Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  Simone flew out of Paris on July 8, and arrived in Chicago during the hottest stretch of a hot summer. She was wearing an embroidered Indian peasant blouse, carefully chosen to please Nelson, according to her account of the trip in The Mandarins. But after she had panted up the wooden back stairs into the Wabansia flat, she felt a chill. Nelson “greeted her casually and then issued all sorts of pronouncements and ground rules for her stay,” according to biographer Deirdre Bair. He had decided that the relationship was going nowhere, and he did not love her anymore. “We’ll have a nice summer together, all the same,” he told her. Simone was mortified—she had braved her fear of flying and imminent world war to come see him, and he did not seem to want her at all. In The Mandarins the Nelson character, “Lewis,” wants to listen to a baseball game, on which he has bet three bottles of scotch. After a day in which everything seems counterfeit, they get into bed together, but Lewis turns his back without an embrace, claiming he is too tired. When Simone’s character “Anne” packs for their trip to Miller, she puts the embroidered blouse at the bottom, never wanting to wear it again—“it seemed to me as if there were something malignant in its embroidery.”

  Even Nelson’s old Polish neighborhood, where Simone had felt so at home, had become hostile. The heat was oppressive, softening the tar on the streets. When she went to a hairdresser in the neighborhood, a girl washing her hair asked her severely, “Why are you all Communists in France?” It was also hard to stay clean during the sticky days—there was no bathtub or shower at Wabansia. Art Shay offered to drive her to a friend’s house to take a bath while Nelson played poker. She left the bathroom door open, and he snapped a picture of her in the nude, from behind. “You naughty man,” she muttered, though she seemed unperturbed.

  Simone describes the trip in The Mandarins and in her memoirs as a series of disappointments—but she has the historical advantage, having been publicly open with her point of view. Nelson was mostly silent in public about the affair, but it is also possible to see his perspective. Her shifting summer schedule must have made him feel like a walk-on part in the great Simone and Jean-Paul show—a toy Simone kept in the cupboard until she wanted to play with him again. He loved her, but the situation was impossible, and Amanda and Margo were in the background, offering possible alternatives. He was just trying to have a good time with Simone without being dishonest, and the effort was exhausting.

  Simone remembered that things were better once they got to Miller. They took walks on the dunes, watching the squirrels, seagulls, and blue jays, the sand burning their feet. In the evening under the reddish moon, the lake breezes felt like a gift. Simone would lie down on the grass and read Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, while Nelson typed a review of Fredric Brown’s Here Comes a Candle for the New York Times. Local Miller residents recall her sunbathing in the nude, which provided a jolt for the postman and cheap thrills for young boys. Once, Simone went swimming in the lake and started to struggle—Nelson’s “secondhand sea” that looked so peaceful from the shore had strong, unexpected currents. “Help!” she called to Nelson off in the distance, who after a moment of smiling confusion came to her rescue. Frightened and giddy, they hurried back to the cottage, had a couple of double shots of whiskey, and “friendship flamed into life between us,” Simone remembered. They parted on friendly terms, but Simone worried that she would never see Chicago again. When she got back to New York, she wrote him that “I have lost your love and it was (it is) painful, but shall not lose you.”

  Soon after Simone left, Amanda arrived in Miller for a two-week vacation, to the amazement of Nelson’s friends. She had suggested the visit back in the spring, after she sent him flowers for his birthday. They took walks to look at the autumn colors and talked about their possibilities. Dave Peltz remembered Amanda smoking cigarettes with a gold-tipped holder, glamorous and sophisticated as a movie star. “Nelson was swept off his feet again,” Dave said.

  In a letter to Amanda later that month, Nelson tried to tamp down any expectations. “Don’t worry about not letting me know how you like stroking my pointy little head and holding my hot little hand; because I do know, and it troubles me,” he told her. “Because I like holding your hot little hand too—only not that much.” He told her he did not want to give up “book-writin’ to baby-raisin’.” He also mentioned in the letter that he’d lost his Hollywood agent, George Willner—who had been hurt by the blacklist—and maybe Amanda should take over his California interests. The movie project was going nowhere, in part because of its controversial drug angle, but also because the Red Scare was hitting everyone involved.

