The reviews for the travel books were mixed, from amused to downright hostile. In a review of Who Lost an American? headlined Intellectual as Ape Man, Time complained that the “wheedling, folksy tone of the huckster … comes from the mouth of a man who once had a real gold watch to sell and not a brass turnip.” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Robert Lowry characterized the book as “surrealist and grotesque.” Arlo Karlen in the New York Times was especially harsh, claiming that what had begun as Algren’s “small but unique gift became a habit, and finally a tic, a machine clanking out a self-intoxicating gabble of Algrenisms.” Karlen compared his attacks on his literary critics to the swagger of a “tough-sentimental literary lush” on a bar stool, vowing to take on any critic in the house, “his breath stronger than his brains.” Between Kazin and Karlen, Algren began to think the Times was out to get him. The Chicago Tribune’s Lester Goran said Sea Diary reminded him of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” “Freaks, finks and creeps abound, but there is no higher purpose than a sideshow.”
In between the travel books, Nelson was able to tell stories and give opinions in a different way through a series of in-depth interviews with writer H. E. F. Donohue. These became the book Conversations with Nelson Algren, published by Hill & Wang in 1964. With Donohue as an active, often skeptical questioner, Nelson spoke of his childhood, his army days and early novels, as well as his opinions on American foreign policy. He also stepped up his attacks on American literary criticism and on Simone de Beauvoir, arguing that to publicize their affair meant that it must never have meant much in the first place.
This was not, however, the final dagger in his friendship with Simone. That came when Nelson’s own publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, came out with the English translation of Simone’s autobiographical volume Force of Circumstance in 1965. An excerpt had been published in Harper’s in December 1964. Nelson got the proofs from Putnam editor Bill Targ that January, and wrote Simone a handful of what she called “bitter, cruel and terrible” letters. He then took his bile public with an essay called “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir,” ostensibly a review but really a personal attack. In Force of Circumstance, Simone did not hide Nelson under the veil of a fictional character but rather gave details of their affair, admitting how much she dictated its terms based on Sartre’s needs, and quoted some of Nelson’s letters to her, which Nelson had given her permission to do. In his response Algren criticized the “asphyxiating” dullness of her writing, but his special venom is reserved for her sexual views. “Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped,” he wrote. “Procurers are more honest than philosophers.” He never revealed in the review that Beauvoir was talking about their relationship—he did not have to. He ended the piece by imagining that Saigon might fall and the world might crumble, but Beauvoir would keep droning on about her sex life and Sartre and skiing. “Will she ever stop talking?”
The letters between them stopped and the friendship was dead. They had both killed it—Nelson with his bitter words, and Simone by violating their privacy. Knowing his anger over the veiled version of their affair in The Mandarins, where he had appeared as Lewis Brogan, she had nevertheless chosen to take it even further, and then was surprised by his reaction. The Mandarins had at least made him look like a good lover—Force of Circumstance made him look like an emotional cuckold and a fool. Whoever was most to blame, the result was clear: that source of support for Nelson—the love, the encouragement, the introductions to new ideas and new parts of the world, the help with foreign translations that exposed him to new audiences—was gone forever.
13
GOOD-BYE TO CHICAGO
Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.
—EUGENE DEBS
But I tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.
—LUKE 4:24
In early 1965 Nelson decided to roll the dice on two big changes in his life. The first was another marriage. He had told H. E. F. Donohue he would consider marrying again if he met an attractive woman in her thirties—still young enough for kids and able to cook. In December of 1964, he started dating somebody who almost fit the bill—a forty-year-old widow named Betty Ann Jones, a petite, dark-haired off-Broadway actress. They went out a few times—their dates included a repeat of the visit he had made with Simone to the electric chair—before Nelson proposed. They married on February 27, 1965, less than three months after they had started seeing each other. Nelson claimed later that he had fallen for Betty’s self-image as an actress, while she had fallen for his self-image as a writer. John Clellon Holmes described her as a “handsome, savvy woman, with a sharp eye out.” But Stephen Deutch’s eye was sharper, and he saw trouble ahead—he thought Nelson’s and Betty’s personalities were too different for them to stay together.
