Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  Nelson did not write Simone again for two months after she told him about Claude, who moved into Simone’s red-curtained, fifth-floor flat at Rue de la Bûcherie. In the meantime Amanda returned to Indiana for a long summer visit. After she got back to California, he teased in a letter that she had a lot of nerve making him ask her to marry him, when all along he had been waiting for her to ask him. “Leap year, silly,” he teased, referring to the old tradition that this was the only time women could propose. “And I’m not getting any younger.” He suggested they do it in Paris, where everything would be luckier, instead of Gary—he had a gambler’s trust in luck. He decided to wait a little before springing the news on Goldie, though he suspected the old lady was probably already figuring things out.

  This sudden proposal and the wish to marry in France sounds like spite—Conroy thought it was. But Nelson’s letters to Amanda during this period show strong affection—he calls her Baby Tiger—though not a passionate love, and after the initial stunned silence he continued to write to Simone. It may have been that the man writing about nonconformity wanted a little conformity. Simone’s declaration of a new romance was a goad for him to stop brooding and claim something of his own. Nelson’s friend Denise DeClue said that despite his revolutionary writing, Nelson was an “old-fashioned guy” when it came to relationships, and his heart was where his body was. “I must have loved Amanda,” Nelson told Art Shay. “I married her twice.”

  It was a big sacrifice for Amanda—to give up a good job as a secretary with the Screen Writers Guild, leave all her friends and longtime home in Los Angeles, and come to suburban Indiana to be with a man who had mistreated her in the past. It was also a sacrifice for Nelson—he should have remembered from past experience he did not work well with Amanda around. He was a “sap,” Nelson later confessed to novelist John Clellon Holmes. But the letters Nelson sent Amanda through the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 contain no reservations, only practical details about whether to bring her typewriter, and how to safely pack the car. He also gave her news of Bubu, who had had a litter of kittens in Nelson’s bedroom. Nelson and Amanda were both cat lovers—Amanda was bringing her own small, tidy Susan, pampered with a high-priced diet of fresh liver. They also talked about having children. Amanda was not yet forty, and it was not too late. Simone told Nelson he would be a nice father, though a moody one.

  Simone, happy in her relationship with Claude and always generous, suggested in November that Nelson and Amanda come to Paris for a honeymoon trip—without even knowing their plans. “She knows how things are before you tell her, every time,” Nelson wrote. “What can you do with somebody like that?” Nelson paid a deposit of $170 for a cabin on the SS Liberté, a French line, sailing March 24. He joked that is was just as well they were getting out of the country for a while—the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower had just made everything worse.

  It was already worse than he thought. After many anxious weeks of waiting to get his passport, he learned in a March 3, 1953, letter that it had been denied due to allegations of Communist Party activities. Shocked, Nelson wrote the passport office that he was not a Communist, nor had he recently terminated party membership, but his appeal was in vain. He had always felt so free to travel—and now it was as if the blue steel bars of Brewster County Jail had come down around all forty-eight states. The SS Liberté returned sixty dollars of his cabin deposit. Amanda and Nelson were committed to going ahead with the marriage anyway, without the good luck of Paris. After Amanda had come back to Chicago, Van Allen Bradley remembered meeting them for drinks at Riccardo’s, one of Nelson’s favorite restaurants north of the Loop, and Nelson “proudly and rather schoolboyishly” showing off Amanda’s engagement ring.

  Amanda and Nelson remarried on March 16, 1953—just over sixteen years to the day of their first attempt. For a few months, they seemed to enjoy their conventional roles, with Amanda doing the shopping and cooking dinners for Nelson while he worked on the “Nonconformity” essay and sketches for a new novel. But the relationship deteriorated quickly. The house was all Nelson—his books, his piles of papers, his insomniac habits, his pictures of Simone. Amanda, an intellectual, sophisticated woman who had been an independent professional in California for the last ten years, was suddenly confining herself to a back bedroom in the tiny Miller house to give Nelson space to write, just as she had stayed late downtown while they lived together on Evergreen. This time it was worse, since she did not have the distraction of an outside job. It was a small house for realizing disappointments—a white-sided prison with a lilac bush in the yard.

