Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  The affair could never work—it could never last, because of her lack of convention and what would turn out to be his surprising excess of it, because they were too firmly wedded to their own lives and cities to commit to each other, because it was too hard to sustain a long-distance relationship, and because he had what seems like an irresistible impulse to wreck both romances and friendships. She was a woman of awesome power, so the end of the affair only strengthened her, gave her more to write about, and widened her world and affections. He later denied that the affair meant much more than any of his other romances, and liked to call Simone a French school-teacher who was just “another deluded broad.” But it is clear that the break with Simone came at the beginning of darker days for Nelson—and while it was not the main cause of his deterioration as an artist, it added to the load. He spent part of his last day on Earth yelling about her, and she went to her grave with his ring on her finger.

  One of the great literary romances of the twentieth century started in late February 1947, with a series of hang-up phone calls. A short-term girlfriend of Nelson’s, writer and interpreter Mary Guggenheim, had advised Simone to look up Algren when she was in Chicago. She warned Nelson ahead of time that he may get a visit from the French intellectual and the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, and he knew who she was, though later he claimed ignorance. Beauvoir, energetically looking for whatever she could learn in every city on her first American tour, had two numbers to call when she got to Chicago—an old woman and a writer. The writer sounded more fun, but her first attempt at reaching him was a misfire. “You have the wrong number,” his sulky voice answered.

  Simone had a thick French accent and was sure she’d gotten the pronunciation wrong. She tried again. “WRONG number!” the voice repeated, annoyed. She called again, but he hung up.

  Nelson had been cooking dinner in the big yellow kitchen of his two-room Wabansia flat. He was used to people with strong Polish accents who had never used the phone before calling and yelling into the receiver. He thought someone was trying to get information. He kept hearing the same “hoarse screech” and hanging up; he needed to get back to the stove.

  Finally the operator asked if he would be good enough to hold the line for a moment: “There’s a party here would like to speak to you.” The name of Dick Wright was mentioned, so Nelson paid attention. Simone gave her name. He did not catch it. She said she would meet him at the “Leetle Café” in “Palmer House” and would be carrying the Partisan Review. He knew the Palmer House, but not any “Leetle Café.” When he got to the opulent hotel, he saw “Le Petit Cafe.” The former schoolteacher had unhelpfully translated it for him, his first experience of Simone’s tendency to provide too much information. “She wasn’t taking any chances on my understanding French,” Algren recalled.

  Nelson waited outside the entrance to the café in a shadowed chair, watching Simone go in and out the door four times before he decided she was OK. It could not have been hard—she was attractive to him right away: a petite brunette, with thick reddish-brown hair braided and piled on top of her head, wearing a little green scarf and a heavy, travel-stained, woolen dress down to her ankles. To identify herself, she carried a copy of the Partisan Review as promised. Simone had pale, porcelain skin, and eyes, Nelson later wrote, “lit by a light-blue intelligence; she was possessed by something like total apprehension” with judgments that seemed “a fraction sooner than immediate.”

  Nelson bought her a drink. Simone talked a great deal, with great force and emphasis—and he did not understand a word she said. So he talked about the war, without thinking about what she was doing while he was drinking Chianti and shooting dice as Private Algren. She had been scraping for food in occupied Paris, wearing wooden clogs and her dead father’s old wool trousers against the cold, and seeing her friends risk their lives for the Resistance. Luckily for him, she did not understand much of what he said, either. But he was nice to look at—a head taller than her, his sandy hair starting to thin at the forehead in a high and untidy widow’s peak. He looked then, Art Shay remembered, like “an amalgam of Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, with a healthy dash of Woody Allen.” Nelson and Simone were getting along well enough on the nonverbal level, and Simone was sick of her fancy hotel, with its painted cherubs on the lobby ceiling and the “smell of dollars and disinfectant.” So Nelson ditched the “Leetle Café” and took the exotic bluestocking on a Chicago adventure, up and down the city on that cold February night, following the strings of yellow lights, out of the shining downtown Chicago Loop and into the shadowy places.

