Amanda was a good listener, and she came into Nelson’s life just when he needed one. In the months after the party, they began meeting each other. They sat by the lake on warm summer nights and had long talks about books and family, while Chicagoans who had either been evicted or were just trying to escape the heat camped out on quilts around them. He was a good listener, too, with a focused, gentle manner. She told him of her lonely childhood and her discomfort when her mother had remarried. He called her “Mashya,” the whispery Polish diminutive of her name, so like the Russian nicknames for beloved women Nelson found in his favorite novels. Soon, Amanda and Nelson moved in together, sharing a series of rattletrap apartments, paying the rent with whatever they scraped together on odd jobs. They got married at City Hall on March 1, 1937—a week before Nelson’s twenty-eighth birthday. Nelson said the marriage was necessary because Amanda’s mother would not visit if they kept living in sin.
It was a long, strange relationship that began in pity and ended in hatred. Nelson claimed later that there was never much of a physical connection between them, and he told her that he did not want children. Yet she held on tightly to him over the years, despite separations, despite Nelson’s cheating on her, slamming doors in her face, and trying to remove her from his life “finger by finger.” Nelson speculated later that she was seeking in him something that had been missing in her own childhood, a man to depend on and take care of her, and he was not that man. But Nelson was seeking something, too—he saw himself as homeless, and Amanda represented home, someone with whom he could talk and listen to music, someone to help him get through tough social visits with his less-loved family members, someone he kept circling back to, despite numerous breaks. “She was just there for him,” said Art Shay. “She didn’t have much of a life.” When she was around, he felt crowded, irritable, and unable to work. But when she was away, he felt hollow and afraid, as if the “world had gotten too big and too dark.”
Nelson was terrible at being married, and later reviled the institution as “simply distracting” and claimed he had divorced Amanda after three years, when they were really married for a total of twelve. He complained that marriage was incompatible with the life of a real writer, as opposed to just a hack journalist, and pointed to Dickens’s awful marriage to excuse his own failures. Nelson was an insomniac and had as little awareness of the divisions of day and night as a cat—napping for a couple of hours here and there, and then getting up to drink glasses of hot tea or coffee with sugar and to read or write, pounding away on a typewriter in the middle of the night. He would pace around constantly from room to room. He also was messy, leaving books and papers in tottering stacks, mixed with dirty cups. He could be warm and funny and generous—putting careful thought into the right presents not just for Mashya, but for her mother.
But he could also be cold, and his bizarre sense of humor could turn nasty—the not-always-reliable Howard Rushmore claimed that once when he was staying at their apartment in January of 1936, Nelson told him to go ahead and climb into bed with Amanda and make love to her, as Nelson wouldn’t mind. He freely invited his own friends over, and starting in March of 1938 had Conroy crash for months in their apartment in the mostly African American Bronzeville neighborhood at 3569 South Cottage Grove Avenue. Originally built as an arcade for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the building with its big front windows attracted artists, who called it Rat Alley. Residents included Gilbert Rocke and Mitchell Siporin, a black-haired, bespectacled social realist who painted colorful, surreal images of workers from the nearby Back of the Yards neighborhood. On Saturdays Amanda made Jack, Nelson, and herself stew that they would eat all week—she had gotten used to chaos. Jack, “beaming, gleaming, flopping and pitying his lot,” would get so drunk that friends would put pennies on his eyes as he lay on the floor. But Nelson complained if Amanda invited her friends over, saying it was his apartment, even though she was paying half or more of their expenses. He often drank and gambled too much, and would disappear to odd places—sordid taverns on Madison Street, brothels, and poker parties.