  Algren urged Americans to speak out against this continuing oppression—in January of 1951, he signed an open letter along with writers Margaret Halsey, Arthur Miller, and William Shirer to protest violations of the right to free speech. The letter, published as an ad in the New York Times, called on Americans to stand up for their rights “to determine for ourselves, free from hysterical denunciation and the fears of fanatics, what all of us can see, hear, read and learn.” But some in the arts community were testifying against one another, and using the paranoia for their own ends—even to protest a bad review. Crime writer W. R. Burnett was so worried about Algren’s May 20, 1951, slam of Little Men, Big World that he sent a note to Walter Winchell, the conservative syndicated gossip columnist. Algren’s review had objected to the book’s cardboard characters, but Burnett told Winchell that his book took a stand against Communism, and that anti-Communists like him were being attacked by Communist critics and reviewers. Winchell turned this petty, spiteful letter over to the FBI.

  That spring of 1951, John Garfield would appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He denied that he was a Communist but refused to name names of other Communists in Hollywood, something that could have gotten him off the blacklist.

  While he waited for Hollywood to figure out what it was doing, Nelson started the slow process of developing a new novel—“just feeling around, just feeling around in the dark.” He wanted to further explore the drug world, which had just been an afterthought for Golden Arm, and now he felt he knew more about it. Confident that he had another great novel in him, Nelson turned down an intriguing offer from Dalton Trumbo, who in June of 1951 was out of jail but still blacklisted and unable to write under his own name. He suggested Nelson act as a front for him. Trumbo would send him a sentimental story for Hollywood, and Algren could submit it to his Hollywood agent under his own name, for some easy money. “If you have any moral compunctions about such a procedure in relation to motion pictures, please forget them,” Trumbo advised. “Hollywood is a vast whorehouse.” There is no evidence Nelson considered the offer—he was not that desperate yet.

  Nelson also got to work on the Holiday piece about Chicago through the winter of 1950–1951. The essay would be part of a special issue on Chicago, which would also include contributions by Carl Sandburg and Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, as well as a story on Bronzeville by the black poet Gwendolyn Brooks, a friend Nelson had recommended. Holiday was paying Nelson $2,000, but the editors were uneasy about what he was sending. They liked the reminiscences from his childhood, but not his perspectives on the city’s history. Though associate editor Harry Nickles gushed in a May 24, 1951, letter that they all loved the writing, Holiday was a glossy traveler’s magazine and they needed something less opinionated, with more reporting, and shorter—at six thousand words. Another editor suggested a line that would show some respect for the sturdy pioneers who built the city to introduce the piece. Algren was infuriated, and though his heavily edited “One Man’s Chicago” would run in Holiday’s October 1951 issue, he and McCormick planned to issue the full essay as a short book soon thereafter. Art Shay remembered how McCormick had come up with the book title, while Shay was driving him and Algren out to Indiana. “I’ve always thought of Chicago as a hustler’s city,” McCormick said. “Yes, it’s a sort of tough, working-class city, a sort
of city on the make.” It was a lucky thing, as Nelson had wanted “Cold Sun and Broken Towers.”

