Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  “I’m a friend of Margo’s and she needs help,” Nelson whispered.

  “She ought to know better than to send a square down here,” Max retorted, but returned with Nelson to Wabansia, where Margo was lying facedown on the floor in a pool of sweat. Nelson remembered how she started to smile as soon as Max touched her, before the needle even went in. Nelson saw Max as a blessed friend instead of a villain—a contrast to the role he assigned to Nifty Louie in the novel. Nelson saw in the addict’s revolt against society “a special grace. When he shoves a needle into his vein it is, in a sense, to spare others…. Things are going wrong in the world, so, in a sort of suicidal truculence, he impales himself.”

  With this collection of material, Nelson thought that maybe he could try the dope angle, but he worried that it might be too sensational. Brennan told him to go ahead and use it, so the card dealer picked up a habit, and the novel began to find its shape. Nelson decided to have just the dealer, Frankie, on dope, and not his wife—two in the family would be too much. Sophie became another kind of psychological cripple.

  Another influence on the novel was the changes coming to the city in the late 1940s; after more than a century of expansion, Chicago was showing the first whispering hints of a coming decline. Except for during the Depression, manufacturing jobs had expanded in the city from 1900 through the late 1940s. But then they started to shift from the city to the suburbs, and the Chicago economy began a move toward the service sector. Returning GIs had begun moving to the suburbs to raise their new, growing families, attracted by big yards and privacy and aided by low-interest veterans’ loans. During the war, federal officials had urged Chicago to start plans for a modern highway system, which in the next decade would push through Chicago neighborhoods like pythons, eventually swallowing up Nelson’s Wabansia nest. Suburban areas had begun to receive investment at the expense of poorer, innercity areas, while the slow melting of restrictive housing covenants helped allow African Americans move to areas that had previously been out of their reach. The need for housing among African Americans was great—the lure of wartime manufacturing jobs had helped expand the black population in the city from 8 to 14 percent during the 1940s. But the movement of blacks into formerly white communities often resulted in white hostility and rioting. Down in Nelson’s old neighborhood by St. Columbanus in the summer of 1946, about two thousand people gathered around the house of a black doctor and his wife, some throwing rocks and firecrackers. The couple moved three days later. In The Man with the Golden Arm, both Frank and Sophie complain about blacks moving into the neighborhood, though in 1950 the city was still the most segregated in the nation. All these factors helped drive people out of the city, a trend that would accelerate in the years to come. In 1950 the Chicago Plan Commission declared Nelson’s neighborhood and the whole inner ring of residential areas along the north and south branches of the Chicago River blighted or near blighted.

  The look of the streets was changing, too—the Chicago Transit Authority had begun tearing out streetcar tracks and replacing them with buses, removing the wire cables that had been woven over the avenues like a protective net. The iceman, organ-grinders, and rags and old iron men were going away. Entire sections of the city were being replanned and redesigned. Even the slums were changing—the “Little Hell” area just east of Nelson’s neighborhood was demolished during the war and replaced with the first buildings of the Cabrini-Green housing project. This was followed by a series of planned public housing developments, something at first considered to be an improvement, but which later brought new forms of misery and alienation.

  All these changes were just beginning, but Nelson’s senses were sharp, and he felt a shift in the city’s air, a feeling of autumn that comes even as it seems like summer days will never end. He wrote of this cooler feeling in the 1947 Chicago Sun article “Laughter in Jars,” in which he compared the “stormy, brawling, husky laughter of Youth” in Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” to the hollow, cautious laughter of the city today, something “that sounds more like a juke box running down in a deserted bar…. Chicago’s laughter has grown metallic and its smile has deteriorated into a complacent smirk.” Critic Carlo Rotella noted that Nelson would give these premonitions to Sophie, the mad Cassandra of The Man with the Golden Arm, when she imagines that the city seemed somehow “crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it…. Nobody was at home to anyone else anymore.”

