SOURCE: Kelly, Jack. “‘I Thought I Was Writing Realism.’” American Legacy: Celebrating African-America History and Culture 6, no. 3 (fall 2000): 35-40.

[In the following essay, Kelly gives an overview of Himes's life and work.]

When the expatriate, ex-convict, and lifelong writer Chester Himes couldn't pay the rent with his “serious” novels, he turned up the volume and produced a series of scalding, darkly funny detective stories.

In 1956 Chester Himes was, he told a friend, “living on a prayer.” He had been writing for more than two decades with scant financial success. He owed back rent on his Paris apartment. He was forced to borrow money from friends even for stamps and cigarettes. Marcel Duhamel, an editor who had translated one of Himes's early works into French, suggested that he write a detective novel for La Serie Noire, a line of “policieres” issued by the prestigious Gallimard house. Himes protested that he didn't know how to write a detective story, but Duhamel talked him into giving it a try. “Get an idea,” he said. “Start with action … Make pictures. … Don't worry about it making sense.”

The forty-six-year-old Himes thought the assignment demeaning, a hustle required by his penury. Yet the violent, convoluted, hilarious, grotesque books about two Harlem detectives that he would create, including Cotton Comes to Harlem, would contain some of his best writing and make him famous.

Himes knew crime from the inside. One snowy night in November 1928, when he was nineteen, he robbed a rich white couple in their Cleveland home, using a Colt.44 that could “shoot hard enough to kill a stone.” He fled with their jewelry in their Cadillac coupe. “I remember it being exceedingly pleasant in the softly purring car moving swiftly through the virgin blanket of snow and the white translucent falling curtain,” Himes recalled in The Quality of Hurt, the first volume of his autobiography. “I had the illusion of hurtling silently through an endless cloud.” His penalty, though, sobered him: twenty to twenty-five years at hard labor. “I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary,” he remembered. “I learned all the behavior patterns necessary for survival.” He also began to write. From his cell he sold stories to magazines aimed at black audiences, such as Abbott's Monthly and the Atlanta Daily World. In 1934 his story “Crazy in the Stir” appeared in Esquire, which was then publishing works by writers such as E Scott Fitzgerald.

Life in prison was violent and inane. Two black convicts “cut each other to death over a dispute as to whether Paris was in France or France in Paris.” A fire that swept through the overcrowded prison on Easter Monday, 1930, killed more than three hundred inmates. His writing success and the intervention of his mother, Himes biographers Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre assert, won him a parole in his eighth year of incarceration. When he re-entered the world in 1936, he was becoming committed to a career as a writer. But years of struggle lay ahead.

In several of his stories Himes hid his racial identity, but race would soon become the overriding concern of his work. It was an issue that tore at his own family. His mother was a cultured, lightskinned woman, as snobbish about her Caucasian ancestors as she was prickly about the condescension of whites. She instilled in her son a pride bordering on arrogance and an acute sensitivity to racial distinctions. His darker father had risen from poverty and retained what Chester saw as a “slave mentality.” The tension in the marriage led to fights, “emotional shocks,” and eventually a bitter divorce. The family's circumstances were comfortable at first. Chester was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909. His father taught blacksmithing and industrial arts at the prestigious Lincoln Institute there and later at Negro land grant colleges around the South. Mrs. Himes tutored Chester and his older brother Joseph at home, bestowing on them a love of music and reading.

The family began to disintegrate after 1923, when Joseph was blinded during a school chemistry demonstration. They moved to St. Louis, then to Cleveland, to seek care for the boy. Unable to find steady work as a teacher, Chester's father suffered, in his son's words, “from the frustrations of unemployment and Jim Crow.” After graduating from high school Chester landed a job as a busboy in a Cleveland hotel to earn money for college. While at work, he stepped into an open elevator shaft and fell thirty feet, breaking his back, jaw, and an arm, and spent most of four months in a cast. Leaving the hospital, he entered Ohio State University, intending to become a doctor.

