The Several Lives of Chester Himes.

Sanders, Mark A.

Edward Margolies and Michael Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 213 pp. $28.00.

Reviewed by

Mark A. Sanders Emory University

The French novelist Jean Giano once remarked that he would "give all of Dos Passos and Fitzgerald for a few pages of Himes." If, perhaps, slightly overstated, Giano's point is well-taken: Chester Himes deserves much more credit and critical attention than he has received. Given Himes's prodigious output and its lasting influence, the number of critical studies devoted to his work remains disproportionately small. Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre's The Several Lives of Chester Himes responds to this critical dearth, hoping to inaugurate a new, more prolific era in Himes scholarship. To this end, Margolies and Fabre attempt to harness a richly varied and peripatetic life, reshaping it into serviceable patterns and metaphors.

Several Lives begins by presenting Himes's life and writing in a suggestive symbiosis. Himes, for Margolies and Fabre, embodies a series of dynamic contradictions which shed light on his historical moment: "... he contained within himself so many of the contradictory impulses, desires, and aspirations of his American upbringing.... surely he mirrors in himself the social, cultural, and racial conflicts of the America he wrote about. Indeed his most powerful writings express these unresolved tensions." Himes was fitful, transient, always on the move in search of ever elusive resolution, and so his writing serves as another kind of motion, both reflecting and answering his search: "If there exists a persistent thread in Himes's life, it is his constant restlessness. The several worlds he passed through ... served only to exacerbate his frenetic search for peace of mind.... Finally, it was only the act of writing that provided him with the catharsis he sought...." Through writing, Himes could objectify, at least temporarily, the hurt and injustice he felt as an African American, the alienating absurdity of racism, and the resulting chaos (both psychic and social) of black life. Yet writing also worked to reinforce these contradictions, which would keep Himes in motion, and of course keep him writing.

As they report the details of Himes's life, Margolies and Fabre highlight, along the way, more specific tensions shaping both the life and art. Deeply ambivalent over the possibility of black male agency, Himes questioned whether the black hero could ever affect his predicament, or was destined simply to be victim of it. Predictably, anxiety over black masculinity produced a rather conventional chauvinism; Himes and his protagonists fought to be "men" in the traditional sense, a struggle which often resulted in the physical and psychological abuse of women. In turn, a patriarchal construction of masculinity betrays Himes's anxiety over sexuality and the political, psychosexual dynamics of interracial relationships. Specifically in terms of race, Himes's fiction seriously doubts whether the U.S. can ever overcome its history of racial strife; to the contrary, its urban policies seem to demand violence and embattled black communities. And defining his later years was the anxiety over his place in Western letters, particularly the literary merit of detective fiction. In brief, Himes's multiple lives - his tortured adolescence, his incarceration, his struggle to write and publish in the U.S., and his overdue celebrity in France - begin, for Margolies and Fabre, to suggest a coherence through recurring themes: alienation, violence, absurdity, and hurt.

In addition to the specifics of the life itself, Several Lives provides important practical tools for ensuing scholarship. It supplies a complete chronological listing of Himes's publications, a valuable complement to the bibliography Fabre compiled with Robert Skinner. Furthermore, the study's notes cite important holdings, particularly those in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. Important too, Margolies and Fabre correct crucial inaccuracies in Himes's autobiography.

All told, Margolies and Fabre make a serviceable contribution to Himes scholarship, yet one that leaves serious Himes readers with less than a full portrait. A description of a life more than an interpretation of one, Several Lives chronicles the practical facts and events, and at isolated moments cites larger patterns and tensions these events suggest; unfortunately, these brief insights go largely undeveloped. At 175 pages, this study does not promise a biography in the fullest sense of the term; still, recent work in African American biography, particularly studies by Arnold Rampersad, David Levering Lewis, and Thadious M. Davis, have raised the critical benchmark dramatically. Their reading of psychological motivation; the creation of political, social, and aesthetic contexts for both the life and art; and their meticulous rereading of the literature in light of these interwoven contexts deliver multi-dimensional subjects in the process of shaping their lives. By comparison, readers of the Himes study have yet to realize the psychological and emotional dynamics of Himes's childhood household, or the connection between incarceration and recurring themes of confinement and chaos, and they have yet to appreciate fully the appeal and trauma of the expatriate life. In short, we have yet to see Chester Himes delivered in his fullest complexity; but toward this end, Margolies and Fabre provide an essential first step.