SOURCE: Storhoff, Gary. “Slaying the Fathers: The Autobiography of Chester Himes.” a/b: Autobiography Studies 11, no. 1 (spring 1996): 38-55.

[In the following essay, Storhoff traces “Oedipal” themes in the two volumes of Himes's autobiography, noting that Himes repudiates not only his familial and literary “fathers” but also the traditional form of autobiography itself.]

In a crucial moment in The Quality of Hurt for the history of African-American literature, Chester Himes relates the famous argument between Richard Wright and James Baldwin about Baldwin's essay “Everybody's Protest Novel.” In the essay, Baldwin criticizes “protest literature,” implying that Wright's work is similar in intent to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Wright had his opportunity to retaliate when Baldwin, wishing to borrow money, asked Wright to meet him at a restaurant, and Wright requested Himes to accompany him. Unlike Baldwin, Himes recalled the event as rancorous.¹ The argument's climax occurs when Baldwin retorts to Wright, “The sons must slay their fathers”—meaning that Baldwin's Oedipal destiny was to write in opposition to his literary forbearers, especially Wright, so as to establish himself. Himes feigns incomprehension at Baldwin's parting riposte: “At the time I thought [Baldwin] had taken leave of his senses …” (Quality 201).

Himes's disingenuous comment is belied by his own entire lifetime of Oedipal revolt, both in his literature and his personal life. The Oedipal aggression Baldwin exposes describes Himes also; especially in his use of the autobiographical genre, Himes exhibits his aggression toward precursors, both literary and ancestral. The two volumes of his autobiography—The Quality of Hurt (1971) and My Life of Absurdity (1976)—reveal his life lived out in rebellion in which he imaginatively slays father figures that he confronts, either historically or literarily. The meaning of Himes's work emerges from constant and incessant repudiation of fathers, expressed not only literally and thematically against the “fathers” that appear throughout his autobiography, but formally against the autobiographical narrative itself.

Himes goes beyond assaulting parental surrogates in the plot; he so fundamentally disrupts the autobiographical form in plot, theme, and action that the reader's expectations are undermined. The white (or black) reader coming to Himes's autobiography expecting a meditation on Himes's “African-American experience” will be profoundly disappointed. Of course, Himes ferociously indicts racism, as do other African-American autobiographers; however, the emphasis of his work is rather on his own aggressiveness toward those who attempt, from his perspective, to control him. The Oedipal rebellion, which David Dudley sees as a component of all male African-American autobiographies, cuts across every dimension of Himes's life and work, dictating life choices, racial politics, and narrative design.² Himes's autobiography thus constitutes an assault—on authority figures, on the autobiographical form itself, and by extension, on the (white/black) reader.

“THE PURE AND SIMPLE NECESSITY TO BEAT HIM TO THE TRIGGER”: HIMES AND MONOLITHIC MASCULINITY

Himes's vision of himself derives from a childhood and young adulthood during which he was socialized toward violence, when he was taught that violence is an appropriate, even necessary, means of dealing with disagreement and disobedience. Himes seeks what Leland S. Person in a much different context terms “a monolithic masculinity” (516)³—a one-dimensional, overly simplified social construction of manhood that stresses brutality, dominance, and conflict. In the autobiography, Himes shows that his childhood was marked by his evolving conviction that violence was essential to maintain manhood. Born in 1909 in a middle-class family that lived in the South and in Ohio, Himes witnessed incessant conflict between his father and mother that quickly escalated into mutual spousal abuse. Although his two brothers become successful (Joseph becomes an internationally known sociologist; Edward, a union leader), Chester turns to crime in his adolescence. He chooses the role of gang-leader, writing that his most important goal was “the pure and simple necessity to beat [anyone] to the trigger” (Quality 41). At nineteen, he commits armed robbery in a suburban Cleveland home; captured, he serves over seven years for armed robbery at the Ohio State Penitentiary and is paroled in 1936.

Himes's career as a writer brings him personal satisfaction and monetary reward in the celebration of violence. He begins his career as a writer in prison, describing in his short stories the brutality of prisoners and the horror of the 1930 fire at the penitentiary in “To What Red Hell” (1935). Meeting with critical rejection of his subsequent work, he decides to expatriate to Paris in 1953, never to return to America. In 1956, Himes meets Marcel Duhamel, who convinces him (with a ＄1,000 advance) to write a detective story; his nine detective novels, beginning with A Rage in Harlem (1957), feature graphic violence commensurate with his own rebellion: “I was writing some strange shit. … [M]y mind had rejected all reality as I had known it and I had begun to see the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought” (Life 126).

