Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  Back in Chicago in the spring, Nelson kept writing reviews and going to parties. He told Stephen Deutch he wanted nothing more than to have his own place by the lake, like Deutch had, but ideally in San Francisco, so he could look at the ocean. But he could not afford it, and still had not landed on a new, big project. Longing for society, Nelson would go to O’Rourke’s north of the Loop, where he had an unrequited crush on the Japanese American bar owner, Jeanette Sullivan. It was a crummy kind of place, a favorite of journalists and eccentrics, with tables made of shellacked plywood, and no air-conditioning, but with portraits of the great Irish writers Yeats and Joyce hanging on the wall. Bagpipers would come in for free drinks, and sometimes a patron would feel inspired enough by an old song on the jukebox to climb up on a table and sing. Mike Royko would often be there, in a bedraggled trench coat, ready to drink after turning out his daily column, and Studs Terkel, and Roger Ebert, then a young, feisty, round-bodied film critic in horn-rimmed glasses. While Algren complained later that he was not appreciated in Chicago, everyone at places like O’Rourke’s and the Old Town Ale House and the Billy Goat Tavern knew who he was and “gave him his props,” according to Bruce Elliott, who later became part owner of the Ale House and painted a picture of Algren that still hangs on the tavern wall. Even Royko, who deferred to nobody, would defer to Algren. When Royko, Terkel, and Algren would sit together at the bar, like a trio of old vaudevillians, it was obvious that Algren was the leader, the one they listened to the most, Elliott said. A story he liked to tell was of “Lost Ball” Stahouska, a crook more guilt ridden about trying to hide the ball at a softball game than about robbing a store, because everybody did that. It was the Chicago idea of corruption—it was OK if everyone did it.

  Occasionally, Algren would get into some kind of argument with someone at the bar—once it devolved into people throwing cocktail limes and lemons at one another. On another occasion Algren got into a quarrel with hard-drinking columnist Tom Fitzpatrick that ended with Algren pinging a shot glass off Fitzpatrick’s head. Ebert would arrive at O’Rourke’s on Thursday nights with a group of young women from a film class. Algren would sit in Ebert’s booth, and the girls would hang on his every word. In his early sixties, Nelson could still appeal to women, despite his gray hair and paunch.

  One of the women he dated in the early 1970s was young Denise DeClue, an aspiring writer from the University of Missouri who had first met Nelson at a writers’ conference in Boulder, Colorado. DeClue remembered being taken out to dinner by a group of older writers, including Algren, who had “adopted” her for the weekend. She decided to try cherries jubilee for dessert; this resulted in a round of teasing about her virginity by the old hacks at the table. She responded with spirit, by smacking Nelson in the face with whipped cream. “I was being a jerk, wasn’t I?” Nelson admitted, and told her if she was ever in Chicago, she should look him up.

  So when Denise finished college and came to Chicago in the summer of 1970, she called Nelson and told him she was in suburban Berwyn, with a boyfriend, and could they come visit? He told her she should come visit, but without the boyfriend. Denise and Nelson dated for about six months. She remembered how kind and fun he was, and how curious to hear everything she thought about the world. In the apartment on Evergreen, he played her Lenny Bruce and Billie Holiday records, and gave her books about the 1950s blacklist, which continued to trouble him. But he was never didactic, never professorial. “What do you think about this?” he would ask, genuinely interested in her opinion. She did not remember him working on much of his own writing at the time, other than book reviews. He helped her sell a story about the illegal abortion issue to Christopher Chandler, who had started the new publication Chicago Free Press. Algren had been digging up material from the bottom of a dresser drawer to give to Chandler to publish. DeClue started dating Chandler, but that did not stop Algren from being friendly with them both. “I knew one day you’d be there, and the next day you wouldn’t,” he told her simply when she told him it was over.

  Another woman saw a different side to Nelson—a harsher, meaner one. Nelson’s friend Marilew Kogan had a sister named Ginny, lovely but emotionally fragile, a “Blanche DuBois” type who liked to do paintings at the lakefront. Rick Kogan remembered going out to lunch with his aunt at the Wrigley Building, and Ginny asking, at an attention-getting volume, if Rick was nice to his girlfriend after they had sex. Embarrassed that his aunt was asking about his sex life, Kogan said yes, he thought so.

  “Nelson never did that,” Ginny said. “He was not nice to me after we had sex. After he would FUCK me, he didn’t say a word!” She said the expletive so loudly that the maître d’ had to ask them to leave. They left for Riccardo’s, where Ginny told Rick sadly that Nelson was a “beast” to women and she thought he only slept with her because he could not have Marilew.