  While Nelson made progress on the novel, he also was doing better financially. In January of 1948, he was selected for a Fellowship in Midwestern Studies from the Newberry Library, which gave him $200 a month, February through October, to help him complete what he was then calling “The Dead, the Drunk and the Dying.” Or maybe he’d call it “Hustlers’ Hearts,” or “The Weaker Sheep,” or “The Monkey Never Dies”—titles always gave him trouble. The money could help on the Mississippi trip with Simone, along with whatever leftover Academy of Arts and Letters money hadn’t been spent at the racetrack. Together with Simone’s $1,000 from American royalties on her writing, it promised to be a grand time. His prospects seemed so good that in March the Chicago Daily News featured him in a silly story about the city’s most eligible bachelors, caricatured jumping on pogo sticks as they are chased by ladies with butterfly nets. Nelson was described as the “have-you-read-any-good-books-lately” type with a “highly developed sense of humor,” who, rumor had it, was being eyed by an Eastern heiress. The article resulted in at least one mash note from a woman who promised that under her influence, he might write something as good as Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I.

  That April Nelson told McCormick that he would send him a manuscript in “rough shape but readable enough to give you an idea of what I’ve been up to.” He warned McCormick that he would be away for his trip south, but he’d be waiting for a letter of criticism.

  On May 8 Nelson “happened upon a strange creature, apparently of foreign extraction, running aimlessly down Wabansia Avenue. Took her upstairs with intention of phoning police. But the hour was late, and she obviously needed sleep and a warm meal. I’m too kind for my own good.” Simone had come at last, and they were getting ready for their honeymoon. She had been so excited about the visit that she’d fixed her missing front tooth and got fitted for a diaphragm. They started a joint diary in a small, lined accounting notebook, to chronicle the trip. Through most of it, Nelson seems happy and expansive, writing sharp, economical descriptions of the people they saw and the places they visited along the Mississippi, and then in Mexico and Guatemala. Simone’s entries are more terse—focusing on the specifics of what they ate and where they stayed. The diary is an insight into their characters—Nelson boyishly excited, looking with fresh eyes on everything, but growing moody and negative as the trip neared its end; Simone steady and practical, focused on present necessities and following an agenda, while she stored up feelings to be analyzed later. The trip began with humor and romance, and ended with short tempers and recriminations as the limits of their relationship hit Nelson hard.

  They took a few days preparing for their excursion, visiting the bank for travelers’ checks, doing the laundry, and going to the doctor’s office, with an evening outing to the orchestra, going around the city through several days of rainy spring weather. Nelson joked in the diary that he manfully took the vaccination needle without anesthetic, though the doctor needed to give him a dime to clench in his teeth. He kept the dime. Simone remembered how the Guatemalan official handling her visa had curtly corrected Nelson for stating he was an American citizen—Nelson was a “citizen of the United States,” the man instructed; they were both Americans. Nelson tried to interest Simone in his junkie friends on Madison, but she was both bored and scared. “I spent two hours in a filthy den, surrounded by strangers talking, too fast for me to follow, to other strangers,” Simone recalled later. One of the men went to the bathroom and gave himself a fix while Nelson watched. The next day,
Nelson took her to see the wife of a thief who was hiding from police and had been inspired by Nelson to write his own novel. After their errands Simone would sit on the squeaky bed reading a draft of “Hustlers’ Hearts,” so absorbed that only the opening of a liquor bottle could get her to run to the kitchen, “tongue lolling.”