In the late 1930s, Nelson and Jack were drawn into a circle of wild satirists, toughs, mill workers, and underground figures in East St. Louis known as the Fallonites, named for their leader, a handsome, witty, brawling, hard-drinking, womanizing ironworker named Lawrence “Bud” Fallon. The pack included Wallie Wharton, an Anvil editor who wrote barroom satires about the pompousness of the Communist Party, and Jess Blue, a pistol-toting petty mobster who knew a lot about prostitutes and years later acted as a pimp to a teenage girl. The group kept girlfriends, whom they called “jeeps,” and the fact that Nelson was living with Amanda did not stop him from picking up other women while he was with this crowd. Separated from his family and drinking heavily, Conroy was flattered by the group’s regard for his literary status, and he wasted his creative energy helping Wharton write satirical plays that were performed in St. Louis and Chicago taverns, according to his biographer, Douglas Wixson. In Chicago the play The Drunkard’s Warning became a satire on James T. Farrell, mocked as James T. Barrelhouse. Performances were supposed to raise money to start the New Anvil magazine, which Conroy and Algren planned to edit together. The otherwise generous and gentle Conroy had never forgiven Farrell for his negative review of The Disinherited. Still smarting over Farrell’s corrections on Somebody in Boots and his pity after the writers’ conference, Algren helped contribute lines and performed in the show, even after Farrell’s family pleaded with them all to stop.
Nelson also suffered under the group’s mischief. Bud Fallon mocked his note taking with this bit of doggerel:
Ain’t got no Pulitzare, but I’m not the type to care,
’Cause I got a pocketful of notes …
Never had no Guggenheim, I just don’t have time,
But I got a pocketful of notes …
O lucky, lucky me! I’ll await posterity
For I got a pocketful of notes!
Nelson, easily teased and always better at dishing out ridicule than taking it, was the target of pranks by the group. Bud wrote him obscene and anti-Semitic letters under Wallie Wharton’s name. Nelson got so mad he threatened to tell the postal authorities on Wallie, before figuring out that Bud was the actual author. Fallon later sent anti-Semitic letters to Meyer Levin, the editor of Esquire, with Algren’s signature. In New York at the Second American Writers’ Congress, Jack and Bud’s buffoonery got in the way of Nelson’s attempt to pick up a blonde at a bar. It was also at this congress that Nelson had a chance to see Ernest Hemingway, his hero among living American writers. Hemingway spoke on the writer’s responsibility to fight against Fascism and to tell the truth as he sees it so that it becomes a part of the reader’s experience. Hemingway’s future wife, Martha Gellhorn, also spoke at the conference. They later began corresponding with Nelson, and both became powerful advocates of his books.
Nelson’s desire to be with the Fallonites in “lusty, smoky and virile” East St. Louis showed a touch of masochism—more of the desire to live on the thin edge of things that had gotten him into trouble in Texas. He was never really a tough guy, but he wanted to act the part of a tough guy, as he had wanted to be like the semipro ball players he saw as a kid in Albany Park, and Bud Fallon and his gang offered models. If he could not be them, he wanted to understand them. As Walt Whitman said in Leaves of Grass, which Nelson quotes at the beginning of Never Come Morning:
I feel I am of them—I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself,
And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
Nelson did get some benefit from the Fallonites—he learned details of brothel life and petty crime that he later used in his fiction. He wrote out notes about East St. Louis prostitutes in pencil on a big tablet of thin paper, with phrases that appear later in Never Come Morning. The novel suggests that the underground scene Nelson found in the cindery southern Illinois river town could be even nastier than in Chicago. He gives the hooker Chickadee
, one of Mama Tomek’s girls, an origin in East St. Louis taverns as an acrobatic dancer. She scoffs at northern Illinois pimps as soft on their girlfriends—“down my way he takes all her money ’n slaps the crap out of her.”
It was in East St. Louis, too, that Nelson met a legless man named Freddy who inspired both Railroad Shorty in the short story “The Face on the Barroom Floor” and Achilles Schmidt in A Walk on the Wild Side. Freddy, who mixed colored water in a bathtub and sold it as perfume, had lost his legs as a fireman on the Michigan Central. “I believe he was the strongest man I’ve ever known,” Nelson said of Freddy. “I don’t mean just in physical terms. He had a strength of person that dominated every scene he occupied.” He described Freddy as both “clear as light” and capable of “tremendous rage.” Nelson kept spotting legless men, both in Chicago on North Avenue and later in Wales during World War II, symbolizing how someone could muster terrible power even after being cut to pieces.
