Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  This was the honeymoon time, if honeymooners can be people who don’t actually see each other. Nelson worked intensely on the manuscript that became The Man with the Golden Arm, letters from Simone piling up in a tin box. She included in one letter mauve bellflowers; in another, a lipstick kiss. He shared with her over a dozen possible titles for his novel—she liked “High-yellow and the Dealer”—along with the names of his characters, and ideas for how they could be developed. She kept his yellow letters by her bed in her messy, toothpaste-pink hotel room in Paris, to read again and again and memorize. She pressed him to work hard and well while they were apart, and she thought it was good that he gambled to relieve tension; she preferred to drink. She also claimed she wouldn’t mind if he took other women to bed, though in another letter she threatened to poison his lips and skin to kill off any rivals. She seemed to have transmitted a little of the “Beaver” energy across the ocean. He sent her books, like Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and they talked about them through the mail. He asked her about the books he loved himself. Had she read Dreiser, London, Melville, and Twain?

  It could have been a good arrangement for writers—a passionate love affair without the distraction of somebody being around the house all day. But Nelson hadn’t learned from his last failed experiment with marriage, and a long-distance romance was not enough for him. He wrote that he hoped her next visit would be permanent. He planned to ask her to marry him when she returned.

  There was a problem—tough for her to explain, and tougher for him ever to understand. In Paris was Sartre, an ugly little man, just five feet tall, walleyed, with a round, pitted face, yellow teeth, and enormously magnifying spectacles. He had a bad complexion and protruding ears, and was going bald. Algren once said if he had met Sartre as a stranger, he would have mistaken him for a cheerfully unsuccessful salesman of men’s pants. But he had one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century—and Simone had started a conversation with him in 1929 that she knew could continue until Judgment Day, and they would still find the time too short. They had become lovers, and decided together they would not marry, but would more than marry. They would have no secrets from each other, and would have everything in common—money, work, and plans. He was exactly the companion she had dreamed about since she was an idealistic teen—he was her double, and she could share everything with him.

  But Sartre was never able to stay monogamous. He was enormously egotistical, he loved the game of seduction, and faithfulness meant something different to him than it meant to normal people. He was not the first man to think he was entitled to multiple affairs—but he may have been the first one to offer a thesis for it, and get his came-in-second-in-the-agrégation companion to go along. He told Simone that they had an “essential love,” but that it was best that they also have “contingent love affairs.” It was braver and more revolutionary for a woman to accept this arrangement than it was for a man in those days, but Simone agreed. They both had their affairs—though Jean-Paul’s were more numerous. They promised they would tell each other of any and all “contingent” loves. They would always be together, even if they were sleeping with other people. Simone later told Nelson that she and Jean-Paul had stopped being together sexually several years prior.

  This sounds tidier than it was, of course, and is exactly the type of philosophical theory that blows to atoms the minute it touches actual flesh. In reality Beauvoir was often pained by Sartre’s relationships, and his current affair with a married woman named Dolores Vanetti, whom he had met on his own trip to America in 1945, was more worrisome than others—there seemed a risk he might actually marry her. It would be romantic to think that Nelson was the only man Simone was thinking about in the spring of 1947, but it would not be true. Sartre had written her to postpone her trip back to France because Dolores was staying with him some extra time. Perhaps her attraction to Nelson was intensified by this parallel French-American relationship—even a tough feminist intellectual could want a little revenge. Playwright Joe Pintauro, who became friends with Nelson toward the end of Nelson’s life and studied the existentialist writers, speculated that Simone was emotionally vulnerable at the time and recognized in Nelson a rising American literary star, the next Theodore Dreiser. She was coming from a country where women were even less liberated than they were in the United States—French women hadn’t even gotten the vote until the 1940s. Maybe part of what motivated Beauvior was trying to hook onto the next big thing, Pintauro said. That did not mean she did not genuinely love Nelson, but strong emotions have shadowy roots.

  When Nelson wrote that he hoped next time she would come to stay, she answered that while she loved him, she had already tried to explain that she could not give her life to him. “Do you understand it? Are you not resentful about it? Will you never be? Will you always believe yet it is really love I am giving you?”