  They went to West Madison Street—Chicago’s Skid Row, lined with narrow, dirty taverns and dozens of flophouses, where men took shelter in little six-foot-by-four-foot cubicles topped with birdcage wire for fifty cents a night. Called the “Land of the Living Dead” by Time magazine, it was a more reliable source of poverty and depravity than Division Street. Ragged men stood in doorways to shelter from the wind, or stumbled over the broken glass and wine bottles that littered the icy sidewalks. Inside a bar, a small band played on a wooden platform in a corner. Under a sign that said Absolutely No Dancing, drunks and cripples danced. Simone remembered later how a woman with long pale hair tied with a red ribbon drank one beer after another, talking and shouting to herself, and occasionally getting up to dance, lifting her skirt. A drunk asleep at a table woke up and grabbed a fat woman in rags. “They dance with a joyous abandon that verges on madness and ecstasy,” Simone wrote. She was also curious about the tiny tin elk heads that decorated the booths at one of the bars. Nelson tried to convince her that they were actually animal heads shrunk by the Okawakums, a primitive tribe on an island in the Pacific. And would she like another drink?

  Simone was entranced—with the city, with the music, the rebellious dancers, and the dim tavern lights shining into her amber bourbon, a new drink for her. She liked stirring the ice around with the little glass stick. “It is beautiful,” she said. This much Nelson understood, and he was pleased. Here was someone who felt the way he did, who could see how things could be tragic and wonderful at the same time, that here, where the bankers and the chamber-of-commerce types did not go, was where real things happened. “With us, beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, and also good and evil—each has its place,” he said. “Americans don’t like to think that these extremes can mingle.”

  They went out into the freezing early morning into another, even sorrier tavern, where drunks crowded the counter for nickel beers, or tried to sell pencils. Men sheltered from the cold in the hallway, sleeping crouched in corners. Many were veterans, returned from the war suffering from battlefield traumas, and not able or willing to return to their families, if they ever had them. Algren remembered that he introduced her to thieves, whores and heroin addicts—fallen and falling people. But he knew they were all more than that, more than a number for a sociological report. He told Simone that the bleached blonde at the cash register, a drug addict who had escaped from prison, was an expert on French literature. Simone thought he was kidding. Then the blonde came to their table to join them for a drink and asked Simone, “How is Malraux doing on his latest novel? Is there a second volume? And Sartre? Has he finished Les Chemins de la liberté ?”

  Simone returned to the Palmer House, her head full of Skid Row and Nelson. The following afternoon, after a meeting with officials from the Alliance Française, she asked the French consul to drop her off in Nelson’s neighborhood. Nelson joked that the arrival of this “Crazy Frog” in a fancy car had given him just the sort of status he did not need among his neighbors—now they would want to borrow money. In re-creating the scene in The Mandarins, she remembered the corner of Wabansia and Bosworth as smelling of “burned paper, damp earth, poverty.” There was a wooden porch projecting from a brick wall, to the left a saloon with a red Schlitz sign, to the right, on a large billboard, a shiny American family sniffing a bowl of hot cereal. His smile at seeing her was so big and toothy that she called him “crocodile”�
��and their nicknames for each other were born.

  In Nelson’s kitchen there was a little table under a window and three rickety chairs on an uneven linoleum floor littered with newspapers. There was a desk with a typewriter and a reading lamp, piles of typed paper, and a record player. Photos and news clippings were pasted to the walls. The cat slithered around the sparse furniture, looking for bugs. The bed was a sagging double mattress in an iron frame, covered by a red Mexican blanket. Nelson took Simone around the neighborhood, showing her his favorite bakery and little Polish taverns, walking around in the snow and a wind that cut down Milwaukee Avenue from the northwest like knives. She wanted to stay, but had to go to dinner with some hateful French dignitaries and could not get out of it. Nelson kissed her good-bye.