The choice of violence as a life pattern emerges as his revolt both against his mother and his father. His dark-skinned father, Joseph Himes, was a professor of mechanical arts at various Southern “Negro A & M Colleges” (Quality 4); as Himes grew older, he felt increasingly contemptuous of his father's servility before whites. He disposes of his father precipitously, primarily because his father is submissive in his response to white racism. By putting the words of Booker T. Washington in his father's mouth, Himes economically but cynically characterizes his father's racial accommodationism: “As a child I often heard my father quote the famous saying of the great educator: ‘Let down your buckets where you are’” (Quality 4). The minimal reference to his father implies Himes's refusal to identify with a textualized castrated father.

His light-skinned mother, Esther Bomar Himes, threatens whites with a loaded pistol (like Chester himself), one of his earliest childhood memories (Quality 8). It is her incipient violence against white racism that most clearly anticipates Himes's own.⁴ But his mother's own internalized racism complicates his identification with her: light-skinned, he is continuously taught by his mother to despise the prominently African features of his father and of his father's family. Mrs. Himes instills her own aggressions against the white power structure and Africanist features.⁵ To identify with her would risk his masculinity; to repudiate her would compromise his racial identity.

His relationship with her is further complicated by her identification with unreasoning authority. At a critical moment in Himes's youth, Mrs. Himes becomes the symbol of absurdist persecution and punishment that he will inevitably rebel against. This formative incident occurs when Himes was thirteen, when Chester and Joseph follow through on Chester's idea of making torpedo bombs as a chemistry experiment. Mrs. Himes, punishing Chester for minor disobedience, forbids him to assist Joseph, though Chester's help is essential. Joseph, alone on a stage conducting the experiment, is blinded in an unexpected explosion, which presumably Chester's involvement would have prevented, when ground glass particles blast into his eyes. When he finally receives treatment after being turned away from white hospitals, he has lost his vision permanently. From Chester's perspective, his mother's punishment precipitated both Joseph's tragedy and Chester's guilt. The theme that will later shape Himes's detective fiction and autobiography—the absurdity of arbitrarily harsh punishment, which will inevitably have horrifying consequences for the victim and the persecutor—originates in his relationship with his mother and her punishment and its unforeseen consequences to innocent people. His mother's punishment resulted in Joseph's suffering and his own guilt; he will mete out his own punishment of his mother to the women who come into his life. Yet mixed with his desire to inflict pain and suffering on the mother-substitute is his devotion to his mother despite his repudiation of her: “I loved my mother with a strange fierce love which survived everything” (Quality 22).

“COMPLEX, INTRIGUING, AND NOT PARTICULARLY LIKEABLE”: HIMES'S TREATMENT OF WOMEN

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Himes's autobiography is his frank description of his mistreatment of women.⁶ In his abuse of women, he is, in his own words, “complex, intriguing, and not particularly likeable” (Quality 285). Himes documents his abuse intimately throughout the two volumes of his autobiography, each of which was intended to revolve around his relationship with a woman.⁷ In his affairs, he seems to test the boundaries of the black masculine roles that are made available to him by a racist society; thus, from this perspective, his brutality toward women stems from his overconformity to a masculine code of toughness,⁸ and to his unquestioning acceptance of a social construction of masculinity that enshrines the strong, autonomous, violent male. The women in his autobiography act as witnesses to (and recipients of) his ritualistic male gestures of manhood. Yet Himes, perhaps unwittingly, dramatizes the precarious nature of his violent assertions of male identity. The consequences of his objectifying women in his work turn against him, and the effect of his quest for monolithic masculinity is the alienation of his first wife, his subsequent lovers, and many of his friends. Himes's sexual life inevitably leads him into conflicts, not only with Richard Wright and other black expatriates, who (according to the autobiography) refuse to accept Himes's lovers, but with racists he continuously encounters in Europe.⁹

His sexuality becomes a weapon for him to punish women but also to expect (and perhaps welcome) punitive responses from them. His tumultuous relationships with women reveal Himes's own will to control and dominate, his own need to fulfill a code of brutal masculinity, but also his need to experience abuse and punishment in return. His typical attraction to neurotic, depressive women, in unconscious rebellion against his strong mother who plays the patriarch's role in his childhood, ironically brings him much unhappiness—women who are viciously abused and controlled by him, but who exact some emotional revenge by clinging to him unmercifully.

Himes's choices in women continually seem to invite reprisals—not only from his society, but from the women themselves.¹⁰ The most brutalized of his white lovers is Marlene Behrens (Regine Fischer), a German actress half his age whose story constitutes the first sections of Himes's second volume, My Life of Absurdity. Behrens suffers terrible beatings from Himes, he admits, and she lands in the hospital from one incident of battering (these attacks were not isolated), yet he nevertheless depicts her as controlling him, as himself as her pawn: “‘You're going to make me hurt you some day,’ she said” (Life 60). He senses a threat in her presence: “Marlene was entirely capable of destroying me if she didn't have her way” (Life 195). In blaming his victim, Himes intentionally inscribes the most violent form of sexism in their limited relationship: “The final answer of any black to a white woman with whom he lives in a white society is violence” (Quality 137). Behrens and Himes's relationship evolves quickly into a mutually destructive affair; despite his abuse of her, he acts as her rescuer, helping her through her many neurotic periods, but Marlene apparently accepts her role as victim adroitly.

