# In Print... The Literary Scene

● By PHILIP BUTCHER

## FICTION

### LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. $3.00.

Chester Himes' second novel, *Lonely Cru-
sade*, is a disappointment to those who hoped
the Negro author would outgrow the hatred to
which If He Hollers Let Him Go was dedi-
cated and the unilluminating concern with
violence which has characterized his short
stories. Mr. Himes' vision is still distorted with
bitterness and his second novel is more uncon-
vincing than his first.

The “hero,” Lee Gordon, becomes a union
organizer though he cares little about unions,
knows less, and does not even have a union
card. His ignorance is a convenient, if unbe-
lievable, circumstance which lets Mr. Himes
advance his own explanation of unionism. In
the course of Gordon’s inept, half-hearted ef-
forts to organize the Negro workers at the Com-
stock Aircraft Plant, Himes effectively presents
the background of wartime Los Angeles, the
best feature of the book.

Gordon comes in contact with many types
and classes of people. He despises most the
Communists but finds it advisable to work with
Luther, a black giant who is disloyal to every-
one but himself. Gordon's affair with Jackie,
a white girl more interested in sex than in
Marx, eases his abnormal racial inferiority com-
plex and bolsters an ego faltering before his
wife's disaffection. When Gordon becomes in-
volved in a stupid murder Luther has com-
mitted, his union friends and the wife he has
tried to discard come to his aid. Awaiting trial
at the close of the book, the organizer snatches
a banner from a worker who has been shot at
a union demonstration and marches down the
street. But the act is a gesture of futility, not a
conversion.

Himes sings of pessimism, perversion, hatred,
and frustration, a song ch Horus by his paper-
thin characters. Only Lee Gordon is three-
dimensional. He is an extreme introvert, so
sensitive to race and sex and even tactual im-
pressions as to be a psychopathic case, though
one cannot agree with another of Mr. Himes'
Negro characters who feels that the organizer
is insane—like all Negroes. Gordon's crusade—

whatever it may be—cannot but be a lonely
one, for he cannot abide himself, his wife, his
own race, Jews, whites, organized labor, Com-
munists, liberals, and most other people or
groups outside these specific categories. Unfor-
tunately, Mr. Himes seems to have the same
all-inclusive aversions.

### ALBERT SEARS. By Millen Brand. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1947. $2.75.

Millen Brand is a meticulous craftsman, an
artist whose forte is the portrayal of characters
on the periphery of our society. Mr. Brand be-
gan work on *Albert Sears* as long ago as 1941,
when he discussed with this reviewer the prob-
lems likely to confront a Negro family in a
white neighborhood.

This, his third novel, is really three stories in
one. The central narrative concerns Albert
Sears, an uncompromisingly honest old man,
and his relations with his estranged wife, his
mistress, and his natural son, Al. Al's story is
that of a little boy who cannot adjust to his
awkward family circumstances or the common-
place brutalities of his environment.

As a result of a fight between real estate
dealers, Negroes have been allowed to move
into an apartment house in the decaying lower
middle-class white residential neighborhood in
Jersey City where Al lives. The Negroes are
intimidated by irate whites and all but the
Manhursts move. Tom Manhurst feels obli-
gated to stick it out on principle and though he
is beaten and jailed, his wife and family remain
in the apartment. Sears has no affection for
Negroes, but he helps Mrs. Manhurst when
vandals cut off the heat and water and he
comes to Tom's aid later when he is again
ganged. The Manhursts' courage finally tri-
umphs and the neighborhood is opened to other
colored residents. Mr. Brand's picture of the
Manhursts, their friends, and their problem is a
sympathetic one, but it is limited in depth and
range.

Brand is not a robust author and Albert Sears
is too vigorous a character to suit his particular
talents. So are the Manhursts and the thematic
values they represent. But the author's portrait
of little Al is superb. When, by joining little

23

Edgar Manhurst and the colored boys in a gang fight against their tormentors, he discovers that fighting can be the only effective way to reply to attack and can be compensation in itself, Al learns to return his father's affection and finds his natural place in society. Mr. Brand's study of the boy's growth is a literary achievement worthy to rank with his best-seller, *The Outward Room*.

## NON-FICTION

### THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN.
By Mary White Ovington. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1947. $3.00.

Mary White Ovington's autobiography is a modest, spirited account of a noble life. It is also the story of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and other militant white and Negro liberals founded in 1909.

As a young woman Miss Ovington accepted as her cause the downtrodden of mankind, wisely deciding to work with those nearest at hand and most in need. Social work among Negroes was a neglected field when she made her careful study of the 60,000 colored people in New York in 1904. Later her interest broadened to include other areas and she spent much time in the North and South, studying, speaking, writing, and organizing.

This book is no formal history of the NAACP and hence is refreshing in its candor and its personal viewpoint on the men and women who built the organization and on the issues with which it grappled. Miss Ovington's chief pleasure on looking back over the Association's early history—other than in its obvious achievements—is in noting that the organization was originally controlled by whites but is now run largely by Negro executives. There is no satisfaction like that of helping people to help themselves.

Miss Ovington's book is composed and calm except for a continuing sense of outrage at the mistreatment of the Negro and an elation over his improved status. As much as one shares the author's just pride in achievement, one cannot wholly agree with her closing optimism. The walls have not yet come tumbling down, though there are signs of their eventual crumble. When they do fall, Miss Ovington will be remembered as an able trumpeter.

### THE NEGRO IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE.
By Edith J. R. Isaacs. New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., 1947. $3.50.

For over twenty-five years Edith J. R. Isaacs was editor of *Theatre Arts*. Now she has

used the resources of that magazine to bring out a book which contains a wealth of fine photographs not elsewhere available and a stimulating account of the Negro in the American theatre.

The text of Mrs. Isaacs' book is thin; it is a survey and is not intended as a definitive study. She treats the early period sketchily, hurrying on from 1821, when James Hewlett's African Company played Shakespeare in New

Julius (Jules) C. Bledsoe, celebrated operatic baritone, and composer. Born December 29, 1898 — Died July 14, 1943.

York, to the Broadway she has known and followed as a devotee and critic. Here her work becomes more detailed. But here, too, she widens her range to include music and the dance and her book descends from criticism to become almost a catalog listing of the performances of Negro actors.

Mrs. Isaacs is sometimes too generous in her praise and seems to consider every role won by a colored actor as an advance for the race instead of merely a personal triumph for the individual. She does include a sympathetic study of the efforts of serious playwrights and acting companies to portray the facts of Negro life in the drama, and she laments the poor state of such efforts at present.

The shortcomings of this book are almost entirely those of omission and Mrs. Isaacs must

24

Commonweal

OCT 3 1947

A4

LETTER

Lonely Crusade. Chester Himes. Knopf. $3.00.

CHESTER HIMES, the author of "If He Hollers Let Him Go" has taken for this book, "Lonely Crusade," a highly probable theme about Lee Gordon, a young Negro, perhaps in his early thirties, who had just been hired as a union organizer. The scene is in Los Angeles, Calif., during 1943, when the migration of Southern whites and Negroes had the social workers and the police busy with many theories.

The name of the company, the product, the fact that it was top priority add nothing to the story. The union was industrial, though not called CIO, but it had to be since no other union was working that area except the Jim-Crow, left-wing Machinists, at that time, AFL.

It was the organizer's job or a porter's job for Lee Gordon. And he was deep under his skin, an A.B., with fierce pride and brutal, uncontrolled animal passion, all that a social worker would want, except that Mr. Gordon goes through this book with almost no moral standards. He was on the make most of the time, and cheap. The author caused this book to be vulgar, assuming that this is the way to describe Mr. Gordon.

Assuming that there are enough books about the race problem to have them pass by without calling them "definitive," it is not risking too much to note that Mr. Himes has called one of his Los Angeles avenues "St. Nicholas," since his story is really a Harlem story. Later on, the author has his chief character play around with persons remarkably suggestive of Los Angeles. If he can get by with this without a libel suit, he is not being read as widely as he would have it.

The communists might not care for this book, for Mr. Himes has set them off in gin-mills where the usual intrigue that goes on among small-fry revolutionists crops up repeatedly in the life of Mr. Gordon. What constitutes the "lonely crusade" in Mr. Gordon's fiddling around with the communists is not apparent, for his morality is as difficult to define as theirs.

There is a simple plot. Mr. Gordon sets out to organize Negro workers. He is warned against the communists, but he falls for a girl, the usual "Commy bait," at the first party he attends. In the end, this is the girl who hands him over to the police when he confides in her, for a murder that he has just attended in company with the perpetrator, a low-type communist. The only thing significant about this girl is that she is white.

Mr. Gordon has what Negro society is wont to call "a lovely wife," with all the connotations of a dumb Nelly. It is evident that Mr. Himes who talks through his Mr. Gordon, does not care for the honest, intelligent, moral Mrs. Gordon whom Mr. Gordon "protects" from the communists, and any other man. Poor Mrs. Gordon. She wants her husband to do something, but it is clear that she is not offering him much strength.

If the reader wants to infer that Mrs. Gordon represents the shielded Negro woman, the college girl who is kept away from the realities of society, he runs the risk of falling a victim to the propaganda of the Communist Party which works to break down the respect that this

type of woman holds in the Negro community. This is the key, by the way, to the talk about matriarchy that crops up in this book.

There is some talk about Jewish-Negro relations, too. The point that Mr. Himes drives home quite well is that the majority of Negroes who talk about the problem tend to give vent to expressions that by sound and fury, are anti-Semitic. A closer reading of this book might suggest that Negroes are fed up on the prattle about the unity of all minority groups.

If you want to know about the moral and the end of this story we can tell you right off that there is no moral in evidence. Our chief character, the brutal, confused, college-trained but uneducated Mr. Gordon has barely got out of serious trouble, and can get back into that trouble almost any day. The communists had outdouble-crossed him. The white girl he tried to be "modern" about and love, forgetful of his sacrificing wife, has handed him over to the police, in an effort to shield the criminally insane Negro communist who had committed murder for money. Mr. Gordon had told the girl that he was there, too, an accomplice in the getaway, anyway.

Well, the union defends him at the crucial moment, and comes riding in like the Blue-Jackets just as Mr. Gordon's neck is being tried for size. But there is a union demonstration, and out of the crowd oozes Mr. Gordon. At the moment of moments, he breaks through the police cordon, defies cries of "Stop or I will shoot," and grabs the fallen flag. It is a camera finish. The reader is left to decide whether it is the lady, the tiger, the cops or Mr. Gordon. The author concluded with Mr. Gordon, who began "marching down the street."

GEORGE STREATOR.

No, but he talks for a girl, the usual "Commy bait," at the first party he attends. In the end, this is the girl who hands him over to the police when he confides in her, for a murder that he has just attended in company with the perpetrator, a low-type communist. The only thing significant about this girl is that she is white.

