Chester Himes (45 page)

Lesley learned quickly of his emotional lability, how a letter in the mail could ruin his day or fill it with light, how he could pass from blazing anger to laughter in the space of minutes. Humor, she says, was his last and greatest weapon. At a showing of the Harlem documentary he later made with Pierre Gaisseau, which he thought derisory and insulting, she “could feel him sitting next to me sizzling with fury.”
²³
And while she understood his mood swings, even understood something of the reasons for them, this did not necessarily make it any easier for her.

For his part, Himes persisted in his longing for things lost, in his compulsion to rescue and “protect” white women, and in his perennial attempt (just as progressively his mother had edited her life, cutting and pasting) to have one more go at “correcting” situations, at making them right in accordance with his preconceptions, ignoring realities. For better than two years he was to shuttle back and forth from Lesley to Regine, at one point adding a third woman, Marianne Greenwood, to his ever more complicated dance card.

That June Himes drove to Hamburg where he and Regine moved in as resident house- and dog-sitters for Dr. Ramseger, literary editor of
Die Welt
. Himes could not work, he drank heavily, drove wildly, finally had to be treated for ulcers: the rift between what seems and what is grew ever wider, ever more difficult to ignore. When Regine went in September to visit her family, Himes returned to Paris and to Lesley. In December, Regine joined him in Paris, where she had found a secretarial job. The reunion went poorly. Himes and Regine quarreled every day, and it was not long before Regine discovered that he was still seeing Lesley whenever he could slip away. Once Regine turned up screaming abuse at Lesley's door; another time she phoned to inform Lesley that she was about to kill herself, and was turning on the gas just as Chester arrived home. She and Himes fell to blows one day when she found Lesley and him together on the street. She
returned to the apartment, where Himes came upon her later, and slashed her wrists.

Regine went from the local hospital to a psychiatric clinic at Vincennes, then on to clinics at Nogent-sur-Marne and Giesherslag. From there she posted an unbroken stream of “pitiful” letters to Chester. Correspondence from Herr Fischer meanwhile, to which Himes responded testily, begged him to assume moral responsibility and leave his daughter alone.
²⁴

Beginning work on a new detective novel he was calling
Be Calm (Ne nous énervons pas!, The Heat's On
, later filmed as
Come Back, Charleston Blue)
, Himes's feelings toward Regine were deeply ambivalent. Her dependency, underlined by the suicide attempt and intensified by the hospitalizations, infuriated him. Yet he was drawn to his old caretaker role, and certainly, that given, could not in the present circumstances abandon her. And while her instability frightened him, he seemed unable or refused to see how he contributed to it. “What is the right thing?” he asked in a letter to Dr. Fischer.
²⁵

That March Himes and Lesley went off on holiday, driving to Italy in the Fiat Roadster to visit a prospective publisher before renting a house short-term at Cagnes-sur-Mer near Biot. One night while visiting Walter Coleman and Torun, who lived nearby, Chester grew jealous that Lesley was speaking to Walter's brother Emmett and struck her. They quarreled, Lesley insisting “I won't accept to be treated this way” and Chester that “You're my woman” before they came to some understanding or some impasse they could agree to let stand as one. Returning to Paris, they discovered that Regine was back in her old apartment and back at her old job. Lesley told her that she didn't know where Chester was when she phoned. Chester then fled back to Biot to stay with Walter and Torun, remaining with them all that spring.

By summer 1960, however, pity or latent guilt perhaps having got the upper hand, Himes was again living with Regine, this time in Austria, at Kitzbühel.

By September, he had left Regine and was back with Lesley, representing her as his fiancée in a letter to Van Vechten. In two months while at Kitzbühel he had finished
The Heat's On
, “about Sister Heavenly, Uncle Saint, Pinky (a giant Negro halfwit), a three-million-dollar bundle of dope … and my two hard shooting detectives.”
²⁶
Shortly thereafter Lesley resigned her job at the
Herald Tribune
and she and Chester drove once again, in the Hillman, to Italy, touring Genoa, Naples, swinging in from the coast to visit Rome, before settling into a house at Acciaroli on the western shore below Salerno. Himes spoke vaguely of going from there to Africa. But the trip proved expensive and, winding up in Rome by the second week of November, Himes had to borrow money from Duhamel to settle debts. He and Lesley returned to the Riviera, to St. Tropez, where late that month they learned of Richard Wright's death. Back in Paris, Himes consoled Ellen and the children, helped with funeral arrangements, and afterward encouraged (perhaps even had a hand in) Ollie's writing of “The Last Days of Richard Wright” for
Ebony
.
²⁷