Himes's attempt to force the relationship's end is associated in his autobiography with a struggle against a father figure. In a biographical article, Michel Fabre shows that by 1960, Himes was deeply involved with a new lover, his wife-to-be, Lesley Packard (223-8), and that he wished the relationship over. In his autobiography, however, Himes contrives the ending of his relationship with Behrens over a quarrel with her father who demands of Himes that he “act humanely” (Life 199-200). When confronted with an ostensibly reasonable and equitable father who encourages Himes to identify with him “as a man of [his] generation,” Himes refuses to be manipulated by a father surrogate. Himes is willing to accept Mr. Behren's identification with him only in his own terms: “You've never been kind to her. Neither have I” (Life 200). In the narrative, then, a bitter and angry conflict with the father rescues not only the daughter, but the fictive “son” from a destructive love affair.

The Behrens affair seems to solidify in Himes's imagination the trap posed not only by the white world, but by his own Oedipal rages. In an attempt to exert maximum control over a woman, he loses control of himself completely: “I was her slave because she was helpless” (Life 199). His statements about his own culpability are evasive; rather than confront his own explosive rage honestly, he associates his violence against her with the existential “truth” he learned during his incarceration at Ohio State Penitentiary—that “anyone could do anything” (Quality 65). But if the world was essentially out of control, he too was implicated in this confusion of passions: against the best advice of his friends, her parents, and of his own vague intuition, he had involved himself in a relationship with Behrens that could have been fatal to his artistic career, if not his life. Not only was Behrens in great danger, but so was he. Unwilling to acknowledge his guilt in his vicious treatment of her but also unconscious of why he needed Behrens, he evades the intimate realities of their violent relationship and of the abuse he meted out to her consistently to assert a general, anonymously absurdist conclusion about humanity: “All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting” (Life 126).

Himes's involvement with women in his autobiography was intricately connected with his Oedipal resistance, a coded “slaying” of his mother, whose obsession with skin color and arbitrary punishment required, in his own mind, violent retribution through surrogate lovers he chose. Unlike his father, who married a light-skinned African American who revered white skin, Himes chooses white lovers curious about his black skin and then makes them suffer for choosing him. Like a literary character Himes knew well—Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas—Himes repudiates the image of the father by attacking women.

“ONE BLACK AT A TIME”: HIMES AND RICHARD WRIGHT

Himes's compulsion to attack father surrogates extends to his own literary father, Richard Wright himself. David Dudley, who ignores Himes in his recent discussion of African-American autobiography, argues that repudiation of the male predecessor is a primary component of the black male autobiographical tradition: his purpose is to “identify among these writers a kind of Oedipal conflict wherein each rising writer faces and overcomes his predecessor in the tradition” (1). Beyond tradition, Fabre implies that Himes's repudiation of Wright is caused by Himes's envy: “Was Himes resentful of Wright's success and security?” (219). However, envy in this case is complicated by Himes's grim understanding of the economics of publishing, which may overlook him in favor of an established writer: “The powers that be have never admitted but one black at a time into the arena of fame, and to gain this coveted admission, the young writer must unseat the reigning deity. It's a pity, but a reality as well” (Quality 201). Perhaps too, Himes saw in Wright's Native Son a reflection of his own inclination toward violence, especially violence directed toward white women. Bigger Thomas is the most famous literary depiction of a black man abusing women, white and black. His rejection of Wright may stem from that fact that he sensed Wright understood his own compulsions to strike out against surrogates of parenthood all too well.

Himes's rage against Wright is consistent with his repudiation of all authority figures. He met the ultimate father figure in his benefactor, mentor, and literary paterfamilias, Richard Wright. The surprisingly few comments he makes about Wright—who assisted him in his passage to Europe, welcomed him in Paris once he arrived, arranged for his hotel accommodations, lent him money and supplies, supported his work both personally and in published reviews, and introduced him to friends, agents, and publishers—are for the most part unflattering, if not flatly disparaging.¹¹

In the narrative, it is clear that Himes constructs Wright as his own foil. Where the more famous Wright sacrifices integrity for even greater fame, Himes self-consciously chooses the role of the alienated, African-American artist. He makes Wright at least partially responsible, however, for Himes's own alienation. He writes that he frankly “had never liked Dick since early 1957 when he had told [Himes] he had organized the Paris Club, an organization of brothers, and barred [Himes] from joining” (Life 215). Himes asserts that what he found most deplorable in Wright was his adaptation to a “white,” middle class life, one which violated Himes's sense of Wright's inner self:

In trying to effect his departure from America and its way of life, Dick had become more of an American than he had ever been. But, whereas in the U.S. he could not escape his image of a Black Boy, in Paris he was a rich man. And he enjoyed being a rich man, he loved the bourgeois life. But he wasn't adapted to the bourgeois life. From beginning to end, deep in his soul, Dick identified with the poor and the oppressed. He was a natural-born leftist …