  Algren scholar Bill Savage imagines Chicago: City on the Make as a “victory lap” after Algren’s other Chicago books and short stories, with Algren walking around the baseball diamond tipping his cap to the cheering crowd. All the things Nelson had been trying to express about Chicago over the years are distilled into this piece—and it is like a glass of strong drink. It’s something radically different from what he’d tried before—a prose poem that’s not attempting to be fiction or criticism or journalism, but tries instead to get the feeling of an entire city through time and space, from its beginnings in the swamps and prairie among the cheated Potawatomi Indians to the modern-day money hunters on the Chamber of Commerce; from its glittering downtown with “more majesty than Troy” to its ethnic villages and slums, “spreading itself all over the prairie grass.” It is not a travelogue—it doesn’t promote Chicago as a vacation destination. It condemns the hustlers and the hypocrites, and points out that the city’s do-gooders like Jane Addams have always played in a “rigged ball game,” getting only two outs to the inning while the hustlers were taking four. It repeats Sandburg’s warning that the slums will take their revenge, and that the city’s racism is just as poisonous as the South’s, though more infuriating because it is more subtle. “The Negro is not seriously confronted here with a stand-up and head-on hatred, but with something psychologically worse: a soft and protean awareness of white superiority everywhere, in everything.”

  The essay also mourns the cultural giants that have gone away—from Vachel Lindsay to Sandburg to Clarence Darrow to Richard Wright—saying that the city now stands “on the rim of a cultural Sahara without a camel in sight.” It sees Chicago as something slippery and always in motion, like the prairie grasses, or the lake’s moving waters “slipping out of used colors for new.” Chicago is “an October sort of city even in spring,” a “drafty hustler’s junction,” and a “sort of mottled offshoot, with trailers only in swamp and shadow,” to which no one can really belong. He also sees it getting colder, declining, with the new conmen more legal and businesslike than those of the past—a town now belonging more to soldiers than to artists. He brings up the modern oppression of the Cold War, artfully comparing the era’s cringing patriotism to his own boyhood memories of having to disown the Chicago “Black Sox” to fit in with his new North Side neighborhood. “Giants lived here once,” Algren declares. “Now it’s the place where we do as we’re told, praise poison, bless the F.B.I., yearn wistfully for just one small chance to prove ourselves more abject than anyone.”

  But for all its anger and regret, City on the Make is a love poem as well as a jeremiad, opening with a quote from the poet Baudelaire: “I love thee, infamous city.” It is an ode to a place that divides the heart, “Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it can never love you.” Loving Chicago is compared to “loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Algren paints the city in the hard colors of red neon and yellow streetlight, gray rain and black El girders, and somehow makes it glow. Looking at Chicago after reading City on the Make is like looking at sunflowers after seeing the Van Gogh painting—the subject has changed because of the artist’s vision. Algren ends the essay by remembering the Potawatomi as “much too square,” leaving nothing but a dirty river, “while we shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty heart … that holds both the hustler and the square…. For keeps and a single day.” It has become the most widely quoted creative work about the city since Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” poem of 1914.

  The slender book, less than one hundred pages and featuring a moody black-and-white Robert McCullough picture of Algren in his shirtsleeves on the back, came out in a short run of five thousand copies in late October of 1951. It pleased him, especially after the chop job published in Holiday. The reviews were largely mixed—the Chicago Tribune called it a book unlikely to please anyone but masochists—definitely a highly scented onject.” The Sun-Times praised it, with the Times’ Emmett Dedmon writing that the book’s qualities are those of “fine poetry—vivid images, richness of language, economy of form, and most important, poetic vision.” Dedmon said the only work comparable was Sandburg’s Chicago Poems—a satisfying comparison, since Algren had dedicated his book to the seventy-three-year-old poet. Budd Schulberg of the New York Times compared it to Goya’s unflattering portraits of nobles, saying that the book’s “degree of distortion” is a way to measure its creative impact. Chicago writer Rick Kogan, son of Algren’s friends Herman and Marilew Kogan, speaking sixty years after the book’s publication, said that Chicago: City on the Make may be the Algren work that endures the longest. “Nelson’s use of language for me is much more apparent in City on the Make and in some of his short stories than it is in his novels,” Kogan said. “I think that’s where his literary genius lies.” Studs Terkel called the book Algren’s “love-hate poem” to his city, revealing Algren as both a clown and a prophet.

