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Kriss
shuddered with a sadistic thrill, at once excited and repulsed
by the prospect of seeing Jesse writhing on the floor with blood
spurting from his cut throat because her skin was white.
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Passages such as
this suggest to me that Chester Himes might well have been the original
rage against the machine. This novel (in some editions called The
Primitive; in others, The End of a Primitive) is so intense,
so furiously hateful and angry, so disturbing, so full of wrath and
pent up frustrations—all of which make it very hard to think and
write about. At the same time, it's very funny in places. Its themes,
and handling of them, will make virtually every reader uncomfortable—and
therein lies its importance, in its refusal to flinch. However, it isn't
the novel—itself, alone—that's interesting; it exists within
a very compelling set of circumstances. We know it's based on a real
life affair Himes had with a white woman named Vandi Haygood, who died
of a drug ovedose in 1955. The lines between the facts and the fiction
are somewhat blurry. Himes describes both the novel and the conditions
in his life under which he composed it in his two volumes of autobiography,
The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity; nevertheless,
James Sallis, in his authoritative biography Chester Himes: A Life,
declares that:
His
late memoirs are so rife with conflation and confabulation, highly
suspect. Memory at best is an uncertain instrument, and the volumes
of autobiography Himes wrote when well past sixty resound with
errors of fact, skewed sequences, even incorrect dates for central
experiences.
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In
my opinion, this is a novel best studied with all these observations,
and more, kept in mind; indeed, I would say The Primitive
is a great candidate for a kind of concentration in which critical,
biographical, and autobiographical writings about the work in
question are as important as the work, itself. It's exhausting
and draining for both characters and readers, as it must have
been for Himes to write, though he talks about its composition
almost as if it were a mystical experience: "By then I had
reduced myself to the fundamental writer, and nothing else mattered."
(Himes wrote the novel in Spain while living with a woman he had
met on the ship going over to Europe, Willa Thompson Trierweiler.
His account of their relationship takes up a huge chunk of The
Quality of Hurt.)
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It
begins with a trenchant passage describing Kriss Cummings' awakening
to a new day; and the sequence is wholly mordant, weird, so unlike
any other writing or point of view that we know—startling,
mesmerizing, both engaging and repulsive at once, simultaneously
pulling us in while almost completely turning us off to Kriss'
character and persona. Great pains are taken to describe the difference
between 'loneliness' and 'aloneness'. As she comes slowly out
of sleep, her arm 'searchingly' seeks a man beside her to hold;
there is none. There comes a little exposition about her ex-husband,
whom she despised; but, tellingly, she could always count on the
'security of his presence'. She's mortified of being alone, yet
she wakes up alone almost every day. She sleeps with countless
men, evidently, simply for the purpose of not being alone.
(The edition I have reads eighty-seven men, though Sallis quotes
an edition which reads one hundred and eighty-seven. As
a brief aside, I want to mention that the edition I have is from
a major paperback publisher, Signet Books, circa 1960s and is
so chock full of typos and proofreading mistakes that it raises
some real questions. It's hard to believe it was ever put on shelves.
I'd like to know the story behind that!) The apartment
is described as 'like waking in a grave'. Kriss' routine of endless
drinking, endless meaningless sex, and constant TV watching is
evidently only broken up by the hours she spends at her job as
Assistant Director of the India Institute. We see her dressing
for work, choosing a red dress because it makes her feel daring
and 'She couldn't get along in the world without feeling daring.'
Himes cuts to another scene in which the other major character,
Jesse Robinson, is also waking up in the morning. The author
draws subtle distinctions—Kriss' apartment is in Grammercy
Park, Jesse's in Harlem; hers is back from the street, with
the windows looking only upon the lifeless bricks of another
building, cut off, dreary, while his windows allow views of
the city. She's alone, he has roommates (who provide some great
comic scenes, especially the little dog). Most pointedly, Himes
criss crosses-scenes in which Kriss and Jesse ponder their nude
bodies in mirrors: she's disgusted by hers, he's satisfied with
his. This series of contrasts in which her side consists wholly
of negatives and his side is made up of comparative positives
is somewhat misleading upon a first reading because it makes
it seem as though he's the good guy and she's some evil noir
man-eater, and that's all there is to it. And, in fact, Himes
does employ many of the techniques of the classical noir
story; the Wikipedia
page on Noir Fiction lists him as one of the main practicioners
of the genre. There are almost uncountable instances in the
novel where Kriss is said to act or speak toward Jesse 'viciously'
or 'maliciously'; Himes invents a phrase, 'secret sensual smile'
that he uses ad naseum in regard to Kriss, and he means to suggest
that she employs this as a weapon against her men.
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And
she would smile her secret sensual smile, that cream-fed look
of unfaithful women that no painter on Earth has ever caught.
