In the West Texas town, he wandered into the public library and had a conversation with the librarian about the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Nelson thought the librarian was ignorant, so he felt justified in swiping a book—Mother, a novel about revolutionary factory workers by Maxim Gorky. Maybe after everything that had happened, he wanted to get something of his own back; it was the start of a long career of pinching books. Nelson wrote long letters to friends in Chicago, complaining about the state of the Confederacy.
Things got worse. After losing money in a craps game, Nelson was locked in an El Paso County Jail cell full of drunks on suspicion of breaking a window, and then fined five dollars for vagrancy. The railroad then took him to La Feria, at the very bottom of the state by the Mexican border. He remembered staying in a hotel full of people with no money. He told an interviewer years later that someone from a traveling carnival staying at the hotel wondered if Nelson, with his look of baby-faced innocence and constant surprise, would want a job as a shill at a carnival roulette wheel. This is one version of the story; in another, told in the short story “The Last Carousel,” he gets the job after first trying his luck at the wheel himself. Since Nelson was a lifelong gambler, this version may be closer to the truth. In the story Nelson saw an older man who seemed to be winning big—the wheel operator was looking worried. The player got Nelson to help him on a double bet, won twelve dollars, and gave Nelson a silver piece to play himself. What a generous old world this was after all! When Nelson won on the spin, the older man urged him on, and Nelson added the damp dollars from his shoe. The wheel spun, the little lights shone on the midway, the merry-go-round music sounded sweet in the thick, warm air, the good old man whispered advice, and Nelson could not stop winning. And then he could not stop losing, and all the money he had won and wagered was gone. What happened?
In the story Nelson played the part of a sucker so well that he was hired on for regular performances. The wheel owner, a tall Texan in a rancher’s hat and boots, would spot a “mark” on the grounds and signal to his partner, a short New Yorker who spun the wheel while Nelson and a few other shills pretended to rejoice as they won money, trying to draw the mark in. Once a mark was taken, the silver dollars would have to be returned, and Nelson’s real pay was just enough for hamburgers and coffee. Nelson stayed at the fair long enough to pick up the local slang and a few secrets of the trade—as he told about the adventure in “The Last Carousel,” the “merry-go-round” was called a “razzle-dazzle,” and the half girl could look pretty good when she came whole out of her box. Nelson also learned something about show business: it was not enough for the savage Solomon Islander to sit in a cage in his underwear; he had to give the crowd a story!
One night, Nelson spotted a sheriff looking around the midway and slipped away from the wheel while he was six dollars ahead. He hurried to the sheriff’s side like his new best friend, walking alongside until he could lose himself in the crowd. He did not risk leaving by the gate. “I felt that one of the carnies—or both—might be wanting to see me about something,” he said later. “So I got through a fence in the darkness and stumbled about till I reached the Santa Fe tracks.”
Nelson was tired of finding holes in fences. “I wasn’t an editorial writer. I wasn’t a columnist. I wasn’t even a police reporter or a desk man writing obituaries: I was a bum.” It was hard just to keep clean. In desperation, he wrote a letter to Dean Murphy complaining about how he could not get any better work than dishwashing in the South and could Murphy help him? Murphy suggested getting him a job at the university, washing dishes. Indignant, Nelson decided not to worry about quick repayment of the University of Illinois loan. It was time to go home. He hopped freights north, arriving on Troy Street thin and ragged, broke and angry, but with an education in sociology that beat anything he could have picked up in graduate school. As he told an interviewer later, “I guess I did a lot of ‘research’ in my time, except at the time I was doing it, I didn’t know it was research. Maybe if the cops who have picked me up in my time for vagrancy and such had told me I was doing research I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it.”
Nelson remembered the highly colored, holy card pictures of Democracy and Opportunity and Equality he had studied in school. The Depression had lifted the veil on what seemed to him a massive fraud. There was no equity here, no justice. “All these scenes, one after another, piled up into something that made me not just want to write, but to really say it, to find out that this thing was all upside down. Everything I’d been told was wrong.” He could understand why a man would cheat and steal for his family, or just to keep himself alive. His heart and imagination settled in 1931, at the bottom of the wretched twentieth century, among the rags and bones. Years later, critics cut him for this, calling him the “bard of the stumblebum” and wondering why he kept writing about such low people. But the marks of early adulthood, and trauma, sit firmly in the imagination. Herman Melville was on a whaling ship when he was twenty-one, and he talked about its unique horrors long after he’d settled on land. Nelson stayed in the freight cars and dimly lit rented rooms, with the hungry men and their thin soup, for the rest of his creative life. It did not mean he was stuck in the 1930s. It meant he did not forget what the decade taught—that in a winner-take-all capitalist society, the crust of civilization can be terribly fragile. He knew the race was rigged, and not everybody was going to make it. He believed it was the duty of the artist to shine a light on the ones left behind. Kurt Vonnegut saw the atheist Nelson’s pessimism about life on Earth as essentially Christian. “Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them.”
3
PRISON AND SOMEBODY IN BOOTS
These prison wall blues keep rolling across my mind.
—GUS CANNON, “PRISON WALL BLUES”
I was in penal servitude, and I saw “desperate” criminals.
