Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  Nelson was lonely and pursued relationships with other women in the next few months, including Mari Sabusawa, a petite, politically active Japanese American who would marry the novelist James Michener; a blonde named Barbara Fitzgerald; and his old drug-addict friend Margo. Algren’s friends said women used to throw themselves at him in those days—he still had a rugged attractiveness. He also was a great listener—a draw for any woman, remembered Doris Peltz. “He was gentle, appreciative,” Peltz said. “I never heard him raise his voice, never.”

  His neighbors in Miller saw all the women coming in and out of Algren’s house and explained to their children that Mr. Algren went through a lot of “housekeepers,” said Dave Witter, whose family lived nearby. Simone was supportive of the relationship with Barbara, offering to let her come to France and visit. But she was mystified by his continued attraction to Margo, who was still struggling with addiction. “Why don’t you marry a nice clean American girl,” Simone wondered. Dave Peltz understood better—he thought troubled Margo was “raggedy, a stray cat” like Nelson himself, and they seemed to understand each other. But like a stray cat, Margo came and went.

  Missing a family of his own, Nelson let himself be adopted by other people’s families—staying in the city overnight with Jack and Gladys Conroy or Studs and Ida Terkel, or playing and drawing pictures with the Rowland and Shay children. Art remembered how Nelson shocked his gentle wife, Florence, during one visit, while they discussed a newspaper story about a hitchhiker who murdered an entire family. On each of the man’s knuckles was tattooed a letter, spelling out H-A-R-D-L-U-C-K.

  “That poor son-of-a-bitch!” Nelson commented.

  “You mean the father?” Florence asked.

  “No, the hitchhiker,” Nelson responded, causing Florence to hit him with the newspaper. But Nelson wondered what had happened to the hitchhiker in his life to make him do something so awful. His sympathy was with the guilty.

  It was a tough winter by the lake—with heavy snowstorms. The local kids skated and played hockey in the lagoon, which Nelson used as a shortcut to and from the little grocery store. Feeling flush from new foreign translations and an appearance on a television show, Nelson bought Goldie a fur coat. He continued his practice from Wabansia of giving presents to his neighbors—on Christmas he would stick bottles of liquor into his Miller neighbors’ mailboxes. His feelings of nostalgia and longing for family seemed to have deepened with the marriage of his niece, Ruth, that spring in a traditional Jewish ceremony, with solemn music. It underscored the passing of time.

  As the deep snow finally melted away around his little house, Nelson acquired a cat that he named Bubu de Montparnasse, after a character in a French novel. It was a furry, homely, randy outdoor cat, built like a badger, with short legs and long hair that was once white with orange markings, but was now too dirty for its colors to be distinguishable.

  “Bubu came out of the woods only when the weather was bad, or when love-making had exhausted her,” he wrote in an unpublished sketch. As he typed at his desk under a gooseneck lamp by the front picture window of his little Indiana house at night, he could hear her ecstatic yowls out in the trees, “part pleasure and part pain.”

  “You’re a terrible little bum,” he’d tell her when she came in for milk. She would then jump into a drawer full of his manuscripts to go to sleep, littering them with sand and orange hairs and the leaves she had picked up on her dirty behind. Then, alone with his typewriter in the too-quiet suburban night and struggling over a passage, Nelson would get aggravated and take it out on the only living creature around. He would get out of his old swivel chair with the stuffing coming out of the cushion, snatch Bubu out of the drawer by the scruff of her neck, and toss her out the door.

  “It was himself he was throwing outside,” Dave Peltz said.

  On May 21, 1952, actor John Garfield died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. He hadn’t been able to work in Hollywood since the blacklist, which some blamed for aggravating his long-term heart problems. “He defended his streetboy’s honor, and they killed him for it,” said writer Abraham Polonsky. Bob Roberts got blacklisted, too, and would immigrate to England. Even if Garfield hadn’t died, he may not have done the movie based on Algren’s novel. Ingo Preminger, the brother of maverick director Otto Preminger, said that Garfield had already abandoned the idea of playing Frankie Machine because of concern about the production code. After John’s death the rights to the film were bought by a group of investors led by Ingo. Ingo had argued to Otto that Golden Arm would give Otto a chance to break the production code and further establish his artistic independence—the novel itself was of little importance.

  10

  THE NONCONFORMIST

  I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon.

  It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Hollywood! It’s like an old chair—if it’s useful, keep it;

  if not, give it to Goodwill.

  —SYLVIA SIDNEY

  In December of 1951, David Dempsey of the New York Times reported that Nelson Algren was rewriting his first novel, Somebody in Boots. Ken McCormick, feeling the momentum from The Man with the Golden Arm slipping away, hoped something would happen soon. The publisher had bought the rights to the novel from Vanguard—but Nelson was finding the project trickier than he had imagined. It would take more than just excising the musty quotes from The Communist Manifesto that started the sections. The year 1935 was two wars, three books, and a New Deal ago, and Nelson felt his first novel was like a “bag of dead bones.” He regretted taking the $1,500 advance—he had no interest in breathing new life into that “schmuck” Cass McKay.