  The trip would take them from Chicago by train, then into Cincinnati, where they shared the still-novel experience of watching a television during dinner—the devices were starting to show up in public places. They then traveled to Louisville and Paducah, Kentucky, along the Ohio River, where Nelson heard hillbilly music on the jukebox and finally felt like he was going someplace new. They then rolled south down the Mississippi River on an old-fashioned Green Line paddle-wheel boat, visiting Memphis and Natchez, seeing cotton fields and crumbling, columned plantation houses. Simone had listened to a recording of “Old Man River” back in her Paris hotel room in anticipation of the trip, but it hadn’t prepared her for the reality of it, the wide, gently flowing river, the peaceful, dreamy monotony of the voyage, the Spanish moss on the trees, the moonlight on the water. Nelson was comparing this journey to the hungry ones he’d made south in his twenties, when he had to hitchhike or hop freights. Now he was riding the river like Mark Twain, with bourbon and chicken dinners and a beautiful international celebrity. But he still had his eye on the poor, rather than on his fellow passengers—at one stop in Kentucky, he had noted a “little bearded cripple with an aristocratic face” who asked the price of an egg, and then a cup of coffee, before settling for a glass of water, while Nelson and Simone had their dessert.

  Nelson was disappointed in New Orleans—it had lost something since 1932, and seemed more touristy and respectable, more wealthy and dull. Still, they found jazz to fill the sultry evenings, julep zombies, and a hotel bed with a big mirror at its head. Nelson recounted a visit to a friend’s that offered not so much a meal as an “exhibition,” with chicken, gumbo, corn, okra, eggplant, beans, potatoes, beer, whiskey, pies, cake, cookies, ice cream, and pudding, before the hostess signaled that dinner was over by rolling over in her chair. It was lucky they had the little diary to capture their Mississippi days—Nelson was hopeless with the German camera they’d brought along, and none of his pictures from the boat deck had come out.

  In Mexico Nelson accepted everything merrily, not minding the many dinners of beans and tortillas, the bugs in their candlelit hotel, or the heat. They spent days in the jungles and the Mayan ruins of Uxmal, which depressed Nelson with their great, unmoving stones, holding memories of pride and death. Nelson teased that Simone climbed the temple of Chichén Itzá without any idea of how to get down, and then did get down, “red, burned, sweating, swollen, tired, thirsty—and quite happy, it seemed.” He felt like a discoverer in the jungle, and kept forever among his possessions a little red-and-brown frowning god-figure made of stone, later authenticated as dating to ad 400–700. Nelson declared that Simone’s true love was really tequila, and confided in her things he did not easily share, about his youth, and women and his writing. He told her a long story one evening, and wrote in their diary, “You got tight listening and looked quite lovely, naked by the fire.” They swam in a lake formed by a volcano, and felt like they were the only two people left alive in the world. Reflecting his giddy mood, Nelson sent a bit of doggerel to Jack Conroy: “Bingo Bango Bongo / I’m in Chichicastenango” a parody of a popular Andrews Sisters song, later used at the Pink Kitten Club in Golden Arm. It was a happy, careless time. They managed to get the camera to work, and took amateurish black-and-white pictures of landscapes that seem out of a distant past—barefoot little Mayan shepherd girls with long skirts and shining braids, and mud huts thatched with straw.

  They traveled to Mexico City in mid-June, and saw bullfights, folk dancers, slums, markets, and even a Danny Kaye movie, The Brooklyn Kid. They ate turkey with mole sauce, and tamales hot enough to take off the insides of their mouths. It was around this time that the entries picked up a tired, querulous tone, reflective of exhaustion and misunderstandings. Nelson’s entries got shorter and less colorful. They accused each other of behaving badly. By this time Nelson had learned that they weren’t going to be together as long as they’d originally planned, because of Simone’s need to rush back to Sartre. Back in February she had told him that they would travel for a couple of months, then she would go to South America for some lectures, and then return for more time together. But this was not happening, and now she confessed that she needed to return to Paris in July. “Oh, all right,” he said, lightly, and Simone was relieved, but after that his mood darkened. While Simone was enjoying the peace of the evening in Taxco, Nelson scowled, “At the end of two days I’d be shooting off a revolver in the street just to make something happen.”

