “Tang,” but I became uncomfortable with it after a while, because the story became too exaggerated. I originally envisioned a general conflict between the races, but in the final scene Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, shoot at each other. One of them takes the side of his race brothers, while the other one chooses to uphold law and order, not because he feels any loyalty to whites, but because the political and social implications of the rebellion are too much for him.

Why did you kill them off? Was this a literary consideration, or did it reflect some ideological position?

Well, it shocked me to discover that I'd inadvertently ended the careers of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, because it amounted to a kind of literary suicide. Maybe this is the reason I couldn't complete the book, although I did write a synopsis for an ending. At the time, I had nearly completed all the books that my original contract with Duhamel called for, and I suppose I wanted to turn my attention to autobiographical writing.

Then I became fascinated by a story Phil Lomax told me about a blind man shooting a pistol in the subway. It sounded so completely absurd, a blind man killing people at random, or perhaps according to a choice governed by his blindness. That story resulted in Blind Man with a Pistol.

In which of your characters do you most see a reflection of yourself?

Personally, I never felt any attraction to violence. Besides, black violence against whites has never been as important as the American press pretends to believe. It was obvious to me that blacks had no chance in an armed confrontation, the odds being one to ten. It's through acting upon white guilt, and by knowing how far to carry their threats, that Negroes might achieve the greatest results.

Do you think there's any difference between the novels published by Gallimard in the Du Monde Entier series, and those published in the Série noire?

Marcel Duhamel asked me to write for the Série noire, but my previous novels had appeared in such prestigious series as Nadeau's Le Chemin de la vie with Corréa, and Feux croisés with Plon. Before that, Gallimard had accepted The Primitive for their Du Monde Entier series, although it is in many respects a crime novel. I liked that very much. In writing for Série noire, I was limited by a formula, but this didn't prevent me from saying whatever I wanted. At the same time, my “mainstream” novels are set in a world that is just as violent and obscene as the world of my domestic thrillers. It's the media, the press, the critics who decide how to categorize you. They're the ones who really define literature.

Have you ever had any trouble with the French media?

On several occasions, articles that dealt with my work or career, and that had already been planned for publication, didn't appear. One example is a Paris-Match interview done in 1958, and another is an article on Harlem that I had written at the request of Pierre Lazareff. It was turned down, but was later published in Présence Africaine. I gave Candide magazine a piece in which I compared racism in Algeria with racism in Alabama. Candide printed it, but French friends warned me about reprisals by the Organisation de l'armee secrete. I was worried for a while, but nothing happened.

You wrote somewhere “Writing had become my raison d'etre, something that couldn't be taken away from me. I had become a writer.” What is, in your opinion, the particular function of writing?

In the penitentiary, the simple fact of being able to write a story, to type it on the typewriter, gave a man a particular status. Other convicts respected you for it.

Writing was also a way to escape, because it meant connecting with the novelists I admired, like Dostoyevsky. I admired him, and found an affinity with what he did in The Brothers Karamazov. I became part of a peer group apart from that of convicts.

Which writers do you admire the most?

Among American writers, Faulkner comes first. Some of his less important novels display a terrific sense of humor. You might remember that The Reivers delighted me when you and John [A. Williams] brought it to me while I was in the hospital in April of 1963. Well, I think Faulkner is the greatest. I admire Hemingway's short stories, too.

You often spoke of Faulkner as the master.

I did. He was, to me, the greatest writer in the world until he died. I read all his early works, and it's the early Faulkner who influenced me most, together with Hammett. Sanctuary, Light in August, Mosquitoes—Faulkner can plumb the depths of a soul better than anyone else.

His portrayal of black people is also masterful. More than anyone else, he managed to define and express the mind of the South, both black or white. He was prone to exaggeration, but his picture of Negroes in the South is lively and acute, in spite of the fact that he's occasionally been accused of racism. My favorite book by Faulkner is Light in August, because it shows the absurdity of racism, and the confusion and suffering it causes.

Which American writers do you like nowadays?

