ENG - "A startling discovery" - Himes and James Dean

The following comment (to From Cast the first stone to Yesterday Will Make you Cry) was left anonymously (what a pity!) on this blog.

"The 1952 version under the title Cast The First Stone was a paperback tucked on to James Dean's bookshelf. The fact that Jack Warner, head of Warner Brother Studios in the early 1950s, had both Dean under contract  for his major and most iconic films (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant) and had Himes under contract briefly as a screenwriter and then fired him because he was black is another shocking fact lost to history. The relationship between Jim and Dido in Himes' novel is also very resonant of the relationship between Jim Starck (Dean) and the character of Plato, played by Sal Mineo in Rebel.

Could there be a connection/influence that few people have ever realized?"

ENG - Chester Himes and the Ohio State Pen fire (1930)

On several American websites (see below), one can find articles about the Ohio State Penitentiary fire - Easter Monday fire - on April 21, 1930. They are illustrated by some extraordinary photographs (the penitentiary on fire, the caskets in the improvised morgue).

Chester Himes was a convict in the penitentiary at that time, having been sentenced to 20 to 25 years in 1928. One of his short stories, To What Red Hell (1934), is related to this fire. It shows the disarray of a convict, running to and fro in a desperate attempt to rescue other inmates. Himes used it again later as a chapter of his prison novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, initially titled Cast the First Stone.

"From the dormitory windows they saw the fire trucks come through the stockade gates. They heard the clang of bells, the motor roar. They saw convicts running across the yard, the sudden surge of Negro convicts from the wheel barrow company,carrying blankets in their arms; then the white convicts from the dining room company. Guards came running. Everyone was running." (beginning of chapter 8).

At the turn of the 20th century, the Ohio Pen was presented as a modern model prison. From the start, however, the reality was quite different. In the 19th century, a cholera epidemic killed 121 inmates. The websites articles (below) reveal that even if prisoners may have initiated the fire as a means of diversion to protect their escape, the extreme overcrowding of the penitentiary - the prison population exceeded twice its capacity at the time of the fire - and the lack of safety devices and emergency procedures were the main causes of the extension of the fire, which caused 322 deaths.

After the fire, the Ohio Parole Board was established in 1931. It eventually decided the release of more than 2,000 prisoners. Himes was one of them. He was released in 1936, after 8 years in the Pen. He had already published short stories in several popular magazines, which was considered by the Parole Board as a token of rehabilitation.

Websites

The Ohio Penitentiary Fire

The Report of the Board of Inquiry on the causes of the fire (May, 1930)
The history of the Ohio Pen

ENG - Chester Himes and James Thurber: a deja vu feeling

While reading Pinktoes and Plan B, I experienced a kind of deja vu feeling. It related to sudden collective movements in both novels: in Plan B, the war between whites and blacks, and in Pinktoes between black women and white women. My conclusion was that the text of Pinktoes and Plan B (Himes) bears a surprising analogous resemblance to the 15 thumbnails of The War between Men and Women (James Thurber).

The mode of narration used by Himes, characterized by the abruptness of the movements and the visual descriptions, constitutes a literary form most suitable to express sudden, explosive movements. There is always a momentum - a group pursues another, a group flees another - and sudden reversals.

"In Pinktoes, after a rumor is spread, according to which [Mamie Mason] only seeks to mongrelize the white race, a newspaper mentions ‘massive raids by black women on all white men.‘ The second phase of the war is marked by the radicalization of the positions of white women. As worthy ‘descendants of the pioneers who conquered the Redskins’ they assert themselves determined to ‘fight fire with fire’ and turn to the most diverse means to become black. Panic then overtakes black women. Racial antagonisms are affirmed in large movements where opinions and actions of the protagonists are illustrated in the extreme. There is no longer room for the individuals; only remaining are generic categories such as ‘black women’, ‘white women’, ‘all white men over forty years’. 

The same phenomenon can be seen in Plan B. After the massacre of dozens of blacks by the police, whites are horrified. Their collective guilt is reflected in different ways: extravagant blood collection, public atonement, personal and official mourning events. When the inquiry reveals that the massacre began after the death of three policemen killed by a black sniper armed with a mysterious gun, the situation is reversed. ‘Trepidation supplanted their orgy of guilt. Why should they feel so bad about a few blacks being killed by the police when all of their lives were in danger? Trepidation grew to anger. Were they asking too much to feel safe in their own country, their own homes, living their own lives? Hadn’t they done enough for the blacks who were imposed on them by their ancestors? Did they bring the blacks here from Africa? […] Inevitably, this resentment aroused strong, exaggerated hostilities on both sides of the color line." 

From Sylvie Escande, Chester Himes, l'unique, L'Harmattan, 2013.

The Google search does not reveal any connection between the two authors. It is likely that they never met. The author Himes, meanwhile, could not but know James Thurber, a famous New Yorker writer and cartoonist in the 1930’s.

The biographical elements they have in common separate them more than they link them: both of them studied at the University of Ohio in Columbus - Thurber fifteen years before Himes. He has given a very funny account of his studies in one of his short stories, University Days. Thurber was white - the only blacks in his books are servants speaking a colourful language. In The Third Generation, Himes’ autobiographical novel, one can clearly see the absolute separation that existed between white and black students. If the two authors shared an unremarkable university career, their subsequent paths logically diverged: a journalistic career for Thurber, crime and the Ohio State penitentiary for Himes.

Still, an intimate fact may have played a role: Thurber had lost an eye as a child, the victim of an arrow shot by his brother. We can see in two Himes’ novels the weight of his guilt after the accident that blinded his brother Joe, during a chemistry manipulation that the latter should never have performed alone (Yesterday Will Make you Cry, The Third Generation).