  Nelson said he understood, but he did not. He told her he felt more married to her than he had ever been to Amanda, and he could agree to an unconventional relationship—she would see him, if he could, he would visit her in France, then he would go home. He wrote that he understood her concerns and knew that not being able to spend her entire life with him did not mean she did not love him. He saw how they could not uproot themselves from their native soils—Beauvoir belonged to Paris for her work, and he needed Chicago for his. These two dramatic people recklessly agreed there would be no scenes, no melodrama.

  She came to him in September, and there she was, wonderful Simone, his frog wife—sometimes laughing, sometimes frowning uncomprehendingly at his slang and his jokes, listening to jazz records, drinking Southern Comfort and eating rum cake on the floor of the Wabansia goat’s nest—their nickname for his apartment. He would grin his crocodile smile, twirl her around the kitchen, and lead her to bed, or sometimes, shift the typewriter on his desk for the same purpose. He never called her “Castor” as her other friends did but always “Simone,” or “Simone, honey,” spoken softly, as if he were shy about saying it. When he talked about her to friends, she was “Frenchy.” They were cozy together in the mild Chicago September, talking about what they liked better—Tender Is the Night or The Great Gatsby, and why did the big, rich United States not take care of its artists? She worked on the travel book that became America Day by Day—which included heavily censored sections about her visits to Chicago—and read a draft of The Man with the Golden Arm, typed on yellow paper, and full of cross-outs, as she sat on the red Mexican blanket. She also read the writers he liked—Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Stephen Benét. They talked about the role of women—and compared their status with that of black Americans, how they both distorted themselves with subservience. He introduced her to his black friends in Chicago, so she saw the extreme segregation of the city. She had already befriended Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, on her trip to New York, and dedicated to them her travel memoir America Day by Day. She talked with Nelson about her idea for an essay on the “woman situation,” and he encouraged her to expand it into a book. Bair credits Algren for the book’s American slant. Simone was inspired by Nelson’s observations about race relations, as well as the 1,500-page An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal. “I should like to write a book as important as this big one about Negroes,” she confided. She joked that she would call it Never Come Woman. She told him later that she picked “The Second Sex” since “pansies” were the third.

  Friends of Nelson always talked about how funny he was—a perpetual joker, constantly weaving threads of absurdity into conversation. He was “one of the few writers I knew who was really funny in conversations,” recalled Kurt Vonnegut. When he introduced Nelson to Chilean novelist José Donoso, Nelson had said, “I think it would be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.” When Nelson injured his finger playing softball, he started a running joke with Amanda about it, comparing the finger to different kinds of food—a nice, pink avocado, or a pork chop that looked good enough to nibble. Fr
iends of Simone, on the other hand, recalled her lack of a sense of humor. She was puzzled by jokes. When Nelson sent her comic books, she used them for insight into gender roles. But whatever her friends saw, she played a different role with Nelson, and they teased each other through the mail. Her letters to him show a lightheartedness and sense of mischief never seen in her other work, which Nelson complained was like eating cardboard. On her direction he gave up wearing suspenders and switched to belts, though he refused to learn French. He sent her a list of “Seven Good Frog Commandments,” sternly insisting that she have no other crocodiles before him. She answered that she was his faithful frog, who loved her crocodile very much.

  One late night, when Simone and he came back to the flat from being out drinking wine, they found a large, heavyset woman in a blue-and-white dress waiting to see him. She was an acquaintance of Nelson’s from his WPA days who had written him a letter from the state mental hospital on West Irving Park Road—the same place where Nelson later confines Sophie in The Man with the Golden Arm. He had written her back and unwisely provided his return address. So when she escaped from the asylum, she turned up at his flat. They let her in, and she drank scotch, and then a little more scotch, and then a little more scotch, while she told Nelson and Simone how well everyone thought of Nelson. The lady downstairs thought well of him. The people in the street thought well of him. Suddenly she yelled, “You son-of-a-bitch! You’re responsible for this!” and showed him the black-and-blue marks on her arms, where apparently she had been restrained in the asylum. She jumped to her feet and demanded razor blades. Nelson had some on a shelf, and he quickly threw them away to keep them out of her hands. So she ran into the small toilet, and found a blade there. She then began to shave her arms and legs, saying, “You know, this will make all the difference in the world.” She pointed at Simone and demanded that Nelson send her home. “I’ve waited a long time for this night,” said the woman, razor blade in hand.