I repeat, this was a hard school.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE DIARY OF A WRITER
Back in Chicago, things weren’t much better, but at least no one was trying to put him in jail. Looking for something to do, Nelson spotted an ad for a writers’ workshop at the Jewish People’s Institute at 3500 Douglas Boulevard in Chicago. He spent an hour riding on the Kedzie and Douglas streetcars from his parents’ house on Troy to the four-story brick-and-stone building in the Lawndale neighborhood. Tucked among the folk dancing classes and Hebrew choral groups and the old men coming from their schvitz, Nelson found the office of Murray Gitlin, who taught a writing workshop and was looking for manuscripts. The amiable Gitlin encouraged him to write up his stories of the road, and let him use the typewriter in a corner of his office.
Writing at the time had taken on a desperate sense of purpose, and the left in general and Communism in particular had a huge attraction for artists, writers, and other intellectuals. Nelson, who turned twenty-four in March of 1933, was not the only young writer in the early 1930s who had looked around and decided that something had gone terribly wrong with the country. In the summer of 1932, more than fifty writers had signed a manifesto supporting the Communist candidates in the coming election, including Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, and John Dos Passos. The year 1932 saw the publication of the first volume of James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy about a Chicago street kid, and Jack Conroy’s proletarian novel The Disinherited came out in 1933. Small, leftist magazines had sprung up in the cities, including New Masses, Rebel Poet, Left Front, American Mercury, American Guardian, A Year Magazine, Blast, and the Anvil, all publishing stories about the struggles of workers and the poor.
The Anvil was edited by Conroy, the Moberly, Missouri–based godfather of the new worker-writer literary movement of the Midwest, which sought to express the problems of the times in the voices of the people themselves, rather than those of sophisticated outsiders. Algren began corresponding with Conroy, a big, curly-haired, blue-eyed, hard-drinking son of Irish immigrants. Ten years Algren
’s senior, Conroy was both a writer and an actual laborer—he took backbreaking jobs in sawmills and factories to support his family, and wrote at night while exhausted. He had lost his half brothers and father to Missouri coal mine accidents and had taught himself about literature. The Anvil was one of the most influential of the small, left-wing literary magazines that proliferated in the 1930s, and Conroy always found time to cheer on beginners like Algren, who came to see him as both a friend and a surrogate father. Algren would later accuse Conroy of ruining people’s lives by encouraging them to become writers.
Without a wife and children, Algren was not interested in copying Conroy’s method of writing after wearing himself out all day in manual labor. After his months of canning peas and picking fruit down south, Nelson did not feel he needed to prove his proletarian bona fides. He also was not interested in a safe, white-collar post at Sears, Roebuck, like his high school classmates. It irritated him to think that he would have to work a meaningless job just to survive. He wanted to write, and he was attracted not as much to the voices of the working class, like his father, as to those beneath, the ones who fell off the lowest rungs of respectable employment into the morass below—the beggars and petty thieves and prostitutes.
When Gitlin told him his letters about the Sinclair station would make a story, Algren agreed but decided not to stick with himself as the aggrieved Yankee narrator. He instead restructured the story to be told in the voice of Homer, a cowering grifter giving his statement to a lawyer in a murder case. In the story a “Jew kid” named David, a college graduate from Cincinnati with a pregnant girlfriend at home, is repeatedly robbed and conned by Homer and an ex-felon named Luther, known as Fort for the last prison he left. The kid catches on that he is being cheated, but he can’t seem to free himself from the others; only in his sleep does he seem fully aware of his situation, and he wakes up screaming about the inhumanity of his circumstances—“We’re cut apart!” and “Thy blood is not my blood.” After the three commit a robbery together and get away in a boxcar, Fort is so startled by the young man yelling in his sleep that Fort kills him. The title of the story, “So Help Me,” is a repeated plea by the narrator—a vow that he is telling the truth and nothing was his fault. It was a risky and brilliant voice for such a young writer: an unreliable narrator speaking in dialect about robbery and murder and making it all seem inevitable.
“So Help Me” was picked up by Story magazine in August 1933, for twenty-five dollars. It was a prestigious magazine at the time and a big score for a newcomer. The same issue had pieces by William Faulkner and Meridel Le Sueur. The publication of “So Help Me” was followed later that year by “Forgive Them, Lord,” in A Year magazine, about a black man named Christopher who witnesses a murder of a black father and daughter. The girl had been impregnated by a white man, whose family wanted to cover it up. The witness decides to keep quiet about it, knowing there would be little chance of justice. Like Homer, he tries to justify his fear to himself—maybe the girl deserved it somehow, maybe it was for her own good—and he resolves to be a good Christian and forgive the white killers. But a woman learns what he knows and betrays him for seemingly no reason at all, and he, too, faces being murdered at the end of the story. His practical, pious, slavish decision not to be a hero turns out to be worthless, and he loses both his soul and his life. These early stories contain what became frequent Algren themes: casual, senseless cruelty and the inability of the oppressed to stick together against a common enemy.