You must realize that any educated black American is aware of different literary traditions than those you found in white schools, at least until recently. My mother had a good education, and she made a point of telling us about the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which we would recite at school. There were nineteenth-century figures like Frederick Douglass, and later, there was the poetry of Langston Hughes. His autobiography made you want to travel to Europe and Africa, and meet all kinds of people.

These books weren't best-sellers, however, and most of the successful books dealing with black people were written by whites, such as Sinclair Lewis or Margaret Mitchell.

What relationship have you had with black novelists?

I've known most of them over the years, like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and I've long been the friend of John A. Williams. His novels—The Man Who Cried I Am and Sissie especially—are excellent. His work is unknown in Europe, and much neglected in the United States. But those writers weren't my influences, they're my friends.

Yet you're sometimes impatient with them in your autobiography, and when you depict Wright in A Case of Rape.

That book is pure fiction. I didn't use Dick Wright or William Gardner Smith as characters, although I had them in mind when I created my characters. I know Dick believed he was Roger Garrison. He believed he was the only black American writer in the world, and that everyone was against him. It wasn't true.

I wrote A Case of Rape in order to show the prejudice and humiliation American blacks endured in France during the Algerian War, not to expose any antagonism that may have existed between black American writers and artists in France. I loved Dick more than you can imagine.

What about Richard Wright as a best seller?

Native Son rocked the nation like a bomb, like the great revolutionary novel it was. But Uncle Tom's Children had already given a remarkable picture of the living conditions of Negroes in the South.

You were a great admirer of Wright. Do you think you belong to the “Wright school” as has sometimes been claimed?

When you write about the same time as a great writer, and explore similar topics, critics tend to dump you into that same category. There was no school, no circle, but rather a friendly association. I greatly admire the writer in Wright. I didn't always agree with him, but he opened the way for us. He wrote in a strikingly original way.

In The Man Who Cried I Am, John A. Williams has written very accurately, I think, about the Wright who lived in Paris, grappling with complex problems and unethical people. I sometimes wonder why that novel has never been translated into French. I know very few contemporary American novelists, but I think Ishmael Reed is among the best that I have read.

Did you associate with black writers other than Wright in France?

There was a young man who wanted to make films, and who became a writer for that reason—Melvin Van Peebles. He adapted the text for the cartoon series Wolinski created from For Love of Imabelle in Hara-Kiri magazine. Van Peebles made good money from that. Since then, he's enjoyed considerable success with Sweet Sweet-back's Baaadasss Song and Don't Play Us Cheap.

Which novelists have made a strong or lasting impression on you?

Among those I'd mention detective story writers—but they are far more than that—such as Dashiell Hammett and Chandler. Also Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Flaubert. I also think of Zola's Germinal and The Soil. I've known French writers like Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Jean Giono, and the British writer, Robert Graves, who was my neighbor in Mallorca, but those were superficial acquaintanceships, rather than literary influences.

Now, Flaubert explores the French society of his century better than anyone else, including Balzac. He's fascinated by politics and violence, which may explain why I am attracted, not by his style alone, but by the attitudes he expresses.

Are you violent, or sensitive?

You can't have one without the other. The more sensitive you are, the more easily wounded you can be, and the more likely you are to burst into violence.

Have you got a strong sense of humor?

I'm not the one to answer that question. I think my readers have found a lot of humor in my detective novels, in my depiction of Harlem, and even in some of the dramatic scenes of The Primitive.

You need to make a distinction between caricature and humor. I don't think I'm a caricaturist. I provide the details of a scene or a character, and never exaggerate without a good reason for it. By rendering all the details of a scene, you can create a more balanced picture. Through exaggeration, you can sometimes reveal a reality not otherwise apparent, but you must use caution.

You've sometimes been called a “surrealist” writer. Do you think that's accurate?

I didn't become acquainted with that term until the fifties, and French friends had to explain it. I have no literary relationship with what is called the surrealist school. It just so happens that in the lives of black people, there are so many absurd situations, made that way by racism, that black life could sometimes be described as surrealistic. The best expression of surrealism by black people, themselves, is probably achieved by blues musicians.

What do you think of spirituals?

