Write Like a Man: Chester Himes and the Criminal Text Beyond Bars

The Quality of Hurt is a fantastic, masculine work. American writers don’t produce manly books. Himes’s autobiography is that of a man.

—John A. Williams, Conversations with Chester Himes

By 1952, Chester Himes had spent a decade and a half writing and rewriting a novel that no one would publish. The text, a prison novel based on his own seven years spent at Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery from 1929 to 1936, may not have been attractive to publishers for a number of reasons. It is a novel about white characters written by a black author, which has perturbed critics since its initial publication in January of 1953, and prevented publishers from marketing the text as being about racial experience or racial uplift (the primary mid-century marketing approach for books by emerging black authors). Like many prison novels, it is not tightly structured around a linear plotline, but rather seeks to capture time as it passes for prisoners behind bars—perceived not as an unbroken chain of events but rather as loosely linked brutal episodes. On top of this, the narrative portrays horrific abuses and inhumanities, scenes of absurd and graphic violence sure to unsettle readers. But to Himes’s mind, these were not the reasons that each version of the manuscript throughout the 1940s and early 1950s was rejected time and time again by publishers. He tinkered with and altered some aspects of the text as he rewrote it over the years, but in each version the emotional arc of the story is structured around a homoerotic romance between the main character, Jimmy Monroe, and one of his fellow inmates. “The book has been around a great deal (since I wrote it several years ago) and has aroused a great deal of comment, mostly complimentary on the writing,” Himes wrote in a letter to his friend Carl Van Vechten in June of 1946, “but the homo-sexual story seems to have killed it.” The version of the text he was referring to, and the version with the most explicit scenes of homosexuality, was called Yesterday Will Make You Cry, completed sometime in the mid- to late-1940s, which Van Vechten proclaimed among all his novels to be “probably his best” (Himes, Dear Chester, Dear John 1).

As Himes observed, its “homo-sexual story” proved unpublishable, and he reworked it (toning down the sexual content) into a version called Cast the First Stone that he thought he might be able to sell.¹ Coward-McCann, a New York publishing house, accepted the manuscript of Cast the First Stone for publication in 1952, but only under the stipulation that editors could cut whatever they wished. Defeated, Himes agreed, writing again to Van Vechten on March 11, 1953:

I had to spend [the prison novel] in order to get the money and time to finish my new book [The Third Generation]. In my contract I had to give Cecil Goldbeck at Coward-McCann the complete right to cut it as he saw fit. He cut 250 pages from the original script of 650 pages, and the part he cut was mostly the heart, the pulsebeat and emotion, of the story. But there was nothing I could do about it except refuse to have it published; and I needed the money and the time. … Anyway, it is done. And if by this time life has taught me anything at all; it has taught me the utter futility of worrying about a book once it has been published.

But it was not done, because in 1998, fourteen years after Himes’s death and forty-five years after Cast the First Stone’s publication, Norton published the earlier version of the novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, that had not undergone invasive editorial changes and that contained descriptions of the protagonist’s explicitly homosexual romance. Suddenly Himes scholars saw the larger picture of his prison writing and his origins as an author. While Himes went on to make a name for himself in the field of violent racial protest novels and hard-boiled...