Nelson had eccentric ideas about marriage, said Suzanne McNear, who knew better than to accept a proposal. “His idea of marriage was that it would be convenient,” McNear said. “Maybe somebody would cook or clean the house or be available for a drink.”
Betty’s first surprise was that he insisted on separate bedrooms. “He had no schedule,” Betty later told Nelson’s friend Jan Herman, a journalist and critic. “He’d wake up in the middle of the night and go to the typewriter for three minutes, then go back to bed.” It is clear she did not know what she was getting into—she told Studs Terkel that living with Nelson was like being with a “wheel on fire.”
Nelson’s second big gamble that year was to finally accept some of that “campus gold,” and go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to teach. “How little bullshit can I get away with?” Algren asked Holmes. Holmes told him that for anyone who liked to talk about books and writing, it was a license to steal. “A simplification I came to regret,” Holmes wrote.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which had gained an international reputation under former director Paul Engle, was about as far in character as one could be from Chicago—out among the cornfields in Iowa City. Betty, who had taught theater classes in New York City, also got a job in Iowa, teaching in the communications department. They arrived in the fall of 1965, and he settled into a job for which he was not at all suited. He did not believe writing could be taught and had a disdain for anyone who thought it could be—that is, his students and his employers. One of his students at the workshop was John Irving, who would write The World According to Garp. Irving was attracted by Algren’s “rough charm” but realized that Algren did not care for the small town, the prep school boy, or his writing. “The best tutor for a young writer, in Mr. Algren’s clearly expressed view, was real life, by which I think he meant an urban life,” Irving remembered. Algren learned that some of his students were there to avoid going to Vietnam, while some hoped for teaching jobs. He saw no future Hemingways or Faulkners out there—the only two students he thought wrote good English were not native speakers. After he left Iowa, he would frequently attack the workshop as a con for the gullible—like the Famous Writers School that told all prospects they could be writers as long as they could pay for lessons. Nelson believed that in order to write, students had to live and form their own personalities. Serious creative writing was a solitary journey, not a group holiday. Nelson joked that he was in favor of writing workshops since they paid him more than he got paid for actual writing. “But the young people to whom I talk are not the ones who are going to do any serious writing themselves. If they were they wouldn’t be listening to how someone else does it: they’d be doing it their own way, by themselves; without literary field trips through the dead past.” After one of Algren’s many attacks on the writers’ workshop was published in the Chicago Tribune, Engle wrote back to angrily defend the school he had helped establish, citing the awards won by its students. Pointedly, he referred to Nelson as a “former novelist.”
Writer Burns Ellison loved Algren so much he returned to the workshop when he heard Algren was teaching th
ere. In a memoir about the workshop, Ellison remembered how Algren used to mimeograph piles of stories by Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and James Leo Herlihy for class study, instead of the students’ own. He would also bring stacks of magazines, newspapers, and book review sections, pile them on his desk, and allow students to help themselves. The classes often started late and ended early—Burns remembered that Nelson was uncomfortable presiding over a class discussing literature and the art of fiction. “The only times he seemed to feel at ease were when he dispensed with talking about the Art of Fiction and told his stories, his anecdotes about hookers and pimps, junkies and barflies.” Once he read aloud from “How the Devil Came Down Division Street.” But classroom attendance soon fell off—with students either quitting the workshop or switching to another teacher. “They had enjoyed hearing his stories about Life’s Losers, but only up to a point; after all they were Life’s Winners,” Ellison wrote.