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The novel opens with them apart and takes about fifty pages to gather
a head of steam until they finally come together for a drunken, pill-popping
weekend of hostile sex and bitter conversation, of paradoxical love
and perfervid hate. Himes is working out two things, here, that were
consuming him in his personal life, at the time: his furious disappointment
at not really making it as a writer in the States and his obsession
with interracial relationships. I mentioned that The Primitive
is based, in large measure, on his romance with Vandi Haygood; at
the very start of The Quality of Hurt he shares his reasons
for eschewing America:
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Another
is that I came very close to killing the white woman, Vandi
Haygood, with whom I had lived; and I was both shocked and frightened.
I suppose murder, and more, given America's sex and racism syndrome,
when the potential murderer is a black male and his potential
victim a white female. I had always believed that to defend
my life, or my honor, I would kill a white man without a second
thought. But when I discovered that this applied to white women,
too, I was profoundly shaken. Because, by then, white women
were all I had left.
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As the yarn grinds through its alternating harrowing scenes and comic
moments, time becomes a blur, a jumble; the characters proceed to
torment each other in a thick haze of alcohol and explosive emotion
that makes them lose track of what happened when. Saturday night is,
all of a sudden, Sunday morning. A major event in the story is reported
on television news before it actually takes place in the novel, raising
the question of the actual chronology of events described. It could
be that Himes intentionally wants to demonstrate to us how stewed
the characters' minds are. Sallis writes:
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They
grow more and more confused as to the sequence of events, what
they have dreamed or remembered and what has actually occurred,
whether it is day or night, how much time has passed. Himes'
careful writing bears the reader directly and fully into that
confusion, culminating in a blackout for the reader much like
Jesse's own.
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It could
be that this is due to careful writing, indeed, but I think it could
also be that Himes' view of the nature and character of memory, as
a whole, is that it's a farrago, impossible to organize coherently,
at all [see the quote above noting the 'conflation
and confabulation' in Himes' memoirs]. It could be that Himes is really
pushing the envelope of the roman à clef as far as he can.
(There is a passage in the book that is a word-for-word lift of an
episode that appears in the autobiography, a story of how Himes got
into a small fender-bender with a drunken rich lady of the town; he
was, of course, tossed into jail and his wife encountered some serious
hardships in getting him sprung. This is not a short passage; it goes
on for some pages. That it appears in both books, virtually verbatim,
is astonishing and disorienting, and it suggests to us that Himes
is playing a kind of game, mixing fact and fiction like the ingredients
of a stew, inviting us—or, perhaps, daring us?—to
try to separate them, sort out one from the other.)
The instance in which Jesse visits his editor, James Pope, to collect
his latest manuscript, serves to illuminate the fever heat he feels
toward the American literary establishment and, in reverse, it demonstrates
the way some (most?) whites in Jesse's world feel towards black writers.
He's already guessed, long ago, that the publisher is passing on the
book. He remains polite throughout the meeting, barely able to keep
the lid on the simmering Pandora's Box of bare emotions contained
beneath his somewhat composed exterior (he's not one hundred percent
under control; he does let a few zingers slip out). One of
the explanations Pope gives for the novel's rejection—"The
public is tired of the plight of the poor downtrodden Negro"—sounds
quite similar to sentiments Kriss expresses, or starts to express,
such as "White people are tired of being hated by you..."
Everything exists in strands, fragments, but they're tied up and wrapped
around each other—Kriss, racism, the publisher, the reading public,
booze—it's all of a piece in Jesse's perception. The main form
of incursion from the outside world exists in the presence of the
television in Kriss' place, which plays all the time, and the authority
of which never seems to be questioned.
Personally, I feel that The Primitive must be important in
big ways that I find difficult to articulate; it shoots off in so
many different directions, is so malleable and bendable, a hunk of
clay that can be shaped according to the reader's predilections. Even
psychoanalysis has come into play with some commentators. In an essay
called "Slaying The Fathers: The Autobiography of Chester Himes",
from the collection The Critical Response to Chester Himes,
Gary Storhoff wrote:
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His
sexuality becomes a weapon for him to punish women but also
to expect (and, perhaps, welcome) punitive responses from them.
His tumultuous relationships with women reveal Himes' own will
to control and dominate, his own need to fulfill a code of brutal
masculinity, but, also, his need to experience abuse and punishment
in return. His typical attraction to neurotic, depressive women,
in unconscious rebellion against his strong mother who plays
the patriarch's role in his childhood, ironically brings him
much unhappiness...
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Psychoanalyzing
an author in this way takes a great deal of confidence on the part
of the critic, and perhaps a more in-depth knowledge of the work than
I can claim to have. I only offer the observation as an example of
the big possible orbits that present themselves in studying Himes.
The Primitive, and the legend, aura, and mystique surrounding
its author, are endlessly engaging and compelling. In my view, any
faults in the composition, and any ugliness or near insanity in the
viewpoint, is well worth enduring because of the honesty with which
the author confronts not-so-pretty feelings and behaviors. If you're
not fidgeting around in your chair while you read this novel, if you
don't feel forced to pause and think about some of the emotions you
may have felt in your own relationships, something's wrong. And to
force a response within a reader's heart is one of the hardest goals
the novelist can set for him/herself.
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