  Many people would have found this kind of late-night encounter with the mentally ill unsettling, but not Simone. Nelson recalled that instead of running into the street and calling the police, Simone was “dying”—she was “laughing her head off.” This was not the stern, humorless worker her friends in Paris knew. Nelson knew someone else.

  The idea of their impending separation seemed ridiculous to him. If she loved him so much, why couldn’t she be a writer in Chicago, as his wife, cooking his pot roast and washing his socks? Before she left later in September, he asked her again to stay with him for good, and she had to say that it was impossible. She again explained her relationship with Sartre. But Algren had always had a keen nose for baloney—and the “contingent love” idea had a powerful reek. Was he contingent? Contingent on what? The idea astonished him. He wrote later that being able to love only contingently meant being able to live only contingently. If she did not play a direct role in Sartre’s work and she was not sleeping with him, why did she need to be with him all the time? For now Nelson was willing to be a monk for her, and wait. She took a cab to the airport, and it came too early. When she arrived, she sat and closed her eyes. A man came to her with a box and said, “Miss de Beauvoir, you must have some friends here, this is for you.” It was a bouquet of white flowers, from Nelson. She called him, and when she heard his voice, “so near, so far,” she cried and cried.

  Through the mail, they began planning a big trip for the following summer—a “honeymoon” trip down the Mississippi, to New Orleans, and then to Mexico. They would be together from May through September. He had proposed that they celebrate May 10—the day he put that silver ring on her finger.

  That trip was to be one of the happiest of both their lives. It was also the beginning of things falling apart. Beauvoir was keeping something big from him—she was planning to cut their New Orleans trip short by two months to return to Paris to help Sartre on a screenplay. The fearless Simone was afraid to tell him in a letter—she planned to explain in person. In coming up with their peculiar arrangement, there was one question Sartre and she had avoided—how would a third person feel about it? The defect in the system was about to manifest itself with “particular acuity,” as Simone wrote later.

  But Nelson did not yet know of Simone’s plan—so they spent that time of waiting between September 1947 and May 1948 writing letters, exchanging gifts of books and liquor and candy, living in love and illusion. “Wait for me,” she wrote, with the red Parker fountain pen he’d given her. Nelson spent his solitary hours revising and revising Golden Arm—forty times in some sections. It came in “lumps,” he told his friend Joseph Haas later, with each lump needing to be smoothed and grained down. Then when a passage looked and sounded just as he liked, he often had to toss it aside because it did not fit. But while the work was hard, he was not unhappy. “I had more kicks, aside from writing in that time, than ever before,” he told Haas. It was “a lucky book, and a lucky time now past, and I was lucky to write it.”

  8

  GOLDEN YEARS

  Yet why does the light down the dealer’s slot

  Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?

  —NELSON ALGREN, “THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM” (POEM)

  This is a man writing and you should not read it

  if you cannot take a punch.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  In the early summer of 1947, Nelson had about two hundred pages of his third novel stacked on his desk beside his black Royal typewriter, along with cascading piles of notes and corrections, mixed up with letters and shopping lists. But he was running into his familiar plot troubles. Ken McCormick at Doubleday thought it was shaping up, and Nelson was beginning to feel better about it himself, but admitted, “I still don’t see it clearly all the way.” He told Ken he knew damned well that it wouldn’t be in publishable shape by the following spring. Nelson sent the manuscript to his agent, Madeleine Brennan, who thought the story of the professional card dealer and war veteran needed a peg—something to hang it all on. Nelson had considered a drug angle—the use of morphine to ease pain during World War II was something he would have witnessed as a litter bearer in the army. Though the drug had been used as far back as the Civil War, by World War II, innovations in needle design allowed medics to administer it right on the field. The morphine problem among returning veterans was also in the news. In January of 1947, newspapers around the country had run stories about the Jewish Chicago boxer Barney Ross, who had gotten addicted after suffering malaria and a shrapnel wound in the war. He had kicked morphine in four months after checking himself into a public health facility in Lexington, Kentucky, and called the narcotic “the toughest foe of his career.” But while morphine seemed promising and innovative as a hook for the novel, Nelson was not sure he knew the issue closely enough to write about it. He needed details and close encounters, or he could not write about anything.