Thursday, Oct. 30, 1947

Daily People's World 5

Book
Review

Edited by MERLE NANCE

"Lonely Crusade," by Chester Himes,
Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., $3.

SAN FRANCISCO

It would be interesting to
know just what motivated Mr.
Himes in bringing forth this
tedious monstrosity. "Lonely
Crusade" is 398 pages of the
unleavened misanthropy of a
mind that distrusts trade un-
ionists, dislikes Jews, hates
Communists, despises Negroes
(the author's own people), and
is just generally and complete-
ly anti-people.

Concerned with the story of
a Negro trade union organizer
in a Los Angeles aircraft fac-
tory, the book winds tortuous-
ly through a hodge-podge of
half-baked discussions on con-
cepts mistaken for Marxism; of
lurid sexual excursions (mostly
interracial); of adolescent in-

trospective fumblings.

Obviously aimed at being
sensational, the book succeeds
only in being dull. Its incredi-
bly stupid characterizations of
the Communist party—its pur-
pose, its method, and its mem-
bership—is but a repetition by
rote of scurrility made familiar
by Hearst.

The author's first novel—"If He Hollers Let Him Go"—was an honest book, with intensity, pace and drive in which only the seeds of his present failure were present. But in "Lonely Crusade" the seeds have flowered, with the result that this book is malodorous with the heavy stench of a decadent mind, meanly bitter, contriving and cheap.

One could speculate on why
Mr. Himes—who tries to write
in the rough-tough style of

James Cain with the pessimis-
tic racial overtones of Richard
Wright—should so betray his
original promise as a writer.

Possibly his contempt for
people, whatever their race or
class, leads him to believe that
the public will swallow any-
thing if it is sensational
enough. Possibly he thinks to
jump on the red-baiting band-
wagon, sensing that there lies
profit.

It may be right about this latter point—there is money in red-baiting. And in Negro-baiting. And in Jew-baiting. But there is very little for artistry there, very little for integrity, and very little for the Negro. In grinding out "Lonely Crusade," Mr. Himes, it would seem, as a Negro and as an artist, has sold his heritage for a mess.—M. N.

Author Himes has sold
his heritage for a mess

OCTOBER

2020

NY Times
SEP 14 1947

# Fear in Our Midst

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes.
398 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
$3.

By NASH K. BURGER

"LONELY CRUSADE" is a novel of fear, of the fear ever present in the mind of a Negro living in a white man's America. It is a fear that in the case of Lee Gordon, Mr. Himes' protagonist, so preys on his mind and emotions that his actions become unaccountable, even to himself. But as Mr. Himes tells it, Lee Gordon's lonely crusade to put down his feeling of fear and isolation becomes only an exaggeration of every man's struggle to find himself and his place in the world.

The story of Lee Gordon's effort to organize the Negro workers in a California war plant follows the somewhat familiar pattern of such fiction. But Mr. Himes portrays Lee Gordon as a human being (albeit a somewhat unbalanced human being), compounded of both strength and weakness. There is stupidity, even treachery, within the union, within Lee's own race, that gives the narrative realism and conviction. There is never any doubt that Mr. Himes is on Lee's side, but he is wise enough, honest enough, to present Lee's story in human, not stereotyped ideological terms.

Lee is the victim, too, of Communist double-dealing, and he learns how Communist concern is not for the union, not for the

Negro, but for the Communists. The book offers one of the most detailed accounts in recent fiction of the strange, incredible techniques of Communists burrowing around in the labor movement. Another remarkable aspect of the novel is its consideration of the tendency to anti-Semitism in the thinking of some Negroes.

Lee Gordon operates in a tough, jungle world, and Mr. Himes presents it like it is. It is a world that, in the end, was too tough for Lee himself and, as caught in Mr. Himes' pages, may be too tough for some readers as well. Lee's tortured odyssey through drunken orgies, police beatings, murder and riot; Lee's strange inability to achieve satisfaction in his relations with his patient, loyal wife or the white, Communist girl with whom he has an affair—these things are presented as bluntly as they happened, and they keep the narrative broiling.

The material Mr. Himes is working with here is similar to that he used in an earlier novel, "If He Hollers," although the present volume is more complex, broader in scope. Even so, it is a rather special, limited field. Mr. Himes can write with power and effectiveness (when he keeps his philosophical dialogue to a minimum), and it would be interesting to see what he could do with other aspects of Negro life in America and with a protagonist less psychopathic than Lee Gordon.

January, 1948

the Crisis

27

Aene

**GUEST STARS** — Jackie Robinson, right, the Brooklyn Dodgers' first baseman, guest starred April 23 on Information Please radio program, competing with, left to right: Franklin P. Adams; Dr. Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta university; and John Kiernan, in answering ques-
tions. Tallulah Bankhead made an appeal for the United Negro College Fund. Both Dr. Clement and Robinson showed themselves well versed
in poetry, movies, card games, and popular songs.

and of what bad companions and reform
schools did to him. Whenever society "re-
forms" such boys as Nick it really graduates
them as full-fledged criminals. And like Nick
Romano they often end in the electric chair.

This book will move you as few recent
novels can.

CHARLES Enoch WHEELER

THE PATHOLOGY OF RACE

Lonely Crusade. By Chester Himes. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. 398pp. $3.00.

In *Lonely Crusade* Chester Himes has pro-
duced what is perhaps the most compelling
study of race relations set forth in any novel
by a Negro American since Richard Wright's
*Native Son*. Himes has the advantage of treat-
ing his theme rather more searchingly from
three angles; the Negro's place in unioniza-
tion exclusive of Communism, the impact of
Communistic activity upon "democratic"
unionization, and the over-all pattern of race
relations of all sorts. His novel is, therefore,
a frank, almost blatant study of the pathology
of race in these United States interfused with
virtually all the ramifications of class strati-
fication, religious dogma as applied to the
Jew, and the residue of master-slave relation-
ships of the Old South. This last, of course,
is brought out by full treatment of the in-
fluence of migrant Southerners who, carrying
their attitudes with them, have changed the
complexion of thinking and feeling in Los
Angeles, the scene of the story.

Lonely Crusade tells the story of Lee Gor-
don, a Negro, from the time of his employ-

ment as union organizer in the Comstock
company to the time of his assumption of a
full sense of responsibility as an American
citizen. Lee is no cut-and-dried hero, no noble
savage or idealized armchair college graduate.
In fact, he sometimes becomes so earthy that
one wonders whether Himes is trying to
picturize a plain rat in college garb. He brut-
alizes his wife, ties up with a white woman
who even offers bluntly to become his pros-
titute, and according to his own mature judg-
ment even sells out the union upon which
he must later depend, only because he is so
conscious of being a Negro that he is com-
pletely frustrated. Though completely con-
scious of the purpose, the sincerity, the
personal friendship of such characters as
Smitty, Joe Ptak, and "Rosie" (a Jewish Com-
munist), as well as of the loyalty of his wife
Ruth, Lee not only makes the mistakes of
a normal human being but also precipitates
a situation in which all connected with him
must stand to lose unless he can fight his way
through to an essential understanding of his
place in society and his purpose in life.

Herein lies the essential drama of *Lonely
Crusade*. Lee does find himself. Though need-
lessly melodramatic at times, even sordid so
far as sex is concerned, his maturation is
fairly steady and consistent with the sensitiv-
ity which Himes gives him at the beginning.
Neither a fool nor a genius, Lee muddles his
way through the mazes of interracial relations
until he finds himself face to face with the
reality of dialectical materialism as explained
by "Rosie." This is the turning point in his
career, the *sine qua non* of his spiritual ex-

istence. In this, and only in this, can he lay
claim to full manhood, a state of being which
means shedding his consciousness of being
Negro.

It should be noted here that Himes has the
knack of developing character rather than
simply explaining it. In a novel such as he
has produced this is important because the
theme and the plot are essentially supporting
elements for the major characters and their
foils. The social problems dealt with never
become secondary, but they do give place to
the treatment of character in those persons
about whom the story revolves. In this respect
Himes represents a good cross between Dick-
ens' characterization and George Eliot's keen
psychological analysis, together with the newer
Freudian psychology with its emphasis on the
pathology of race.

Altogether Himes' latest book is worth seri-
ous consideration. The reader will find little
here that is different from the propositions set
forth in his earlier work, *If He Hollers Let
Him Go*. The real difference lies in the au-
thor's facility in handling his materials, in
what appears to be a much firmer grasp of
the materials dealt with, and in a finer feeling
for the artistry of the medium of expression.
There is something almost Poesque in this
novel in the delicacy of treatment of emotions,
something of the fine feeling of Browning in
dealing with delicate situations. Unfortunately
the book lacks delicacy in those passages
where it leans toward the coarseness of To-
bacco Road and Forever Amber, a fact which
might alienate otherwise sympathetic readers.

ARTHUR E. BURKF

28

The Crisis

Negro Extension Agents
Push Improvement of
Rural Housing

Colored agricultural extension agents throughout the South are helping farmers to repair, enlarge, remodel, or rebuild their homes, according to reports received by the U. S. Department of Agriculture from State Extension Service directors.

The urgent need for rural home improvement in the South is indicated by census data which show that about three-fourths of the farmers in the South are ill housed. Most of these farmers live in homes that are over-crowded, run-down, and otherwise inadequate. Less than one farm home in 20 has in-door toilet facilities, while three out of 20 have no toilet facilities at all.

Seeking to help remedy this grave rural housing problem, extension agents are showing farmers how to repair, remodel, or rebuild their homes. The agents not only furnish floor plans for new homes, but in some communities they also are showing farmers how to make and lay concrete blocks and how to build.

Extension workers in Alabama and Georgia have taken the lead in developing a complete block-house program. In Alabama, extension workers have joined with Tuskegee Institute in carrying out demonstrations in home construction with concrete blocks.

Recently in Georgia, a one-week rural housing school was held by the colored extension workers for the purpose of showing farmers, step by step, how to improve their homes. Among other things, the farmers were taught to make and lay concrete blocks, set window and door frames, build and hang doors, replace window panes, cut steps and rafters, erect frame and concrete block houses, install plumbing and bathroom fixtures, and wire homes for electricity. Similar schools are being planned in other states. The lack of funds, they say, makes it extremely difficult for the average farmer to hire all the labor and buy all the material for building his home. The best outlook for better housing in the South, say these officials, is through the use of family labor and local materials such as sand, gravel, field stones, and rough lumber.

County agents say that by supplying most of their labor and materials, farmers with only a few hundred dollars will be able to build "Home-Made Homes" as they are called in some States.

Press Association, Inc.

