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Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Hirnes. Jackson: Up of Mississippi, 1995. 150 pp. $15.95.
Reviewed by
Bernard W. Bell Pennsylyvania State University
A American male writers don't produce manly books," John A. Williams wrote after reading the manuscript of the first volume of Chester Himes's autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972); "Himes' autobiography is that of a man." This provocative comment on Himes the man and writer appears in the introduction to Williams's "My Man Himes: An Interview with Chester Himes," the most illuminating and important of the eighteen "interviews" in Michel Fabre's and Robert E. Skinner's Conversations with Chester Himes. The most frequently recurring themes in these interviews and paraphrased, journalistic conversations that range chronologically from 1955 to 1985 are the deep-rooted violence of American culture; the absurdity of American racism; the schizophrenic, sensual lives of petty black criminals and their victims in Harlem; the need for organized revolution in the struggle for social justice and equality; and the exploitation of black American writers. Even though several of these conversations and interviews are rather short and sketchy, they offer useful complements to the story of Himes's life as a black American man and artist that he more passionately and provocatively reveals in his eighteen semi-autobiographical novels, numerous short stories and essays, film script, and two-volume autobiography. "The reappearance of nearly all of his fiction in the recent past," the editors write, "suggests we are very close to a major reappraisal of Chester Himes, and this collection will help in that process."
How does this collection help readers to reconstruct and reappraise Chester Bomar Himes as a black American man and artist? Because most of the selections were translated from French or German into English (seven) or conducted by Michel Fabre (four), the interviews and conversations are primarily European vignettes, reconstructed by the French, of Himes's national, racial, gender, and class identity formations as they were orally constructed over time by Himes himself. The translator of a French volume of Himes's short stories in 1982 and a French edition of his Plan B in 1983, the co-author with Edward Margolies of The Several Lives of Chester Himes, and the former Director of the Center for African American Studies and New...