  “By the time she left I was ready to vote existentialist,” Nelson wrote to Amanda. But he claimed he did not know that’s what Simone was—until after he picked up a recent copy of the New Yorker and read an article that gushed that she was “the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw.” He repeated this story often—that he did not know who she was, which is odd because he had already been warned by Mary Guggenheim that Simone might pay a call. Either Nelson was pretending more ignorance of celebrities than he actually possessed, or he regularly expected visits from mysterious French schoolteachers, or her accent was just that impenetrable. He later told a friend that he “never understood a word she said.” Nelson told Goldie about the visit, too; she believed that existentialism must be the same as Communism—they were both “exter-remists.” Nelson left books for Simone at the front desk of the Palmer House and was sorry she did not pick them up before she left. A letter she sent him from her train to California is flirty, with an accent even on paper. She had started reading his new book, The Neon Wilderness, in her berth on the train. She liked the book and she liked him, too. “I think you felt it, though we spoke so little,” she wrote. She said she’d be glad to come back in April. “If you do not I will come to Paris one day after you,” he responded. But she had doubts—if it was so hard to say good-bye after a short time, wouldn’t it be harder to say it after they’d spent a longer time together? “Too bad for us if another separation is going to be difficult,” Nelson told her. The pattern was already setting itself, for many painful good-byes, and no one was saying no.

  Mary Guggenheim came to visit, but he kicked her out, wanting the flat clear in time for Simone to come back. After hemming and hawing and flirting with a jazz musician in New York, Simone called him in April from New York. Did he have any time? He did. As Lewis Brogan says in The Mandarins, “I have all my time. My time is all mine.”

  So she flew out to Chicago. At first she remembered their encounter as awkward and unhappy. How could they top the first meeting? And if they did top it, what could they do then? In the novel she makes a sad comedy of his not understanding her request for a hotel room, and then not being able to find one, and then finding one, to her immense disappointment, instead of taking her back to his flat. She gets to see a little of the mean Nelson—gruff, chilly, impatient, a man in a stiff collar, like Herbert Hoover’s. To her astonishment, he asked her if she wanted to see the zoo—the real zoo, not the one on Madison. “I didn’t come here to exhibit myself to your animals,” she sniffed. Eventually the awkwardness thawed, and he took her to see more of America—a baseball game, a bowling alley, Polish diners serving sour cream cakes, the lake-front, where they sat in the new spring grass watching children run around playing cowboys and Indians, and even more of the lower depths. He took her to the Cook County Jail, which he had visited in early March to see Julius “Dolly” Weisberg, a convicted murderer and former nightclub owner who had died in his cell before making it to the electric chair. Nelson showed her the chair and explained to her all the details he had learned of execution—how the condemned wore a white shirt with two buttons, black tights, and a black hood, how the contacts were attached at the nape of the neck and the ankle, and how the guards thought blacks needed less of a jolt than whites since blacks got more scared. He would use this all later in The Man with the Golden Arm. She did not return to her hotel, and they went instead back to Nelson’s flat on Wabansia, where they made love on the squeaky bed with the Mexican blanket. She remembered that their lovemaking started initially because he wanted to comfort her after their whirl of strange experiences, then out of passion. At thirty-nine, she had what she described as her first complete orgasm, which speaks either very well of Nelson or very poorly of Jean-Paul Sartre.

  The following evenings were spent at more dive bars and burlesques. One bar was too scary even for Nelson—he avoided it because its piano player had been shot. Entering another bar, they drank vodka, and Nelson advised her that the patrons were all sinister characters. She looked around as “a pretty young man laughingly caresses a fat dwarf,” drunks make speeches, and a dignified blonde in pearls works a dice table, reading a book about New Orleans while she waits for customers. When Nelson asked one of these dice girls if anyone had ever tried to cheat her at the game, she answered poetically, “Well, they try, but I have a very naked eye. So they don’t get away with much.” Stuck on the mirrors behind the bar were pictures of naked Japanese girls, stolen by GIs from the pockets of dead enemy soldiers. Having taken this all in, Simone looked at Nelson and told him she thought he was the only truly sinister character around there.

