Chester Himes: A Life

by James Sallis

Overview

“[A] smart, conscientious, often stylish biography” of the great African American crime writer of the mid-twentieth century (The New York Times).
 
Best known for The Harlem Cycle, the series of crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, Chester Himes was a novelist and memoirist whose work was neglected and underappreciated in his native America during the 1950s and ’60s, even as he was awarded France’s most prestigious crime fiction prize. In this major biography, literary critic and fellow writer James Sallis examines the life of this “fascinating figure,” combining interviews of those who knew Himes best—including his second wife—with insightful and poignant writing (Publishers Weekly).
 
“Himes wrote some of the 20th century’s most memorable crime fiction and has been compared to Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. His life was just as spectacular as his novels. Sentenced to 25 years in prison for armed robbery when he was 19, he turned to writing while behind bars and, when released after serving eight years, published two novels. Their poor reception by the white establishment only confirmed Himes’s beliefs about racism in America. He eventually moved to Paris, spending most of the rest of his life abroad. While in Paris, he began to produce the crime fiction that would make him famous, including A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem . . . [a] riveting biography.” —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“Satisfying, thoughtful, long-overdue.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“As intelligent, and as much fun to read, as a book by Himes himself. There is no higher praise.” —The Times (London)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504073899
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	03/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	380
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

James Sallis (b. 1944) has published seventeen novels; multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems; books of musicology; a biography of Chester Himes; and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. Sallis has written about books for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the WashingtonPost, and served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007, he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. His novel Drive was adapted as the acclaimed feature film of the same name. Sallis teaches writing at Arizona State University and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog.

Read an Excerpt

1. Unnatural Histories

"That's my life-the third generation out of slavery,"1 Chester Himes ended his 1976 autobiography, a book striking off in so many directions, encompassing so much, that it seems one life could never have contained all this.

Almost thirty years before, in a speech before a mixed audience at the University of Chicago on "The Dilemma of the Negro Writer in the United States," sounding remarkably like one of his models, Faulkner, Himes had written:

There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults . . . we would be drooling idiots, dangerous maniacs, raving beasts-if it were not for that quality and force within all humans that cries "I will live."2

Himes knew a great deal about such assaults-about assaults of every sort. Champion Ishmael Reed3 reminds us that by the time Himes reached the age of nineteen, he'd suffered more misfortune than most people experience in a lifetime. Already Himes had survived his parents' contempt and acrimony for one another, his father's slow slide into failure's home plate, his mother's crippling blend of pride and self-hatred, the childhood blinding of brother Joe for which he felt responsible, subterranean life among Cleveland's gamblers, hustlers, and high rollers, and, finally, a forty-foot plunge down an elevator shaft that crushed vertebrae, shattered bones, and, though he recovered, left him in a Procrustean brace for years and in pain for the remainder of his life. He'd go on to survive eight years in a state prison, early acclaim as a writer followed by attacks and, far worse, indifference, an ever-mounting sense of failure and frustration, tumultuous affairs leading in one case almost to murder, and, as Himes never lets us forget, a lifetime of pervasive, inescapable racial prejudice.

Hardly a representative life? Actually, "for all its inconsistencies, its contradictions, its humiliations, its triumphs, its failures, its tragedies, its hurts, its ecstasies and its absurdities,"4 it is.

In prison Himes had come to believe that people will do anything, absolutely anything. "Why should I be surprised when white men cut out some poor black man's nuts, or when black men eat the tasty palms of white explorers?"5 This belief, along with his own inner turmoil, accounts in large part for the level of violence and abrupt shifts of plot in his work, not to mention the absurd comedy, that so distinguish it. We grow to expect sudden desperate acts from characters who in fact often seem little more than a series of such acts strung together. Pianos and drunken preachers may fall from the sky, children may be fed from troughs like barnyard animals, stolen automobile wheels may roll on their own through most of Harlem, precipitating a chain of unrelated, calamitous events. In Himes's absurd world, Aristotelian logic holds no purchase; neither characters nor readers may rely on cause and effect. We can't anticipate the consequences of acts, have no way to predict what might be around the next corner, on the next page. It could be literally anything. So we're forever off balance, handholds having turned to razors, cups of wine to blood. We look out from eyes filled with a nebulous, free-floating fear that never leaves us. We can depend on nothing, expect anything. And nothing is safe.

Much like his work, Himes's life is filled with contradictions and uncertainties, sudden turns, stabs of violence, dark centers at the heart of light. In his time he was no easy man to know; time's filters haven't changed that. There is so much of the life, so many things done, so many places lived, so many apparent selves and so rich an internal life, that, every bit as much as his fiction, Himes's life seems always overblown, exaggerated, too vivid-as though all experience has been rendered down to one single dark, rich stock. One often feels that it is only the centripetal force of the tensions within him that keeps Himes's world from flying wholly apart. He seems a man who must always work everything out for himself and by himself, creating self and world anew with each effort at understanding, "remaining always (in critic Gilbert Muller's words) radical and unforgiving."6

Whatever they and their jacket notes claim, the majority of writers lead dull lives. They spend much of their lives alone in rooms staring at blank pages or half-filled screens. When not in those rooms, they wander half-lost about the house, quarrel with wives and lovers, drink, worry about their work going out of print or not finding a publisher, read new books to see who might be getting a leg up on them, share with other writers complaints over the horrible state of publishing.