  A significant woman friend of Nelson’s from the 1970s was McNear, a blonde, blue-eyed, delicate-featured Wisconsin native with three young daughters. Suzanne was an editor for Playboy’s fiction section, and she and a fellow editor had invited Nelson and Studs to a dinner party in 1970. Nelson fell asleep and Suzanne was surprised to find him still in her home when she got up in the morning, reading a book. “I don’t think you have all the right books in your collection,” Nelson said. She responded, in defense, that she had been moving a lot. “There are a lot of things you need, including mine,” he said.

  Soon thereafter he brought her a pile of his books to read, and they became friends, though not lovers, meeting regularly for drinks and dinner. He loved her daughters, and liked to take them out to the circus and matinees at the Goodman Theater. He also introduced them to his friend, the French mime Marcel Marceau. Suzanne’s youngest, Mary, was so pleased with their excursions that she got jealous when he once brought along another little girl, and would not speak to Nelson for a week.

  His mischievous quality did not fade with age—every time he and Suzanne visited a bookshop together, he would steal a book. He would also steal from individuals—a fan sent him a first edition of one of his books to ask if he would sign it. Instead, he sold it. “I don’t have any money and nobody’s giving me any,” was how he explained it.

  “He was a troublemaker—just for the sport of it,” McNear said.

  The writing Nelson submitted during this period was often in rough shape, according to his editors. John Blades, then the book editor of the Chicago Tribune, was a longtime fan of Algren’s who was excited to have him start writing reviews and occasional feature articles for a paper that had given him some hard criticism in the past. But the feature articles Algren submitted were often recycled from previously published work, and some of the reviews needed a lot of editing, Blades said. “I had to ask him to revise,” Blades said. Sometimes the copy would come loaded with land mines. Blades remembered how Algren’s review of a biography of his old friend Ring Lardner of the Hollywood Ten was a tirade against the author of the book, Jonathan Yardley, who never forgave Blades for it. Algren’s critique of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop contained what Blades believed was an attack against former director Paul Engle, who was married to a Chinese woman. Algren’s article mocked Engle for his “odes to fried rice.” Blades said the reference had nothing to do with the rest of the article, and would not have been recognized by anyone but Engle and people who knew him, but was purely malicious and made the poet so furious that his assistant told Blades he would have strangled Algren if he could get near him. “It was just this perversity he had,” Blades said of Algren. “It was like a smiling cobra.”

  Blades said that while he knew the Tribune was not getting Algren’s best work, it was still distinctly Algren—a unique and valuable voice. Nelson also took the work of criticism seriously—he declined, for example, to review a book by his friend Kay Boyle because he did not want to hurt their friendship if he didn’t like it. McNear said that when Algren reviewed a book, he liked to go back and read the author’s previous work. “He spent a lot of time on
it,” she said.

  Clarus Backes, another Tribune book editor, had harsher memories. Backes wrote after Algren died that assigned articles would arrive “all but unprintable—disorganized, hastily done, filled with extraneous opinion and meaningless asides. We used it anyway, of course, after heavy rewriting, but I always felt a bit guilty doing so. We were cynically trading on his name under false pretenses because in fact much of what finally appeared—mediocre at best, even after all the changes—was not his work at all.”

  One Tribune feature that was a real success was Algren’s commentary on Edward Hopper’s paintings. Algren had dismissed his piece to Blades as just “a bunch of captions,” but it was a unique analysis of both Hopper’s work and his own—two artists who depicted American outsiders. Algren got $500 for the article, and he immediately spent all of it taking Blades, McNear, and other friends out for a fancy dinner at a Gold Coast restaurant.

  In 1973 Algren tried another miscellany book—this time a mix of fiction, criticism, and reporting that he called The Last Carousel, after the last story in the collection. Almost every piece was what he called “old lumber”—it had been published previously, and often revised. It included a rewrite of his childhood memories from Who Lost an American?, a few racetrack and whorehouse stories, pieces of the never-finished Entrapment, his letters from Vietnam, and a sentimental essay about the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, with the theory that they had been shot because their crimes were so much smaller than the kind practiced by big business. The collection provides a sampler of Algren’s writing style in the last part of his career, from the colorful reporting of the Saigon chapters to nostalgia about Chicago at the start of the twentieth century to the poisonous criticism of academia in “Tinkle Hinkle and the Footnote King” and “Hand in Hand Through the Greenery.” There are also some absurdist pieces—“Could World War I Have Been a Mistake?” imagines a traveling show that featured Vaslav Nijinsky hitting Sergei Diaghilev with a nine-pound mackerel. First published in Audience in January of 1971, Nelson’s story appeared a year before the Monty Python comedy troupe broadcast its fish-slapping dance routine. Popular culture was finally catching up with Nelson’s brand of humor.