(Life 8)

The passage creates a stunning contrast of temperaments: whereas Himes has the courage of his own convictions and lives in poverty, Wright chooses affluence and surrenders his identity; whereas Himes stoically bears the existential condition of his own absurdity, Wright craves “authority … he was rootless without an absolute” (Life 8); whereas Himes fulfills in his career and in his personal life the social construction of masculinity, Wright can never escape the “image of a Black Boy.” Himes's derogation of Wright's masculinity reinforces the seriousness of Himes's commitment to the masculine mystique, but this ideology cuts him off from the potentiality of Wright's friendship, offered many times throughout their association in the autobiography. Himes portrays Wright's efforts at friendship as intimidating, threatening his own sense of sexuality that must be bolstered with Himes's aggressiveness.

Himes's repudiation of Wright centers on his repugnance of Wright's own sexuality, and on Himes's own insecurity about his readers' reading of Himes's masculinity. Unable to develop a relationship with Wright that is intimate but free of his own anxieties about possible homosexual implications, he persistently projects his concerns onto observers and his reader. He is especially apprehensive, for instance, that homophobic friends in Paris do not misconstrue his relationship with Wright and his wife Ellen: “[T]he residents in the hotel began to wonder what sort of arrangement we had—were Dick and I lovers, or Ellen and me, or did they take turns with me?” (Quality 188). For Himes, Wright's genuine interest in Himes and his work cannot be untainted by sexual drives. According to Himes, Wright constantly intrudes into Himes's love affairs, but Himes sees Wright's concern only as a vicarious lasciviousness and perhaps evidence of Wright's own latent homosexuality, as when Wright jokes about Himes's “secret weapon,” or when he describes Wright's onanistic fascination with two lesbians: “He had a sharp curiosity about the sexual behavior of odd couples, lesbians, and prostitutes. … He was greatly stimulated by these encounters [with lesbians], and after a moment rushed away to write or to indulge in whatever else he had in mind” (Quality 196).

The main purpose of Himes's own construction of Wright's gender is to fashion Himes's redoubtable masculine identity by contrast. The more powerful, famous, and wealthy Wright is deployed by Himes to dramatize weakness and impotency in comparison with Himes's own virility. Once again, Himes constructs Wright as his complement—where Himes is virile, Wright is voyeuristic; while Himes's masculinity seems controlled, Wright can barely conceal his burning but passive lust; as Himes enjoys his sexual liberty, Wright seems to chafe within his monogamous but (from Himes's perspective) frustratingly bourgeois marriage. Because Himes cannot imagine a friendship with Wright, he forecloses possible friendship and intimacy.

Perhaps the most violent repudiation of Wright that Himes could contrive within the autobiography is the rejection of Wright as a literary mentor, in favor of William Faulkner, Himes's “secret mentor” (Life 169). Himes writes, “I had no desire to write like Dick: Faulkner had the utter influence over my writing” (217). Faulkner, Himes claimed, had a clear sense of life's absurdity, and therefore Faulkner was far closer to Himes's vision of a tormented world than Wright, who seemingly was unable to detach himself emotionally from his own characters. Racial coding in Faulkner's characters paradoxically makes Faulkner seem artistically closer to Himes. The character of Joe Christmas, in one of Himes's favorite books, led Himes to an emotional identification with Faulkner, who, he conjectured, understood the absurd situation of African Americans better than Wright himself:

I read Faulkner's Sanctuary and Light in August; I would crack up reading how the old white Southerner would taunt his grandson by telling him, “You're a nigger, you're a nigger. …” I would feel like running through the street crying “I'm a nigger, I'm a nigger. …” It was lunacy.

(Life 179)

In this context, beyond the obvious privileging of the white author over Himes's direct black antecedent, one must recall Faulkner's well-known criticism of Wright and of African-American literature, made in Japan in 1955: Wright, said Faulkner, “had a great deal of talent,” but

[h]e wrote one good book and then he went astray, he got too concerned in the difference between the Negro man and the white man and he stopped being a writer and became a Negro. … Another one named Ellison has talent and so far he has managed to stay away from being first a Negro, he is still first a writer.

(185)

Himes's argument for Faulkner's preeminence is contextualized by the respect accorded to Faulkner during the 1960s and 1970s, as opposed to the dismissive attitude toward Wright's work. Himes takes sides against Wright in a critical debate that situated Wright as a distinct inferior, particularly among white literary critics. William Andrews summarizes the segregated nature of literary criticism during this time regarding Faulkner and Wright: “In Faulkner's shadow lurked Richard Wright, but Wright's perspective … was judged parochial next to Faulkner's much-vaunted universality” (1).