**BASEBALL COMMISSIONER CONGRATULATES PLAYERS** — Baseball Commissioner A. B. Chandler (center) congratulates Dodger players Dan Bankhead (left) and Jackie Robinson on the part they played in the 1947 World Series in dressing room at the Yankee Stadium, New York, October 6, after their team lost the series finale to the New York Yankees

Two New Appointments

Commissioner Donald McMillan, Eastern Territorial Commander of The Salvation Army, from headquarters at 120 West 14th Street, has announced two leading appointments to the Harlem Neighborhood Committee for The Salvation Army's 1948 Annual Maintenance Appeal. Colonel Leopold Philipp, of 426 West 126th Street, has accepted the chairmanship of the Harlem Neighborhood Committee. Col. Philipp is President of the Up town Chamber of Commerce.

Acting as co-chairman will be William R. Hodgins, of 501 West 145th Street. Mr. Hodgins is prominent in civic affairs of the community, with special interest in boys' activities.

The campaign began on January 6, 1948, and is to continue through February 21. Its goal is $1,000,000 in funds, which is to be utilized for the support and maintenance of the Army's sixty services and institutions in the New York City area!

"Saturday's Children"

(Continued from page 19)

cover the cause and cure for poliomyelitis. You can help to guarantee this service for another year by contributing to the 1948 March of Dimes. This is the annual fund-raising appeal of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, an organization pledged

Acme

**APPOINTED TO WEST POINT**—Norman J. Brown, 18-year-old honor student, was appointed to the U. S. Military Academy, Brown took competitive examinations in which nearly 200 students from schools throughout the United States participated.

to give aid without regard to age, race, creed, or color, and the proud holder of a ten-year record of a pledge up-held.

# History as a Nightmarе -

(Co nu d from Page Eleven) impact of rejection and continual in-dignity on his personality is a personal one and this impact, multiplied, can destroy, not only himself, but an entire nation.

The minstrel man is gone and Uncle Tom is no longer to be trusted. Even Bigger Thomas is becoming irrelevant; we are faced with a black man as many faceted as we ourselves are, as indi-vidual, with our ambivalences and in-securities and our struggles to be loved. He is now an American and we cannot change that; it is our attitudes which must change both towards ourselves and him. "History," says Joyce, "is a night-mare from which I am struggling to awaken." We have all heard what hap-pened to those who slept too long.

THE ORIGINAL
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPINGS

220 W. 19th St., NEW YORK 11, N.Y.
Tel. CHelsea 3-8860

Cir. (D 137,944) (S 223,200)

This Clipping From
LOUISVILLE, KY.
COURIER-JOURNAL

SEP 28 1947

Race-Consciousness
Of Negro Analyzed

A Review by Carl E. Zimmerer

LONELY CRUSADE: By Chester Himes. 398 pp.
Alfred A. Knopf. $3.

TWO years ago Chester Himes wrote a powerful book entitled "If He Hollers Let Him Go." It dealt with the theme of Negro race-consciousness. Now the same author has written again on the same subject.

Lee Gordon, the central character of "Lonely Crusade," is a young Negro labor organizer at a California war plant. He is moody, highly introspective, and unsure of himself.

He has an affair with a white woman, leaves his wife, and is falsely accused of murder. He has many contacts with Communists, who try in vain to use him for their own ends. One of his closest acquaintances—Lee has no real friends—is a Jewish Communist.

As a novel this is a brutal, ugly, frequently nauseating story. Its merit exists rather in the book's value as an illuminating sociological document. Articulate Negroes such as Himes are too few for the good of his race.

What Himes really accomplishes is a drawn-out analysis of the fear which he says underlies every thought and emotion of the Negro and distorts every relationship he may have, whether with white people or with other Negroes.

It is this all-pervading fear which soaks this book with pessimism and despair. And although the story ends on a brave note of hope, it is a quavering, uncertain note, not at all promising of anything but death.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

189

(I must beat my breast, make accusation against myself! Oh God, hear my babbling: —I fell into every trap, I could not free myself from evil for so much as a single day. I feigned pity and overlooked the poor. I showed warmth and ardor, but it was only affectation. My climate was winter, frost, snow, and nothing behind it. To promise meant to break my promise, I lay hidden in my ego as though under a feather quilt. Like all arch-coquettes, I even misused my remorse, taking delight in myself. Thus I rhyme here and sing so that I can celebrate myself, in order to make myself important in your eyes as a coward and a weakling. To cling and to intrude, yes, but what can I answer when you turn yourself to earnestness and send a glance at me? What will I have left then of all the good gifts which I pawned, to the last one, with the Devil long ago? Perhaps there remained a goodness only this or that moment when I was able to join myself ecstatically to you, weeping! When I, a universe of bliss, was pierced by the hymn: "Holy, Holy." Then was I yours! —While I still had the illusion that I believed, I already lay long in the dust. I have in my possession only these short gleams. They are the last coins that my vices have not stolen. So I can pay my debt to you only with my own debts.)

By metaphysical impulse Werfel was a Jew, but in his need for salvation he was in truth a Christian, one might indeed say almost a Russian Christian: for it was only through sin, only driven along by sin, that he could attain to completely purified expression.

## The Writing on the Wall

LONELY CRUSADE. By CHESTER HIMES.

New York, Knopf, 1947. 398 pp. $3.00.

Reviewed by MILTON KLONSKY

THE terminal moraine of socially conscious novels, comic strips, movies, pulp fiction, etc. left behind by the Popular Front icecap of the 30's has, for better or for worse, permanently changed the American cultural landscape. Novels like *Lonely Crusade*, which deal with racial prejudice from the point of view of the insulted and injured themselves, are now common. What sets them apart from the muckraking books of the Upton Sinclair era is that they do not present any news to anyone (although they are equally sensational), and the

issues involved, which were once considered so ugly and obscene that they had to be discussed in whispers like a dirty joke, are now frankly presented for mass entertainment as well as uplift. There is a financial profit in moral indignation.

Close students of the *grafitti* scratched on the walls of men's rooms during the war have observed how, amid the standard clutter of telephone numbers, sexual brags and invitations, heroic drawings of sexual organs, etc., there was a gradual influx of social consciousness. This took the form of lewd threats of violence against the — Jews and, to a lesser extent as the threats were more fully carried out, against the Negroes. In barracks, in shipyards, in bars all over the United States, it was in these chambers of catharsis that the underground from time to time relieved itself of the social and political pieties of war propaganda and posted its own bulletins.

A CAMERA reflection of this phenomenon appeared in the official world of movies, radio, and publishing—but, of course, inverted to respectability: Don't kill the Jews (or the Negroes). Novels on racial and religious bigotry have now become a huge commercial success, even in competition with old-line historical sex fantasies. The two have much in common.

The styles and the sensibilities of these best sellers are cut out of the same sub-literary "popular" cheesecloth, with the only difference, perhaps, lying in the themes they exploit. But even this difference is practically annulled in the more pretentious works by a heavy dose of lurid sex, miscegenation, brutality, revenge, and third-act heroics.

The mucksters who rake the surface of these profound problems may be well-meaning, but their books and movies mean something else. Their honesty is not in question, nor is the legitimacy of the theme of racial intolerance for a work of art. Nevertheless, by cheap exploitation of an issue so crucial for the future of America, I think that the dignity of the cause and the dignity of the injured themselves must suffer. The wolf will not be domesticated and made comfortable. Although the professed purpose of these books is to prod the American public out of its apathy, they may well have the opposite effect of dulling it to sleep with the lullaby: everything will be all right if enough people

190

COMMENTARY

buy and read this book. It is a truism, but one too often ignored, that the only preventive for racial and religious bigotry in America is to raise the living standards of the people, economically and culturally. And that means, among other things, the succession of the Hollywood monopoly and big-business publishing. To paraphrase Jimmy Walker: no bigot was ever ruined by a book.

Lonely Crusade, the novel under review, is in a direct line of descent from its predecessors, more sensational, more insipid for all that and even more clumsily written. The plot concerns a young idealistic Negro, Lee Gordon, who gets a job as a union organizer on the West Coast during the war, has an affair with a white girl sent as a spy by the Communist party, then is betrayed by her because he is colored, just as she, subsequently (by some curious twist of the party's higher strategy), is betrayed by her comrades because she is white. Through this adventure he loses his wife, his job, and his friends, and becomes involved in the murder of a company agent; then, like Job, the hero regains all he has lost, and finally, in The Big Strike, he redeems himself altogether by leading a charge of pickets through the police.

Some notion of the shabby style may be had from the following: "She [Gordon's abandoned wife] did not want to commit suicide. She just did not want to live any more and did not know any way to do it otherwise." When Gordon considers going to bed with his mistress it is to "consummate their gender." A caricature of a Jewish Communist is seriously presented as a philosopher with dialectic like this: "Death will be but another change in the infinity of change. You will return from the reflection of matter to the matter you reflect. But the movement of which you have become a part in your resolution will go on." I can quote more, but this will suffice.

The four hundred pages of Lonely Crusade are sweated out with some steamy episodes of copulation between white women and black men, and, also, several vaporous discussions between Negroes and Jews (invariably presented as Communists) on such topics as Negro anti-Semitism and why Jews love money. The author's treatment here reveals a bias which is almost incredible in a book of its pretensions.

Which leads us to an overwhelming question—what real difference is there between the style of this book written by a Negro and the style of the very American mob culture which humiliates and degrades his people? Lonely Crusade breathes the same suffocating air as the ads, the radio, the movies, the pulps. Although the author is himself a Negro, his book is so deracinated, without any of the lively qualities of the imagination peculiar to his people, that it might easily have been composed by any clever college girl. Such writing, no matter how well intentioned, and the grafitti in the men's rooms are part of the same debased culture; there is, in fact, an almost symbiotic relationship between them, with each feeding off the other. Meanwhile, however, the handwriting on the wall of the men's room becomes clearer and larger.

## The Dreyfus Affair

FROM DREYFUS TO PÉTAIN. By WILHELM HERZOG. New York, Creative Age Press, 1947. 313 pp. $3.50.

Reviewed by N. A. PELCOVITS

It is just fifty years since Emile Zola was convicted by an intimidated French jury of "defaming" the court martial which had railroaded Captain Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island on a trumped-up charge of having sold military secrets to the enemy. For the good citizens of that jury the convincing evidence was not the documents about which lawyers argued in the courtroom but the frightening insinuations of the anti-Semitic press that Zola's acquittal and Dreyfus' exoneration would lead to the resignation of the military chiefs and the disintegration of the army. To the rest of the world, however, it was already clear (as the London Times remarked) that "M. Zola's offense is that he has dared to stand up for truth and civil liberty." French conscience, too, was soon aroused, the Dreyfusard campaign gained momentum, and Dreyfus was rehabilitated by an officially repentant republic. The most famous of modern causes célèbres was over. But was it? A generation later political passions could still be aroused by the presentation of a pro-Dreyfus play in Paris; and even today it would be rash to suggest that the ghosts of Drumont and Rochefort and Déroulède have been finally laid.

The Dreyfus affair is thus far from "over" and the most remarkable thing about this remarkable case is that half a century later it still

Best Sellers
Scranton Pa

OCT 14 1987

Himes, Chester. Lonely Crusade. Knopf. Sept. 8, 1947. 398p. $3.00.