Algren also was interested in talking with his students about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was serialized in the New Yorker in the fall of 1965 before coming out as a book in January. With a lot of uncredited help from his friend Harper Lee, Capote had reported on the murder of an Iowa farm family by two drifters. The book had accomplished two goals that Nelson always wanted for himself—it had evoked sympathy for people who had seemed unforgivable, and it had made a lot of money. Algren had always managed the first goal but not the second, and his obsession with the Capote book seemed to be a sign that he wanted to modernize his own style, according to Vonnegut, who taught at Iowa at the same time. “There he was, a master storyteller, blasted beyond all reason with admiration for and envy of a moderately innovative crime story…. For a while in Iowa, he could talk of little else.”
Out there among the young would-be literati and late winter snow, Nelson’s obsession with poker grew to alarming proportions. Under the misapprehension that Iowa was full of rubes who did not know how to play, he started attending a weekly poker game in the basement of a local named Gilroy, whose wife provided sandwiches and collected three dollars from each player. Neglecting his own wife, Nelson became a regular fixture at the games, smoking cigars, drinking coffee and brandy out of a thermos, and losing to everybody. He played for high stakes, and terribly, giving up pot after pot, calling and raising on hands he had no business playing while “cackling gleefully at his own corny jokes.” Ellison recalled how one game lasted until 6:00 pm the following night, with Nelson $1,200 in the hole. But Nelson was so committed to the games that one night he risked his life going out into an Iowa blizzard. His fellow players assumed that he had lost half his salary to gambling that year. Vonnegut believed that Nelson lost not only his salary, but Betty’s, too.
Betty told Nelson that he was a “compulsive loser” and ought to see a psychiatrist. It is interesting that she said “loser” and not “gambler”—she saw him as addicted to losing. “She says I got a problem,” he said over cards at Gilroy’s one night. “Now is that what you think?” “Deal, Nelson, deal,” one of the sharks responded, and Nelson did not get an answer to his question. By June of that year, the lady he liked to call Betty Boop had asked for a divorce. Like his characters, Nelson had once again had a chance at love, but had not managed to hang on to it. When they left Iowa, Betty lived alone on Evergreen while Nelson went to southern Illinois to visit horseracing friends at Cahokia Downs, near East St. Louis. Nelson was hoping to get a racetrack novel out of his observations of the jockeys, owners, and gamblers. He even invested in a horse called Jealous Widow—also known as Algren’s Folly. Either name could have been in homage to Betty. It was not a lucky horse—Algren advised friends not to bet on her, though he could not avoid doing it himself. Nelson and Betty stayed on friendly terms for several years after the divorce—unlike Amanda, she had not asked for anything but Mugsie the cat and her red Nash Rambler. There was not much else. By January of 1967, she was back in New York, writing Nelson friendly letters about trying to get acting jobs. The marriage had lasted, as Vonnegut put it, “about as long as a soap bubble. His enthusiasm for writing, reading, and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man.” He would spend the rest of his life as a bachelor.
After a summer with the racetrack people, Nelson returned to Chicago, and, as usual, found he had an easier time writing when he was alone in the house. In November of 1966, the Saturday Evening Post picked up his short story “A Ticket on Skoronski,” his first piece of published new fiction since the Post had printed the racetrack story “The Moon of the Arfy Darfy” in 1964, a story that included characters from the abandoned Entrapment. “Going on the Arfy Darfy” is a racetrack expression for someone who leaves without paying a debt—Nelson had hoped to write a novel with the title, but for now short stories were what he could manage. “Skoronski” goes back to the neighborhood setting, and depicts an old man dying in a tavern while the rest of the barflies keep playing poker, barely acknowledging the tragedy. In an exchange reminiscent of Gilroy’s basement, one character tries to talk about a dream, only to be told to shut up and deal. The story ends in mourning, with Lottie-Behind-Bar putting down her head to cry, and saying that God will punish.