Beyond his personal derogation and repudiation of a literary nexus, Himes's autobiography could be read as an encoded “slaying” of Wright's Black Boy and American Hunger—Himes's “signifyin(g)” of Wright, to use H. L. Gates's term to describe intertextual competition among African-American writers (290). More indirect than James Baldwin's distancing from Wright, Himes subverts many of Wright's most essential themes in Wright's autobiography. The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity—in their contemptuous rejection of Wright's political vision and in Himes's insistence upon his own sexuality—could be interpreted as an implicit repudiation of Wright's own politicized (and almost asexual) autobiography, Black Boy (1945). More important, Himes eschews the “hopeful ending” of Wright's autobiography that, as Janice Thaddeus has pointed out, was imposed on Black Boy by Wright's publishers.¹² If Wright (as Thaddeus argues) at first intended to write an “open” autobiography but failed because of the pressure of his editors, Himes pointedly refuses to conclude his autobiography on “a note of triumph.” Unlike Wright's text, Himes's autobiography insists on a world of deprivation, unrelieved oppression, barely controlled rage, and rebellion—in Himes's favorite word, an unrelenting experience of racial “absurdity.” By creating an autobiography that essentially denies the world Wright depicted in his autobiography, Himes's “slaying” of his literary forbearer transcends the merely personal.

THE “SERIOUS SAVAGE”: HIMES AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FORM

Himes's repudiation of the formal expectations of the autobiography go beyond his personal relationship with Richard Wright and his intertextual combat with Wright's autobiography. This rejection extends to the conventions of the autobiographical form itself. Although some disagreement exists as to the nature of the genre, surely the controlling expectation a reader brings to an autobiography is that a completed identity will be expressed in the narrative—a rounded, thoroughly known self, encapsulated in the past tense, that the author has meditated upon. In a seminal essay on the genre of autobiography, Georges Gusdorf writes, “Autobiography … requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time” (35). Roy Pascal argues that this quest for “special unity” is an almost formulaic feature of the genre: it “imposes a pattern on a life, constructs out of it a coherent story” (9). The autobiographer's retrospection and his or her faith in the language to construct a self, should lead to a rounded narrative with a strong sense of closure. Ross Miller writes, “The pose of the autobiographer as an experienced man is particularly effective because we expect to hear from someone who has a completed sense of his own life and is therefore in a position to tell what he has discovered” (231). In a much more dramatic tone, Roger Rosenblatt writes that “Every autobiography is an extended suicide note; both announcement and vindication of the event. The life recorded is the life complete to a specific point, and is therefore as good as dead” (178). Though the life is not ended, the reader expects the autobiographer's Aristotelian curve: a plot with a beginning, middle, and definite end; a closed narrative that relates a conceptualized “meaning” that summarizes the writer's existence.¹³

But Himes resists a reader's attempt to enfold his life within these generic criteria. He deliberately fills his autobiography with trivia to deflect the reader from other, more serious considerations that would lead to an inference of completed meaning of the self. He is especially concerned in overturning a reader's possibly complacent sense of realism in the autobiographical genre. It is as if Himes intends the reader to sense the comic absurdity of a scrupulous concern for accurate representation, given the racist system an African American must confront. For example, he gives the addresses of acquaintances, and then explains that they died or moved (e.g., Life 253, 388). The reader learns of bad restaurants (Life 319, 370, 387; Quality 219), the menu at a much better restaurant (Life 335), the illnesses of his cat (Life 301-5), his neighbors' obnoxious pets (Quality 321), and the misbehavior of his dog Mikey. He goes into inordinate detail about the various pets he owned, even dedicating My Life to his wife “and our cat, DEROS.”

He similarly subverts the conventional inclusion of photographs in an autobiography; photography in an autobiography is supposedly a stringently realistic text, to be “read” just as the literary text itself is interpreted. Himes, however, includes photos that deny an easy assumption that life can be captured in a photo. Several of his photos (ones of his mother and of himself) are full-faced. But other photos humorously taunt the reader attempting to discover Himes. His dog Mikey, for example, is fully featured in two pictures, and two other dogs appear in two other pictures. Four pictures (one a single photo) feature his pet cats, although DEROS does not appear. Two photos depict Himes with his cars; one car is apparently malfunctioning while Himes (dressed in a suit) attempts to repair it. One of the few pictures portraying another African-American writer, Ralph Ellison, is taken from a great distance, so it is impossible to tell which figure he is in the photo.

Himes's playful evasiveness also colors his narrative. He goes into great detail about an automobile he purchased, telling its price, its malfunctioning, its repairs, etc. Knowing that he is violating the generic convention that only “important” material be included in an autobiography, Himes writes: “If one thinks I'm writing too much of my autobiography to my secondhand Volkswagon, that is the way it was” (Life 157)—toying with the reader's expectation of a realistic description of significant events—“that is the way it was.”