  Nelson became moody and depressed, especially after the execution of the Rosenbergs in June. Eisenhower had denied their appeal on June 19, declaring that “by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.” The couple was executed in the Sing Sing electric chair that evening—it took several tries to kill Ethel, and at the end smoke was rising from her curly black hair. Nelson thought capital punishment was the worst kind of murder, since in an ordinary murder a person might fight back and have hope, and not be sure of death until it came. But in a state-sponsored murder, the victim knew the day and hour, and had the agony of waiting. “Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands,” he told Studs. “There is no torture in the world more terrible.” He wondered what worse things the McCarthy era could bring.

  In letters to Simone, Nelson spoke of his depression, calling himself the “American Prisoner.” He paced the house, unable to stack sentences like the good bricklayer he had been while writing The Man with the Golden Arm. He asked Amanda how she thought this was a marriage. She protested that they should keep trying—they could grow old together. She continued to have hope for the relationship despite all the evidence against it. “Any man who doesn’t want to be married to me must be some sort of nut,” Amanda told him.

  “I never have been very strong in the head,” Nelson retorted.

  In an unpublished memoir, Nelson compares their two cats, in a manner that suggests he was comparing the personalities of their owners. Bubu is described as a big, raggedy, randy outdoor cat, while petite Susan is clean, sharply observant, well behaved, and disinterested in sex. That’s Nelson’s side—Amanda told biographer Bettina Drew that the stress of trying to live with Nelson during those years gave her a permanent nerve disorder, Raynaud’s disease. “He was cruel to Amanda,” said Dave Peltz.

  Sometimes Nelson would disappear without telling Amanda where he was going, heading into the city on the South Shore train to go to the muddy grounds of the Hawthorne racetrack, or to play poker in the Gold Coast mansion basement of politician Adlai Stevenson’s ex-wife, Ellen. Algren’s friends were continually dismayed over his blind faith in his own poker playing over the years—something that took both money out of his pockets and time away from his typewriter. Shay said that Algren’s poker playing might have cost the world of literature as many as four great novels.

  But it is not clear from Nelson’s life if gambling was a crippling addiction, or just an expensive way to relax—the degree of the problem varied over time. Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and gambling addiction expert from the University of California, Los Angeles, who is familiar with Algren’s life and work, said the writer definitely showed a pattern of gambling addiction. But it is impossible to say in hindsight if Nelson was an addict or just a gambler, which was part of his personality. A person can drink a lot without being an alcoholic, or gamble a lot without having a gambling addiction—it depends on one’s relationship to the supposed vice. “If you live in a world of gambling and that’s the people you surround yourself with and that’s what you do, even if it takes up a lot of money and time and energy, it doesn’t make you make an addict,” Fong said. On the other hand, if someone views gambling as a way of escape and a way to avoid responsibility and mask emotional pain, and he keeps gambling even if he does not enjoy it,
that can be addiction. Fong said the larger question was whether gambling really damaged Algren’s career. He may have been richer if he had stayed away from the track and the poker table, but it is hard to say if his productivity would have increased. Algren’s literary hero, Dostoyevsky, definitely showed the signs of a gambling addiction—and lost nearly all his money at the gaming tables in 1863. It made his financial situation precarious, but does not seem to have harmed him creatively. He used his experience to write the novel The Gambler, dictating it in just a month to pay off debts. The short novel is now seen as a pioneering study of the mind of a disordered gambler—and was followed by some of the writer’s best work, including The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot.