  The sour feelings intensified when they returned to New York in late June, and the prospect of their parting loomed. During those oppressively hot summer days, they trudged around seeing the New York sites—boxing matches, Chinatown, Coney Island, Little Italy, museums, movies, and plays—and Nelson had lunch with Story magazine cofounder Martha Foley, who had included his work in a couple of short story collections. But the fun had gone out of the little diary. Suffering from the heat, Simone dragged him to dinner at restaurants with air conditioning, causing Nelson to pout because he preferred places where he did not have to wear a tie and jacket. Exasperated, she asked him, “Don’t you care for me as much as you did?”

  “No, it’s not the same anymore,” he responded.

  On Saturday, July 10, they had dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Nelson was in a bad temper, and Simone was anxious, crumbling and rolling her bread into little pills. They went to listen to the “Queen of Swing,” Mildred Bailey, at the integrated Café Society in Greenwich Village. Bailey sang for everyone to “Please Be Kind” while Nelson grew increasingly unpleasant.

  “I can leave tomorrow,” Simone told him.

  “I’m ready to marry you this moment,” he said. She must have refused, because later in the diary he recorded, “You weren’t very nice to me at all.” Perhaps it was on this evening that she proposed living on her own in Chicago, so they could be together but she wouldn’t disturb his work. He rejected this idea as ridiculous. He was going on forty, and he wanted a wife and a home of his own.

  They stayed up the next night playing poker until 2:00 am, and Nelson mocked her, saying she played “very well for someone who doesn’t know how to play: exhibiting all your weaknesses of character: obstinacy, lightheadedness, impulsiveness, overconfidence and naivete.” She left on the plane to Paris two days later, wondering if she would ever see him again. She carried with her a gift from Nelson to Jean-Paul—a pipe. Despite what he saw as his ridiculous situation, Nelson was gallant.

  In a letter after she returned to Paris, she begged him to understand her position—she could not give up her life with Sartre. He needed her. “I want you to know that, whatever you decide in the future: it is not by lack of love that I don’t stay with you.” A true Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre proposed paying to allow Simone a trip to see her Chicago lover, and Simone wired Nelson to see if he’d be interested. “No. Too much work,” he responded. While in New York, he had met with his publishers—and needed to both finish The Man with the Golden Arm and abridge Never Come Morning for a paperback edition. This came out later that year with a lurid cover—a young woman by a bed, wearing a skintight, low-cut peignoir. Algren scholar Bill Savage noted that this was the start of Algren paperbacks being marketed as sexy potboilers—which came to hurt the public’s perception of him as a serious writer. Simone spotted the problem right away, thinking it looked like one of the books people bought secretly on the quays of the Seine.

  Nelson also had found time for politics that year. In May he had signed a letter in solidarity with Soviet writers and against anti-Soviet policies in the United States. Also signing were leftist intellectuals Alvah Bessie and Howard Fast, who were later blacklisted. It may be difficult to
understand why Nelson would have signed such a letter—by that time he had had it with the Communists, and by 1948 it should have been clear that the USSR under Stalin was not the paradise liberals had imagined in the hungry days of the 1930s. Dick Wright had already publicly repudiated the party in 1944. To comprehend the May Day letter, it is important to remember what was going on in the United States at the time, when civil liberties were being threatened by anti-Communist paranoia. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee was looking for subversive activities in unions, cultural groups, plays, the civil rights movement, and, most famously, Hollywood. The hearings were absurd—one low point was when Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers, complained that her daughter had been forced to say the subversive line “share and share alike, that’s democracy” in a 1943 script by Dalton Trumbo. In November of 1947, Trumbo, Bessie, Ring Lardner, and seven other motion-picture directors and screen-writers were cited for contempt for refusing to answer the committee’s questions about their possible Communist ties. Algren became a local champion for their cause, and befriended both Trumbo and Ring Lardner. Nelson’s attitude in 1948 seemed to be not so much pro-Soviet as against the American inquisition of its artists. He felt that creative life was being threatened again—this time not by economic depression, but by the government itself. It was an intolerable situation for someone who took the Constitution seriously. His fears were justified, more than he knew—the FBI had reopened its file on him, and that May Day letter became a part of it.