It was a productive year for Nelson, with something published nearly every month. Masses, a Socialist bimonthly in Canada, took “For the Homeless Youth of America” in the March–April 1934 issue; this work was an excerpt from the novel Nelson was then calling “Native Son.” Another excerpt, “If You Must Use Profanity,” a story of the humiliating circumstances of a southern charity house, went to American Mercury that April. “Lest the Trapdoor Click” came out in June 1934. Conroy took “Kewpie Doll” for the July– August Anvil. “The Brothers’ House,” a story about a boy returning to a home where he isn’t wanted, went into the October 1934 issue of Story. It was picked up the next year for a collection of O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1935.
Vanguard also got the draft of Nelson’s first novel in the fall of 1934, but there were problems. Henle turned the book over for reviews and edits to one of his successful authors, James Farrell, whose work Algren did not respect. Farrell thought the manuscript was in poor shape and wanted big changes, including transforming Cass’s love interest from a mulatto woman to a cute white blonde. Henle also did not like the title, “Native Son,” since he feared it would be confused with the political campaign of a Californian running on the “native son” candidacy. Algren later bequeathed the title to Richard Wright for his own novel. Algren was always touchy about criticism, and resented Farrell’s in particular. He went along with the changes to get it in print, though the ordeal probably helped to sour his own feelings about the book, leading him to decide to completely rewrite it as A Walk on the Wild Side in 1956. In a preface to a reprinting in 1963, Algren called his first novel “an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.” Elsewhere, he complained of its “schoolboy poetry” and lack of humor, and how there was a beheading every other page. While the novel does have bumpy passages of overwriting and excessive violence, it also has a clear, uncompromising vision and compassionate power. It is in a way a religious book, not in the sense of preaching a creed, but in creating empathy for people at the very bottom of society’s ladder. Cass McKay is not handsome, smart, or innocent, and he commits both rape and armed robbery. But the novel also reveals him as a sensitive boy who is capable of both great love and pity, and would be more than he is if not for societal problems he did not create.
Nelson said he wanted to portray Cass as a “Final Descendant” of the pioneer woodsmen who had come south out of Kentucky when the hunting was gone, men without land, slaves, or skills, alienated from both the plantation owners and the cities, forced into the border towns by the Rio Grande. The novel starts in 1926, when Cass is fifteen, growing up poor in a desolate Texas town with his joyful, auburn-haired sister Nancy, their alcoholic brother Bryan, who had “left his health in France,” and his father, a bad hat named Stub McKay. McKay is a short man with a curious resentment about everything, “The Damned Feeling” that he has been cheated of something. As he describes his own father, Algren describes McKay as a good worker who has a hard time holding a job because of his temper. He sings bloody hymns and reads the Gospels for excuses to hate and fight. He despises the Mexicans living all around them, and takes Cass out of school because a new teacher was half Mexican. He is an archetypal American character—the ignorant bigot who thinks other poor members of the working class are trying to take from him what little he has, a type that would be drawn to Fascists and demagogues.
At the beginning of the book, both Cass and Nancy are hopeful characters who can appreciate beauty and love. Nancy is mischievous—she dances and plays, and laughs at everything she sees. “Of the sweet purple clover she wove herself garlands, she made herself crowns of lilac and rose.” For Cass, “a common bush would become a glory, a careless sparrow on a swinging bough a wonder to behold.” He watches for a lilac to bloom, and brushes away the train soot that gathers on its buds. But he is surrounded by poverty and its related tragedies. In a drunken rage, Bryan rips the head off the family cat. Stealing coal off a train with other poor townspeople, Cass sees a lovely little Mexican child with a baby buggy beheaded by the wheels of the moving train. Another man comments that “she must have just slipped a little”—the horror is beyond expression. Later, Stub kicks Bryan viciously in the crotch, unmanning him. Stub is the first of the book’s villains in boots, an image of oppression repeated throughout the novel. “There were only two kinds of men wherever you went—the men who wore boots, and the men who ran.”