  He took her to a mission because after all that sex and liquor it was high time to save her soul. Someone played the harmonium, and they stood with crowds of hungry tramps, pretending to sing together out of a blue hymnal. They snuck out, but the tramps stayed—there would be dinner served afterward.

  She needed to return to New York, and Algren went with her, taking his first airplane ride. This time it was Simone’s turn to show off what she’d found in the lower depths—the Bowery, the Harlem clubs—but Simone’s biographer, Deirdre Bair, said they spent most of their time in bed at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. Nelson clowned and pretended to be in awe of the skyscrapers like the country boys from his old army unit, calling himself “only a boy from the provinces” and “a local youth.” The latter description was taken from the headline of an article he’d saved from a neighborhood newspaper after Somebody in Boots was published: Local Youth Writes Book. The woman who would become known as one of the mothers of feminism postponed her trip back to Paris and fussed over her “beloved local youth” for two weeks, “just like all the American women I had ridiculed for the way they catered to men’s needs. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.” She described Nelson later as “unstable, moody, even neurotic,” but she liked feeling that she was the only one who understood him. To Simone he possessed the rarest of gifts, “which I should call goodness if the word had not been so abused; let me say that he really cared about people.” Nelson and Simone did not talk about Jean-Paul, not yet. There was only so much reality these famous realists could take at one time.

  In mid-May it was time to say good-bye again, and this time she cried so hard in the taxi on the way to the airport bus terminal that the driver asked if she would be away from her “husband” for a long time. Nelson had given her a copy of Never Come Morning to open on the plane. Inside, he had written:

  à Simone

  I send this book with you

  That it may pass

  Where you shall pass:

  Down the murmurous evening light

  Of storied streets

  In your own France

  Simone, I send this poem there, too,

  That part of me may go with you.

  She cried again, all the way across the Atlantic. To the astonishment of her friends in Paris, she showed off the silver ring he had given her, a wide, ornate band she wore on her middle finger.

  After two visits to Chicago, Nelson had figured out that while Simone may have been a bluestocking, she was not easy to shock. Simone was not some sheltered bourgeois. She had grown up poor, with a family that pretended to be rich because
they used to be. One of her childhood jobs was to cut old newspapers into square pieces and thread them onto string to use for toilet paper. From her balcony in what was then the slum district of Montparnasse, she could watch oddballs—one who draped himself in a kitchen curtain, another with blue glasses whose nose was painted red on one side and yellow on the other.

  As a teen in the 1920s, she would sneak out to bars and pretend to be a hooker or an artist’s model. Like Nelson, she sought out the edges, attempting to see as much of the disorder of real life as possible. She would smash glasses, snatch the hats from other customers’ heads, and throw them into the air, shouting “Chapeau!” While a young teacher in Marseille, she roamed the seedy dock areas alone, and hiked through the countryside, flagging down trucks for a lift. She once jumped from a moving car in the middle of nowhere when the driver threatened her with rape. When Nelson first met her, she was still missing a front tooth from a biking accident during the war—she hadn’t been able to repair it. “I want life, the whole of life,” she wrote in her diary. “I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of a flame.”

  She had also been a fiercely competitive student and diligent worker—her friends called her Castor, the Beaver. She had taken second in philosophy in her final exam at the Sorbonne, a then unheard-of honor for a woman. The student who had come first was Sartre.

  Letters between Nelson and Simone flew back and forth all that spring and summer, filled with endearments. “I am in our Chicago home as well as you are in France with me,” she wrote. “We have not parted and we’ll never part. I am your wife forever.” She called him “husband.”

  “I did not think I could miss anybody so hardly,” Algren wrote. “If I were to hold you just now I should cry with pain and happiness.”