This period in Himes's life is the most unsettled of all, ceaseless hopscotch as he moves restlessly from Paris to Italy to the Cote d'Azur, from Lesley to Regine and back again. He and Lesley returned to the Riviera in early December following Wright's funeral. In March they were in Paris to attend the opening of an exhibition of Walter Coleman's jazz portraits. By April Chester appears to have been living alone in a small flat on the edge of Paris, across from the park at Les Buttes-Chaumont, as he put finishing touches on
Mamie Mason
for Olympia Press. The following month, it seems, he was again living with Regine, and in June the two of them returned to Hamburg, house- and dog-sitting again for Dr. Ramseger. From there they made their way to Darmstadt just south of Frankfurt, where they were guests of Chester's publisher, then on to Wiederstadt, where in early August Chester was arrested for drunken driving, held overnight, and, brought before the court the next morning, forbidden to drive again in Germany. Furious, Regine departed for her parents' home. Chester stayed with Walter and Torun before taking an apartment in Mougins-Village not far from Duhamel's splendid new home; at his editor's instigation he lunched and spent an afternoon with Picasso and family. Lesley, meanwhile, had returned to work, now with
Time-Life
.

Himes's emotional state, as one might surmise from the heavy drinking and arrest, was as inconstant as his address. He was heavily overdrawn on his account with Gallimard and months behind on the new book due them. External distractions abetted the internal: bad weather, visitors, the temptation of new work (journalism, scripts and treatments) that promised to bring in money but seldom did, the
constant scramble for funds. He loved Lesley yet still felt bound, often infuriatingly so, to Regine, and at any rate “responsible” for her. He felt himself to be directionless, writing in a letter to Van Vechten that, now aged fifty-two, he has found neither country nor work nor destiny. “My brain was stale,” he wrote of this period in
My Life of Absurdity
.
²⁸
As for his work, he sensed little unity there either; in a manner, he believed, he had spent his time chasing after phantoms, skittering from one bare foothold to the next. All the old dissatisfactions with what he was doing reemerged. His detective stories had been fun at first, a pleasant change, full of new challenge and adventure and freedom, but now they'd become a grind. Even commercially, for all their popularity, the books remained on shaky ground. He couldn't count on U.S. publishers. They didn't know what to make of his thrillers, failing to realize, as the French did, that these novels were “violent and funny in a way never seen before,”
²⁹
and proved hesitant to take the books on. When they did, they paid little, and brought them out in versions markedly cut, jumbled, or rearranged—
scrambled
, as Himes said. Even Gallimard, he suspected, constantly gave him short shrift, manipulating royalty statements, copies in print, and even actual sales to keep him in their debt and turning the books out.

He seems, in short, to have grown sick of the whole business, weary and exhausted from what he perceived as a continuous struggle. Quite the worst of it may have been that the drive to write, whatever it was that for all those years had impelled him past frustration and failure, was in decline: “I didn't like to write any more, but I knew there were several stories I had to write. I had to write until I found the definitive story or as long as I was able.”
³⁰
The passion was gone, or going, he suspected—and if not the passion, then certainly the energy. Yet at fifty-two, with absolutely nothing to fall back on, with no home—no country or other work, no destiny—what else could he do but go on writing?

A long letter to Lesley from this period serves both to reflect Himes's mood and as a rare document of self-analysis—a letter that, in its honesty, Lesley found deeply moving. He is, Himes says, hopelessly incomplete, wounded, alone and insecure; it is essential that Lesley understand this, that she not embrace some fantasy image of him. He is a liar, undependable, and for the most part despicable. He drinks to deaden his emotions and has lived in an agony of self-torture all his life.

I am in for it. The only thing that is going to let me out is death … You should have known. Can you and I change this old and terrible world?
³¹

Yet he bid heartily for her love, and would continue to do so. He loved her, he said, as he had loved only one other woman, Willa. Early the next year (1962) they began living together. Three years later from the Riviera, where he was working on the novel that would become
Blind Man with a Pistol
, he wrote asking her again to marry him.