“Even in the South, up until then I had been sheltered from the impact of race prejudice,” he told an interviewer. “Ohio State changed that.” Blacks were not allowed to live in the school's dormitories, use the student union, or eat at local cafes. Depressed, angry, and disoriented, Himes failed to apply himself to his studies and was asked to withdraw after barely a semester.

He plunged into the seamy world of Cleveland's lowlifes, working in a gambling den, selling bootleg liquor, carrying a gun. He associated with hoodlums called Bunch Boy, Four-Four, and Red Johnny, whose names and personalities would later populate his crime novels. Arrested for passing bad checks, then for stealing guns from an armory, he was paroled to his father, who now worked odd jobs around Cleveland. Sharing a double bed in a rented room, Chester resolved to escape the place “that stank of my father's fear and defeat.” While at a local club, he overheard a chauffeur boasting about his employer's wealth and about the spot where the man kept his money and jewelry. Chester decided to chance it. After the robbery he ditched the Cadillac, but he was caught trying to pawn the jewelry in Chicago. The police hung him upside down by his ankles and beat a confession out of him.

In 1937, more than a year after his release from prison, Himes finally landed a steady job, with the Works Progress Administration, first digging ditches, then writing a history of Ohio. He soon married Jean Johnson, with whom he had lived before his prison years. His mother refused to attend the wedding, considering the bride too dark skinned for her son. Himes would remain a nomad most of his life. He and Jean wandered from New York to California and back several times over the next decade; during their travels he came to know other young writers such as Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. In the war years he worked, by his account, twenty-three different jobs in Los Angeles shipyards and factories, and Jean found a good position with the USO. The always insecure Himes felt like “her pimp” because she earned more than he did—and that was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

All this time Himes was writing. “No matter what I did or where I was, or how I lived, I had considered myself a writer ever since I'd published my first story,” he recorded in his autobiography.”—Foremost a writer. Above all else a writer. It was my salvation.” In 1944 he managed to obtain a foundation grant to finish his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, an account of four painful days in the life of a black shipyard worker.

Published in 1945, the book was written, Himes said, “from the accumulation of my racial hurts. I meant for it to be a shock treatment.” Although the reviews were generally favorable, Himes felt that his publisher had sabotaged the book by failing to publicize and distribute it.

Two years later Himes published Lonely Crusade, a complex novel about the race problem. The story of a union organizer in an aircraft plant who fights the treachery of his Communist allies as well as that of the bosses, it is, like many of Himes's works, autobiographical and uneven. Himes was never a meticulous craftsman, and he mixed passages of persuasive writing with paragraphs of leaden prose. Some reviews were vitriolic: Ebony magazine called it “a virulent, malicious book full of rancor and venom.” Many scheduled author appearances and radio interviews were canceled.

Both these early “protest” novels were the type of books expected from black writers who, in the 1940s, were working in the shadow of Richard Wright. The reactions to the books profoundly disappointed Himes. In 1948 he was thirty-nine years old, directionless, and thinking of leaving the United States.

He spent about five years writing and holding menial jobs around New York and New England, often as a caretaker or bellhop. He found work as a clerk in the mailroom at Reader's Digest and as a YMCA porter in a New York suburb. A version of a prison novel that he had labored over for years came out as Cast the First Stone. It was largely ignored.

In 1953, separated from his wife, Himes left for Europe. On board the Ile de France he began one of several lengthy relationships with white women. He wrote of such a liaison in a scalding book called The End of a Primitive (first published in 1956 as The Primitive). In Paris he fell in with a group of black expatriates including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the cartoonist Ollie Harrington. He would live abroad for the rest of his life. He savored the racial tolerance he found in Europe, but he would never feel at home there. “I have been a misfit all my life,” he would write.

Although Himes published a few more books and short stories, he was becoming increasingly desperate for cash. He decided to take Duhamel's advice and begin working on a series of police thrillers.