In a more conventional autobiography (e.g., Wright's), the tortured story of Himes's adolescence and childhood would be “justified” by an adult perspective characterized by a transcendent and unifying vision, acceptance, and integration. In the beginning of the narrative, Himes establishes these conventional generic expectations of autobiographer's sense of completion. That is, he seems to initiate on his first page (when he intimates his reasons for living in Paris) the generic structural movement from the utter chaos and invisibility of his childhood, adolescence, and imprisonment, to a retrospection in which he reassembles his life's fragmentation into a “special unity.” There were “many reasons” he left America, he tells the reader (Quality 3). But Himes comically upends the reader's expectations in the text's conclusion. He ends the first volume not with his self-vindication, his affirmation of an identity as an expatriate gained through suffering and meditation, but with a letter of apology to a friend for a bounced check that he had intentionally written. The bounced check, however, is a message in itself to the reader of his autobiography. Himes is ending his autobiography by defining himself as a trickster, engaging the world in its most significantly empirical form—money—and then misrepresenting himself and his situation. Furthermore, the deliberately bounced check is itself a literary text, a sign to be interpreted within the context of Himes's generic subversion.

Himes's refusal to play strictly by the genre's rules is emphasized especially in the second volume. Critics have conjectured that the “failure” of My Life is the effect of Himes's illness (he suffered from Parkinson's Disease), his progressively weakening eyesight, poor editing by publishers, or simply Himes's ineptness or artistic indifference. A reading more sympathetic to his oppositional stance leads to a realization that Himes's autobiographical decisions are deliberate and calculated. “Genres,” writes Frederic Jameson, “are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public” (106). Thus, when Himes intentionally violates the conventions of the form and averts in obvious ways the reader's most elementary expectations, he voids Jameson's sense of literary conventions as the “social contract.”

Comically overturning literary convention, moreover, implies his latent aggression towards his readership. Himes remarked in an interview with John A. Williams, “I want these people [his white readership] just to take me seriously. I don't care if they think I'm a barbarian, a savage, or what they think; just think I'm a serious savage” (314). Explicit in Himes's remark is a distrust, verging on hostility, of his readership; a vision of himself as an autobiographer that undermines the reader's complacencies about race and gender so that finally he or she begins to hear what he is trying to say. In The Quality of Hurt, Himes writes that he survived his prison experience only by rage: “I had such violent seizures of rage that I made men twice my size quake with fright. In my fits of insensate fury I would have smashed the world, crushed it in my hands, kicked down the universe” (62). He succeeds in channelling his rage into his literature: In My Life, he writes, “I had come to a final decision a long time ago when I was in prison that I was going to live as long as possible to aggravate the white race” (314). The aggravation he intends to inflict is produced in his manipulation of the autobiography genre, a commodity consumed by those readers eager for a considered “truth” about Himes's unique African-American experience. His “serious savagery” is subtly implied in his aggression against his reader, and his own sensibility leads him to wrench conventional forms.

How are we to assess his work? Himes is uninterested in the opportunity the genre offers to reveal his subjective experience and uncover the causal patterns of his life. For example, most of the critics who discuss Himes's autobiography are puzzled that Himes chooses to withhold from his reader why he began writing fiction in the first place.¹⁴ Just as Frederick Douglass neglects to narrate the details of his escape, Himes never explains why he chose to begin writing in prison. But such a personal revelation is irrelevant to his fundamental concerns. Himes is concerned mainly with interrogating the traditional autobiographical form of a completed, considered life. Himes challenges the authority of autobiographical conventions by refusing to comment on his most private decisions, and by “concluding” his narrative casually, with irresolution, with a sense that any presentation of a self is only provisional.¹⁵ To determine precisely what he does is to call into question the socio-political nature of reader-response literary analysis, especially since theorists are often indirect or evasive in treating how a (white, middle-class especially) reader confronts a text written by an African American, particularly a writer so long ignored as Himes has been.

Briefly, reader-response criticism examines the effects of a text on a reader, or on “interpretive communities.” In essence, the reader in this model is forced to engage with a text to shape its meaning himself or herself; no passive recipient of a predetermined meaning, the reader actively processes a text that is filled with gaps, erasures, and blanks, to construct a meaning that is his or her own. Aesthetic meaning emerges, then, from a process of interaction between the reader and the fissiparous text. The aesthetic object, which Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading identifies as the meaning of the text, varies “in accordance with the social and cultural code of each individual reader” (93).

The “social and cultural code,” however, remains problematic for a writer who chooses to reject traditional Euro-American autobiographical models. Robert B. Stepto has brilliantly called into question the reader-response approach offered by Iser, Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, and other theorists. Stepto has proposed that African-American writers, anticipating the skepticism or even hostility of their (white) readers, have been led to “create and refine … a discourse of distrust” (312). Stepto contends that an African-American author posits an unreliable reader who himself or herself must be assaulted:

In Afro-American storytelling texts especially, rhetoric and narrative strategy combine time and again to declare that the principal unreliable factor in the storytelling paradigm is the reader (white American readers, obviously, but blacks as well), and that acts of creative communication are fully initiated not when the text is assaulted but when the reader gets “told”—or “told off”—in such a way that he or she finally begins to hear. It is usually in this way that most written tales express their distrust not just of readers but of official literate culture in general.