The story is a revision of an older story, “Say a Prayer for the Old Guy,” published in 1958. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Nelson kept revising and recycling, with versions of the same stories and essays reappearing in different publications. His kindly agent, Candida Donadio, would tell him, “Those are bits and pieces, Nelson, bits and pieces,” Suzanne McNear said. A major source of income through the late 1960s was the sale of his manuscripts to Ohio State University’s archive for $20,000, paid over three years. Old letters and early drafts of his old books were bringing in more money than his new stories were.
He did not seem to have the energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s to write anything long. “It was running out of steam, more than anything,” said McNear. She also thought he drank “way too much,” though few of Nelson’s friends and acquaintances thought he was an alcoholic. Part of his socializing was just loneliness—he wanted to be out with people, where things were happening. One of these social excursions, with some East St. Louis friends in early 1967, led to an arrest for marijuana possession. The 1957 Cadillac matched the description of one that had been used in a burglary, and police found “a quantity of marijuana” inside, according to the arrest record. In his Chicago Police mug shot, the fifty-seven-year-old writer looks old, weary, and surprised. The charge was dropped.
Nelson continued to be disgusted by US politics, particularly the continued US involvement with the Vietnam War, which he regarded as “the crime of the century.” In August of 1968, the national anguish over the war was centered in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Mayor Daley’s orders to firmly control protesters outside the convention were carried to extremes by the Chicago police, who beat up protesters, clergymen, reporters, and even passersby in what was later termed a police riot by an official government report. Daley excused it all with the claim that the officials knew of plans to assassinate political leaders, including him, so he had taken certain necessary precautions. The assassination notion was not substantiated, and the riot showcased Mayor Daley’s Chicago just as Nelson had described it in his 1961 after-word to City on the Make: this Chicago is a place where the “punitive cats have the upper hand.”
Though he had said just a year earlier in a magazine interview that he did not want to go to Vietnam to cover the war, Nelson changed his mind in 1968, leaving in mid-November from San Francisco to Tokyo, and from there to Saigon, writing up travel stories that were published in the Critic, a Chicago Catholic literary magazine. Nelson liked Tokyo—he was impressed by the energy, the focus on personal dignity even in a place of twelve million people, and the cleanliness. He saw a great interest in the arts and writing—and correctly envisioned Tokyo one day being like Paris in the 1880s, a center of the artistic world. He also professed to like the humble subservience of their women. The se
xism in some of his writing from this trip is appalling, coming from the man who helped inspire The Second Sex and so thoroughly eviscerated Hugh Hefner. Nelson decided that the “Oriental” woman was more graceful and possessed more poise than an American woman because she knows she is a woman. “The reason the American woman over-dresses, flops when she sits, strides when she walks, booms when she speaks and gets stoned on half a martini, is because she doesn’t feel sure she is a woman.” He also alleged that American women claim to want virility, and then try to destroy it when they find it. He did acknowledge that as attractive as Asian women could be, Asian men were bored with them. His crude depictions of Asian accents also date these stories—a modern reader’s enjoyment of his description of sumo wrestling is marred when a Japanese friend declares that betting is “irregal.”
In Saigon he found corruption, poverty, and sadness. Nelson did not really cover the war, but found another version of Algren Country—gambling on battling crickets instead of horses, and whores who had to turn over what they made to the cops and the “mama-sans.” He told Joel Wells, his editor at the Critic, that Saigon seemed like less of a war town than a boomtown, with only the very rich and the very poor. Here, he was rich, and though he criticized aspects of the trade in prostitutes in the Orient, he also was a customer. While staying at the Hotel Victoria, he found a thriving black market along the Tran Hung-Dao, Saigon’s equivalent of Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue, which leads into the Chinese ghetto. As he had back in Marseille, he tried to make some cash off selling goods from the American army PX—cigarettes and toothpaste and tape recorders. But this time, instead of gambling with generals for high stakes, his black market efforts led to him getting beaten up in an argument over price. He would not try a similar adventure again. Ironically, it was after this Vietnam trip that the FBI’s investigation of Nelson finally came to an end. He was no longer seen as a threat to the nation—that would have disappointed him, had he known.
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