The author of this novel is a Negro who has already produced one piece of fiction dealing with the American Negro's struggle toward progress—this was called If He Hollers Let Him Go, and that title indicates sufficiently, I believe, the bitterness underlying Mr. Himes' approach to the question, and warns readers that his subsequent books are likely to be rather brutal than otherwise in their treatment of the theme. Lonely Crusade tells the story of Lee Gordon, a Negro union organizer in a large West Coast aircraft plant. His struggle is threefold: to win a place for himself, on his own merits, within the union; to win

over the Negro employees to union participation, while keeping them from falling prey to Communist propaganda; and to work, as a member of the union, against the overwhelming anti-labor forces within the administration of the plant.

One particular aspect of the heartbreaking, uphill battle of the American Negro, this book does present forcefully: the division within the ranks of the leaders and demagogues of the race itself, constantly weakening the group's ability to forge forward. Some are so nearly destroyed psychologically by the battle of black against white; others are easily taken in by Communist promises of a "new world coming"; a third group is entirely reactionary, and unwilling to throw its support to the side of the angels, being satisfied with the status quo.

Lee and his wife are objectively presented, and strike the reader as an average American working couple, rather than as "types" representing an ethnological whole. The fault of the book, then, lies not in its handling of the racial theme, nor in a distortion of the capital-labor struggle, though it must be said that the plant owner is a rather improbable character. Mr. Himes has found it necessary, however, to have a very large part of the story center about an extramarital affair between Lee and one Jackie Forks, a white girl and a Communist, who brags of having had many such liaisons. There is supposed to be, I dare say, great psychological significance attaching to this element of the book, but the great amount of space devoted to it and the score or more of pages completely obscene and artistically irrelevant, make the book unsuitable for any class of reader. One is further forced to the conclusion that if Mr. Himes continues this sort of writing, he will be a powerful force militating against recognition of the Negro, not only as a literary artist, but as a contributor to the ethical and moral welfare of the nation.

Dom Bernard Theall,
Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. C.

* * *

SCARED OF WHITE FOLK?

By HORACE R. CAYTON

Sure, Most of Us Are,
Points Out Author
Of Challenging Book

(The views expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily express the editorial opinion of The Pittsburgh Courier.—The Editors.)

IT'S not a very popular point of view, and one which is very likely to be misunderstood, but for some time I've been saying that way underneath, deep underneath — Negroes are afraid of white people. Further, I have said, and I believe, that being afraid of white people makes Negroes hate themselves and white people for their fears. I don't think you can be afraid of anything, pretend to have manhood, and not have hate for yourself for having that fear.

I have experienced it a number of times in my life—in the South when I first saw a lynch mob; on boats when I was a seaman and found that the few Negroes in the crew were in the minority and were actually afraid of being thrown overboard; in meetings with “big white folk” when they were trying to get us few Negroes to do what they wanted done, but we didn’t think it was the best thing for the Negro.

I'm not trying to say that I hate all white people. That's far from the case. Some of my best friends are white people. I'd protect them against anything. But the category of white people invokes fear in me and, I believe, invokes fear in every Negro.

Mr. Cayton

LET ME GIVE you an example. I was eating in a Quebec restaurant recently. Nearly everyone there spoke French. I had difficulty making the waitress understand my order. It was all fun and they laughed at me and I laughed at them and I felt free. Then I heard an American Southern accent and I froze. Perhaps I'm different, but that's how it affected me.

All this is getting around to talking about Chester Himes' new book, "Lonely Crusade." I think it's a great book. I also think it will offend a lot of people, but that's beside the point because it's closer to the truth than most anything I've read recently. In the book Chester Himes' central character, Lee, a union organizer, experiences all the excruciating tortures of fear and hatred and fear of his own hatred.

In a union situation he tries to act manly and dignified and finds himself frustrated by the union structure, the Communist party, and finally and most important, by his own emotional inability to cope with his fears and anxiety. The book makes sense to me. It is a powerful, penetrating analysis of what some Negroes have to endure in dealing with white people in the United States.

YOU WILL NOTICE that I said "some," for I believe that the amount of fear and tension varies from section to section and from individual to individual. But I believe that there is a basic increment of fear in every Negro's heart.

Himes' book is about a particular man in a particular union in a particular city. In the work he develops in a most craftsman-like manner this man's fear and anxiety and his frustrations with his wife, his white mistress, and on his job where he is supposed to convince Negro workers that they should join the union.

The book is not supposed to be a treatise on the Communist party or the trade union movement nor is it supposed to describe and depict the attitude of every single Negro in the United States. It's just a story about Lee, a union organizer in a shipyard in Los Angeles. In accomplishing this, it is credible, powerful, decisive, incisive and a work of art.

YOU DON'T HAVE to read the book and say "I wouldn't have acted that way" (though I dare say I would have). You don't have to make generalizations about all trade unions or about the Communist party or about the amount of anxiety you might have felt. But given the character Lee, given the situation, "Lonely Crusade," written by Chester Himes, is a great book. I advise you to read it.

Chester Himes has indeed embarked on a lonely crusade. But I think anyone that tries to state truth and especially tries to get into the basic emotional drives in the human personality will inevitably be lonesome. After all, writing is the most lonesome job in the world. There's just you and your mind and your typewriter there.

NY Sat Review
of Literature

OCT 25 1947

Fiction. The novel of "social significance," a label attached to the works of politically-conscious left-wing writers in the Thirties, is beginning to raise its head in the current literary scene. Four of them are reviewed in this issue: Benjamin Appel's bitter account of the fall of the New Deal and most of its works in Washington; Chester Himes's grim recital of the persecution of a sensitive Negro labor organizer in Los Angeles; Robert Rylee's melodrama of power politics in Texas, and Allen Taft's well-intentioned but inadequately treated "American Story." For readers who prefer fiction for entertainment there is an absorbing English murder trial in Edgar Lustgarten's "One More Unfortunate," and Walter Karig's "Zotz" provides a brilliant and amusing parody on Washington's wartime bureaucracy. For a brief masterpiece of endurance and love note C. F. Ramuz's "When the Mountain Fell" next week.

New Republic

OCT 6 1947

## Fiction Parade

THE "Negro problem" is too often conceived, even by the intelligent and sympathetic, as simply a matter of the white man's granting Negroes political and social equality. But in his new novel, *Lonely Crusade* (Alfred A. Knopf; $3), Chester Himes writes of a more personal aspect and from the other side: his own race-consciousness might be called the "Negro's problem."

As a novel, the book has many flaws. The story of Lee Gordon, a Negro union organizer in a California war plant who gets involved with the union, the employer and the Communists, is much too extended and repetititious. The drama is not so much tragically inevitable as tragically predictable. For the most part the writing is inept: e.g., "Meeting Negroes eye to eye, and talking to them lip to lip, he could not help but learn."

This is unfortunate, but of secondary importance. Successfully penetrating, shocking and then depressing, is the case of Lee Gordon as the representative of his race. He is an exaggerated

figure, not so much an individual as a catalogue of the Negro's emotional distortions. One could scarcely hope to find a realistic and balanced member of a race "mentally ill" from feeling "a shuddering sense of deficiency and a vague fear of being overtaken by disaster."

He is a self-acknowledged victim: "To be hurt was Lee Gordon's destiny," and "fear was the price he paid for living"—living in a world of wars in which he "gotta fight everybody... the white folks and the black folks, the capitalists and the Communists." Everything in life succumbs to this emotional chaos: his relations with his wife, with his friends, with his employer, with himself, and he surrenders to "being crazy in a crazy world—an idiot among idiots; all speaking in an unknown tongue."

This neurotic pattern is characteristic of our time and not of the Negro race alone. The victim is the classic modern hero; undefined, pervasive fear, emotional and physical insecurity, sexual neuroses, the abnegation of beliefs, the loss of values, a general cynicism and brutality: these are universal disasters.

The unsettling conclusion of this book is that equality is not enough for the Negro. All his life he has "learned nothing to make him proud of being a Negro and everything to make him ashamed of it." Amnesties and privileges, no matter how generous, won't annul this degradation. And perhaps the instinct is sound that suspects the healing properties of an equality which is as much a problem for the white man as for the Negro.

Atlantic

OCT 1947

LONELY CRUSADE

$3.00

Chester Himes

KNOPF

A GENERATION or so ago the new immigrant and his struggles to overcome obstacles and prejudice formed an important element in American writing. Today two top fiction best-sellers deal with racial problems, the one with anti-Semitism, the other with anti-Negroism.

Chester Himes's new novel is a study of the American Negro, a brave and courageous probing into the Negro psyche. His diagnosis reveals a racial malady for which there is no immediate remedy. The cure, as he sees it, is centuries of equality and miscegenation. And in the beginning simple equality is not enough. Equality to the Negro means special privileges.

Mr. Himes's hero, Lee Gordon, is indeed a lonely

crusader, seeking justice in a white ocean of prejudice and discrimination. A college graduate, a sensitive Negro of basic honesty and integrity, he comes up against the usual barriers. His college degree cannot get him a white-collar job, and since he refuses to take menial work, he and his devoted wife live in poverty, with the result that Lee Gordon's sense of manhood and fitness is gradually corroded, and his wife loses faith in him, though not her love for him. This tragedy Lee Gordon blames on the white man.

Lee Gordon's real troubles begin in the spring of 1943 when, at the age of thirty-one, he gets a job as union organizer of an aircraft plant in Los Angeles. The job is given to him not because he is a professional union organizer — he is not even a member of the union — but because the union needs a Negro organizer. And Lee Gordon takes the job because it is a white-collar job. The next fifty days are a nightmare. His honest efforts are thwarted at every turn, by the plant management and its deputy sheriffs and by the Communist Party, which tries to gain control of the new union. Lee Gordon refuses to sell out to either, and in the end is destroyed by both.

Mr. Himes's story, for all its hard realism and able writing, reads like a melodrama, with the Communist Party the real villain and the deputy sheriffs the actual murderer. His story also suffers from a form of elephantiasis. He tries to embrace too much and his themes cross and get mixed up, so that in the end Lee Gordon's tragedy could just as well have been that of a white man. This overzealousness led Mr. Himes into long generalizations and oversimplifications. The usual racial prejudices and discriminations against the Negro are merely catalogued, with the result that large segments of his book read not like a novel but like excerpts from extended social studies.

Mr. Himes has touched upon every phase of the Negro problem and has mercilessly vivisectioned the American Negro's personality. We have here clinical revelations of the Negro's homicidal mania, of his lust for white women, of his pathetic sense of inferiority, of his paradoxical anti-Semitism, of his arrogance and his incurable Uncle Tomism. At times it seems that Mr. Himes is trying to convince us that the whole Negro race in America, as a result of centuries of brutal oppression, is sick at soul.

