11 juin 2015

ENG - The Paris black bank


The cover of La rive noire : de Harlem à la Seine (by Michel Fabre, 1985; it has not been translated into English) shows a black-faced Statue of Liberty. The title literally means: “The Black Bank: From Harlem to The Seine”. Michel Fabre, the best connoisseur both of R. Wright and C. Himes, shows how from the middle of the 19th century till the ‘70s, Paris was the destination of many black writers and artists. For example, after WW2, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes settled in Paris (respectively in 1946, 1948 and 1953). Wright died in France in 1960, Himes spent there nearly 30 years before moving to Spain – where he had a house built for him, which he could not afford in France in spite of his success, and Baldwin only went back to the US in 1960.
Several particular reasons motivated Himes’ exile to France: Lonely Crusade, his second novel was badly received by all his most likely readers (white liberals, Blacks, Jews, communists) and was a commercial failure. He also nearly killed Vandi Haygood, his white girl friend; this would later inspire The End of a Primitive (1956), maybe his most beautiful novel. But the fundamental reason was the same for the three authors: the absolute necessity of fleeing from a nightmarish existence. For them as for those who preceded them, France meant freedom and Alexandre Dumas whose grand-mother was a black slave was considered a token of France’s difference. 
The black bank corresponded to a part of the left bank of Paris, from the Latin Quarter to Montparnasse. In his autobiography, one can follow Himes in the left bank cafés where the Black Americans spent a lot of time because of the cold and uncomfortable conditions of their hotels: first the bar Monaco, on the rue Monsieur le Prince, then the café Tournon, near the Luxembourg gardens, launched by William Gardner Smith, “Dick’s domain”*, which Himes was happy to leave for the Select, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, after La reine des pommes (The Five-Cornered Square).
As regard Himes’ feelings towards France after arriving there, it is somewhat difficult to sort out between the sources and periods. In an unpublished article quoted by M. Fabre, dating from the first months or years of Himes’ exile, the latter says: “My fate, whatever it be, is in America. I’m American, as a Frenchman is French, as an Englishman is English and I will be back (to quote Mac Arthur, another American) to fight in America until death.” Later, recalling the success of La reine des pommes (The Five-Cornered Square - 1958) in the 2nd volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity (1976), he writes: “I was now a French writer.”
Still Himes lived in a permanent inner revolt and antagonism against the Whites. He also was remarkably ungifted at learning languages and his courageous attempts to learn French were totally unsuccessful. M. Fabre concludes: “He was the stranger everywhere, only a passenger lingering in France.” Indeed Himes appears quite isolated from the French, in particular from the French intelligentsia, compared to the friendships Richard Wright gained in France: the Sartre-Beauvoir couple, Marcel Camus, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire. In France as in the US, Wright tended to be the American Black Writer.

* Dick: Richard Wright (My Life of Absurdity).





1 commentaire:

  1. The commentary is very interesting. Chester Himes mentioned the glory days at the café Le Tournon in his autobiography. I try to imagine Richard Wright in the morning, according to a ritual, playing the pinball after saying hello to his fellow compatriots. The cartoonist Ollie Harrington seemed to have been the master of ceremony. There had been many conquests of white women in Le Tournon according to Chester Himes. The reason Chester was estranged to the french intellectuals (Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir etc...) is because Chester Himes was incapable of learning french and let it be known, french intellectuals were no master of the english language either. Nevertheless, I would add that the gap was more than linguistic. Himes rebellious nature even refractory made his thinking waterproof to any reasoning based even remotely on any specific ideology. Yet it was not the case of Richard Wright who took advantage of the dialectical materialism of the communists when he lived in Chicago. Even if he was not communist anymore, sitted in front of Sartre or even Camus, Wright was painted in a better light. Chester Himes, after all, wrote "Lonely Crusade", against the single worldview of the labor movement and its unions. Chester couldn't suffer "liberals" and there was no love lost on their part either. This is all the complexity of Chester and also his irresistible charm.

    RépondreSupprimer

Ecrivez ici votre commentaire.