At the same time that he was writing his letter of confession to Lesley, Himes initiated an affair with Marianne Greenwood, a photographer and friend of Torun who lived in Antibes. Both Chester and Marianne thought the affair time-limited, as she was soon to leave for Guatemala to do a book on Latin America with writer Ernest Taube. Taking her to Paris when the time came, on October 23, and starting back home at 3
A.M
., Himes fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the Hillman. Lesley hurried to the hospital at Sens, having been called by the police, and after Chester's discharge (Ollie Harrington paying the bill) stayed with him at Hotel Aviatic, where shortly he collapsed. This time they went to the American Hospital at Neuilly. Acute anemia and a broken pelvis required weeks on crutches and bedrest.

Marianne, meanwhile, had delayed her departure until December, and once released from the hospital at Neuilly, Chester flew to Stockholm to spend a week with her. Returning to the Riviera, he rented Marianne's apartment at Antibes. Himes spent the year's final weeks courting Lesley, who had known of this affair almost from the first. In March he moved into her new ground-floor, two-room apartment on rue de la Harpe in the Latin Quarter near the Saint-Séverin church.

While at the American Hospital, Himes had been contacted by Pierre Gaisseau, whose feature film
The Sky Above the Mud Below
had gained much attention and who now with Arthur Cohn wanted to make a film about Harlem life. Himes began drafting the script of what would become
Baby Sister
while in hospital and completed it at Marianne's apartment at Antibes.
Baby Sister
was never filmed, the project crippled by failure to find support among American studios, conflicts between Cohn and Gaisseau, and, at one point, a breakdown on Gaisseau's part; Himes published the script in 1975's
Black on Black
.

That July, settled back in with Lesley, at the suggestion of Pierre Lazareff of
France-Soir
, and despite the unhappy collapse of an earlier collaboration with Lazareff, Himes traveled to New York to work with Gaisseau on a documentary of Harlem for French TV. Headquarters established at Lewis Micheaux's bookstore across from the Theresa Hotel, Himes, Gaisseau, and crew ranged far and wide: the Afro-American bank on 125th Street, Rosa Meta's beauty parlor, the upper fringe of Central Park, Adam Clayton Powell's Abyssinian Baptist Church. This was the film at a private showing of which Himes sat beside Lesley “sizzling with fury.” Believing it filled with derisory, insulting clichés, not only did Himes withdraw his name from the project, he also wrote the article “Harlem, an American Cancer” in rebuttal. He had hoped to print it in Lazareff's own paper, such a piece being part of his and Lazareff's agreement, but
France-Soir
ignored it; eventually it appeared in
Présence Africaine
and
Die Welt
.

Back in Paris from New York and before the private showing, Chester had gone with Lesley, on vacation from her job, to Corsica, stopping off in Marseilles, where Chester was given royal treatment by the local Communist party paper, to visit Himes's old friend, physician and jazz drummer Roger Luccioni.

With Marianne, however, there was to be one further rendezvous. In January of the new year, 1963, using money advanced by Plon for a new detective novel, Himes flew to New York claiming business with agent Samuel French, and within the fortnight had touched down in the tiny fishing village of Sisal in the Yucatán. With little else to do, he turned out almost half of a new book, making no mention of Marianne in regular letters to Lesley, intimating to John A. Williams that he and Marianne had come to recognize irreconcilable differences both in their careers and their very personalities. Carl Brandt, meanwhile, whom Chester had approached to be his agent, wrote that upon asking around he had been told that Himes was “untrustworthy,” and declined taking him on. Frequent letters from Lesley left Chester sodden with guilt.

One morning while in the Yucatán, February of 1963, Chester woke to find himself virtually unable to speak and paralyzed on one side. At the Merida Hospital it was believed that he had been stung by a scorpion. Lesley tried to get money to him and failed; finally he was able to return to the States on money wired to him by Van Vechten. There, while at New York's Presbyterian Hospital, he was looked after
by Van Vechten and John A. Williams. Doctors diagnosed a stroke—the first of many that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair and make speech increasingly difficult. Ed and Constance Pearlstein remember his speech being slurred at this point. Discharged, Himes recuperated at the Albert Hotel before returning to Europe, and in March of 1963, one year after first moving in with Lesley, he again settled into the apartment at rue de la Harpe.