Hemingway and the Black Renaissance

In his first memoir, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years (1972), Chester Himes recalls a French newspaper reporter asking his opinion of Ernest Hemingway. Like his friend Richard Wright, Himes had emigrated to Paris and became a kind of phenomenon among French intellectuals and journalists during the postwar period. He fashioned, through his prison and crime fiction, a reputation as a leading exemplar of the hard-boiled style, a mode recognized as synonymous with Hemingway. Himes's reply to the Parisian journalist's inquiry offers insight into the African American writer's thinking on the subject of Hemingway's writing:

. . . I burst out laughing. I apologized for my apparent rudeness and explained that her question had reminded me of an incident in a restaurant in New York called Cyrano's, where I was having a drink at the bar with my first editor, Bucklin Moon, while awaiting a table for supper. There was an elegantly dressed drunk occupying the stool next to me who was saying: "I don't really like A Farewell to Arms. After I had read it for the fifth time I really decided I didn't like it."

(186)

The Quality of Hurt repeatedly invokes Hemingway, the autobiography's remarks taking on something of a patchy conversation with the senior author, who had also relocated to Paris in the 1920s. The majority of the references clearly indicate Himes's high regard for Hemingway's literary art. Himes gives the impression that the white author's writing not only served as a model for his own literary labors but that Hemingway's narratives played a vital role in forming the black author's perception of existential experience. When Himes narrates his experience of a Spanish bullfight, he naturally thinks of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932), but the reflection is intensely personal. Himes recalls how Hemingway's study of bullfighting related to his own narrow survival of the scandalous 1930 "Easter Monday" prison fire while he was serving his seven-and-a-half-year term in the Ohio State Penitentiary.¹ Death in the Afternoon's "forced contemplation of death" assisted Himes in facing forthrightly the authentic meanings of violence and mortality (326). The model of Hemingway's compelled confrontation with reality helped the black author forge his literary style, a combination of understatement and deceptive simplicity. Himes also suggests that Hemingway's influence informed this controversial author's often shocking subject matter. And in the 1955 interview granted Annie Brièrre, the French journalist who solicited Himes' estimation of Hemingway, he spells out in specific terms his veneration for the white author: "Hemingway is tremendous, especially when he describes a character's emotions. He's a writer of great emotional power. He doesn't make any judgments about man, society, or life in general" (2). Such are precisely the sort of objectives Himes aspired to in his own writing.

Himes was by no means the only African American author of note to express an intense esteem for Hemingway, as those who are familiar with Ralph Ellison's praise for the white author know.² It may not seem surprising that two black authors of the mid-twentieth-century period should set great store by Hemingway's stimulus except that Himes and Ellison in their time inhabited polar positions in the world of African American letters. Himes regarded himself and indeed was critically perceived as the brash chronicler of explicit violence in African American life, a writer who turned a glaring spotlight on American society. Alternatively, Ellison dedicated himself to generating a lyrical fiction that would wed African American folktale and jazz musical forms to avant-garde modernist prose techniques, with a view toward fashioning a pioneering prose that would take its place on the shelf alongside the most historically influential American novels. Indeed, though he highly regarded Hemingway, Ellison held Himes in disregard, unhappy, Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad remarks, "to be lumped in reviews with Himes as fellow pupils of 'the school perhaps founded by Richard Wright'" (203). Ellison's view of Himes's most celebrated novel, If...