He created his two most distinctive literary characters as an afterthought. He had no great respect for cops, but Duhamel suggested that “you can't have a policiere without police.” So the author dutifully provided a pair of detectives, introducing them in chapter eight of For Love of lmabelle, the first book in the series (later reissued as A Rage in Harlem).

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson were “tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men,” who “had always looked like two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town.” They stalked through all eight of Himes's Harlem novels, shooting and pistolwhipping criminals, eating prodigious amounts of soul food, and investigating a phantasmagoria of crimes.

Although he claimed to be “imitating all the other American detective story writers. … I just made the faces black, that's all,” Himes did something very different. He not only changed the color of the faces; he transformed the themes, settings, language, and essential concerns of the detective novel.

He was familiar with pulp literature. He had read Black Mask magazine and had taken Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon as one of his early writing models. Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the patriarchs of modern detective fiction, wrote with a style and level of insight that often surpassed the limitations of the genre. Himes took a different tack, turning up the volume of violence and action until the books roared with surreal music.

Himes has been hailed as the dean of black detective novelists, but he had predecessors such as Rudolph Fisher, whose 1932 book The Conjure Man Dies was probably among the first examples of the genre by an African-American. In Himes's own mind, his Harlem series evolved as much from Faulkner and Dostoyevsky as from popular crime novels. He put his own stamp on the form. He discarded well-oiled plots for loose, improvisational narratives as his heroes traveled the twisted byways of a racist society. He called his Harlem books “domestic novels,” featuring in them the gambling, confidence games, prostitution, and narcotics that were the difficult home truths of the ghetto.

Living in a world without a moral center, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger resort to messy compromises between the white power structure they work for and the black community they are a part of. We learn little about their lives, but they strike us as real because they are flawed. They can be brutal, beating and shooting suspects with abandon, yet they claim they are “never rough on anybody in the right.”

“This is Harlem,” Grave Digger remarks in The Crazy Kill. “Ain't no other place like it in the world. You've got to start from scratch here, because these folks in Harlem do things for reasons nobody else in the world would think of.”

The core of Himes's detective novels is the portrait he paints of New York City's black ghetto. Possessed of a Dickensian love of detail, he is at his best describing the pulse of urban life. We flash past the landmarks: the Apollo Theater, the Hotel Theresa, Smalls' Paradise, the Brown Bomber Bar. He shows us “the bookie joints, the barbecue stands, the barbershops, professional offices, undertakers', flea-heaven hotels, grocery stores, meat markets called ‘The Hog Maw,’ Chitterling Country, ‘Pig Foot Heaven.’” Above all, he give us Harlem as “a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living.”

Himes admitted that he “really did not know what it was like to be a citizen of Harlem.” He had lived there only sporadically over the years. The Harlem of his books is an existential fun house created by racism, a Hieronymus Bosch landscape in which a man whose arm is sliced off in a bar brawl gropes drunkenly on the floor, searching for the severed limb. “It got my knife in his hand,” he yells. “I thought I was writing realism,” Himes declared. “It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.”

Absurdity, Albert Camus said, grows out of the confrontation between the irrationality of the world and “the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” It was a natural theme for Himes, who had long battered his head against the irrational brick wall of racism. He called the second volume of his autobiography My Life of Absurdity. “If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life,” he wrote, “eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life.” Some thought Himes's racial lampoons went too far. Ernest Kaiser, a bibliographer at New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, told Himes biographers that his images degraded Harlem and its citizens. The Saturday Review referred to his “minstrel-like caricature” and “Amos ‘n’ Andy dialogue.” His intention was to show how racism reduces humanity to a sinister burlesque; critics sometimes saw only the stereotypes.

Himes at his best could make the language wail. Wild action scenes, broad humor, neon description, and firecracker dialogue tumble across the page. Like the blues, his writing turns heartache into laughter; like bebop it comes at us with machine-gun velocity:

The jukebox was giving out with a stomp version of “Big-Legged Woman.” Saxophones were pleading; the horns were teasing; the bass was patting; the drums were chatting; the piano was catting, laying and playing the jive, and a husky female voice was shouting: “… you can feel my thigh / But don't you feel up high.” Happy-tail women were bouncing out of their dresses on the high bar stools.