Eager to escape his home, Cass is attracted to the road, and learns of other cities in the hobo jungle. He takes off for a week and agrees to go with a prostitute, though he doesn’t have any money. He is then beaten so badly by the girl’s pimp that he is left with a permanent gray scar on his face. He returns to a home full of growing despair and poverty—Stub is out of work and Nancy has lost her joy, burying herself in the Bible. Cass feels a wall coming between them, and questions her faith. “Reckon the wrongest sin we done, sister, was just bein’ bo’n hungry in a pesthole in Texas,” he tells her. Their home is broken forever when Stub kills Luther Gulliday, the man who got his job, by throwing him under the train. Terrified by what has happened, Nancy and Cass argue, and Cass cruelly tells her that she should go to a whorehouse. He never stops regretting it, especially after he finds her in a brothel later and she doesn’t recognize him.
Cass then takes to the rails again, ending up in Nelson’s jail, with its one-armed man wearing a pair of Spanish boots and enforcing the “rules of the court.” Once released, Cass travels with Nubby O’Neill, seeing him as a guide and a father figure. He calls the thief “judge.” They rob a store together and get separated. Cass spends his take on getting drunk and is taken in by Norah, a “hay-bag” whore, the type who rolls drunks. Norah had been a factory worker, and her early experiences are told with precision and sympathy. She could not get enough work because she was not one of the boss’s favorites. So she quits the factory to be a dance girl at a burlesque, but the manager mistreats the girls, and she refuses to apologize for striking him. Norah ends up as the most despised kind of prostitute, for the crime of not being sufficiently subservient. But Cass and Norah fall in love, and this is followed by one of the few sunlit spots in the novel—like any normal couple, they tease and take care of each other. They also rely on robbery to support themselves—and Cass gets caught and jailed. When he gets out again, he searches for her. To survive, he takes a job as a barker for another burlesque and befriends Dill Doak. Again, there’s a spot of light, as Doak tries to teach him about the injustice of their world and takes him to see a Communist speaker in Washington Park. But then Nubby turns up again, and he mocks Cass for walking with someone “so black he looks like a raincloud comin’ down the street,” so Cass abandons his friendship with Dill, seeing it as a mistake. Cass finds Norah again, but she has been infected by a venereal disease and runs away from him, and he loses his job. So Cass and Nubby take to the road again, with Cass hoping for nothing greater than maybe getting a tattoo, someday.
Nelson always had a problem with plot in his novels; Somebody in Boots doesn’t have much of a story—it is more of a chronicle of trouble, a picaresque with every scene a new kind of terrible. There is no suspense—after a while the reader doesn’t wonder what will happen to the characters. It is clear that no one will be saved—the question is how far they will fall. There is no growth for Cass or Nancy or Norah. Cass seeks love; he finds it and loses it. With Nancy and Dill, the loss is Cass’s own fault, from ignorance and a surge of misplaced pride. He loses Norah because of his time in prison and her own bad luck. In the end he is seeking love from the worst person he can find—a vicious criminal, somebody in boots.
The lack of a traditional story arc, suspense, and character growth are problems for the novel, as is its lack of humor and hope. It is a tough read. However, it is impossible to doubt the reality of these people. There’s nothing fake about Cass, Nancy, Norah, or even Stub. Stub’s thoughts before he kills Luther Gulliday are awful, but complex and human. He
feels shame, and yet a sense of importance, moving out of the house deliberately “as one upon whom many wait,” and manages to think practical things about how the drought is affecting the grapes at the same time as he is planning his murder. Despite the passages from The Communist Manifesto affixed to the front of each section, and the angry, purple condemnations of the Chicago “Tribute” newspaper, and the Century of Progress, there is little politics in the novel, and no hope of revolution from homeless boys like Cass. He is not a symbol, like Jurgis in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Frank Norris’s McTeague, and he’s not a cartoon, as the character Dove sometimes becomes in A Walk on the Wild Side. He’s a human boy—one who wants love and is crippled by ignorance and guilt. Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko praised the novel as having “that awkward strength of a great writer’s first book.” Algren emptied himself into it—all his sorrow and youthful outrage. It is a tragedy that he later could not stand by it, and was so undone by its lack of commercial success.
