Penzler Pick, May 2001: In James Sallis's long-awaited biography of novelist Chester Himes, he reveals that his own crime fiction career was partly inspired by the older writer's example. Admiring Himes's work ever since he first encountered it, Sallis began to haunt used bookstores in order to turn up more of it and eventually dedicated one of his Lew Griffin titles to Himes, while making the author of
Cotton Comes to Harlem and
Pinktoes a character in another.
Researching and producing a life of a fellow author is homage of a vastly greater order. It is a full-time, obsessive commitment that seldom turns out as expected. First viewing Himes as a sui generis author of savagely slapstick ghetto crime comedies, Sallis came to regard his subject instead as "America's central black writer." "It is exceedingly strange to know so well a man one has never met," Sallis begins. Yet a fully rounded portrait of Chester Bomar Himes, the Missouri-born, middle-class rebel and prison veteran, much of whose life was spent as an angry black man in European self-exile, was not an easy one to paint, even for someone as sympathetic as this biographer.
Born in 1908, Himes was a 19-year-old college dropout when he began serving what would be seven years of a 20- to 25-year jail sentence for burglary. "I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary," he would later write. While behind bars, he managed to sell two hard-boiled stories to Esquire. Bought by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich, these "authentic" tales of a real-life convict appeared in a magazine that featured such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 1936, at the age of 26, Himes was paroled and from then on embarked on a writer's path, though there were many obstacles, real and perceived, awaiting him. Whether moving from a stint in the WPA Writers Project to a utopian community in Ohio, or from the fringes of the Hollywood labor force to the lesser ranks of the Communist party, Chester Himes came more and more to regard himself as "a man without a country."
Even at Yaddo, the famed New York state writers' colony where he had a fellowship in 1948 (and lived across the hall from Patricia Highsmith as she worked on her first novel, Strangers on a Train), he was dissatisfied. Soon joining such fellow African American expatriates as Richard Wright and James Baldwin in France, he began to establish a reputation in Europe that would eventually precede him home.
"It is exceedingly strange to know so little, finally, about a man with whom you have spent so much time," Sallis winds up admitting ruefully at the end of his introduction. Readers of Chester Himes: A Life will know much more than they did when they began this highly intelligent if idiosyncratically assembled volume. --Otto Penzler
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, Inc.
From Library Journal
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.DRon Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Best known as a writer of detective stories and the chronicler of Harlem life in the 1930s and 1940s (his Cotton Comes to Harlem was made into a movie during the so-called Blaxploitation period), Himes was much more complex and idiosyncratic in both his work and life. Sallis retraces Himes' childhood in a middle-class family: his father was a dark-skinned, industrious man, his mother was part white and part black, a woman who carefully gauged racial and class distinctions and sought the best for her children. Himes' attraction to the street life eventually led to prison, where he discovered writing as a means of expression and salvation, if not livelihood. Himes depicted America's dispossessed and explored the unresolved racial and sexual tensions and contradictions of American life. He voiced the unspoken truths of America: black hatred of their oppressors, fear of the discovery of that hatred, and the self-hatred borne of that fear. Himes' unique blend of horror, sorrow, and humor should make this biography widely appealing among contemporary readers. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
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
Highly recommended -- John Leonard, CBS Sunday Morning
Sallis successfully salvages the life and literature of Chester Himes from critical and readerly neglect -- Kirkus Revies
The author succeeds splendidly in fleshing Himes out in this riveting biography -- Library Journal, Starred Review
About the Author
A writer of varied talents, James Sallis is a published poet, critic, translator, and novelist. He has been praised as "a fine talent, introspective, sardonic, a master of quick characterization and narrative compression" (Buffalo News) and as "a rare find…a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss" (Newsday).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
