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FREEDOMWAYS SECOND QUARTER 1972 chose writing as a means of expressing himself when there is no indication of any interest in writing prior to his entering prison. Even more odd--perhaps bizarre is a more accurate word--is the crime that led to his imprisonment. From the way he describes it, the robbery was purely an act of compulsion. He was simply unable to resist the idea once it was solidly planted in his mind. Recalling the scene with brilliant clarity, he describes in vivid detail the setting and his intense emotional state at the time. But perhaps the most revealing thing about this book is the author's apparent inability to relate emotionally to the people around him, including his family. In fourteen years of marriage to an attractive and loving wife, for instance, Himes succeeded only in proving his inability to either give or appreciate love. Indeed, he hardly considers women at all except as objects of pleasure. "Outside of her body," he writes, "the most appealing thing about a woman is a sense of humor!" He entertains the reader, however, not with memories of their humor but of their bodies. Himes went abroad in 1953 but in a sense his exile began long before he departed these hostile shores. His autobiography is in essence the remembrances of an alienated spirit, a man apart who apparently rarely extended himself beyond his own self-interest. He considers himself a misfit. The [[italicized]] Quality [[italicized]] of [[italicized]] Hurt [[italicized]] becomes even less interesting upon his arrival in Paris although it is supposedly in Europe he found himself as man and writer. He plunges into his new life with enthusiasm ... and with a new woman. Before the Ile [[italicized]] de [[italicized]] France [[italicized]] docks in a French port, Himes has fallen in love with a "white American socialite" whom he has met on board. She was still married to a Dutch playboy with "an enormous penis." She has college-age children, a thriving neurosis and apparently little money but she enjoys what Himes calls "exploratory sex." She is the one person he writes about with sensitivity and feeling. Since the nineteenth century many black writers, musicians, and painters have gone to Europe to escape American racism. They sought, among other things, an atmosphere that was free of those debilitating social pressures that are especially frustrating to the sensitive, creative temperament. Some, however, left for more perverse reasons--they wanted to live apart from their own (black) people, an attitude not uncommon in some light-complexioned blacks with a modicum of education and "background." In this autobiography, and in much of his fiction, there are indications that Himes is not entirely free of this tendency. 156 [[next page]] BOOK REVIEW HAIRSTON In a sense Europe "freed" him from being a "Negro." Now he could find acceptance as a man [[italicized]] and not as a colored [[italicized]] man; as a writer and not a Negro [[italicized]] writer--he could find some relief from the psychic bruises of hostile American culture in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris. No doubt there were material--and perhaps even some spiritual--advantages derived from living in Europe but the experience seems to have had a minimum effect on Chester Himes as a writer and thinker. His novels from Europe offer no clearer insight into the problems of man and society than his earlier works. Unlike Richard Wright, whose intellectual powers flourished in Europe, Himes seems addicted to the commonplace. It is difficult to believe that a writer would commit himself to such a trivial account of his own life. He complains bitterly about the various ways America has "hurt" him as though it were a personal grievance. A larger view of the American experience seems beyond his interest or intellectual grasp. He gives no reasons why he became a writer, how it happened, or what writers influenced him at the beginning. Recalling his Lonely [[italicized]] Crusade [[italicized]], a controversial anti-communist novel, I was curious why he, like many ambitious but hopelessly bourgeois black writers, became such a willing anti-communist. I was curious because anti-communism is clearly an ideological [[italicized]] position that applies the interpretation of "communist subversion" to every struggle against colonial oppression and racism. (Richard Wright's wrong-headed analysis of the Bandung Conference is an example of the destructiveness of an anti-communist outlook.) But since so few questions are answered about Chester Himes as either man or writer, I must ask again: why did he write his book? No man's life is trivia and certainly not Chester Himes's. His long, productive career as a writer is not without distinction for his novels said much about the realities of American life, its values, antisocial tendencies, ruthless individualism. And If [[italicized]] He [[italicized]] Hollers [[italicized]] is a superior novel by any literary standard. It brilliantly portrays the destructive social dynamics of American life, how its poisonous racism seeps into every corner of our experience. Even his crime novels reveal much about the quality of life of the United States. I found this autobiography disturbing because none of Himes' qualities as a writer are reflected in the work. The [[italicized]] Quality [[italicized]] of [[italicized]] Hurt [[italicized]] never rises above the pedestrian level except in one overwhelming way. It reveals to us a terrible lonely man. But his is a loneliness of the spirit, a weariness for commitments that were never made, for 157