4
MARRIAGE AND THE WPA
The nation asks for action and action now.
Our greatest primary task is put people to work.
—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 1933
We Poke Along
—A JOKE TITLE FOR THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION
Somebody in Boots came out in late March of 1935 to mixed but promising reviews. Edith Walton at the New York Sun called it “grim” but praised its eloquence, “terrible vividness,” and “pitiless realism.” “Somebody in Boots is a powerful, disturbing book, which does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness…. The implications of his story are there for anyone to see, and that Cass is victim rather than villain should be plain to the dullest mind.” The influential H. W. Boynton in the New York Times praised the power of the writing and the book’s sharp portrayals of prison and sweatshop life, though he doubted its characters were a fair representative of the “homeless boys of America” to whom the book is dedicated. The Daily Herald in London, reviewing the book after it came out in England in September, said that while Algren’s Communist sensibilities are never disguised, he makes Cass’s story a “parable of the down-and-outs,” and recommends the book for giving “an unglossed picture of one aspect of American life, with all the optimistic ballyhoo left out.” The British publication Constable put the novel on its autumn 1935 list of recommended books, calling it a “truly shattering revelation of the lives of the submerged.” Predictably, the Republican Chicago Tribune, mocked as the “Tribute” in the novel, thought it all was too much. The Manchester Guardian thought that Nelson overstated his case in leaving nothing but robbery as the fate for Cass, and nothing but prostitution for Norah. “It is a novel for sadists,” the Guardian warned, foreshadowing the criticism of Algren’s books in the 1950s.
The problem was not the reviews but the sales, which amounted to less than a thousand copies in the first year—nowhere near enough to pay him anything beyond the advance he had already spent. In their scarce leisure time, working people in 1935 looked to Shirley Temple movies and screwball comedies to escape the realities of their lives, and most weren’t going to spend $2.50 on a novel that told of a bloody stillbirth in a refrigerator car. The Publisher’s Weekly list of top sellers for 1935 included Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with settings long ago or far away. Cass shares a literary resemblance to Jo the street urchin in Dickens’s Bleak House, a homegrown savage who was both too wretched and too familiar to command general interest. Two decades later, Nelson would joke to an interviewer that sales from his first novel “kept me living in affluent style,” but at the time, it was not funny. Nelson had now been out of college for four years and was still living hand to mouth, on the small payments from a shrinking number of leftist magazines, and the novel into which he had poured so much of himself was a commercial flop. His brother-in-law Morris thought he was a bum, and Nelson could not offer proof to the contrary.
Algren returned to New York in late April of 1935, this time as a delegate and speaker for the American Writers’ Congress along with Conroy. Writers at the standing-room-only gathering at the Mecca Temple on Fifty-Sixth Street included Richard Wright, James Farrell, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, Malcolm Cowley, and chairman Granville Hicks. Maxim Gorky, hailed as the father of proletarian literature, sent his greetings. It was a tumultuous time for midwestern proletarian writers, as the Communist Party USA had begun to lose interest in regional art. Conroy had lost control of the Anvil to the genial but obtuse Walter Snow, who turned down a story by twenty-four-year-old Tennessee Williams that Conroy had already accepted. Snow was more concerned with getting subscribers and allying the magazine with party bosses in the East than in helping out young writers, according to Conroy biographer Douglas Wixson. Algren was in such deep despair over his book that the formidable Le Sueur had to grasp his thin arms and help him up to speak before the crowd, and then he pleaded with everyone to buy his book. The session ended with a chorus of the Marxist anthem, “The Internationale.” Nelson perked up enough to march in the city’s May Day parade, with authors who raised their fists in the air and shouted, “We write for the working class!” Red flags were flying. Other groups shouted, “Free the Scottsboro boys,” and young women dressed as angels banged tambourines. One of the writers lifting his fist beside Algren was Howard Rushmore, a journalist friend of Conroy’s from St. Louis who was active in the Young Communist League. Years later, Rushmore got a job as research director for a Wisconsin Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy.
