Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  As for poker, it supplied plenty of material to write about, but at a high cost, since he was terrible at it, though he liked to brag otherwise. His friend Dave Peltz remembered that when a straight fell into his hands, Nelson’s eyes shone “like bright lights. He couldn’t hide it.”

  He also had mixed luck at getting grant money. He had applied repeatedly and unsuccessfully over the years for a Guggenheim, recruiting Martha and Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg as sponsors. Back from the army, he tried again for the prize, this time with the idea of writing a war novel, but found that after two months the war had already started slipping away. He wrote the story of the black soldier in Marseille, but was not satisfied with it, and could not spin it into anything bigger. From his window looking out on the alley, he could watch life spilling in and out of the neon-lit taverns all night long, and he started putting together the stories that became his second great Chicago book, The Neon Wilderness, and thinking about the characters who would people The Man with the Golden Arm.

  Despite Edward Aswell’s support and friendship during the writing of Never Come Morning and the ensuing Zgoda explosion, Algren did not want to work with Harper anymore. He thought they were too cheap, sneering later that they were a very literary house that paid in prestige rather than cash. He got an offer he liked from Ken McCormick at Doubleday for both of his works in progress—a book of short stories and a novel—at sixty dollars per week for two years. Disappointed, Aswell asked him in February of 1946 to reconsider, noting that while Harper’s offer may not be as big, “in a decision of this kind there are imponderables … and money isn’t the only way to measure it. I believe in you as a writer and am willing to give you my time without limit.” Nelson decided to skip the imponderables and get the cash, receiving a contract from Doubleday that March. He later named a gray-and-white cat “Doubleday” in tribute to his new masters.

  In the same year that he broke with Harper, Nelson decided to officially break with Amanda, at least for this decade. This was prompted by a visit Nelson made to visit Amanda in Los Angeles, where she had moved from San Francisco, according to attorney Eva Mason, who handled the sale of Amanda’s letters to the Ohio State University. Amanda did not trust her 1932 two-seater Chevrolet to take them to the racetrack. She was dating a photographer at the time, so she asked him to take them all to the track in his bigger car and they had such a good time Nelson asked her why she did not marry this swell guy. She reminded Nelson that it was because she was still married to him. Back in Chicago, Nelson used a lawyer who was the brother of a friend, and secured a divorce for eighty dollars that October. Nelson told Amanda he would probably stay single, unless she got married again. “I know I’ll have to feel that you’re taken care of, and reasonably happy in the process, before I’ll be able even to consider another plunge,” he said. “If I ever do, I fancy it’ll be just about when the yarn’s all unraveled. Say, ten years from now.” Whatever happened, he told her she had his blessings, “for keeps.” They divorced on the grounds that she deserted him, since incompatibility was not yet an adequate reason in Illinois. But they stayed friends through the 1940s and early 1950s, with Nelson sharing his goofy adventures, his book difficulties, and his fears, and even making crude racial wisecracks, showing that at least with intimates he was not a spotless liberal. Reporting that Jack now did some work for the Chicago Defender, the influential black newspaper, Nelson joked that Jack would now have to spend money on burnt cork and hair curlers.

  In another letter to Amanda, Nelson, known socially as a generous, storytelling clown, speaks of his trouble dealing with people, and his lack of trust. “Probably short of a book, I [could] not explain my feeling for people,” he wrote. “I’m so detached from them, and so afraid of them that I desire to end the suspense. It isn’t so simple that one might assume the fear is of merely facing anyone, talking to anyone. I can do that, even with aplomb, even with brilliance. But when the act is done, I’ve not got anything, only a sharpened sense of being away.” He also worries about his own occasional cruelty in his personal relationships. “It’s awfully easy to hurt, to destroy, and I’m full of a crawling feeling that I’ve excelled in this kind of power.” He recognized that his life was largely one of observation and performance, and it made him feel strange. He sounded like an existentialist, without using the word.