  Instead, Nelson was working on other projects—both literary and political. On July 17, 1950, Julius Rosenberg, a machinist and former government worker, was arrested on charges that he had helped the Soviets acquire information on how to build the atomic bomb. The next month, his wife, Ethel, was also arrested. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had already pleaded guilty, testified against them both. There was no documentary evidence and the prosecution focused heavily on the Rosenbergs’ liberal politics, including the fact they were active members of trade unions. The Rosenbergs and a third man named Morton Sobell were convicted, and while Sobell got thirty years and Greenglass fifteen years, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. While the mainstream press supported the prosecution, in August 1951 the National Guardian published a series of articles comparing the Rosenberg case to the infamous Dreyfus affair from nineteenth-century France. In both cases anti-Semitism was blamed for the harshness of the prosecution. Those protesting the conviction complained both of the weakness of the case, particularly against Ethel, and the severity of the penalty. Nelson was outraged and became intensely involved with both the national and Chicago-area committees demanding a new trial. The case was not just a cause for American leftists—the Rosenbergs’ plight attracted support from a wide variety of international celebrities, including Sartre, Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and even Pope Pius XII.

  In March of 1952, Nelson told the Daily Worker newspaper that “the whole business is straight out of Cotton Mather—the execution of a decent man and woman for non-conformity. It is medieval.” That April he signed on to a letter asking for financial support for the Rosenbergs’ cause, saying that their execution would endanger the Bill of Rights. Fellow signatories included civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois and novelist Waldo Frank. On the Chicago committee, Nelson kept busy with speaking and fund-raising events throughout 1952. At one August meeting Nelson attended at a downtown hotel, the couples’ letters were acted out as skits. Algren’s involvement was recorded by the FBI, along with any other action he took for political causes during the 1950s, no matter how seemingly benign. This included the unsuccessful 1951 campaign to elect attorney Pearl M. Hart, an advocate for immigrants later known as a pioneer in the gay rights movement, as alderman of Chicago’s Forty-Fourth Ward. So
meone at these meetings was always eager to tell the FBI who was there, including an acquaintance of Studs Terkel, who reported that Studs said Nelson was “a very good guy politically” but not active, which the informant took to mean not necessarily a Communist Party member. Studs and Ida Terkel and Jack Conroy were also being watched. NBC had dropped Studs’s critically acclaimed NBC television show Studs’ Place off its schedule after he refused to take a loyalty oath. The walls were closing in on Nelson and his friends—and he was pushing back. Judging from his file, Nelson’s involvement in political and cultural causes increased, rather than decreased, in the age of McCarthyism. The threat of the blacklist only seemed to encourage him. His cause was not Communism, but freedom of speech and opposition to state-sponsored murder. He told Simone that the Soviet Union was not a workers’ democracy, and that the Rosenbergs had died for a lie. Years after the execution, Algren told writer H. E. F. Donohue that he was not saying the Rosenbergs weren’t spies—“All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t have burned them.”

  In the late summer of 1952, Chicago literary editor Van Allen Bradley came out to Nelson’s Gary house for drinks and a hot-weather lunch of chicken, ham, cheeses, vegetables, and watermelon, served by Amanda, who was again visiting from California. They both explained to Bradley that they were divorced, but it was amicable. In fact they were discussing getting back together. Algren talked with Bradley about his reading habits—he still loved Dickens and Hemingway, and every two years he reread Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He also was writing—sometimes for as long as six to seven hours at a stretch, sometimes for as little as two. Asked by Bradley if he cared about negative reactions to his work, Algren responded that this was not his concern. “Every serious writer is interested only in expressing himself,” Nelson said. “He doesn’t care what the reaction was.” This was nonsense—Nelson kept his reviews pasted into scrapbooks, almost killed himself over the failure of Somebody in Boots, and complained for decades about the Polish Roman Catholic Union. But this was the line he gave Bradley for the article, a southern gentleman who copied it dutifully, though he probably knew better. Bradley asked Algren if he would consider writing something for the Christmas book section of the Daily News. Earlier that summer, Algren had made a speech at the University of Missouri about the challenges of being a writer in a conformist age, so he chose this topic for the Christmas issue—following Dickens’s tradition of using the holiday season as a call to conscience. The two-thousand-word article “Great Writing Bogged Down in Fear, Says Novelist Algren” appeared on December 3, 1952. It criticized McCarthyism and America’s inability to see its own problems, and asserted that “the condition of liberty is the capacity to doubt one’s own faith and to doubt it out loud as well.”

  “It was a strong and moving indictment, honestly written, and I printed it expecting a reader controversy to break over my head,” Bradley recalled. “Instead there came an outpouring of applause that amazed us all.” The head of the department of religion at a Catholic college used it as a sermon text—another reader ordered a hundred copies to use as a Christmas greeting, while the Nation reprinted it as “American Christmas 1952.” Jack Conroy suggested that a Chicago publisher could put it out as a small book, but Doubleday came first and gave Nelson a $1,500 advance to make it into a short book, a follow-up to Chicago: City on the Make.