  Simone was back in the United States in the fall, in time for the release of Chicago: City on the Make. She had gone through some trouble to get there—to get a visa, she had to take an oath back in July that she had never belonged to a Communist or Fascist party, and then she had been challenged over signing a long-forgotten petition for the nearly Communist French Women’s League. Simone suggested that it would be much easier for Nelson, an American citizen and thus one of the “kings of the world,” to come visit her instead—but if he did not want to, there was nothing she could do about it. When she finally arrived, Nelson told her that it was obvious to him that she did not want to be lovers anymore—so they had to be just friends. It was a shock, but she adjusted—she was used to his sometimes cruel moods. She slept in the bedroom, while he slept on his lumpy couch. They spent the visit mostly in Miller, walking the dunes in the mild October evenings, or going downtown for movies or drinks or book signings. They also liked to watch television—their favorite was the gentle, cerebral Chicago-based puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which humorist James Thurber credited with helping to save the nation’s sanity. These were beautiful, blue-sky days for saying good-bye to Chicago, as this would be her last visit. On a trip downtown, they drank gin martinis like tourists at the Tip Top Tap at the Allerton Hotel, where they could peer down from twenty stories at “the fanciest all-around job since Babylon.” Nelson also gave a speech about drug addiction before a Jewish club—he believed that addiction should be treated not as a crime, but as a disease, as it was in England. It was a tough crowd—Simone heard people in the audience mutter, “He doesn’t speak as well as he writes.” He also complained about police corruption—he knew that the true villain of the street was not the addict but the “nark-squad hero” with his brown paper bag to fill with bribes from both addicts and dealers. A judge in the audience lectured him on the heroics of the brave boys in blue, to loud applause. Corruption in the police department was common knowledge to Chicagoans in the 1950s—they considered it “part of the natural environment,” like the fact that the river was polluted, or that George Halas owned the Bears football team, Mike Royko wrote later. But it was not nice to talk about these things aloud.

  The last day of Simone’s visit was filled with awkward silences—he had told her he was thinking of remarrying Amanda and things could not go on as before. Simone was lying in bed in the back room, drowsing in the unusual late-October heat, surrounded by newspapers and magazines when Nelson came in with a strange expression on his face. She sat up suddenly, asking what was wrong. Simone remembered that “his face crumpled, he fell to his knees beside the bed, he told me he loved me.” And they became lovers again for the few hours they had left.

  Simone got onto the South Shore train to Chicago crying, trying to unpack this ball of confusion. She had tried to tell Nelson that it was nice to have him as a friend, and he had told her, “It’s not friendship. I can never offer you less than love.
” After flying to New York, she wrote Nelson a letter from the Lincoln Hotel, asking if everything was really over. She admitted that she had felt guilty about the relationship since the beginning, knowing she loved him so much yet could give him so little. She begged him to please keep her in his heart until they could meet again. “I am just a poor heap of crumbling pieces.”

  This sorrowful letter, sent on October 30, must have arrived just as Chicago got socked by a big temperature drop and back-to-back November snowstorms, and Nelson had plenty of time to pace his lake house and brood, watching the wet November snow coat the trees and melt into the still-unfrozen waters of the lagoon. He wrote back that he could still have feelings for someone and yet not allow her to rule or disturb his life. “To love a woman who does not belong to you, who puts other things and other people before you, without there ever being any question of your taking first place, is something that just isn’t acceptable.” He wanted a different kind of life, with a woman and a house of his own. He told her that he was trying to take his life back from Simone—he did not like it belonging to someone he saw only a few weeks every year.

  Simone wrote back that he was not being fair. Her visit was brief because he had invited her for only a short time, and it had been two years now since he had come to see her in France. For the past three years, she had accepted the idea that he would love other women—how could she be holding him back? She would try not to love him, and joked that she would instead love her new black car. “Well, that’s that,” Simone thought, believing she would never again fall asleep feeling another person’s warmth. It was painful, but the experience was not wasted—she was hard at work at the time on both an essay on the Marquis de Sade and the novel that would include a barely disguised account of her relationship with Nelson. The FBI was not the only one taking notes.