  Whether Nelson’s gambling hurt him as a writer is a chicken-and-egg question—it certainly hurt his financial comfort, which may have led him in later life to take shortcuts, including his increased recycling of old material. His friends remember that despite the money he got from reviews and advances and lectures, he was constantly broke, constantly avoiding the tab, though he picked it up for everybody when he did have money to spend. Peltz remembered going to a restaurant with him and leaving a fifty-cent tip on the table. Nelson claimed to have forgotten something, but he really went back to pick up the tip. However, Nelson’s gambler’s nature might have helped him to be the great writer he was in the first place. The way Nelson’s brain was constructed, he seemed to relish taking big personal and creative risks, living on the ragged edge, and hanging out with a dramatic group of people—and that’s part of the mysterious personal alchemy behind Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, and The Man with the Golden Arm. The same part of Nelson that led him to hop a freight train or steal a typewriter made him play the horses, and that was who he was. “For people who really enjoy gambling, that psychology is combined with seeking new experiences, risking things, not wanting to be tied down to a typical conventional lifestyle, wanting to be your own man and having your own success,” said Fong.

  Nelson’s urge to take bets with long odds sometimes put him on top—using morphine addiction as a topic for a novel in 1949 was risky, and it worked. Ironically, decisions he made to stabilize his personal life during the 1950s also left him less able to take chances in his creative life, because they left him with such a thin cushion for living. If he had put a little of his Golden Arm movie money from Roberts into the bank, and kept living cheaply and alone on Wabansia with a long-distance but artistically supportive relationship with Beauvoir, he could have kept playing the horses regularly and still had the time and money to write novels he wanted to write, with supplements from grants, lectures, and book reviews. But unlike Simone, content with a bohemian existence, Nelson wanted both art and some semblance of a normal home life. The balance is tricky for all creative artists in a country where the making of art has little government support—and Nelson found it impossible. One of his big gambles was on having a normal life, and he got into a situation with Amanda that he could not maintain, and suffered great losses. Poker was not the only way he risked himself.

  Through 1953 and on and off for another decade, Nelson kept trying to write a novel called Entrapment, a love story that involves both drug addiction and horse racing. He typed hundreds of pages, filled with cross-outs and scribbled margin notes. At least part of the novel would be told from a first-person female perspective—which would have been a tremendous development, given that the central women characters in Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm were more interesting than the men. It was a point of view he had used successfully in short stories such as “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” Entrapment’s lead characters are Beth-Mary, also known as “Baby,” and her pimp, Christian, or “Daddy.” The names echo those in the short story “Design for Departure”—with Nelson again tying his hard-luck characters to Catholic icons. Beth-Mary’s background is based partly on Margo’s—a naive teenage girl who has come from the country with an older man who gets her addicted to drugs. Beth-Mary’s nicknames—“baby” and “tiger”—are the same as those Nelson used for Amanda.

  What’s left of the never-finished novel is promising; Beth-Mary is sharper, more observant, and more sarcastic than Nelson’s male narrators. In a section published in 1957 in Playboy as the short story “All Through the Night,” she seems completely aware of the nature of her addiction, and while she knows that Daddy has turned her into a prostitute and separated her from their baby daughter, she does not see herself as his victim. She knows how they are dependent on each other, and indulges his weaknesses, such as his passing fancies to play tennis or clarinet. Daddy, for his part, likes to imagine he can take care of Beth-Mary—no woman of his is going to flip hamburgers for a living, but he will let her do work that is much more degrading. Beth-Mary sees things more clearly than Christian does. Nelson frequently commented that addicts were the most honest people he knew, and of all his major characters, Beth-Mary is the most frank and the least deluded. Unlike Frankie or Bruno, she does not have a mistaken faith in her own talents—and unlike Homer in “So Help Me” or Banty in “Stickman’s Laughter,” she is not trying to talk anyone into anything. She has a witty, outsider’s take on the world—when she sees an old religious calendar on a hotel wall, she figures it must be “BC,” a crack about the crumminess of the room. The story itself is a picaresque muddle of traveling between rooms in different parts of the country, fixes, memories, petty complaints about not being able to wear a mink stole bought on credit, and bits of heroin dreaming. “I woke up with a lawnmower that had one blade missing ricketing around the room, cutting corners and coming back,” Beth-Mary says to herself. “It took me a full minute to realize that the racket was all inside my head.”