The detective novels—The Real Cool Killers, The Heat's On, All Shot Up, and the rest—were without question a breakthrough for Himes. For decades he had been laboring to produce “literature,” replete with big themes and elegant writing. Released from such constraints, he was like a philharmonic musician sitting in on an uptown jazz jam. Himes himself felt the difference. “The only time I was happy,” he would declare, “was while writing these strange, violent, unreal stories.” Although at first he dismissed the detective novels as hackwork, Himes later began to recognize that he had achieved something unique. He would call the books “my biggest contribution to literature” and assert that they “contain the best of my writing and the best of my thinking.”

In addition to liberating his style, the series released him from the constraints of “message.” He had come of age when social meaning was often seen as a prerequisite of serious literature. The detective novels freed the satirist in him. Following the tradition of Rabelais and Swift, he disguised his rage as high comedy. He exchanged the hammer of polemic for the switchblade of wit; he stopped preaching and became a prophet.

Both the money and the acclaim that accompanied the books temporarily lifted Himes's spirits. “I became a person comparable to Richard Wright,” he said. In 1958 he was the first American to win the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere, for the preceding year's best French detective novel. He was interviewed by Time magazine. “Now I was a French writer, and the United States of America could kiss my ass,” he later wrote with characteristic spleen.

He bought a car and a dog. He basked in the praise of French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau, who called Himes's first Harlem novel a “prodigious masterpiece.” According to biographers, Malcolm X climbed the stairs of his Paris apartment to visit him. But the money was not plentiful, and he was too accustomed to self-doubt to be cheered for long by minor celebrity. “As my fame increases,” he wrote to a friend, “my fate remains the same—broke, desperate.” He was a perpetual outsider. “I am a stranger and will always be a stranger,” he stated. In all the years he lived in France, he never learned more than a few words of French.

In 1963 he settled down for good with Lesley Packard, an Englishwoman whom he would eventually marry. About this time he published Pinktoes, an erotic spoof that traced the “aphrodisiacal compulsions of the ‘Negro Problem.’” Its ribald appeal made it a commercial success. The last of the Harlem series, Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), was his most radical departure from the detective genre. If Cotton was a Charlie Parker riff, Blind Man was the honking free jazz of Ornette Coleman. Plot vanishes, apocalypse looms. The armed blind man appears from nowhere at the end of the novel, opening a pool of panic as he shoots up a subway car. This was a book, Himes said, “where no one would know who was guilty.” It was no longer a detective novel, or even a novel in the usual sense. Chester Himes, who had begun his career as a traditional realist, had entered modernism through the back door.

By the 1970s he had found financial, if not psychic, security. Cotton Comes to Harlem and The Heat's On (Come Back, Charleston Blue) were made into feature films. A few American publishers began reprinting his books. Fed up with France, he and Lesley built a house in Spain. He came to hate that country too. Late in life, exaggerating as usual, he described himself as a “detestable person,” recognizing only that “the good thing is that I wrote.” In fact, despite a wrenching moodiness, he could be a charming, witty companion.

When he died in 1984 after a series of debilitating illnesses, none of his works remained in print in the United States. But in recent years his reputation has enjoyed a renaissance. Publishers have reissued many of his books. A biography, The Several Lives of Chester Himes, appeared in 1997; another is planned. His lasting contribution to literature is now receiving belated recognition. “I was limited by a formula,” he said of his detective novels, “but this didn't prevent me from saying whatever I wanted to say.” Nothing ever did.

For all his bitterness and sense of hurt, Himes possessed a rare integrity that kept him writing on his own terms through years of mishap. Integrity compelled him to inject his own raw pain into his writing and made all of his books, even those that trafficked in slapstick and parody, “serious.” His work remains both an acid portrayal of the damage that racism inflicts on society and an exuberant sketch of the human comedy drawn by a master of prose improvisation.