Chester Himes by James Sallis Page A

relationship he had ever had was with the character he’d called Dido in that novel.
    One bond between Himes and Prince Rico was their strong need for fantasy. Like Luis and Valentin in Manuel Puig’s
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, they talked endlessly of movies and their stars, pored over movie magazines. Himes felt a similar draw to stories in the slick popular magazines, experiencing as he read them “all the soft, mushy emotions” 40 forbidden him by the prison experience and by his own obdurate nature. Subsequent shame over his sentimentality, he wrote, would lead him to become “invariably more vulgar, obscene, callous,” 41 as though two men coexisted (and in many ways they did) inside Chester’s skull. Himes’s early plots, too, careen from familiar hard-boiled attitudes to frank sentimentality.
    That same double consciousness emerged in somewhat different form in correspondence with Van Vechten:
    As I look back now I feel that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate)desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro’s desire for respectability and such. It brought a lot of confusion to my own mind, added to which was a great deal of pressure of a thousand kinds being exerted by friends and relatives and loved ones who were half ashamed of what I wrote, forgetting that it was what I wrote that made me what I was, until I was caught in a bag which I didn’t begin to break out of until I wrote
If He Hollers
. I wrote that defiantly, more or less, at the time without thought of it being published. 42
    Indeed, Stephen Milliken finds in this biform nature, this constant tug to discrete ends, the central critical problem presented by Himes’s work. The work has obvious power, he asserts. It rarely fails to claim and move the reader.
    Yet at all points in every part of Himes’s work weaknesses of the most obvious kind are evident. The author seems continually to be choosing, for example, the more striking effect for its impact value alone, or to be choosing the most tired cliché available in full and triumphant knowledge of its falsity and tawdriness. He can in fact be embarrassingly bad, and yet the apparent weaknesses in Himes’s work seem somehow to be essential to the strengths. 43
    Cast the First Stone
ends with Jimmy looking back at the prison on his way to the farm: “You big tough son of a bitch, you tried to kill me but I’ve got you beat now, I thought.” 44 So does Himes’s first-written novel become, finally, a story of redemption, for its author as much as its protagonist. In prison, in his stories, and especially in this novel, Chester Himes learned how our lives can be ransomed, if forever imperfectly, by the relationships we manage and by literature. Chester Himes, always “the hardbitten old pro” 45
Life
magazine made him out to be, never one to take advice, never one to do things the right or expected or easy way. He’d create his books the same way he steered his life, by impulse and instinct, and if the life boiled over into chaos, then it would be a very
personal
kind of chaos, and the work that lanced out from it, those messages and novels, would be just as personal—like no light ever seen before.
    In that idiosyncrasy, Himes’s work seems peculiarly, unmistakably American. As a nation, as individuals, our strengths often rise directly from our weaknesses. We’ve a particular genius for quirkiness, for getting the job done despite ourselves. As has been suggested already, Himes’s greatest strength as a writer lay precisely in his ability to confront the unresolvable tensions and contradictions within himself, to draw them out in all their untowardness and give them temporizing shape.
    In the wake of the Easter morning fire and subsequent disclosure of prison conditions—beginning with 4,000 inmates housed in a facility built for