(318)

This is precisely what Himes is accomplishing: he is using his autobiographies to disappoint and frustrate the reader, to “tell the reader off.” In challenging the formal shaping of the autobiography genre itself, Himes challenges the (white) literary establishment that endows an autobiography with meaning. He forces a re-examination of covert assumptions about literary forms. For an African American like Himes, Euro-American discourse and discursive structures have been used primarily to oppress. For Himes, racism functions in the subtlest expressions, the most obvious forms. The conventional autobiographical form—because it assumes closure, coherence, and meditative meaning—leaves Himes no space to speak with force and political power.

Himes does not merely ignore literary conventions. He defies them. He structures his work in patterns of violated expectations; he first asks us to read his text as an autobiography, but then deliberately leads us to question the critical conventions on which our readings are based. Thus, the fictive frame of his work is constantly being broken. Involuntarily, the reader of Himes's literature is led to see the consequences of racism in America in Himes's own rage—against his family, his colleagues, his women, and finally against his own readership. Describing one of his earlier books, Himes writes, “I had intended to write about the deadly venom of racial prejudice which kills both racists and their victims” (Quality 112). By “telling [the reader] off,” Himes keeps alive in the reader's imagination his struggle against racism.

There are, presumably, many reasons for the scholarly neglect of Chester Himes. The last thirty years of his life were spent in Paris although Himes never became the internationally known figure Richard Wright was. Himes's work, including the autobiographies, has gone in and out of print in part as a consequence of his tumultuous relationship with his agents and publishers. Himes himself had a theory about critical indifference to his work: he believed that the white publishing world rewarded only “one black at a time,” and he was eclipsed by the more famous Wright, and then by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Yet in reading the autobiographies, one senses that a major reason for Himes's neglect may be that he deliberately creates a very unappealing self-portrait, one that virtually assaults the reader. In his autobiography, he mocks his family, commits crimes, brutalizes his women companions, and betrays his wife, his friends, and his patrons. It is as if his own rage inspires his work. Himes's aggression cuts across literary precursors to life choices and narrative structures. At the heart of his aggression is his unrelieved Oedipal revolt.

Notes

1. For other discussions of this incident, see Chamey, Fabre 362-3, and Leeming 64-5. For Baldwin's account, see his essay “Alas, Poor Richard” (156-9). Baldwin remembers a rather cordial discussion with Wright.

2. Dudley's study of the male African-American autobiography develops two themes in seven writers: the Oedipal revolt against precursorial literary models and “a three-part pattern of bondage, flight, and freedom as the prevalent pattern of men's writing” (10). Although he does not discuss Himes, Dudley's model is useful in illuminating Himes's intertextual relationship with Wright's Black Boy. However, my study differs from Dudley's in my attempt to demonstrate Himes's Oedipal dynamic influencing both life and narrative. For a discussion of the Oedipal Complex in Himes's fiction, see Reckley.

3. Both Person and Brod argue that “masculinity” is as much a social construct as is “femininity.” As Brod writes in asserting the need for a systematic “men's studies,” “[t]he most general definition of men's studies is that it is the study of masculinities and male experiences as specific and varying social-historical-cultural formations” (40).

4. Himes's mother's propensity for gun-play is recounted dramatically in his autobiographical novel The Third Generation (1954), when “she took a small revolver from her purse and aimed it at the white man's back” (100). His own identification with his mother goes further: Chester carries his mother's name, Bomar, and explains that before he began his own autobiography, he reviewed her autobiographical sketches (Quality 121), though he did not use them.

5. Houston Baker, in his review of The Quality of Hurt, discovers an absence of “group consciousness” in the volume (90) and hypothesizes that an African-American reader, expecting African American solidarity, will be disappointed. Perhaps Himes's resistance to brotherhood begins with his tortured relationship with his mother's ambivalence to race, but the frustration that a black reader may experience is entirely deliberate.

6. A simplistic view of Himes's troubling behavior towards women would be that his violence is somehow “within him,” evidence of a possible personal disturbance to explain his battering. Himes himself implies this explanation, suggesting that he was an almost passive agent of his own violence: “I discovered I had become very violent” (Quality 47). Possibly abuse was linked to Himes's wish to demonstrate his masculinity, a cause of violence “more frequent than realized,” according to Davidson (37).

   A more complex view of his violence, however, considers his violent background, his learned response to stress while in prison, black powerlessness in society, and the patriarchal structure of his world. From this perspective, violence is generated not only by the individual, but finds its origin in the interactions of systems that enmesh the individual. Giles-Sims writes: “A general systems theory of family violence assumes that violence is the outcome of the complex social interaction within the family system which exists as part of a larger social system” (19).

