ENG - Himes in the Penguin Modern Classics collection

The first three Chester Himes' Harlem domestic novels, with the exception of Run Man Run (which, despite its great quality, is less known, presumably because it did not have the two detectives for heroes) have been published by the great British publisher Penguin, in the Modern Classics collection, alongside, for example, James Joyce's Ulysses.

In the Penguin edition, the first one, La reine des pommes, is titled A Rage in Harlem. Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan* have identified the successive titles of the novel. The original title, that of Himes' English manuscript (1957), is The Five Cornered Square, which in a literal reading. means a square with five sides, but also contains a play on words, “square” also having the meaning of naive, gullible, or simple. It obviously refers to Jackson, compared to Goldy, his twin brother, so much more intelligent and creative. 

Let us give back to the Série noire where the novel was originally published the credit it deserves: La reine des pommes is a clever equivalent of the original title, pomme being close to square in its naive sense. Still the text was never published in English under the original title. The Anglo-Saxon editions have had for titles either A Rage in Harlem or For Love of Imabelle.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Luc Sante explains why A Rage in Harlem imposed itself, at the expense of the title wanted by Himes "not because it is descriptive or even especially appropriate, but because it combined two nouns guaranteed to act as flint and steel in the mind of the average 1950s American drugstore paperback browser. Harlem (...) was more myth than place to most white Americans of the period."**

* Chester Himes, An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Compiled by Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan. Greenwood Press, 1992.

** A Rage in Harlem. Introduction by Luc Sante. Penguin Modern Classics, 2011.

About the titles of the Harlem Cycle novels, see on this blog Cidade escaldante: What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes' The Heat's On?.