Race, Genre and Commodification in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Race, Genre and Commodification in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of PhD in the Faculty of Humanities 2010 William Turner School of Arts, Histories and Cultures 2 Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………... 3 Declaration/Copyright……………………………………………………………. 4 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………… 5 Introduction: Chester Himes’s Harlem and the Politics of Potboiling…………………………. 6 Part One: Noir Atlantic 1. ‘I felt like a man without a country.’: Himes’s American Dilemma …………………………………………………….41 2. ‘What else can a black writer write about but being black?’: Himes’s Paradoxical Exile……………………………………………………….58 3. ‘Naturally, the Negro.’: Himes and the Noir Formula……………………………………………………..77 Part Two: ‘The crossroads of Black America.’ 4. ‘Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.’: The Aesthetics of Urban Pathology in Himes’s Harlem……………………….... 96 5. ‘If trouble was money…’: Harlem’s Hustling Ethic and the Politics of Commodification…………………116 6. ‘That’s how you got to look like Frankenstein’s Monster.’: Divided Detectives, Authorial Schisms………………………………………... 135 Part Three: Pulping the Black Aesthetic 7. ‘I became famous in a petit kind of way.’: American (Mis)recognition…………………………………………………….. 154 8. ‘That don’t make sense.’: Writing a Revolution Without a Plot…………………………………………… 175 Conclusion: Of Pulp and Protest……………………………………………………………...194 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. 201 Word count: 85,936 3 Abstract The career path of African American novelist Chester Himes is often characterised as a u-turn. Himes grew to recognition in the 1940s as a writer of the Popular Front, and a pioneer of the era’s black ‘protest’ fiction. However, after falling out of domestic favour in the early 1950s, Himes emigrated to Paris, where he would go on to publish eight Harlem-set detective novels (1957-1969) for Gallimard’s La Série Noire. Himes’s ‘black’ noir fiction brought him critical and commercial success amongst a white European readership, and would later gain a cult status amongst an African American readership in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Himes’s post-‘protest’ career has been variously characterised as a commercialist ‘selling out’; an embracing of black ‘folk’ populism; and an encounter with Black Atlantic modernism. This thesis analyses the Harlem Cycle novels in relation to Himes’s career, and wider debates regarding postwar African American literature and race relations. Fundamentally, I argue that a move into commercial formula fiction did not curtail Himes’s critical interest in issues of power, exploitation, and racial inequality. Rather, it refocused his literary ‘protest’ to representational politics itself, and popular culture’s ability to inscribe racial identity, resistance and exploitation. On the one hand, Himes’s Harlem fiction meets a formulaic and commercial demand for images of ‘pathological’ black urban criminality. However, Himes, operating ‘behind enemy lines’, uses the texts to dramatise this very dynamic. Himes’s pulp novels depict a heightened Harlem that is thematically ‘pulped’ by a logic of capitalist exploitation, and a fetishistic dominant of racial difference. In doing so, Himes’s formula fiction makes visible certain anti-progressive shifts in the analysis and representation of postwar race relations. My methodology mirrors the multiple operations of the texts, placing Himes’s detective fiction in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Using archival material, I look in detail at Himes’s public image and contemporary reception as a Série Noire writer, his professional correspondence with French and U.S. literary agents, and his private thoughts and later reflections regarding his career. This methodology attempts to get to grips with a literary triangulation between Himes’s progressive authorial intentions, the demands placed upon him as a Série Noire writer, and the wider ideological shifts of the postwar era. By exploring these different historical, geographical and literary contexts, this thesis offers a wide-reaching analysis of how cultural and racial meanings are produced and negotiated within a commodity form. 4 DECLARATION No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning; COPYRIGHT STATEMENT i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/policies/intellectual- property.pdf), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on presentation of Theses 5 Acknowledgements Thanks to Michael Bibler, Brian Ward and Ian Scott for their advice and feedback, and especially Eithne Quinn for her invaluable scholarly guidance. Thanks to my parents, John and Christina, for their continued support and encouragement. To Emma, I could not have completed this without your love, patience and friendship. 6 Introduction: Chester Himes’s Harlem and the Politics of Potboiling In the Harlem of Chester Himes’s detective fiction, violent death is not only an everyday occurrence, but a lucrative business. One of the most affluent recurring characters in the author’s books is the undertaker H. Exodus Clay. At the end of Himes’s first detective novel, A Rage In Harlem, Clay puts up the bail money for the villainous femme fatale, Imabelle. Harlem’s Assistant District Attorney is outraged, pointing out that her actions have led to the gory deaths of at least two people. A lawyer explains that this is precisely the point of Clay’s investment: ‘Two of those fellows had eight thousand dollars on them when they were killed.’ ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘Why, I thought you knew how that worked, Mr. Lawrence. The money goes for their burials. And Mr. Clay got their funerals. It’s just like they’ve been drumming up business for him.’1 The novel’s graphic depiction of murderous violence (gunfights, acid-attacks, throat-cutting, decapitation) resolves itself at the level of capitalistic exchange. Clay rewards the text’s femme fatale for ‘drumming up business for him’, the corpses left in her wake fetching a competitive price. Indeed, the phrase ‘shilling for Clay’ becomes a byword in Himes’s Harlem for murder, the lives of its citizens valued in dollars and cents.2 In Himes’s detective fiction, violent death above all pays. A sign outside a credit jewellery store sums up such an ethos: ‘We Will Give Credit To The Dead.’3 In essence, H. Exodus Clay stands as a metaphor for Himes’s own status as a profiteer of black ‘pulp’. Indeed, as this thesis argues, Himes’s eight Harlem Cycle detective novels (1957-1969) both enact and thematise black pop-cultural production at the level of brutal capitalist exploitation.4 Like his undertaker H. Exodus Clay, Himes is an African American 1 Chester Himes, A Rage In Harlem in The Harlem Cycle Volume I (Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1996 [1957]), 177. 2 Chester Himes, The Big Gold Dream (London: Penguin, 1976 [1960]), 136. 3 Chester Himes, All Shot Up (London: Panther Books, 1969 [1960]), 84. 4 In order of French publication, the novels’ English titles are: A Rage In Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1958), The Crazy Kill (1959), All Shot Up (1960), The Big Gold Dream (1960), The Heat’s On (1961), Cotton Comes To Harlem (1964) and Blind Man With A Pistol (1969). An unfinished conclusion to the Harlem Cycle, Plan B, was published in 1983, edited together by Michel Fabre and Robert Skinner from notes and short stories 7 who, in Paris in 1957, sought to ‘drum up business’ by creating a ‘black’ hardboiled detective series for Gallimard’s cut-price line of pulp fiction, La Série Noire. Published in French translation, the novels’ lurid vision of an excessively violent and sexualised Harlem brought Himes a level of financial and critical success with a white European audience. Later, the

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