Both of these early stories were published under Nelson’s new pen name—he had dropped “Abraham” for a simplified spelling of his middle name, “Algren,” which offered the pleasing phonetic symmetry of two syllables and six letters in both first and last name. It took back the pre-Jewish name of his eccentric paternal grandfather and separated him from his prosy parents. “He didn’t want to operate as a Jew,” said his friend Dave Peltz. “Nobody knew that he was Jewish.”
“So Help Me” attracted the interest of Vanguard Press, which asked in a form letter if the author was working on a novel. Vanguard was known for radical, politically oriented books and novels of social realism—it had published not only Young Lonigan but also Female by Donald Clarke, declared obscene by a Brooklyn court. Nelson did not wait for anything more formal. Hitchhiking by this time was as natural for him as getting into a car, so he hit the road east, this time carrying pocket notebooks to record impressions. He took a detour to see Niagara Falls with a couple of young men who were giving him a ride, and made notes about the falls’ rainbow-colored spray, the Maid of the Mist boat that took tourists near the waters, and the rats among the rocks. He went for the first time to New York City in September of 1933.
Nelson found his way to Vanguard and met publisher James Henle in his well-furnished office on Fifth Avenue. Henle was surprised to see the tall, lean, intense young man—he did not even know a letter had been mailed. “Are you planning a novel?” Henle asked politely.
Nelson did not know anything about writing a novel, but this was his chance, and he had to think fast. He looked around the office, resplendent with books, plotting out something to say. After all he had seen and done, how hard could it be? He told Henle he would set a book in the Southwest, so he needed to go back there to do research.
“How much would you need?” Henle asked.
“A hundred dollars,” Nelson replied—which seemed like a lot of money. After what he’d seen outside—the shining new Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Pennsylvania Station with its columns like the glory days of Rome—he figured New York could spare it. He giddily agreed he would write a novel tentatively titled The Gods Gather in six months’ time—by March 15, 1934—and got $10 in advance. Henle agreed to advance an additional $90 over the next few months, plus another $100 on completion. Nelson gave Vanguard his sister Irene’s address on Creston Avenue in the Bronx and left the office feeling satisfied with the shrewd way he’d conducted himself in the world of business. Later he joked that this must be a record low in the world of literary advances. Back on the street, Nelson broke the ten at Hubert’s, a wax museum that had an exhibit of the Cubs great Grover Cleveland Alexander, whose career in Chicago was ended by alcohol and who, like Swede Risberg, frequently turns up in Nelson’s later writing as a symbol of old city glory. Algren also took advantage of his time in New York to meet two “Rebel Poets”—Herman Spector and Sol Funaroff, who had just been published by Conroy in a collection called We Gather Strength. He was a writer now, among other writers, talking about the country’s problems. A letter confirming his agreement with Vanguard showed Nelson was still playing with his name—the Bronx forwarding address had him as “Nelson Algren Abraham” while the signature line was “Nelson Abraham Algren.”
Nelson knew he needed to go back to Texas for his book—memory was never good enough. He had to be in the place he was writing about. The writers he admired—Charles Dickens and Stephen Crane and Anton Chekhov—paid close attention to detail. Algren read Crane so often—particularly Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and “The Blue Hotel”—that he felt like he had written his works himself. Of Chekhov, Algren once said, “The son of a bitch really puts you in a room.” Nelson wanted his readers in the room, even if they did not want to be there, especially if they did not want to be there. For Algren it was not enough to say a character had landed in a jail cell—it had to be a particular cell, the one with the metal benches on one wall, a heavy metal spoon held in a bracket, and a smelly bucket in the corner. “You had to know the difference between the cells in two different jails,” he said.
Besides his writing friends, Nelson had nothing to keep him at home—his sister Bernice had her hands full with her family. Nelson’s romance with a sculptress named Barbara Bein had gone sour, and she was berating him to friends. Nelson also did not feel he could use his little bit of money to help his struggling parents, who had been supporting him. The main attraction in Chicago was lovely Sally Rand and her feathered fan at the World�
�s Fair, which was trying to cheer up unemployed midwesterners with the notion that this was really a Century of Progress. Nelson was both fascinated and revolted by the spectacle—with its Midget City, Sky Ride, and rainbow-colored, futuristic buildings for twenty-five cents a ticket, just blocks away from ragged children digging in ash cans. But he wanted to be alone, in the place he was writing about. He did not want to take orders from anybody, and he needed a touch of cold-bloodedness to do what he had to do.
The South delivered on its promise of research almost immediately—he was pulled out of a boxcar by police in Greenville, North Carolina. The white prisoners were sent to the Salvation Army and warned that if they were caught on the train again, they’d get arrested. The black prisoners were sent off to hard labor. Heading west again, he passed through Alabama and Louisiana, then back to El Paso, copying observations about the types of train cars into his notebook and trying out phrases: “the Mississippi was an oily brown” or “the moonlight lay slantwise over the baggage carts.” He took down snatches of dialogue and slang—a Mexican was a “pepper,” “beef” was meat. Nelson had rejected “The Gods Gather” as the name of the novel and settled on “Native Son,” from the old song:
The miners came in ’49,
The whores in ’51,
They jungled up in Texas
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