Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 6 Assuming the Position: Fugitivity and Futurity in the Work of Chester Himes

CHAPTER 6 Assuming the Position Fugitivity and Futurity in the Work of Chester Himes Kevin Bell But there exist other values that fit only my forms. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks In the disappeared third side of a Parisian triangle he draws between Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes, drinking and fighting, advancing and recoiling, all on the terrace of Les Deux Magots on a spring evening in 1953, New Yorker writer Hilton Als, describing the scene nearly fifty years later in a profile on Himes, detects the betrayal of an unspoken ideological mandate presumably governing the field of black American literature after the Second World War. The alcohol consumed by the three writers that evening loosens the boundaries of a hazardous zone of dense interpersonal tension , already laced by an ancient intertwining of fiction’s force and ideology’s racialist insistence. The primary fabric of this tension is a ruptural, sarcastic word-play that, without drink, might have remained soberly submerged, repressed within a public sphere essentially tone-deaf to the agonistic gestures of an inchoate, expatriate black literature, defined from its very beginnings by the paradoxical task of making poetic sense of the multiply dislocated conditions of its own expression. What results that evening is a conversation between Wright and Baldwin that is as sharp in its mutually contemptuous edges as it is pointedly free in its accusatorial range. 150 Kevin Bell The freedom of the dialogue’s violence, however, is silently enframed and brutally circumscribed throughout by the American literary rules of professionalized “blackness.” The rigors of such rules—policed as they are within the self-reproductive regimes of the publishing arm of the American culture industry—are amplified even as they are reconfigured by this interplay among artists who are rivals and, in the shared-ness of the ground each seeks, also brothers, writers who will never form an ideological or creative unit, yet who will ever be viewed within a certain unitary fusion. The scene at Les Deux Magots in 1953 is originally recorded by Himes himself in the first volume of his memoir The Quality of Hurt (1972). By Himes’s account, its very arrangement is born in an antagonistic swirl of egoism, betrayal, voyeurism, and perhaps, notso -surprisingly, fraternity: Later, as we were preparing to leave for the party, the telephone rang. When Dick returned from answering it, he wore that look of malicious satisfaction which his close friends knew so well. He asked if I knew James Baldwin. I said no, but I had heard a great deal about him . . . I had read a review of Lonely Crusade that Baldwin had published in the Socialist Party’s newspaper, the New Leader, but I had never met him. Dick said that he had been instrumental in getting Baldwin an award for eighteen hundred dollars and a renewal for nine hundred from Harper & Brothers to enable him to write his first novel. . . . He said Baldwin had “repaid his generosity” by “attacking him” in a number of published articles. . . . “Now Baldwin has the nerve to call me to borrow five thousand francs (ten dollars),” he said gleefully. He had made an appointment to meet him at the Deux Magots , and insisted that I go with him. I remember thinking at the time that he sounded as though he wanted a witness . . . Then we hurried to the Deux Magots and found Baldwin waiting for us at a table on the terrace across from the Eglise Saint-Germain. I was somewhat surprised to find Baldwin a small, intense young man of great excitability. Dick sat down in lordly fashion and started right off needling Baldwin, who defended himself with such intensity that he stammered, his body trembled and his face quivered. I sat and looked from one to the other, Dick playing the fat cat and forcing Baldwin into the role of the quivering mouse. It wasn’t particularly funny, but then Dick wasn’t a funny man. I never found it easy to laugh with Dick; it was far easier to laugh at him on occasion. Fugitivity and Futurity in the Work of Chester Himes 151 Dick accused Baldwin of showing his gratitude for all he had done for him by his scurrilous attacks. Baldwin defended himself by saying that Dick had written his story and hadn’t left him, or any other black writer, anything to write about. I confess at...