Nelson’s depression continued so deep that his Chicago friends were afraid he would kill himself, and they appealed for help to James Farrell. Farrell, who had lavishly praised Algren’s short story “So Help Me” at the conference, suggested that the younger writer take a rest at Yaddo, a 400-acre writers’ retreat on a wooded estate in Saratoga Springs, New York, hoping the tall white pines, broad lawns, rose garden, and marble fountains would give him a new perspective. Farrell had been staying there as a guest, along with other leftist artists. On the day he was supposed to leave New York City, Farrell walked around with Algren and talked with him for hours before the train left the station. But while other artists found the luxurious fifty-five-room mansion with its oil paintings and Persian rugs a nice break from the struggle of their ordinary lives, Nelson found it all intimidating and depressing. He did not want to eat, and he spent only a single night before hitchhiking out. Two years later, Farrell attributed Algren’s continued hostility toward him to this attempt to help the younger writer when he was going out of his mind. “For which, he will never forgive me,” said Farrell.
Back in Chicago, a girlfriend discovered Nelson “barely conscious, lying on the floor with the gas pipe in his mouth,” in the words of biographer Bettina Drew. The friend called Nelson’s friend Lawrence Lipton. Lawrence was worried enough about Nelson’s welfare that he had the younger man stay in his apartment on Rush Street so he could keep an eye on him. He got Gerson and Goldie to agree to have him put in a hospital for a short time, but Nelson never thought much of psychoanalysis, believing most psychiatrists to be nothing more than “fancied-up mediums” and a waste of money. With the Abrahams deep in debt and about to lose their house on Troy, there was no money for treatment anyway. Jack Conroy also was alarmed by Nelson’s despair, and urged his large circle of friends to write to cheer him up.
One who wrote at Conroy’s urging was an Ohio bookseller, Hoyte D. Kline, who told Algren he admired Somebody in Boots and assured him that the Vanguard salesman, Franklin Watt, was a “fine lad” who was greatly interested in proletarian writing and doing his best to sell it. Kline complained that most of the customers at his biggest Cleveland store were “satisfied Babbitts who buy books from the best-seller lists and Woollcott’s radio vaporings”—a reference to book critic Alexander Woollcott. “We can but hope that the book buying public will wa
ke up,” Kline wrote. He also advised Nelson that while some novelists like William Saroyan get early success and notice from the New York “tribe of nitwits,” it was better to build up your public slowly. “Above all, don’t get discouraged with your writing,” Kline cautioned. “It takes patience but pays out in the long run.” Despite encouragement from Kline, Conroy, Wright, and others, Algren was not patient. He chose to live, but it is a sign of his deep discouragement that while he wrote a few book reviews and poems, his creative output went dry for years, and he did not publish another novel until 1942.
Dick Wright wanted to help his friend, so he held a party at the John Reed Club’s headquarters to celebrate the publication of Somebody in Boots in the late spring. It was there that Nelson met Amanda Kontowicz, a petite Polish American beauty with bright, dark eyes, a full, wide, red mouth, and black curly hair framing a heart-shaped face. Four years his junior, she was quiet and catlike in her ability to watch and wait. Nelson came to know her as a sharp observer of character, able to place the phonies in the crowd and tear them down. She also was somewhat hypochondriac, often complaining of small ailments, a bit conventional, and full of self-doubt. She painted, and Nelson found her work original, but she had little confidence in her efforts. She had lost her father while a little girl and grown up in Milwaukee with her widowed mother, Laura, a deli worker; her Polish-born grandmother, Mary; and her older brother, Ted. When Amanda was a young teen, her mother had married a Polish immigrant named Stanley Piatek. They had later moved to Chicago. Though intelligent and bookish, Amanda hadn’t gone to college, and had come from what was still regarded as an exotic, backward peasant culture among the WASP and Jewish intellectual elite, more foreign and misunderstood than western European cultures like German or French. Arriving on the arm of a poet, she must have felt like an unaccomplished outsider at the rowdy writers’ gathering at the warehouse on South Michigan Avenue. She recognized in handsome Nelson another outsider, even if this was supposed to be his party.
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