Most important, the two authors have in common a fantastic and surreal sensibility that allows them to identify, under the false pretences of the world, lines of force and violent clashes.

On the Google Images of The War Between Men and Women we can see, among other Thurber drawings and photos of the film that was shot, some thumbnails of the series. They have a distinctive number (in Roman numerals) and a very short caption.

ENG - Himes' tribute to Faulkner

While he was writing his first novel for the Série noire in 1957 (For the Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem), Himes, lacking inspiration after the first 80 pages, turned to Faulkner: "The first thing I did on returning to my room was to reread an old beat-up paperback of Faulkner's Sanctuary to sustain my outrageousness and give me courage" (My Life of Absurdity). When he described in Plan B blacks  covered with dust and plaster after being shot by the police cannon, Himes wrote: "William Faulkner would have been vindicated in his description of black skin turning the grey of wood ashes".

Faulkner's influence is manifest in the narration. For example, the structure of Sanctuary, with its alternating focus on the two main characters (Temple and Horace Benbow), and the structuration of time essentially by light marks (in the 1st chapter, the conscience of the passing of time stems from the setting sun, the dusk, the light of a lamp) have certainly inspired Himes. The meeting of Horace Benbow and Popeye, which opens the book with its very cinematic eye contact is obviously quoted by Himes in the sequence between Dummy and Sugar in The Big Gold Dream (chapter 14) with its match cuts connecting the eyes and glances of the two characters.

And Faulkner is also present in the vision of the History of the South. In Plan B, the History of Tomsson Black's plantation is a "crappy counterpoint"[1] to the epical clearing and planting by Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom.

There is, finally, an issue on which the two authors coincide. We grasp it better thanks to the magnificent interpretation of Édouard Glissant in Faulkner, Mississipi. This is "the merciless impartiality" of Faulkner, his uncompromising gaze focused on blacks. Himes goes even further: the monstrous is present in The Heat's on, and in his last two novels, Blind Man with a Pistol and Plan B.

[1] Chester Himes, l’unique.

ENG - Special issue of 813 dedicated to Chester Himes

The latest issue of 813 (N° 122) is a special issue devoted to Chester Himes and coordinated by Bernard Daguerre. It includes, next to a presentation of Himes and his first novels by James Sallis, his biographer, and to several tribute texts (Montalban, Christiane Rochefort, Claude Mesplède) and fictions inspired by Himes (Jake Lamar and Marc Villard) several new studies. "The end of the Free State of Harlem" is devoted to the last two novels, Blind Man With a Pistol and Plan B (Sylvie Escande). "Gravedigger and Coffin Ed in French: translations worth burying" is a thorough survey by Pierre Bondil on Himes’ translations in the Série Noire (Gallimard). In "The Apocalypse according to Chester ..." Xavier Dazerat considers Himes’ last novel, Plan B, as the inevitable culmination of all his previous works and focuses on the forms that politics take in the novel. In "The chains of secrecy", Ruth Fialho, shows that the white predator’s perverse secrets in The Real Cool Killers are open secrets, which testify about the disintegration of the black community and the abandonment of its women. "A garden without flowers" is an investigation of François Darnaudet about the mysterious novel co-written by Himes and Willa, the woman he met on the ship that brought him to France in 1953.

Other articles tell the incredible story of Himes’ cabin-trunk, perhaps more founded than that of his typewriter as told by Dany Laferrière, and examine the successful adaptations of two of Himes' novels in comics (Frédéric Prilleux). A detailed inventory of the controversial adaptations of his novels to the screen (François Guérif and Jeanne Guyon) can also be found.

This issue of 813 has achieved its objective and improves the knowledge of Himes and his work. It even opens up new avenues and fosters debate and new questions.

813 draws its title from a novel by Maurice Leblanc (1910) featuring Arsène Lupin.

ENG - 'I Was Looking For a Street' - Chester Himes and Charles Willeford

I Was Looking For a Street is the title of the novel that Jesse Robinson vainly tries to get published in The End Of a Primitive  (1956). Himes had already given this title to the novel that Jethro is about to write in the autobiographical short story Da-Da-Dee (1948 - in Black On Black)*.

I Was Looking For a Street is also the title of Charles Willeford’s autobiography where he recalls his childhood and adolescence. Willeford’s’ parents died of TB when he was a child. During the Depression, from the age of 12, Willeford lived a vagabond life between trains, small jobs and soup kitchens. It is a beautiful book. To my knowledge, Willeford never explained why he had chosen this title, still it is probable that he thus paid homage to Himes. As a journalist in the Miami Herald, Willeford wrote in Himes’ obituary (1984): “He will be remembered as one of America’s greatest writers, black or white.”

The 4 Willeford’s novels with Hoke Moseley as a main character (hero doesn’t  become him) are Miami Blues, New Hope For the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Danièle and Pierre Bondil have translated them in French (Miami Blues, Une seconde chance pour les morts, Dérapages and Ainsi va la mort).

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* In the French translation: "On l'avait invité à la résidence pour travailler à un roman intitulé Le pigeon. Après avoir écrit une soixantaine de pages, il s'était arrêté pour commencer une autobiographie appelée Hier vous fera pleurer. Mais maintenant il était plein à déborder d'une histoire qu'il avait l'intention d'appeler Je cherchais une rue. Il l'avait trouvée, en effet. Il avait trouvé la rue, Congress Street, une petite rue pleine de boîtes noires, qui partait d'une colline pour rejoindre la rue principale."  Noir sur noir, Paris, 10/18, 1984. Translated by Yvonne and Maurice Cullaz.