Himes's life, on the other hand, is at least as fascinating as his fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Highly recommended

John Leonard

Chester Himes: A Life is as intelligent, and as much fun to read, as a book by Himes himself. There is no higher praise.

The Times (London)

Chester Himes's extraordinary life led him to write extraordinary fiction. It has taken an equally unique writing talent-that of James Sallis-to bring Himes back to life

Ian Rankin

(Chester Himes: A Life) is written with abundant compassion, excellent research, and a novelist's sense of character, plot, place and narrative tension. <%END%>

Reginald McKnight

Novelist and critic Sallis (Bluebottle; etc.) delivers a satisfying, thoughtful, long-overdue biography of Chester Himes (1909-1984), a singular American writer and fascinating figure. Sallis outlines the author's threefold marginalization--as a WWII-era literary realist, as a crime novelist and as an African-American writer, a colleague of Wright and Baldwin. With unflagging clarity, he embarks on simultaneous explorations of Himes's writing and his tumultuous personal life. Sallis details Himes's upbringing in a fragmented, middle-class family, his brief infatuation with crime and the inception of his writing career in an Ohio state prison, during which time his work appeared in Esquire. In the 1940s and '50s Himes found himself in a cycle of literary aspirations and disappointments, epitomized by Jack Warner's memorable dismissal: "I don't want no niggers on this lot." Sallis weaves such accounts in with his solid discussions of Himes's important early novels, tightly atmospheric works that failed to find an audience in the racially charged climate. During Himes's expatriation in Europe, financial difficulties drove him toward surreal detective fiction, which won him acclaim late in life, as his health declined. Sallis's astute, writerly riffs on American inequities and literary vagaries zero in on what haunted Himes even in exile. As an "outsider" writer who forged unsettling social panoramas through violent fiction, perhaps Himes's only equal is Jim Thompson, and, similarly, Sallis's pithy book has the import of Robert Polito's biography of that better-known master of American crime. B&w photos. (Feb. 22) Forecast: Booksellers may note the appeal of this title to readers of mystery, literary history and African-American studies, and score a trifecta. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Chester Himes (1909-84) wrote some of the 20th century's most memorable crime fiction and has been compared to Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammet. His life was just as spectacular as his novels. Sentenced to 25 years in prison for armed robbery when he was 19, he turned to writing while behind bars and, when released after serving eight years, published two novels. Their poor reception by the white establishment only confirmed Himes's beliefs about racism in America. He eventually moved to Paris, spending most of the rest of his life abroad. While in Paris, he began to produce the crime fiction that would make him famous, including A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Sallis (Bluebottle, Eye of the Cricket) admits early on that Himes is a difficult subject for a biography, for he was a multilayered and often difficult person. Yet the author succeeds splendidly in fleshing Himes out in this riveting biography. Recommended for all libraries.--Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Drawing on interviews with his wife and others who knew him, poet and novelist Sallis weaves together the facts of the American writer Himes' (1909-84) life with analysis of his fiction to find the relationship between the two. Himes began writing in prison in the early 1930s, and is now known as one of the 20th century's best writers of crime fiction, especially in Germany and his adopted France. This is a paperbound reprint of a 2000 book. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Despite the appalling turgidity of his prose, Sallis (Gently Into the Land of the Meateaters, p. 289, etc.) successfully salvages the life and literature of Chester Himes from critical and readerly neglect. Sallis covers the basics of biography well, beginning with Himes's birth in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909 and covering the details of his life with a moderately careful eye. Raised in middle-class comfort in an educationally minded family, Himes ended up in prison after being convicted of robbery; he was sentenced to hard labor and served seven-and-a-half years. These years were pivotal ones, and Himes later drew upon his experiences extensively in his Harlem Cycle novels, which feature his famous characters Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Sallis does not shy away from the disturbing aspects of Himes's past, painting his subject as a man with true faults and weaknesses. These positive aspects of the biography, however, cannot mask its many problems. Baroque prose muddies the biographical waters, as allusions flow freely into an otherwise focused narrative. Must the reader know that Himes's mother would have taken Wallace Steven's"Let be be finale of seem" as her personal motto, had she lived long enough to read him? The most trivial biographical details are sunk in a sea of cultural cross-references, such as when Sallis describes how Himes's mother dressed young Chester in girl's clothing—as did Rilke's mother! Combine this pestering pedantry with a firm dependence upon excessive quotations from Himes's literature and autobiography, and the result is a work that fails to find its own voice. Himes deserves a new audience forthe21stcentury—unfortunately, he also deserves a better biography than this one.

Kirkus Reviews