Hatred reeks through his pages like yellow bile. The Negro hates the Jew and the Gentile and he hates his own Negroness; the Jew hates the Negro and the Gentile and his own Jewishness. The pure Marxist Rosenberg, who hates nobody except the capitalists, is expelled from the Communist Party because of his goodness.

The strict Party-line Communists will not like Mr. Himes's book and will no doubt denounce it. The Trotskyites will probably take it to their bosoms, as certainly will all those who believe in unions free of Communist control. As for the Negro problem, it occasionally finds momentary resolution in oversexed white women mixing up Marxism with Negro macrogenitalism.

STOYAN CHRISTOWE

The Daily Texan

# Lonely Crusader Learns Degree
## Not Always Key to Opportunity

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. New York: Alfred A. Knof. 398 pages. $3.

Good jobs were abundant in war-time Los Angelos, but college-bred Lee Gordon was unemployed. He could easily have found a well-paying job in a war plant, working with his hands, but Lee, a sociology graduate of UCLA, felt that his college education fitted him for better things than manual labor.

For anybody else it probably would have, but Lee had one disconcerting characteristic—he was a Negro.

It didn't help that his wife, Ruth, also a college graduate, held an executive position with a small company and had a white girl for her secretary. And it didn't help any that Ruth didn't understand the deep-seated feeling of insecurity that left him moody, depressed, and sometimes brutal to her.

Ruth thought that Lee was trying too hard to prove that he was as good as any white man of equal education. Her practical mind saw the futility of his relentless pursuit of an unattainable goal—social and occupational equality. She thought he should make the best of a bad situation

and go to work in a war plant, but he refused.

Then Lee got a job. A union was trying to organize a war plant which employed many Negro workers. The Negroes being distrustful of the white organizers, Lee was hired to work with the white officials and his special assignment was to get the Negroes signed up. The pay was small—$45 a week—as compared to the much higher wages he could have received as a worker himself, but Lee was happy. He had his chance.

But his happiness was shortlived. The Negroes did not trust Lee because the white union officials apparently treated him as an equal, and the variety of people he met on his job further complicated his position and his life.

There was Joe Ptak, the veteran union organizer whose sole obsession was getting the plant organized; there was Luther McGregor, the big Negro communist assigned by the party to instill communist aims in the union by working with Lee; there was Molly, white wife of a Hollywood executive, ostensibly Luther's employer but actually his mistress; there was Lester McKinley, the former Negro schoolteacher who was proud of his Jewish wife and who tried to help Lee; and there was Abe Rosenberg, the Jewish communist who tried to convert Lee to the Marxian philosophy but who was first and last Lee's friend.

Finally, he met Jackie, feminine, white and communist. Jackie was the first white girl who had ever treated Lee as an equal, and he fell in love with her.

Lee Gordon's narrator is Chester Himes, son of a Negro professor. Educated at Ohio State University, Mr. Himes has done a remarkable job in presenting Lee Gordon, not as just another Negro trying to overcome centuries of tradition and discrimination, but as an American citizen trying to live and work on a plane compatible with his abilities and his education.

Mr. Himes has touched on practically every controversial question of the decade except academic freedom, but the continuity and narration of the novel are excellent. Lee Gordon could easily

have become lost in a maze of complicating circumstances. That he isn't a tribute to the author's skill and sense of reality.

Communism, unionism, white-negro sexual relations, inter-racial marriage, Jewish-Negro relations, strong-arm squads of anti-Negro deputy sheriffs, adultery— all these affect Lee Gordon in varying degrees of intensity. Each is handled naturally, and none is allowed to overshadow the principal figure — Lee Gordon.

—ROY R. REWARDS

Inquirer
Phila Pa

SEP 7. 1947

# Chester Himes Examines Our Social Ills

LONELY CRUSADE. By
Chester Himes. Alfred A. Knopf:
New York. 398 pp. $3.00.

Reviewed by
JOHN DWIGHT KERN

THE plight of the Negro, especially the educated Negro, is the central theme (if there is one) of Chester Himes' second novel, "Lonely Crusade."

Two years ago, in "If He Hollers Let Him Go," Himes made his first novel-length approach to the problem of race-consciousness in America. And he is at work now on a third book, presumably on the same subject.

Obviously Himes is deeply, almost too deeply, involved, emotionally as well as intellectually, in the present and future status of the Negro in America.

Some of Himes' own experiences in war industry on the West Coast may have gone into the making of the present book. But the protagonist, Lee Gordon, resembles his creator only to the extent that both are college men of the same race.

The story opens with Lee's appointment as a union organizer in a California war plant. This job, the fruit of long search for an opportunity commensurate with his abilities, seems more wonderful to Lee than to Ruth, his attractive and intelligent wife.

RUTH loves Lee, so much that she has absorbed his insults and blows for six years, but, so far as her marriage is concerned, she can hardly be expected to believe that all is well that ends in a job.

And subsequent events prove her caution to be justified. For Lee is not happy in his work, largely because he is so hypersensitive that he sees hostility in every eye and broods incessantly on fancied slights. His mood alternates between rage and self-pity, and neither work nor love can satisfy him.

The Communists, against whom Lee has been warned, try to gain control of the union, and they concentrate their efforts on the new organizer. Jackie Forks, a white girl, has a love affair with Lee, which begins as a Communist device but runs its course on a physical plane.

Lee is mixed up in a murder (as a forced witness), is beaten by the police, and then loses his job. At the end he saves the remnants of his

self-esteem by grabbing the union flag from its fallen bearer and leading a lonely crusade against the line of hired deputies.

PERHAPS you can gather by this time that the book suffers from an over-supply of two ingredients: mel-

odrama and propaganda. Equally damaging to the novel's effectiveness is Himes' failure to make clear his intentions.

Here are the raw materials for several novels, all jumbled together in one inchoate mass.

And there is no skeleton key to the author's mind. He avoids slick formulas and pat solutions; in fact, he avoids them so completely that the reader is left wondering what Himes thinks should be done about minority groups and the ills of our social order.

Writers who turn out treatises on sociology or economics or government must expect to be judged by the validity of their contributions to the social sciences. It requires more than a few boudoir scenes, a murder and a parade of pickets to turn a tract into a novel.

Considering the abilities of Chester Himes as a writer (and they are by no means slight), I venture the hope that in his next novel he will concentrate his attention on revealing what his characters think and feel and do. If he can curb his didactic impulses and resolve his personal dilemma, he may quite possibly become one of our more important novelists.

Photo by M. Smith

Chester Himes

Plain Dealer
Cleveland Ohio

SEP 21 1947

Chester Himes Poses
Racial Problem Again
in His Latest Novel

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. (A. A. Knopf, Inc. $3.388 pp.).

Communists won't like this outspoken expose of their destructive tactics within the labor movement but thoughtful readers will appreciate this sensitive portrayal of the Negro in America.

Author of "If He Hollers Let Him Go," Cleveland-born Chester Himes displays talent and insight in a dramatic story about a Negro with an inferiority complex so great it almost destroys his marriage and his work.

Hired as Negro organizer for a Los Angeles labor union, one Lee Gordon discovers that the prestige of his new job cannot rebuild his morale. He has looked inward so long he has lost all sense of proportion. His own cross is the most excruciating burden in the world. Making life miserable for his wife, suspicious of Negroes and whites alike, he is so unsuccessful in his work one is surprised he isn't fired after the first week.

He becomes involved with Communist helpers and is disavowed by union leaders. This leads him into a tragic affair with a white girl, a Communist worker who is as confused as he. In her final betrayal of the man she once loved, she provokes a crisis in Lee Gordon's life which has long been overdue.

Though overlong and occasionally lagging, "Lonely Crusade" is a provocative story. One can disregard the contrived, unrealistic ending in the face of the book's overwhelming sincerity and honesty.

NAOMI BENDER SINKS.

Chicago Tribune

SEP 14 1947

Color Lines
Confused in
Racial Novel

"LONELY CRUSADE," by Chester Himes. [Knopf, $3.]

Reviewed by Henry Cavendish

Following swiftly on the entrance
of the United States into World War
II. came the call of President Roosevelt
for the production of airplanes
in undreamed of quantities. Huge
aircraft production centers sprang
up in the Los Angeles area, and to
their gates swarmed the countless
thousands of migratory workers,
southern share croppers, Negro
laborers, and the nondescript battalions of defense plant workers.

With them came the union organ-\izers. After the union organizers
trailed the forces of communist infil-
tration. And it is against this socio-
industrial background that Chester
Himes, who wrote "If He Hollers
Let Him Go" on a Rosenwald fel-
lowship in 1944, has placed the action
of his second novel, "Lonely Cru-
sade."

It is a story with a theme, that
of the conflicts arising out of race
consciousness amid the social change
of the modern world. Hypersensi-
tive Lee Gordon, a Negro of stub-
born and unreasoning idealism, is
employed by the union in the spring
of 1943 to recruit the Negro segment
of the Comstock Aircraft corpora-
tion's workers in an organizing cam-
paign which is pointing up to a

I often sit and wish that I
Could be a kite up in the sky,
And ride upon the breeze and go
Whichever way I chanced to blow.

UNKNOWN

national labor relations board elec-
tion.

Gordon goes to a Bacchanalian
party of whites and Negroes, falters
in his organizing assignment, is beat
up by sheriff's deputies, becomes
involved in a red hot love affair
with a luscious white chit, drifts
gradually away from his Negro wife,
is involved in a murder, rescued by
the union, and reëspoused by his
wife. Finally he redeems himself by
leading the charge of the union
parade thru the police lines on the
day of the election after the chief
organizer has been clubbed to the
ground.

"Lonely Crusade" is a vigorous
and dramatically written story. But
the theme of racial conflict so over-
balances the action that the net re-
sult is a considerable lack of convic-
tion. Perhaps the principal reason
for this arises from the fact that
Lee Gordon sets out to be a Negro
in conflict with his white environ-
ment. And he ends up as any man
in conflict with himself. Gordon's
failure is not because he is a Negro
but because he is a vacillating ideal-
ist and would fail regardless of the
color of his hide. In brief, the color
line becomes confused in a story
based on the color line.

There are strong passages in the
book, however, and it is still a con-
tribution of considerable value to
the current output of works adum-
brating the racial problems of the
day.

# Bookshelf

CHICAGO DEFENDER

Sept. 13, 1947

By

GERTRUDE MARTIN

## 'Lonely Crusade'

CHESTER HIMES in his new novel, "Lonely Crusade" faces a number of important issues in the life of Americans today: race relations, anti-Semitism, marriage, trade unionism, and Communism. His hero, Lee Gordon, is a Negro who closely resembles the central character of Mr. Himes' first novel, "If He Hollers. Let Him Go." The book does not quite come off because Lee is not just a Negro but a Negro with a chip on his shoulder so big that he cannot even accept his loving wife on face value.

