Chester Himes by James Sallis

Author:James Sallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2000-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

11

European Experience

Anything can save you, if you grab it hard enough and hold on.

On the ship across, two or three days out, Himes begins to convince himself that he is again in love of some sort, slipping into the state as into a fine, old shoe. He has earlier been introduced to Willa Thompson Trierweiler, Boston socialite, unhappily shanghaied wife to a Dutch dentist, novelist-in-progress; now, standing in a ship’s corridor clutching at him, in a matter of minutes she tells Himes of her husband’s sexual aggression and infidelities, of her four daughters, of her most recent nervous breakdown. She is returning home to obtain a divorce and is at work on an autobiographical novel, The Silver Altar. Flashes of intimacy and intimation are exchanged. They’ll work on the book together, it’s decided, meeting in Paris and proceeding to Majorca after her necessary return to Luxembourg. Willa is lively, “innocent”1 and, very much like the Kriss we meet on The Primitive’s first page, beneath a facade of confidence and success emotionally bereft. Himes finds this combination of social status, bearing, and desperate insecurity irresistible. Another vulnerable, damaged woman to protect—with the added benefit of endless distraction from the work he’s vowed to concentrate upon. Willa in turn sees in Himes, one supposes, or somehow manages to attach to him, a stability, balance, a leveling horizon; perhaps also, in his role as professional writer, in his dress and faultless manners, in his outward calm demeanor, a quality of wisdom.

Behind, America, a quiet, smiling man with darkness in his eyes, stood ashore watching Himes’s departure with (as Joan Didion would write in quite another context) the look of a man who all his life has followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow. Always, here, this irresolvable mix: staid optimism and a sense of dread so acute that both national and personal life are driven to extreme commitments. To live on this shore, one had to split oneself into parts, hold contradictory notions. Forever half bright promise, half madness, America was. Always going on about the future, always on its way somewhere, never looking back. Excused all sorts of things.

Chester arrived in Paris on April 10, 1953, one week after departing New York. Wright, Yves Malartic, and old friend Dan Levin had come early to Gare Saint Lazare to meet the wrong train; speaking very little French and that badly, Himes took a cab to Wright’s where, fuming, he was turned away by a monstrous concierge; he returned to the station, at length engaged a second cab, and made his way to Hotel Delavigne where, as it turns out, Wright had booked a room for him. The two finally met the next morning for breakfast at Wright’s favorite haunt, Café Monaco.

Dick expected a gathering of our soul brother compatriots, all of whom knew I was to arrive the night before, but not one of them appeared, an eccentricity which I was later to learn was the natural reaction of the envious and jealous American blacks who lived in Paris—or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter.

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