Chester B. Himes by Lawrence P. Jackson

Author:Lawrence P. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

OTHELLO

1954–1955

Chester Himes and Willa Thompson purchased third-class tickets and left from Newhaven for Dieppe on January 26, 1954. Both of them were dazed and uncommunicative by the time they switched trains and headed southward in France, Chester was glazed over because the Channel crossing had been bad, and, as usual, he was violently seasick. Outside of the hardships of the war in Europe, Willa had not known what it was to travel in this fashion and was unable to grasp the pace of the chaos that had swallowed her; she withdrew “into herself like a hurt animal.”

Chester had pulled off the boat ride to Mallorca by engaging World in an option ploy on the revised and completed Silver Altar. He asked them to reconsider the manuscript and to wire him $500. If they took the book, they could use that for the advance. If they rejected the book, then he agreed to have his account billed for the $500 and have that money taken from future royalties, such as the money owed him for the Third Generation paperback deal with New American Library. Chester hoped for a decision within two weeks. If the manuscript was declined, he and Willa could shop it around to other publishers.

They began their long journey through another country where “inexperienced and untraveled” Chester was unfamiliar with the language and with barely a $300 stipend to sustain them. Thankfully, the Spaniards proved entirely different from the racist Brits or the snobbish French. “I was taken up by the Spanish people because of my ignorance and my race,” Chester observed with gratitude. As vulnerable and flagging as he had been after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he knew, “I needed all the help I could get.”

From Barcelona they booked passage to the Balearic Islands. Arriving in Mallorca on January 28, they were greeted, impossibly it seemed, by wet snow. As soon as they found a hotel, Chester availed himself of a liquor store and exited clenching the necks of two bottles of brandy. After regrouping for a few days, they set out to find Calla San Vicente, which had been praised by William Haygood, Vandi’s ex-husband, for its beauty and bargain prices. This quaint town was on the extreme northeastern shore of the island, across from the Bay of Pollensa. To get there they wedged aboard an ancient, wood-burning, smoke-gurgling train, sitting alongside “tearful, sinister-looking” Mallorcans, for a trip that took the entirety of the day, complicated by the fact that Chester missed their connecting point. After an afternoon-long rain-soaked ride in a broken-down taxi, they found a bar blaring jazz and English people who helped them secure lodging. Fatigued by his journey, Chester settled that afternoon on a first-floor modern apartment in the lovely house Calla Madonna, owned by Dona Catalina Rotger Amengual. The apartment had brown floor tiles, knotty-pine beams, hot water, and an American toilet, all for 750 pesetas, or about twenty dollars a month.

Escaping London eased Chester’s feelings about the less than smashing response to his new novel.

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