At times in the earlier pages of "Lonely Crusade," it seems that Lee may find himself with his new job of union organizer to give him confidence. Although Mr. Himes indicates that the difficulties a Negro woman faces are as great or greater than those of Negro men his women characters adjust more readily than his men. Lee's wife, Ruth, is long suffering but more acceptable a character than Lee.

As in "If He Hollers" Mr. Himes dwells at length on the relations between Negro men and white women. Lee is attracted to Jackie, a white Communist, but is unable to establish a satisfactory relationship with her. In fact Lee does not establish a satisfactory relationship with anyone, white or Negro. Jackie who readily accepts Lee as a lover turns out to be anti-Negro.

"Lonely Crusade" is a thoughtful book; in it Mr. Himes generalizes on his characters who are mostly exaggerated symbols. When the book opens Lee is already whipped by the fact of being a Negro, unemployment, and his own determination that a Negro college graduate can accept only white collar work. The Communists, white and colored, are crude exaggerations living a sort of dog-eat-dog existence. The same is true of the Jews in the book although Rosie does help Lee as much as any one can.

Smitty and Joë, the union leaders, and Ruth are Mr. Himes' best characterizations. His Negro

workers, among whom are Short-drawers, Sugar, Play Safe and Buster Boy, are either ignorant and skeptical of unionism or educated and not concerned with it. Lee himself is far from consistent in his attitude toward the union and is more of an opportunist than a sincere unionist.

Mr. Himes' writing is inflated at times and the action is often slowed up with long discussions. The ending is contrived and the murder of the deputy sheriff seemed an unnecessary addition to the problems Lee already faced. On the whole it is a book which only at times realizes its possibilities as the study of the mind of an unusually embittered Negro.

"Lonely Crusade" by Chester Himes; Alfred A. Knopf; New York City: 1947; $3.00.

## 'The Harder They Fall'

"THE HARDER THEY FALL" is a swift moving brash, realistic novel of the prize ring or, how fighters are made. In this case Mr. Schulberg who is the author of "What Makes Sammy Run" traces the rise of an Argentinian heavyweight, Toro Molina, until he becomes title contender. Toro who is a kindly giant, six feet seven and weighing 285 pounds, would prefer to be back in his home town with Carmelita than to win fame boxing. But his contract is bought by Nick Latka, racketeer, and he rises through a series of fixed fights to become the nation's top drawing card. Primo Carnera is reportedly the model for Toro.

Toro's story is told by Eddie Lewis, a cynical ex-Princeton man who dreams of writing a play but finds Nick's money too great a temptation. His girl, Beth, Phi Beta Kappa researcher at Life is his one tie with the world of respectability. In some respects Eddie is like the reporter who tells the story in "All the King's Men"—too weak to escape a set-up which he rebels against inwardly.

"The Harder They Fall" is people by an unusual group of characters. There is Ruby, Nick's

wife who represents his admiration for "class" but who finds his fighters irresistible; Danny McKeogh, the trainer, who follows Nick's orders but hates what he does; George, the Negro sparring partner who likes Toro is too good for his associates.

Mr. Schulberg writes vividly and knows his subject well. His book is as much as anything a protest against the American public's gullibility. His sympathies are with the fighters who are exploited in their youth but often end up broke and punchy. It isn't a great novel but its breezy style and flashy characters are well suited to its subject. It's a book that's hard to put down once you've started it.

"The Harder They Fall" by Budd Schulberg; Random House: New York City: 1947; $3.00.

## Definitive History of South

A TEN VOLUME history of the South to be published by the Louisiana State University Press and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History of the University of Texas promises to be a definitive work on its subject. In preparation for 10 years, the work will be written by nine authors, all of whom have published important books on Southern history. The 10 volumes discuss Southern culture in its political, economic, social, religious, diplomatic and military aspects from 1607 to the present. The initial volume entitled "The President South" will be written by Rupert B. Vance of the University of North Carolina.

Date for the publication of the first of the series, "The South During Reconstruction" by E. Merton Coulter, is November of this year. A de luxe Library Edition of "A History of the South" is being offered at $60.00 and at a prepublication price of $50.00. A trade edition of each volume selling at $5.00 each will be published simultaneously with the de luxe library edition. Orders are being taken at the Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge, La.

Oklahoman
Okla City Okla

JAN 25 1948

Yale Library Is Given
'Lonely Crusade' Proofs

The manuscripts and galley proofs of Chester Himes's "Lonely Crusade," published by Alfred A. Knopf, has been given to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at the Yale university library.

The New York Times
BOOK REVIEW
Sunday, August 10

WHAT with a new book coming by Chester Himes (his last was "If He Hollers"), our agents also dropped around to visit Mr. Himes and found that his new one will be called "Lonely Crusade": that it will have a California locale (as did the earlier work); that its protagonist will be a Negro union organizer whose wife works in an airplane plant; that it will deal with race relations but as a novel, not a tract, which isn't always the case with these matters.

As for Mr. Himes, our agent found him a thoughtful, serious yet cheerful Negro, who was born in Missouri but whose boyhood was spent in Alcorn, Miss., where his father taught in the State college for Negroes. From that boyhood in a rural, historic college community Mr. Himes retains happy memories and traces of the South in his accent. And two of his favorite authors are Mississippians—Richard Wright (especially for "Native Son") and William Faulkner.

Mr. Himes, like Mr. Wright and unlike Mr. Faulkner, didn't stay put. He has also lived in Arkansas, Columbus, Ohio, and Cleveland, where he wrote for the newspapers. Modest about his own work, he talks readily about other writers and writing. The writing man's great problem, he thinks, is making the world of fiction—essentially a selective, artificial world—at once true to life and yet absorbing and significant.

Press
Atlantic City N J

SEP 7 - 1947

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes (Knopf; $3)

"Lee Gordon was the happiest man in the world" on the day this novel opens, for he has stepped into a job of the status to which his education and ability entitle him but from which his black skin has barred him. It's 1943, and a union has hired him as organizer at a west coast airplane factory. But he doesn't stay happy beyond page one.

All who remember, Himes' first admirable novel, "If He Hollers Let Him Go," must look forward with great eagerness to this second, and yet, I am sorry to say, it is disappointing. Where the early work was concise, peopled with living characters and based on a credible dramatic situation, this is prolix and peopled with dummies, and it contains incidents which, tho they may be borrowed from real life, are not made convincing.

Himes' thesis is that the intelligent Negro is bedeviled mercilessly by his seering consciousness of an inferior position in our society. The question is not whether we agree with that, but whether that has been developed into a novel. Even while we answer no, we can be sure that, as Himes' earnestness and conviction produced a fine book once before, some day they will do it again.

Alameda, Cal.
Times Star
(Cir. 6,500)

SEP 13 '47

Literary Guidepost

Reviewed by W. G. ROGERS

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes (Knopf; $3).

But he doesn't stay happy beyond page 1. He realizes this new work will send him out into the dangerous world where he will encounter hostile whites again; his wife, Ruth, is too tired after her day at the office to rejoice with him at his good fortune; in his first hour at union headquarters a white labor official refuses to shake his black hand; fellow workers of his own race seem sorry specimens of humanity and he gets a lift home that night in an expensive car driven by a Negro who proves to be a member of the Communist party, which Lee despises.

Having gone rapidly from bad to worse, the situation goes on to worst and stays there. We meet

McKinley, determined to kill his white boss, and the boss, Foster, determined to break the union, and the Communist, Luther, at home with his white wife. We attend a drunken party and there, with Lee, are introduced to the white girl with whom he falls in love.

All who remember, as I do, Himes' first admirable novel, "If He Hollers, Let Him Go," must look forward with great eagerness to his second, and yet, I am sorry to say, it is disappointing. Where the early work was concise, peopled with living characters and based on a credible dramatic situation, this is prolix and peopled with dummies, and it contains incidents which, though they may be borrowed from real life, are not made convincing.

Himes' thesis is that the intelligent Negro is bedeviled merciessly by his seering consciousness of an inferior position in our society. The question is not whether we agree with that, but whether that has been developed into a novel. Even while we answer no, we can be sure that, as Himes' earnestness and conviction produced a fine book once before, some day they will do it again

Cir. (D 25,246) ($ 38,658)

This Clipping From
ASHEVILLE, N. C.
CITIZEN

SEP 7 - 1947

'Lonely Crusade'
Disappoints Reviewer

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes
(Knopf)

"Lee Gordon was the happiest man in the world" on the day this novel opens, for he has stepped into a job of the status to which his educated and ability entitle him but from which his black skin has

barred him. It's 1943, and a union
has hired him as organizer at a
west airplane factory.

But he doesn't stay happy beyond page one. He realizes this new work will send him out into the dangerous world where he will encounter hostile whites again; his wife, Ruth is too tired after her day at the office to rejoice with him at his good fortune; in his first hour at union headquarters a white labor official refuses to shake his black hand; fellow workers of his own race seem sorry specimens of humanity: and he gets a lift home that night in an expensive car driven by a Negro who proves to be a member of the Communist party, which Lee despises.

Having gone rapidly from bad to
worse, the situation goes on to
worst and stays there. We meet
McKinley, determined to, kill his
white boss, and the boss, Foster,
determined to break the union, and
the Communist Luther at home
with his white wife. We attend a
drunken party and there, with Lee,
are introduced to the white girl
with whom he falls in love.

All who remember, as I do, Himes' first admirable novel, "If He Hollers Let Him Go," must look forward with great eagerness to this second, and yet, I am sorry to say, it is disappointing. Where the early work was concise, peopled with living characters and based on a credible dramatic situation, this is prolix and peopled with dummies, and it contains incidents which, though they may be borrowed from real life, are not made convincing.

Himes' thesis is that the intelligent Negro is bedeviled mercilessly by his seeing consciousness of an inferior position in our society. The question is not whether we agree with that, but whether that has been developed into a novel. Even while we answer no, we can be sure that, as Himes' earnestness and conviction produced a fine book once before, some day they will do it again.
A.P.

Cir. (5,800)

This Clipping From
RETAIL BOOKSELLER
NEW YORK, N. Y.

SEP - 1947

LONELY CRUSADE

By Chester Himes

$3.00 F

Knopf

Union problems, racial questions, sex, communism are dealt with in this angry story of Lee Gordon, Negro union leaders—his fight against management, his involvement with a white woman and, through her, the communists, and how he is almost framed as a murderer. A fictionized social study by the author of "If He Hollers Let Him Go," a novel in much the same vein. Good sales and rentals.

RECOMMENDED by Roger Pippett

GENERAL

FICTION

THE INDIANS OF THE AMERICAS, by John Collier (Norton, $3.75). The former U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs tells the story of our oldest inhabitants from paleolithic times to the present. A fine, sympathetic survey.

BACK HOME, by Bill Mauldin (William Sloane, $3.50). In 200 acid cartoons and 50,000 words the artist-author of *Up Front* tells what has happened to him—and the rest of the U. S. A.—since he left the army.