With leftist literary magazines falling away, radical writers found a new income through an unprecedented source—the federal government. In May of 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt set up the Works Progress Administration, a relief program that gave people jobs rather than charity. The goal was to allow skilled people to work on projects that would benefit the country, including building dams and bridges, and making public art. Indigent visual artists were set to work painting elaborate, full-color murals in school buildings and railroad stations; actors put on plays for people who did not otherwise have access to theater; and writers were sent out to collect folklore and oral histories, and produce guides for all forty-eight states. According to its mandate from Congress, the work of the Federal Writers’ Project was to “hold up a mirror to America.” Under the leadership of former journalist Henry G. Alsberg, it supported more than 6,500 writers, editors, and researchers through four years of federal funding. One commentator called it the “ugly duckling” of the WPA arts projects since it was easier to see the immediate benefit of a mural in a post office than an oral history from a stockyard worker.
The project was controversial—some joked that the initials stood for “We Poke Along” or “Whistle, Piss and Argue.” A newspaper editorial complained that the Writers’ Project meant that now “pencil leaners” would join the “shovel leaners” among those loafing for a government handout. Writer John Cheever described his own work as an editor at the program’s Washington office as fixing sentences “written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” But Nelson, who joined in the summer of 1936 at a starting salary of eighty-seven dollars a month, saw it as a lifeline. “Had it not been for the Project, the suicide rate would have been much higher,” he said. “It gave new life to people who had thought their lives were over.” Poet W. H. Auden called the project “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state.”
The WPA arts projects attracted odd characters of various skill levels. “We were as ill-assorted as a crowd on a subway express,” said WPA writer Anzia Yezierska, “spinster poetesses, pulp specialists, youngsters … veteran newspapermen, art-for-art’s sake literati, clerks and typists … people of all ages, all nationalities, all degrees of education, tossed together in a strange fellowship of necessity.” The Chicago offices were at 433 East Erie, and breathing in the fresh winds off of nearby Lake Michigan in the morning aided the feeling of rebirth for Depression-weary artists. The way to get on a WPA art project was to declare yourself indigent—take the “pauper’s oath”—and offer some proof that you could do what was needed. It did not take much—Nelson’s friend Dave Peltz, who had started with the WPA’s rat-poisoning unit before moving to the artistic side, remembered that people who wanted to could get into the theater program if they had “any kind of articulation.” Peltz had then switched from the theater project to writing because he liked it better. The energetic Dick Wright joined early in the fall of 1935, to work on the “Ethnographical Aspects of Chicago’s Black Belt.” Nelson’s Rat Alley neighbor Mitch Siporin got a job painting murals in the auditorium at the new Lane Technical High School on the North Side; he would also do the St. Louis Central Post Office. Amanda also got a WPA job, counting the people who lived in tent cities in Lincoln Park. Indigence seemed to count more than ability—Tennessee Williams tried but failed to get a job at the Chicago office. He said it was because his work lacked social content, he could not prove his family was destitute, and “I still had, in those days, a touch of refinement in my social behavior which made me seem frivolous … to the conscientiously rough-hewn pillars of the Chicago project.” Those who did get in included writers and poets Conroy, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, Sam Ross, and Frank Yerby; choreographer and activist Katherine Dunham; and Louis “Studs” Terkel, a gravelly voiced actor who had dropped out of law school to help with his mother’s boarding house, and got to listen to the residents’ stories of their hard-luck lives. Studs had read Somebody in Boots and already admired Nelson before they met. Along with Dave Peltz, Studs became one of Nelson’s longtime friends.
Dave recalled sometimes taking Nelson to the racetrack after their short days doing government work, using Dave’s car since Nelson never drove. On the one occasion Dave remembered Nelson daring to get behind the wheel, Nelson “totally lost control.” “He had no sense of speed, no proportion.” They’d also go with Studs and other friends to the Chicago Arena bowling alley half a block from the project’s offices. Dave remembered that Nelson was comically uncoordinated—when he bowled, he would throw the ball as hard as he could, his arms would fly in opposite directions, and usually the ball would end up in the gutter. “He never knew where to put himself,” recalled Dave’s wife, Doris.