  Later republished as “Watch Out for Daddy,” the story is a sharp illustration of the addict’s world—a place without normal divisions of time, but with a strong sense of belonging, created by addict friends and the fix itself. Nelson saw the drug addict as both the ultimate rebel against square 1950s society, as well as its sacrificial, Christlike victim, dying for society’s many sins. He felt like he hadn’t gotten it quite right in The Man with the Golden Arm—in which the drug angle had been an afterthought. After it was published, an addict friend criticized the section in which Frankie talks for four pages after he takes a hit—nobody “on the nod” would have done that. “You know it ain’t so, it ain’t like that,” the friend had told him, and Nelson wanted to get it closer this time, as close as he could get without taking heroin himself.

  Another section of Entrapment is told from Daddy’s point of view, after Beth-Mary has left him to marry a safer man. The manuscript for this piece shows tortured writing and rewriting. What emerges is a mood poem, like the fever dream Steffi Rostenkowski has at Mama Tomek’s in Never Come Morning, with Christian remembering the feel of Beth-Mary, her arms and her breasts and the fresh-washed smell of her body, while he watches the clock tolling away the empty hours. He thinks about drinking, and thinks about when Baby might see him again, though she’s sent him a note saying she’s getting married to a straight named Virgil. He relives in his mind the places of their relationship with tender particularity—“Love in October. Love in the night-blue hours. Love in the hub of the electrified forest. Love by the yellow moon, love wan by the ashes.” He imagines the different ways he could communicate with her again—a telegram, a phone call, or maybe he would have to come and pick up her things, or maybe Virgil will give her up in a couple of years. But Christian, who like Nelson is a veteran and in his midforties, doesn’t move from the hotel room—he keeps looking at the clock and the Christ figure hung above it. His depression and defeat are total—and he seems imprisoned by the “iron rain” and the “iron traffic” outside his room. He imagines himself as Christ sacrificed and looks for nail holes in his palms, “but all he could see in the one was a little handful of light, and all he could see in the other was a small handful of dark.”

  The writing is as beautiful an
d evocative as the best sections of Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm—it is another Edward Hopper painting, an impressionistic reflection of alienation and the loss of love. Nelson’s mind by the late 1950s was flooded with images of loss—he had lost Bernice and Simone and was losing Amanda in the home he had wanted for so long. Nelson rewrote Christian’s scene over and over, and it is exquisite, but it goes nowhere. This time Nelson could not resolve his old problem with plot. He put his early sketches away in a drawer, to work instead on the long-delayed rewrite of Somebody in Boots. He had taken an advance on it from Doubleday, and it was time to deliver. “Under this arrangement you get diverted from a book you really would like to write,” he said ruefully about Entrapment in a July 1963 interview. “One gets diverted, hung up, estranged from something that is really important or significant to you.”

  In redeveloping Somebody in Boots, Nelson at least would be able to skip the work of cutting all new timber, which is how he described his work on Golden Arm. He decided to turn the episodic story of the horrors of the Depression and its effects on one sensitive but ignorant boy into a naughty Horatio Alger story, in which the hero uses his sexual prowess to rise in the world. Comedy is tragedy plus time, and the twenty years that had come between Nelson’s month in the Brewster County Jail and his new, larger prison of Cold War America opened up the story for comic possibilities. “I renamed him Dove Linkhorn and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Nelson wrote. “He stirred for a moment, then sat up grinning.” But the rewrite was a burden to him, adding to the stress of his failing marriage, and he ended up writing a lot of it away from the little house in Gary, instead writing in Missouri, New York, and Florida, and crashing for six weeks at the Conroys’ on the South Side, in an upstairs room. He even revisited New Orleans and the Rio Grande Valley, to again spark memories of his tramping days and, as he joked to McCormick, to see if he could get back that 51 percent interest in the Sinclair gas station. He wished he could escape with his typewriter to France.