WE CALLED IT MUSIC, by
Eddie Condon. Narration
by Thomas Sugrue (Holt,
$3). One of the most artic-
ulate of jazz musicians gives
you his life-story. Unpreten-
tiously presented and re-
vealing.

THE AMERICAN PAST, by
Roger Butterfield (Simon
and Schuster, $10). A his-
tory of the U. S. A. from
Concord to Hiroshima. Told
in around 1000 pictures and
125,000 words. A huge,
handsome book, courage-
ously edited.

[ REMEMBER DISTINCTLY. Assembled by Agnes Rogers. Commentary by Frederick Lewis Allen (Harper's, $5). This well-selected family album of the American people from 1918 to Pearl Harbor gives you an intimate look at our more recent past in 500 pictures and 37,000 words. ]

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes (Knopf, $3). The powerful, high-tension story of the political and racial adventures of Lee Gordon, a union organizer on the West Coast in wartime. By the man who wrote *If He Hollers Let Him Go*.

THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY, by Lionel Trilling (Viking, $3). A novel about the dilemma of a man of good will in an evil world. Set in the late 1930s against a rural Connecticut background. Distinguished writing.

THE DARK DEVICE, by Hannah Lees (Harper's, $2.50). Taking the lid off an apparently very happy family of ice-skaters. Watch how murder bubbles and seethes below. Suspense and psychology.

GREENER THAN YOU THINK, by
Ward Moore (William
Sloane, $3.50). How some
"devil grass," starting from
Mrs. Dinkman's lawn, grew
and grew and grew. A first-
rate satirical fantasy, swift-
paced and edged with
humor.

THE AXE OF WANDSBEK, by
Arnold Zweig (Viking,
$3.50). The man who wrote
*The Case of Sergeant Gris-
cha* again shows his power
in this deeply impressive
story of all-pervading cor-
ruption under the Nazis.

Post
Bridgeport Conn

SEP 7 1947

Nearer at hand is
Chester Himes' "Lonely Crusade,"
first work of fiction to deal at
length with Communist infiltration
into the Negro community, as well
as the first to treat Negro-Jewish
relations at any length. It's off
Knopf's presses tomorrow.

HENRY
ROMIKE
PRESS CLIPPING BUREAU
220 West 19th St., New York 11, N. Y.
Tel. CHelsea 3-8860
NEWYORK

DURHAM, N.C.
HERALD

9/21/47

The Mixture Didn't Ferment

"Lee Gordon was the happiest man in the world" on the day this novel opens, for he has stepped into a job of the status to which his education and ability entitle him but from which his black skin has barred him. It's 1947 and a union has hired him as organizer at a West Coast airplane factory.

But he doesn't stay happy beyond page one. He realizes this new work will send him out into the dangerous world where he will encounter hostile whites again; his wife Ruth is too tired after her day at the office to rejoice with him at his good fortune; in his first hour at union headquarters a white labor official refuses to shake his black hand; fellow workers of his own race seem sorry specimens of humanity and he gets a lift home that night in an expensive car driven by a Negro who proves to be a member of the Communist party, which Lee despises.

white boss, and the boss, Foster, determined to break the union, and the Communist Luther at home with his white wife. We attend a drunken party and there with Lee, are introduced to the white girl with whom he falls in love.

Himes' thesis is that the intelligent Negro is bedeviled mercially by his seeing consciousness of an inferior position in our society. The question is not whether we agree with that, but whether that has been developed into a novel. Even while we answer no, we can be sure that, as Himes' earnestness and conviction produced a fine book once before, some day they will do it again.

Journal
Milwaukee Wis

SEP 14 1947

A Disturbing Novel
of a Negro's Plight

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. Knopf

CHESTER HIMES in his second novel about the Negro's difficulties takes up a number of the most controversial phases of that continuing problem.

The key figure of "Lonely Crusade" is a young Negro, Lee Gordon, a union organizer in a west coast war plant. Plagued by the deep seated frustrations of his race, he treads a rough path. He is wooed by Communists but does not succumb, though he finds it hard to discover another positive doctrine on which to pin his faith. His life is further complicated by a love affair with a white girl, which ends in her turning him over to the police for a murder in which he was implicated. In the end, Gordon goes forth to die for his principles, but to the end he is lonely and uncertain and his fight for equality is, at least in the short run, a futile one.

Some of the incidents are melodramatic and contrived. But on the whole, Himes has managed to turn out a disturbing book. His previous novel was "If He Hollers Let Him Go." ROBERT WELLS.

New Yorker

SEP 13 1947

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes (Knopf). A bitter story about a thoughtful young Negro who becomes a union organizer at a West Coast airplane factory during the recent war. Unlike most novels that explore the difficulties of the black man, this one does not stack the cards too obviously against the hero; the union members cultivate him for political purposes, and his employer is friendly to him in the hope of using him against the Communists. The tragedy of this particular man is a psychological one—a growing despair over being black, which hamstrings him in every human relationship. Mr. Himes considers this problem intelligently and convincingly; regrettably, though, he seems to think that an ugly narrative is necessarily a powerful one.

HENRY
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPING BUREAU
NEW YORK

AIRLANES
NEW YORK, N.Y
SEPT. 1947

TTER

 FOLLOWING closely in the footsteps of KINGSBLOOD ROYAL, comes LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes (Alfred A. Knopf, $3.00). First a word on the author . . . Mr. Himes' first stories appeared in *Esquire* from 1934 on. He has since written other stories and articles, some of which have been reprinted in anthologies such as the Negro Caravan and Primer for White Folks. In 1944 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to write the novel IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO, which was published in 1945.

THE LONELY CRUSADE is actually several stories, and the unfolding of each one can be followed through the book in such a way that the reader feels as if he's looking at one stripe on a sheet of striped wall-paper. And as the wall paper needs that stripe, so this book needs the varying themes, and the result is a well-blended whole. The main theme of the book and the one which holds it together is that of Negro race-consciousness, picturing directly the fear that underlies every thought and emotion of the Negro and distorts every human relationship which he may have. This is the story of Lee Gordon, and his wife Ruth, both well educated, both holding down good jobs, he as a union organizer, she as a women's counselor. Closely wound into this, is the theme of industrial organization, workers and communism. Abe Rosenberg and his friendship with Lee give a new picture of the relations of Jews and Negroes. There is the story of Lester McKinley, a Negro professor of Latin, and of Louie Foster, general manager of the Comstock Aircraft Corporation where Lee works; there is Luther, a communist stooge, who is kept by Mollie, a wealthy white

woman. And for Lee there is Jackie Forks, a white girl with whom Lee has an affair. There is Luther's murder of Paul, for which Lee is accused.

LETTER

Chester Himes, author of Lonely Crusade

Fear in Our Midst

By NASH K. BURGER

A3

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This Clipping From

Saturday Review of Literature
NEW YORK, N. Y.

Through Many Eyes

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1947. 398 pp. $3.

Reviewed by ERIC L. MCKITRICK

THOUGH it is generally felt, and rightly, that "equality" (in the strictest sense of the word) among human beings can never be more than merest illusion here in America or anywhere else, only a Negro can best realize what sort of basic equality is necessary before the real inequalities among men may be justly considered. Otherwise what good does it do for the Negro and for his immortal soul that a white man befriend him, eat with him, sleep with him, live with him in the social community, if the fact itself does not exist within his own soul? "Some of my best friends are Negroes" can not possibly be more of a noble utterance than "Would you want your sister . . ." simply because, of course, there is nothing whatever to be noble about. True acceptance involves no other sacrifice than a completely honest intellectual effort to confront the question: Why not? All his life, Lee Gordon had run into people who never quite got that far, and who never would.

Comrade Jackie Forks, for instance. Jackie is a white girl who is doing her bit for the Party (up to its usual tricks in Los Angeles, 1943) and she pretends to forget that she is white. Lee imagines she understands him since his own wife doesn't—although Ruth, his wife, is the only person in the world who ever really loved him, outside of his mother. Though Lee has taken a job as a union organizer, a job which he feels might help restore his sense of dignity, he finds wartime Los Angeles one of the last places on earth in which to entertain such high hopes. Throughout a turbulent story seething with violence, he is tortured constantly with his fancied deficiencies as a man, problems which might never have presented themselves had he not been born black. He gets involved with the local Communists, is beaten by deputies, framed in a murder, and trampled on generally.

Where does the truth enter this dismal scene? Chester Himes has given us a psychologically unstable protagonist; to stay with him often requires that the reader's sympathies work overtime, and the events in the story run a dizzy race with credibility. However, the mirror is held up to nature every day in the liberal press, and social documentation is not exactly Mr. Himes's purpose. I feel that as an artist he, like all others, is en-

titled to paint with the broad brush, to objectify any way he wishes the complex, often highly contradictory, sometimes violent, almost always suppressed inner torments of the sensitive Negro who tries only to keep his head decently above water. There is no one better qualified than he to explore to their bitter depths all these painful processes.

The problem is pried into from just about every angle and viewed through many eyes. The Marxists, the Southern whites, the patronizing appeasers, the phony intellectuals, the sex-curious white women, the Jews, the Negroes themselves, all types of them, all have their fair innings.

Eric McKitrick has tasted commercial art, advertising, public relations, music, reading, history, architecture, sports. A veteran, he has now settled on a literary career.

THE ORIGINAL
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPINGS
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review and comment

WHITE FLAG

Chester Himes' banner is more than a symbol of surrender—under it he joins his people's foes.

By LLOYD L. BROWN

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes. Knopf. $3.

CHESTER HIMES was one of the authors discussed by Theodore Ward in his illuminating critique of contemporary Negro fiction published in *Mainstream*, Winter, 1947. In that article, "Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat," Mr. Ward examined one trend in which "hope is being abandoned and replaced by a spirit of defeat." But where the critic found evidence of this defeatist current reflected, though not apparent at first sight, in Mr. Himes' first novel, *If He Hollers Let Him Go*, there is no mistaking the white flag under which this author boldly marches backward in *Lonely Crusade*.

This book is remarkable in several ways. I cannot recall ever having read a worse book on the Negro theme. This may seem a sweeping statement about one book in a country where so much of literature has been polluted by racist poison. It may seem even more incredible since the author is himself a Negro. But those who have observed the phenomenon of renegacy in other fields may understand.

More significant is the fact that in *Lonely Crusade* can be seen the full flowering of the Myrdal-Wright thesis on the Negro question which has had such a wide influence in recent years, a viewpoint which has been doubly insidious because of its liberal trappings. In *An American Dilemma*, the philosophic bible of this school, Gunnar Myrdal found that "The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus." Richard Wright and his followers supplement this anti-materialist distortion

with the thesis that Bigger Thomas images the basic character of the Negro people in America.