Both Dick Wright and Nelson became supervisors, and Nelson’s salary gradually rose to $125 a month, with nine writers under his direction. He gave advice and encouragement to younger writers, a practice he continued throughout his life. “Sometimes if you let them ramble, they might say more than if they feel you’ve got an idea,” he told project staff members on collecting oral histories. He helped young writers examine their own feelings and motives. Margaret Walker, an African American writer, was stuck on a poem and credited Nelson with helping her make a creative breakthrough by asking her the simple question, “What do you want for your people?” In answer she ended the poem “For My People” with the lines “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born…. Let a race of men now rise and take control.” Studs, who made a career out of collecting oral histories long after the WPA ended, said Nelson influenced his own approach to writing for the rest of his life. But Bellow, just twenty-two and a recent graduate of Northwestern University, was intimidated by the rough-edged Algren and Conroy. “I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me,” Bellow remembered. It was the start of a lifetime of mutual antipathy.
Nelson himself was not good at taking direction, even from his kindly boss, Northwestern University professor John T. Frederick, who Nelson seems to spoof in a notebook as Flatbottom Finkpuss. Nelson’s comic description of his work would give credence to the Republican criticism that the WPA was full of boondogglers. “It gave me leisure, that is I could go up there at 10 in the morning and sign on at noon and say, go to the library and go to the racetrack,” Nelson told an interviewer, in his slow, flat-voweled Chicago drawl. “I don’t recall doing any real work. I sat at a desk and would regularly get fired by the head of the project…. After three or four months of sitting there, he’d call me in and say, ‘Nelson, I realize you’re not really happy here.’ And I’d realize which way the wind was blowing and I’d say ‘Oh, I like this work.’ He’d say ‘No, you’re not happy’ and then he’d fire me.” Nelson would retrieve his hat from his desk, have a drink at some North Clark Street gin mill, and then suffer the tedium of going to a relief station and declaring himself penniless, after which he’d be given a bag of moldy potatoes. “When they gave you the bag of potatoes, they had to put you back on the project, whether the supervisor wa
nted you or not. You were qualified.”
Nelson was kidding, as usual—he did some good work for the WPA. His eclectic projects included a short history of Haym Solomon, the Polish Jewish businessman who helped finance the American Revolution; the Galena Guide about the western Illinois mining town that was home to President Ulysses S. Grant; and a collection of Midwest recipes and cooking folklore later published as America Eats. He and Conroy also helped collect oral histories of workers, conveniently located at sleazy North Clark Street taverns with royal names like Queen’s Paradise, Duke’s Castle, and King’s Palace. At the Palace confessions came easier during the “cuckoo hour,” when an extra shot was a penny. The Pink Poodle tavern on Clark became the Pink Kitten in The Man with the Golden Arm. Conroy biographer Wixson said the story “Hank, the Freewheeler,” which was credited to Algren and included in the anthology A Treasury of American Folklore and the posthumously published Entrapment and Other Writings but was not in his usual style, was actually by Conroy, who was freehanded with his work as well as his advice.
The Galena Guide was a collaboration, with Nelson claiming credit for many of the chapters. Galena remains a peculiar place—a city that time forgot. It had been a boomtown in the 1830s and 1840s because of nearby galena lead mines, and it struggled with Chicago for the position of Illinois’s chief city. But the Galena River connecting to the Mississippi became too shallow to navigate, and the market for lead went away, so the town stopped, and its main street still looks much as it did in Grant’s time. It was an “October city” before Nelson gave that title to Chicago, and he was able to see in Galena how a town can stop breathing, a theme explored in both The Man with the Golden Arm and Chicago: City on the Make. Much of the writing in the Galena Guide is clear, flat, and journalistic, though Nelson’s voice occasionally flashes through. For example, he describes the French explorer Julien Dubuque as a “well educated young fellow, with a good deal of drive, and in time he wheedled extensive mining concessions from the Indians.” A description of the view from a stagecoach has a lyricism fore-shadowing City on the Make, with “acres of prairie grass endless as a sea dotted with trees like islands and bearing wave after wave of wildflowers constantly before the wind.” A section on an emigrant’s aversion to the name “Fevre River,” later changed to the “Galena River,” is comic Algren:
Algren Page 8