  In writing the essay that he called “A Walk on the Wild Side,” Nelson revisited some of the same ideas he had explored in his 1943 Chicago Sun article “Do It the Hard Way”—including the belief that a real writer must work from his guts and connect with life as it actually is. But nearly ten years later, he seemed to have become less optimistic about whether this type of work would be welcomed, and harsher about the sacrifices that are required. Nelson and Simone had both been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, a collection of letters and essays published after the writer’s death. Fitzgerald offered a melancholy view of his life as a writer, saying that he had paid for his stories not with blood, but with his emotions, until he was left with nothing. Fitzgerald had used himself up in becoming “identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.” Algren presented Fitzgerald as a model of artistic integrity—someone who poured himself out like a libation in the service of his craft. Algren also warned of the heavy toll an American writer has to pay when he works contrary to the conventions of his time. Citing the models of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Carl Sandburg, Algren wrote that “it would seem there is no way of becoming a serious writer in the States without keeping shabby company.” Thinking of Poe and Fitzgerald, Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay, he also saw how honest writers could become victims. He contrasted these kinds of writers to the more comfortable scribblers like Frank Yerby, Louis Bromfield, and Booth Tarkington, who sought to please and succeeded by never risking failure. “No book was ever worth the writing that was not done with the attitude that ‘this isn’t what you rung for, Jack—but it’s what you’re damned well getting.’” Algren accused current American literature of being flabby and complacent, and demanded that writers go down into the underground of American life to find vitality, as Dostoyevsky had done. Writers needed not only the bravery to tell the truth, but a safecracker’s ruthlessness and sense of alienation. “If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get,” Algren challenged. “And you won’t write anything anyone would read a second time either.” He offered a path to real art as rough and narrow as the way into heaven. Dan Simon, the editor of Seven Stories Press, which published Noncomformity in 1996, comments in an afterword that the essay was also Nelson’s own plea to himself “to persist in the face of increasing opposition from within.” With this credo, he was steeling himself for an increasingly difficult fight, which he ultimately would not win.

  The essay condemns not only McCarthyism and its eroding effects on democracy, but middle-class complacency of all kinds as deadening real life. “From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how.” As he wrote in The Man with the Golden Arm about the “special American guilt” of owning nothing, failure in the well-upholstered 1950s had come to be seen as a moral defeat, and was frightening people into trying to live without risk, not seeing that this was the real defeat. He sees McCarthyism as a replay of the sickness of seventeenth-century Salem, in that America was trying to exorcise its demons by destroying their nonconformists, their “odd fish.” Throughout the essay, he uses long quotes from favorite authors—Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Rimbaud, and Beauvoir. The language of the essay is more straightforward and philosophical and less lyrical than the language of Chicago: City on the Make. It also echoes T. S. Eliot in the repeated line “between the H Bomb and the A.” Eliot writes in “The Hollow Men” that “Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Lies the shadow.” Algren makes the reference despite his opinion that Eliot was a “deeply reactionary ham.” Algren assumes familiarity with the Eliot poem without directly quoting it—his essay is about the shadow cast by fear over the nation’s freedom and creativity.

  The essay that came to be called “Nonconformity” is itself an odd fish—not so much an argument as a rant or a cri de coeur—a work of literary criticism that also condemns 1950s American culture. It is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” which had attacked both the savagery of war and the false piety that upheld it. And like “War Prayer,” Algren’s full essay was not published until after his death, by Seven Stories Press in 1996.

  Versions of it did make it into print—through the Daily News story, the Nation’s reprint, and in a piece that appeared as “Things of the Earth: A Groundhog’s View” in the Pacific Citizen in December of
1952. The sentiments are repeated in another Nation article, “Eggheads Are Rolling: The Rush to Conform,” on October 17, 1953, which goes further in calling out both McCarthy and Time publisher Henry Luce.

  Doubleday had high hopes for the complete essay and was still planning to publish it in the summer of 1953, when critic Maxwell Geismar, an important Algren enthusiast, was asked to write an introduction. “This will be one of the first books they burn: Congratulations,” Geismar wrote Algren. But Doubleday decided the book needed such heavy editing that it sent Timothy Seldes to Gary to help him polish it. Even loving Simone thought that it lacked unity—“made of pieces that do not exactly clutch together.” By September Doubleday had changed its mind and given up the $1,500 advance. Bradley said that he accused Doubleday of being afraid of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others of his kind, a charge Doubleday denied. Seldes told Bradley that there were problems with the essay, primarily its size—the page count in the Seven Stories edition, with heavy quoting from other authors, is less than eighty, even thinner than City on the Make. Seldes said that a big part of Doubleday’s decision not to publish the book was its belief in what would be best for Algren. But Nelson was disappointed, and sent the essay to his agent Madeleine Brennan to seek an alternate publisher. Either the post office or Brennan lost it. Algren later turned over his only carbon copy to Bradley, giving up on the idea of ever publishing it himself.

  In August of 1952, Nelson got a letter from Simone about a new man in her life—a twenty-seven-year-old blue-eyed, black-haired journalist named Claude Lanzmann, now best known for his Holocaust movie Shoah. She told Nelson that they had spent the night together, and planned a real affair after she returned from a trip to Italy. Yet she had a recurring dream that she would be buried with Nelson’s ring on her finger.