  Living alone on Wabansia with his cat, Nelson worked on writing or selecting the stories that would become The Neon Wilderness. Many of the Wilderness stories weren’t created new for the book; the oldest stories were early successes: “So Help Me” from 1933, and “The Brother’s House” from 1934. “Stickman’s Laughter” was published in Southern Review in 1942; “He Swung and He Missed,” “The Children,” and “The Face on the Barroom Floor” appeared in American Mercury in 1942, 1943, and 1947, respectively. “How the Devil Came Down Division Street” had multiple lives, originally appearing in Harper’s Bazaar in 1944, then included in the 1945 edition of The Best American Short Stories, before going into Wilderness and other collections—it is Algren’s most reprinted story. Algren never minded recycling his material—the “pavement-colored cap” and the guy who makes love with the salami string in his teeth are examples of repeated images. One of the many qualities that make the Wilderness collection remarkable is that the stories all appear connected, and the older stories stand up as well as the new. Algren was a master of the short story before he turned to writing novels. Some of the stories are comic. There’s a ghost story, war stories, prison stories, first-person confessionals, and a Stephen Crane–style melodrama of a woman who could not be saved. But they all have a similar vision, with Algren groping in the dark and finding human beings. Like Chekhov’s work, all the tales in The Neon Wilderness sound deep chords in tight spaces. They are the fictional equivalent of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and what Nelson said about Hopper in a 1972 Chicago Tribune article he could have said about himself, that his figures are haunted, moving between twilight and midnight. They are looking for love, or trying to preserve their pride, or trying to decide whether death isn’t preferable to their struggles. Like Hopper, Nelson was exploring “the dark at the top of the stairs.”

  The collection starts with “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” the same police lineup story that Nelson had used in Never Come Morning and would use again in The Man with the Golden Arm. The lineups have similar freaks: the punk who stabbed his father and will go to the funeral if there’s free booze, the car thief who calls his theft speeding “without the owner’s consent.” The difference is that Tenczara in Never Come Morning is a circus showman, mugging for the gallery, while the Wilderness Captain has started to take in the sins he’s told every evening, and to see the men in his nightmares. “They lived in an unpossessed twilight land, a neon wilderness whose shores the Captain sometimes envisaged dimly; in sleep he sought that shore forever.” Instead of enjoying his authority, the Captain begins to dread his role, knowing the lines of sinners never end. The character is developed even more fully in Golden Arm, with Captain Bednar turning the accusing finger on himself. It is a pity Aswell was not around with his penknife for “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” which goes on a little long. There are also metaphors that squeak, like an opera singer going ragged on a high note. A man with “Ogden Avenue eyes” might have meant something to somebody in 1947, but maybe only to Nelson.

  “Stickman’s Laughter” and “Poor Man’s Pennies” stand out as rare Algren tales with happy endings. In the first, Banty Longobadi has just gotten paid and wants to take his wife out to the movies, for a triple feature and free ovenware, plus “community singing,” but finds she’s not at home. So instead of waiting for her, or trying to find out where she is, he is lured into a dice game and for once comes out ahead. Now he really wants to show her the money, but she’s still not home. So he gets drunk and loses everything. He goes home feeling ashamed and unworthy, but she forgives him, saying she shouldn’t have gone out, as if it were all her fault. “So nothing imp
ortant had been lost after all.” In “Poor Man’s Pennies,” Sobotnik is a petty thief who brags about his family’s plantations in Kentucky to impress Gladys. Gladys knows he’s a bum, but also knows the value of his bragging, the importance of maintaining his pride. “Lies are a poor man’s pennies,” she explains, and they are still together at the end of the story, ten years after he has done his last stretch in prison. For Nelson’s characters love is the only source of redemption, and love is willfully blind.

