SU N SH IN E

OR

NOIR?

Hughess disillusionment in Los Angeles was recapitulated, more harrowingly, by the experience of Chester Himes. At the beginning of the war, Himes (who had spent the early Depression in the Ohio State Penitentiary on a robbery charge) headed West with his wife Jean for a fresh start as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers. Despite a formidable reputation as a short story writer for Esquire (the first convict writer of renown), Himes encountered an implacable wall of racism in Hollywood. As his biographer describes the incident, he was promptly fired from . . . Warner Brothers when Jack Warner heard about him and said, I dont want no niggers on this lot \ 53 Racebaited from the studios, Himes spent the rest of the war years as an unskilled laborer in internally segregated defense plants wracked by outbursts of white violence. As he recalled later in his autobiography, it was a searing experience: Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear: I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I had become bitter and saturated with hate.54 Himess Dostoyevskian portrait of Los Angeles as a racial hell, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is noir as well-crafted as anything by Cain or Chandler. Set in the long hot summer of 1944, it narrates how white racism, acting in utterly capricious circumstances, launches the selfdestruction of Bob Jones, a skilled leaderman in the shipyards. As a critic has noted, fear is the novels major theme . . . the progressive deterioration of a personality under the deadly pressure of a huge and inescapable fear.5 5 Himess next novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), is also given a nightmare setting in the racially tense Los Angeles war economy. This time fear eats the soul of Lee Gordon, a Black UCLA graduate and union organizer under the influence of the Communist Party. Together, Himess two Los Angeles novels, ignored in most critical treatments of the noir canon,56 constitute a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.

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