7. Himes planned three volumes of his autobiography. Each volume was to revolve around his relationship with a woman. The last volume was to describe the relationship with his wife.

8. In this context, consult Russell on the concept of the “virility mystique.” See also Brod, esp. 51-3.

9. For a discussion of Himes within the context of the African-American expatriation to Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, see Margolies.

10. He meets the first lover, Alva Trent Van Olden Bameveldt (Willa Thompson), on the ship's passage across the Atlantic. While they live together, he completes his novel, The End of the Primitive; in a letter to his agent, he explains the inspiration Alva provides: “No, I have not killed Alva. I found I was able to do it with my imagination in creating the [novel's] murder scene. So she is still here” (Life 311). Although they collaborate on a novel, when it is rejected by publishers, she suffers a deep depression that makes life difficult for Himes; her departure for America is a relief for him.

    Another white lover, Vandi Haygood, is addicted to drugs and alcohol; in a mutually abusive relationship, the two finally split up never to see each other again. She eventually dies young, perhaps of an intentional overdose of barbiturates.

11. Fabre speculates that Himes's attacks on Wright spring from a thinly veiled envy: “But Himes felt estranged from the novelist who had made it [Wright]: … Was Himes resentful of Wright's success and security?” (219).

12. Thaddeus's thesis, that Wright was forced to submit a truncated ending to his autobiography in order to be published at all during the war years, exonerates Wright from the implication that he simply caved in to his editors. Though willing to accommodate with his publishers' requests, Wright had no clear idea of the kind of drastic changes that were to be made in his text's conclusion.

13. Olney also argues that the genre is self-consciously literary, even in earliest autobiographies (4).

14. For criticism of Himes's reticence about discussing his own motives for writing, see Hairston, Lederer, and Skeeter.

15. Cf. Werner: “[The] insistence on the continuity of the self … becomes a leitmotif in Afro-Modernist autobiographies” (211).

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. “Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, and the Problem of Authority in New South Writing.” Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 1-21.

———. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Rev. of The Quality of Hurt, by Chester Himes. Black World 21 (July 1972): 89-91.

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dell, 1961.

Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.

Brod, Harry. “The Case for Men's Studies.” The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies. Ed. Brod. Boston: Allen, 1987. 39-62.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1974.

Charney, Maurice. “James Baldwin's Quarrel with Richard Wright.” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 65-75.

Davidson, Terry. Conjugal Crime: Understanding and Changing the Wifebeating Pattern. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978.

Dudley, David L. My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.

Eakin, Paul John. “Malcolm X and the Limits of Autobiography.” Olney, Autobiography 181-93.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Faulkner, William. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. Eds. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968.

Franklin, H. Bruce. The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford UP, 1978.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Giles-Sims, Jean. Wife Battering: A Systems Theory Approach. New York: Guilford, 1983.

Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Trans. James Olney. Olney, Autobiography 28-47.

Hairston, Loyal. “Chester Himes—An Indigenous Exile.” Freedomways 12.2 (1972): 155-8.

Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years. New York: Paragon House, 1971, 1972.

———. My Life of Absurdity. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

———. The Third Generation. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1989.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Lederer, Norman. Rev. of The Quality of Hurt, by Chester Himes. America 15 April 1972: 408.

Margolies, Edward. “Experiences of the Black Expatriate Writer: Chester Himes.” CLA Journal 15 (June 1972): 421-7.

Milliken, Stephen F. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976.

Miller, Ross. “Autobiography as Fact and Fiction: Franklin, Adams, Malcolm X.” Centennial Review 16 (1972): 221-32.

Muller, Gilbert H. Chester Himes. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Olney, James. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” Olney, Autobiography 3-27.

———, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1980.

Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960.

Person, Leland S., Jr. “Henry James, George Sand, and the Suspension of Masculinity.” PMLA 106.3 (1991): 515-28.

Reckley, Ralph. “The Oedipal Complex and Interracial Conflict in Chester Himes' The Third Generation.” College Language Association Journal 21 (1977): 275-81.

Rosenblatt, Roger. “Black Autobiography: Life as the Death Weapon.” Olney, Autobiography 169-80.

Russell, Diana E. H. The Politics of Rape: The Victim's Perspective. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein and Day, 1975.

Skeeter, Sharyn J. Rev. of The Quality of Hurt, by Chester Himes.” Essence 3 (August 1972): 81.

Stepto, Robert B. “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives.” Reconstructing American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 300-22.

———. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.

Thaddeus, Janice. “The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright's Black Boy.” American Literature 57.2 (1985): 199-214.

Werner, Craig. “On the Ends of Afro-American ‘Modernist’ Autobiography.” Black American Literature Forum 24.2 (1990): 203-20.

Williams, John A. “My Man Himes: An Interview with Chester Himes.” Flashbacks: A Twenty-year Diary of Article Writing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.