Horace R. Cayton, author and journalist, who is one of the most energetic apostles of the Myrdal-Wright doctrine, recently declared: "I am convinced that at the core of the Negro's mentality there is a fear-hate-fear complex."* (The Negro's fear of the white man creates within him a feeling of hate, which produces a sense of guilt which in turn results in an intensified and compounded fear.) "It is this vicious cycle," Mr. Cayton concludes, "in which the American Negro is caught and in which his personality is pul-

*THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO RACE RELATIONS, by Horace R. Cayton. Reed College Bulletin, Vol. 25, No. 1.*

> Our own contributing editor Anton Refregier will be the instructor in three classes offered this fall at the California Labor School, 240 Golden Gate in San Francisco. Ref, whose work appears in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art as well as on various hotel, post-office and night-club walls and in NM, will conduct fifteen-week courses in drawing, painting and mural painting, beginning September 8. In addition, the school offers many other courses on various subjects. If you're on the West Coast, look into it.

verized by an ever-mounting, self-propelling rocket of emotional conflict." To illustrate his thesis this writer quotes liberally from Himes' first novel, as well as from several works of Wright.

For the devotees of this ultra-modern version of the ancient myth of the Scared Negro, as well as for the unreconstructed adherents of the old tobacco-chewin', red-gallus brand of white supremacy, Mr. Himes' new book has much to offer. His hero twists and turns in fear from page four of the first chapter ("He was afraid . . .") to page 383 in the last chapter ("I'm still afraid . . ."). So hard does the author ride this emotion that he runs out of new ways to describe his protagonist's torment. Thus on page 318 fear is "paralyzing his vocal cords . . ." and on the facing page "fear had paralyzed his vocal cords . . ."

In their jacket blurb the publishers describe *Lonely Crusade* as "picturing directly the fear that . . . underlies every thought and emotion of the Negro and distorts every human relationship he may have, whether with other Negroes or with whites."

If Himes did only that we could dismiss his new book as being merely another redrawing of the "liberal" caricature, a bid for best-seller cash by author and publisher following a tried-and-tested pattern. But along this fearful way the writer does much more—and much worse. And I do not see how those liberals who have been beguiled by the Myrdal-Wright school, including men like Horace Cayton, who proclaim their partisanship in the Negro's fight for liberation, can march with Himes in his crusade. Certainly it is not too much to ask them now to reexamine the roots of their philosophy from which has blossomed this strange fruit—this literary lynching.

THE Bigger Thomas of this book is named Lee Gordon. He is a college graduate hired as a union organizer in wartime Los Angeles. The union is engaged in a drive to organize an aircraft plant which has among its employes a considerable number of Negro workers. Communists, both within the union and outside, are helping out in the drive. This factor makes it possible for Himes to add another "popular" highlight to his book: Red-baiting. Lee Gordon's fear-complex is matched by a relentless and bitter hatred of Communists and this be-

18

September 9, 1947 nm

NEWS Newark N J

OCT 5 1947

Negros in Unions

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. 398 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.

By Guy Savino

Chester Himes, whose "If He Hollers Let Him Go" won hossanas some seasons back treats in his new book not only the age-old struggle between white and black but of such subdivisions as the Negro and the Jew and Communism and the Negro.

Lee Gordon, a young, stringly built Negro, is the central character of the book. Hired as a union organizer in one of California's war plants he speedily runs afoul of the internecine strife among workers. Within the union Communist and non-Communist elements are at work and Gordon is considered fair game by both sides. An added hazard is the effort of the management to bore into the union's strength by paying off the organizers.

In any such situation a Negro because of his lack of experience, would be hard put to set a safe course. Lee Gordon, in some amazingly incredible scenes, escapes most of the hazards, but eventually is implicated in a murder of which he wanted no part. However, at the end he is still free and the book closes with Gordon marching, down the street with banner held high.

"Lonely Crusade" faces up to some of the Negro's most pressing problems. But this reviewer is willing to cry "enough" over the emphasis such books focus on miscegnation. Too often this fascination with white-black romance seems born out of box office considerations. The two-color situation in this book adds little to it. In fact, if Jackie Forks were black instead of white, Gordon's problem would have been the same.

The Negro's position in unionism is sufficiently important to stand by itself. The sensational appeal of the Gordon-Forks affair may do heavy trade for the lending libraries, but it lessens the impact of the more important phase of this novel.

220 W. 19th St., NEW YORK 11, N.Y.
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ST. PAUL, MINN.
PIONEER PRESS

OCT 26 1947

Cir. (D 131,246) ($ 128,686)

This Clipping From

AKRON, OHIO
BEACON JOURNAL

OCT 9 1947

"LONELY CRUSADE," by Chester Himes; Knopf—With the publication in 1945 of "If He Hollers Let Him Go," Chester Himes won recognition as a novelist dealing with the theme of Negro race consciousness. He repeats the theme in this book, pulling no punches in his indictment of the white supremacy attitude.—R. J. D.

"LONELY CRUSADE," by Chester Himes. (Knopf).

LEE GORDON was a Negro and a union organizer. He was proud and happy when he got that job, a "Negro first." But every once in a while, arguing for the union, meeting with white women labor leaders, talking with bosses, his black skin felt more evident to him than the sense of his words. He simply couldn't be at ease. Just as he got to feeling a trifle self-confident, some phrase, some action, would make him think he was the cause of a failure. Still Lee tried doggedly, yet weeping and wondering inside himself.

This sense of Negro consciousness gives strength to a novel whose pages in some parts may be cryptically full of union talk or of domestic turmoil. It is a novel that explains much to those anxious to be open-minded.

Courant
Hartford Conn

OCT 19 1947

"Lonely Crusade" by Chester Himes (Knopf; $3) deals with one of the most controversial subjects of the present day: Negro-White relationships, with emphasis on the Negro's race-consciousness. Chester Himes has painted a thoughtful, compassionate yet ugly picture of the fear that, underlying and motivating the Negro's every thought and emotion, distorts and sullies every human relationship he may have, either with white people or with other Negroes.

Although the author is no Richard Wright, he has none the less drawn a bold, scathingly accurate and brilliant portrait of his protagonist, Lee Gordon, a Negro union organizer. In many instances long-winded, "Lonely Crusade" is a fine study of that psychological terror incessantly affecting and afflicting the lives of American Negroes.

N Y Herald-Tribune

DEC 7 - 1947

Books I Have Liked

BILL MAULDIN: *Tin Horns and Ca'ico*, by Henry Christman; *You're the Boss*, by Edward J. Flynn; *Gus the Great*, by Thomas Duncan.

RUSSELL HILL: *Tales of the South Pacific*, by James Michener; *Herodotus: History; Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 1918-1941*, by Hugh Seton-Watson.

ERNESTINE EVANS: *Great Morning*, by Sir Osbert Sitwell; *First Flowers of Our Wilderness*, by James Thomas Flexner; *Grierson on Documentary*, by John Grierson.

CARL VAN VECHTEN: *Christ Stopped at Eboli*, by Carlo Levi; *Knock on Any Door*, by Willard Motley; *Lonely Crusade*, by Chester Himes.

W. E. WOODWARD: *Gentleman's Agreement*, by Laura Z. Hobson; *Speaking Frankly*, by James F. Byrnes; *Land of Liberty*, by Fred Hamlin.

STEWART HOLBROOK: *The Golden Voice*, by M. M. Marberry; *The Proper Bostonians*, by Cleveland Amory; *Linden on the Saugus Branch*, by Elliot Paul.

VINCENT McHUGH: *Memoirs of Hecate County*, by Edmund Wilson; *All Thy Conquests*, by Alfred Hayes; *The Way of an Investigator*, by Walter B. Cannon, M.D.

PHIL STONG: *Howe and Hummel*, by Richard H. Rovere; *It Beats Working*, by John Lardner; *Germany's Underground*, by Allen Dulles.

Post-Dispstch
St Louis Mo

DEC 9 - 1947

A Dark Journey

LONELY CRUSADE, by Chester Himes. (Knopf.)

Chester Himes, a Missouri-born Negro, author of "If He Hollers Let Him Go," explores again the distorting fear inbred in today's Negro. An uneven book, it does penetrate deeply into the conflicting motivations of his characters, as he bluntly and bitterly pictures the impact of Democracy vs. Communism, the Jew vs. the Negro, and the White Man vs. the Black Man.

Lee Gordon, Negro union organizer, runs the full gamut of fear in less than two months—from the day he reports for the coveted “Negro First” job as organizer until the last day when he is wanted for a murder which he did not commit. Confused and seeking identity as a man, he leaves his wife for a white Communist worker, later even attempts to sell out the union. To him “in this living, peopled world, nothing took the place of acceptance: nothing could assuage rejection.”

But outside his own environment, he finds the saddest rejection of all. Neither does Marxist philosophy serve as a substitute for his own Christian beliefs. Whether he knew it or not, he is a “man fighting blindly, and desperately and dangerously toward a goal,” and in the final crisis makes a direct attempt at that goal.

Argonaut
San Francisco
Calif

DEC 19 1947

White Jungle

LONELY CRUSADE. By Chester Himes. 398 pages. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. $3.

Walter White in his challenging article, "Why I Remain a Negro," recalls with uneasiness the grimness on a Negro soldier's face when he told him on a Pacific battlefront, "Our fight will start the day we arrive in San Francisco." White was uneasy because he believes that "Only hate, the negative force, can separate them; only love, the positive force, can bind them together."

There are those of White's culture who have lost their patience. Injustice and poverty, social oppression in a land of potential plenty has robbed them of their non-violent creed. As questioning, and confused people some must fight for their identity as worthwhile human beings. One such is Lee Gordon, Mr. Himes' tormented protagonist.

Gordon thinks he has found his answer in a job as a union organizer in Los Angeles.

He believes that his wife, Ruth, understands him less than the white Communist, Jackie. But the turbulent wartime city and the neurotic girl only intensify his problems. He becomes mixed up with communists, is framed in a murder and finds prejudice in every corner.

Mr. Himes writes in the school of James Farrell. Gordon is almost entirely motivated by the pressures of his different environments. Given an initial sensitivity he responds to all the inequities whites perpetrate against the colored people with an accentuated bravado. There is a certain Pavlov salivating to situations but the verity of these reactions is born out every day in our newspapers.

Inquirer
Phila Pa

DEC 27 1947

IF ANY trend is to be discerned among the serious novels of today (those not frankly popular or Hollywooden), it is a continuance of that concern with social problems which has been so acute since the crash of '29.

Laura Z. Hobson's "Gentleman's Agreement," Chester Himes' "Lonely Crusade" and Sinclair Lewis' "Kingsblood Royal" are only propagandistic in their presentation of inter-racial tensions and in their implied insistence upon solutions that are compatible with our professions of democracy in the United States.

In Lionel Trilling's "The Middle of the Journey" the propaganda is muted and the problem is largely a manufactured one: the dilemma of the liberal in quest of an acceptable position between the absolutes of the Left and Right.