Blues, spirituals, jazz, is the music of my people, my people's greatest cultural contribution to civilization.

Are you still very fond of the blues?

At my age, music is one of the few pleasures left, as long as you retain some hearing. When I was a teenager, I was fond of black musical comedies in the theatres of Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. I remember hearing Ethel Waters sing in Running Wild. I remember singers whose voices were so sensuous, they were even more erotic than the naked bodies of dancers. I never cared much for classical music, but jazz is something else.

Could you mention the names of a few musicians you like?

Plenty of them. But some are no longer known today, like Budd Jenkins, whereas others have become legends, such as Louis Armstrong. Budd Jenkins is the one who made me love the trumpet. Also Buck Clayton and Cootie Williams. Duke Ellington even wrote a splendid “Concerto for Cootie.” Among sax players, Lester Young remains my favorite, even though I love Miles Davis, Roland Kirk, and the unforgettable Coltrane.

The musicians I've known personally always seemed to me to be exceptional characters, not in the sense of being gods, but ordinary men who had a talent that raised them up and doomed them at the same time. Most of them were ruined by drinking and drug addiction. Budd Powell was the heaviest drinker I've ever known. He was usually drunk when he played. He had to be in order to play the way he did.

What musicians' records have you bought recently?

No really recent ones. There's Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Pharaoh Sanders.

What about jazz singers?

There was Bessie Smith, the great Bessie. And Lady Day was a queen. Stubborn as a mule, completely indomitable, but with a lot of class. She was beautiful.

Have you ever been tempted by show business?

I loved it when I was a teenager, but writing got hold of me while I was in the penitentiary. It captivated me from the day I read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which was serialized in Black Mask magazine. He had an extraordinary gift for telling stories, while describing at the same time his milieu, and the corruption of American society.

What about your own autobiography? Do you see it as the message of a witness to our times?

The acclaim of The Quality of Hurt was one of the marks of my success with the American audience. When I went back to New York City in 1972, they gave receptions for me, and I was asked to speak on the radio and television with other writers. Since then, I've gone back to the West Coast, to the home of my friend Ishmael Reed. But I have sometimes lost contact with a lot of what is happening in the U.S. Not so much with political developments, but with everyday things that are always changing.

Which black autobiographies moved you the most?

Black Boy and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You know, Malcolm had read one of my novels as a young man. And I found Maya Angelou's autobiography [I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings] very moving. She's full of life and talent, and has a lively sense of language.

How do you feel about Regrets sans repentir, the condensed version of your memoirs in French translation?

I trust Yves [Malartic's] choice. He retained what was important to French readers. Of course, the French title doesn't correspond to the titles of the two American volumes. I originally conceived of my autobiography as a sort of chronicle, not as a work of art. I wanted to bear witness to my era, and about the way I looked at it.

The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity are very pessimistic titles, aren't they? Do you still feel the same way about your past?

I've known some hard times in my life. I worked at all kinds of jobs, spent a long time in jail, lived in many places. I've suffered, and my life has often been absurd. But I've also known joy and love, and, at last, I've begun to enjoy some celebrity. I have the satisfaction of having done what I wanted to do without compromise, although I often paid a high price for it. Now I am old and sick. I can see things in a different light, and the little things have really become unimportant.

Note

1. This is the English version of interviews Fabre made in the 1970s and published in French as a montage, “Chester Himes en direct …” in Hard-Boiled Dicks, Nos. 8-9 (December 1983), pp. 5-21. It included “Chester Himes: ‘J'écris, c'est ma couleur.’” (Les Nouvelles Littéraires, December 7, 1978, p. 8); material supplied to Michel Grisolia for his “Chester Himes: de la souffrance à l'absurdité” (L'Express, September 24, 1983, pp. 47-51); also interview material supplied to Jean-Paul Kaufmann for his “Chester Himes: la tentation de la violence” (Le Matin, October 27, 1993, pp. 26-27) and his “Chester Himes: Un nègre au paradis” (Le Matin, November 14, 1984). Copyright Michel Fabre. Printed with his permission.