  “How the Devil Came Down Division Street” is the best of the collection, a folktale in the style of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It tells of how Roman Orlov became the biggest drunk on Division Street because of a ghost that haunted his parents’ apartment and drove him out. Its success was a source of irony for Nelson: he claimed it was easy, telling Studs Terkel he wrote it in a couple of hours and sent it off, whereas other stories he researched and re-researched with less effect. The story has a beautiful simplicity and humor, and ends with a haunting image—that of the devil walking around on winter nights and rapping on doors in our dreams. The story is comic on the surface, but it is about a man who is out of choices and seeking his own destruction.

  Not all of the stories are set in Chicago—“Depend on Aunt Elly” and “El Presidente de Mejico” are brutal prison stories set in the South; “Kingdom City to Cairo” is in southern Illinois; and “The Heroes” is in Germany. Algren critic Brooke Horvath argues that the idea of the “neon wilderness” should be understood as a metaphor not just for the city but for any place where the disinherited live.

  The darkest and most ambitious story in the collection is “Design for Departure,” heavy with Catholic imagery. It tells of Mary, a girl who grows up with two brutal drunks and comes to see death as a release, a place without fighting and blows. As a young woman, she becomes the companion of Christiano, or “Christy,” a brute who beats up drunks for their money. Christy goes to prison, and Mary becomes ill, sinking into a feverish, drug-shadowed darkness and imagining herself as the Virgin Mary. When he returns, she asks him to spend all his release money on a big fix, enough to kill her. She would be fixed by Jesus Christ himself.

  The Neon Wilderness came out in January of 1947, dedicated to Goldie, and to Gerson’s memory. It won positive reviews that acknowledged the tough honesty in Algren’s work, though some critics seemed to miss its humor. Charles Poore of the New York Times said society needs to know about the people in these stories if anything is to be done about the “wider perils that come from these roots.” He said the stories are “not pretty. But they generally ring true.” Kelsey Guilfoil of the Chicago Tribune warned that the stories were “rugged reading” and would not make a good gift for your Aunt Martha. “Not many people who sleep in clean beds in well kept homes will read these stories with pleasure, but they could read them with profit.” Catherine Meredith Brown in the Saturday Review of Books, speaking specifically about “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” wrote that there’s “enough horror, ugliness and ghoulishness to satisfy Sartre.” She called Nelson an “apostle of amorality” who wrote about people unable to even recognize, let alone live by, the normal rules of good citizenship. But Jack Conroy, who knew Nelson so well, focused on the stories’ tenderness and poetry: “Beneath each sordid and brutal recital beats the compassionate and comprehending heart.” Nelson’s friend Studs Terkel also saw beyond the ugly surface and found a “goofy kind of glow.” In an afterword to the stories written forty years later, Terkel wrote that Algren’s characters “are clowns in a kind of circus, white-face clowns, tragic clowns, that speak to you about what it means to be human. Nelson himself was like that.”

  The story collection found a stalwart commercial champion in Chicago in Stuart Brent, owner of the cozy, crowded, eclectic Seven Stairs book and record shop, located in a rundown section of North Clark Street. Named for the seven stairs that led to its door, the shop was located in a decaying Victorian building, with a bay window, a wood-burning fireplace, and bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. A short, energetic man with close-cropped dark hair whom novelist Philip Roth described as a cross between “Chicago intellectual and Persian rug dealer,” Brent was such a fan of The Neon Wilderness that for months, he made promoting it his career. He pressed it into the hands of anyone who came in, selling hundreds of copies. He would even hold periodic bookselling events—one using the excuse of Nelson’s birthday. Nelson always came ready to sign, often adding drawings of cats. In his memoir Brent recalled how one friend did not want Nelson to sign his book, as he wanted “the distinction of being the only person in Chicago with an unsigned copy.” Nelson sometimes brought along Goldie, who was pleased with his growing fame. She would clip articles about him from the newspapers and send them to Irene, then living in El Paso, with the judgments “too fat” or “too thin” scribbled next to the photos.