  One night he got his chance—a Polish friend named Jack asked him to go out for a beer on Madison Street. By the time they emerged from the tavern at two in the morning, it was raining, and Jack invited Nelson to take shelter at his nearby home. Nelson followed him across the wide, glistening street, over the broken sidewalk, into a warren-like building. Going upstairs, Nelson found Jack standing behind a curtain in a filthy flat, swinging his arm up and down. “Jack is having trouble,” somebody said. Misty with beer, Nelson wondered what he was seeing, and was disturbed by Jack’s swinging arm. What did it mean? A few more shadowy people showed up, and took turns carrying cigar boxes into the bathroom. Someone explained to Nelson that they were just having breakfast—would he like some?

  “No, I guess I had breakfast,” Nelson said.

  “You want to see how it’s done?” a man asked him.

  “Hell, no, I don’t want to see how it’s done,” Nelson retorted. Despite his taste for the darker realities and his experience as a medic, he did not like needles. If someone went into a bathroom with a cigar box full of something under his arm, Nelson did not care to see whatever h
e did in there. After this rainy morning, he paid other visits to the place on Madison to listen to jazz records and learn more about the habits of people who were on narcotics. This included a lack of normal groceries and cravings for chocolate sweet rolls and lollipops. They slept lightly and at odd hours—between seven and eleven in the morning, when working people were away and the streets quiet. Then they’d wake up sneezing in their “evening country,” eyes watering, anxious for another fix. Jack was a naturally strong person, and Nelson believed him when he said he would kick the habit if he felt it was getting the best of him. But one night his wife called Nelson and said that Jack was sick and could not see a regular doctor. He needed his own doctor, meaning his dealer. Two of Jack’s junkie friends came by Nelson’s flat at Wabansia and Bosworth in a cab, and together the three of them drove north to make a deal for nine dollars, and brought back Jack’s medicine to West Madison. Jack was weeping and pouring sweat. “Well, you know, it happens to everybody,” Jack explained, and Nelson felt contempt for his weakness. Nelson had more sympathy for another of Jack’s friends, a man with a pushed-in face who unlike Jack did not want to be on dope. “He wasn’t Frankie Machine, but when I think of him I think of this guy,” Nelson explained. There was a cabbie who played drums at night and drove around the city during the day looking for fixes. Nelson did not want to visit the Madison Street warren too often because it took time away from his writing. But he would let the junkies come up to his own place and do what they needed to do. He claimed he never tried it himself; to write, he needed both proximity and a safe distance—a sometimes uneasy balance.

  Nelson also knew about the effects of withdrawal through his friend Margo, a smart, bookish, vulnerable young woman from the country who had become a Madison Street prostitute. A fan of the Stoics in his college days, Nelson thought anything could be broken by simple willpower, and he wanted to help Margo break her habit. He convinced her to go off drugs, and he put her to bed in his Wabansia apartment, heroically planning to see her through the worst of withdrawal. “I don’t want you to see what I look like when I’m kicking,” she protested. By midnight she was so sick she was blind, and Nelson, fearing she would go mad or die, put on his army jacket and went out into the rain to look for her connection, asking random hookers for help for Margo, only to see them flee into the night. He went to a White Tower hamburger stand at Madison and Aberdeen, where the staff dressed like nurses to emphasize how clean everything was—an eerie, bright oasis in the gray, early-morning gloom. There, drinking coffee, he found “a little lame man, wearing double-lensed glasses and a cap shadowing his eyes…. He looked so wrong he had to be somebody,” Nelson remembered.