  Stuart was a few years younger than Nelson and known as warm and family oriented—a contrast to Nelson, who was solitary and could be aloof when he was not clowning. Stuart’s friendship with Nelson reflected both the lighter and the darker sides of Nelson’s character. He recalled that in those days, Nelson dressed in “North Clark Street clothes”—a pinstripe suit with a garish shirt and ridiculous neckties, including one that lit up. Stuart recalled Nelson as quiet and careful in his speech, avoiding vulgarity, and someone who listened with “a remarkable singleness of attention. Even if the room is overflowing with people, you know that he is listening only to you.” Stuart loved Nelson, but also was hurt by him, and would come to feel used for all his efforts to help Nelson’s career. Brent said he discovered that Algren used to steal books from the store, which was already operating on the thinnest of margins.

  Algren once took Brent to one of the North Clark Street taverns he liked to use for material. The story, told in Brent’s memoir, illustrates Jack Conroy’s comment that “the gates of Algren’s soul were open on hell’s side.” The tavern was like a barn, 150 feet long and 30 feet wide, with wooden floors. Every stool along the bar was filled. All around was swearing, laughing, shouting, and name-calling, like something “out of a Gorky novel.” Brent saw a man hit a woman in the mouth, and they both fell off their stools on top of each other, blood pouring, before the bartenders threw them into the street.

  Brent noticed a mesh of wire fencing above the bar. Behind the fencing were live monkeys. Brent wondered what they were for, and Algren advised him to wait and see. Algren’s face seemed fixed “in a slight smile of playful disdain,” Brent recalled, though he did not understand why.

  After Stuart and Nelson had downed several beers, and the world was getting blurry, Stuart was amazed to see two men walk in, climb a ladder, and open the monkey cage. As Brent describes the scene in his memoir, one of the men took a monkey by a leather strap, placed it on his back, and climbed down the ladder. The two men then walked to a door at the far end of the tavern and went into a room, closing the door behind them. Brent was mystified. “I felt an impenetrable wall between my innocence and the full possibilities of human depravity,” he wrote. The monkeys in their cage would turn up at the Pink Kitten Club in The Man with the Golden Arm.

  Brent looked again at all the people in the tavern, and felt his smugness and sense of superiority disappear. He started to see what Nelson was seeing—a world of people without choice or destination. Brent meditated on this Clark Street nightmare for days, asking himself if he ought to feel guilt for people no longer responsible for themselves. “Then it occurred to me that the question was never one of guilt, but only of love,” he wrote. “The agony exists regardless of the setting. The lack of love is not alone on Clark Street.”

  The 1940s were the creative heart of Nelson’s life, and he seemed to know it—to know it was a lucky time and that he was catching his own lightning. He had found satisfaction in his writing, something he knew many people never find in their vocations, but need. He knew that believing in himself was part of being lucky, too. In the winter of 1946, he told Ama
nda that he had a beginning for the new book, with more of the neighborhood stuff, with a lighter tone in spots, but he did not know yet where it would lead. It would be about a professional dealer, someone who gets paid to sit at a table dealing cards to people who want to win each other’s money but don’t trust each other enough to let one another deal. But no, he was not looking for romance, not now. He could not afford it. He would soon receive a surprise in love, from an unexpected quarter.

  7

  BELOVED LOCAL YOUTH

  Something is about to happen. You can count the minutes in your life when something happens.

  —SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, AMERICA DAY BY DAY

  Language is the source of misunderstandings

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY, THE LITTLE PRINCE

  The romance of Nelson Algren and the French writer, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was the most ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible, unreasonable, and amazing thing to come into both their lives. The discipline of waiting for someone on the other side of the world to come back and visit him, and the aesthetic and emotional support she offered through her hundreds of loving letters, helped keep Nelson in his chair and focused enough to write his greatest novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. His encouragement and political insight into the race problems in the United States inspired her to turn an essay about the “woman situation” into the feminist bible The Second Sex. He gave her fiction its most vivid character—Lewis Brogan, the American writer of The Mandarins.