  The Last Carousel was by no means Algren’s best book, but the quality of the pieces overall was superior to the travel books, and the reviews were strong. The Chicago Daily News gave the book a full-page feature review, calling it Algren’s best in twenty years. “Algren is one of those who writes by ear, saving a well-turned phrase, in love with the music that words make,” the paper wrote. The San Francisco, Washington, and New York papers all came in with praise, too, with James Frakes at the New York Times Book Review raving that this was Algren “at the top of his form.” While he quibbled with some of the selections, and some of the hokier turns of phrase like “fly-a-kite-spring,” Frakes said that it was about time there was a new Algren book. “When we’ve a living American writer as sure-footed and fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it’s almost criminal not to have something of his in hardcovers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in.”

  But The Last Carousel was not a big seller. Bill Targ at Putnam had been unhappy with the shape the “unspeakable manuscript” had been in. He complained to Algren that he sweated weekends at home and in the office over it. “Many or most editors would not have allowed some of the trivia to appear between covers,” Targ wrote, but he was trying to keep Algren happy. Algren, for his part, blamed Putnam for the weak sales. He was furious because he said the books were distributed erratically, and some of those positive reviews came in weeks before the books arrived at stores, leaving book buyers who might have been interested after seeing the review with no way to get it. He told Candida Donadio that the book did not come out in some stores until two weeks before Christmas, and that it had sold only nine thousand copies. In an interview with Henry Kisor of the Chicago Daily News, Algren called Targ “an inept blob.” Targ responded in a letter to Algren that he was an “inhuman turd … a liar, an ingrate and shithead.” Nelson found this response so amusing he kept it folded up in his wallet to show friends. He eventually severed his relationship with Putnam, which had carried him through two books.

  Nelson was still talking about how much he had admired In Cold Blood, and in 1973 found a subject for a factual crime story of his own in the murder conviction of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, from Paterson, New Jersey. Algren had been following Carter’s career as a middleweight contender since it began in 1961—he kept news clippings of Carter’s fights. In June of 1966, two black men entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and shot the bartender, a male customer, and a female customer, all white. The men died immediately, while the woman died a month later. Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley, white convicted felons who had been near the bar that night to burglarize a factory, identified a white car leaving the scene as resembling Carter’s. They later identified Carter as one of two black men they saw carrying weapons outside the bar the night of the murder. But an actual witness from inside the bar, who had been shot in the eye, did not pick Carter as one of the shooters. Carter had weapons and bullets in his car, but they did not match the kind of bullets used in the shooting. Alibi witnesses placed Carter at a different bar at the time of the shooting, and Carter passed a lie-detector test when he was first arrested. Despite the problems with the evidence, in 1967 Carter and his friend John Artis were convicted of the triple murder and sentenced to life in prison. The story was a good fit for Algren, as a fight fan and a skeptic of American justice, especially for African Americans, and Esquire assigned him to write an article about the Carter case in early 1974.

  To learn more about it, Algren went to New Jersey to meet with Fred Hogan, an investigator for the New Jersey Public Defender’s Office who was convinced that Bello and Bradley were lying. They hit it off at once, and Hogan arranged for Algren to meet other investigators, and to talk to Rubin Carter himself in prison; Algren found Carter both intelligent and sane. According to Hogan, Algren was a thorough reporter, going to the Lafayette Bar to study how the murders happened and talking to people around the hardscrabble city about what they saw. Hogan said he had to warn Algren to be careful—it was a rough town and people were still upset about the case—but Algren showed no fear, even trying to rent rooms above the Lafayette so he could be closer to the scene. He never talked about himself as a famous writer, Hogan remembered. “I didn’t really know how well-known he was,” said Hogan, who had Algren over for Christmas dinner with his family. “He was a real down-to-earth-guy, a knock-about guy, always a little disheveled.” Hogan also remembered that Algren drank a lot, and ate a lot of junk. When Esquire, Playboy, and then the New Yorker turned down the story, Nelson became even more interested in the case. He wanted to turn it into a book—a true-crime story that could be as big a hit as In Cold Blood. Fred suggested that Nelson move to New Jersey to better understand the case, and Nelson took him up on it. It was for the same reason he went back to South Texas to work on Somebody in Boots—he needed to be near his subject to write about it. As he explained later, “The only way I could work is up close.”

  Nelson’s announcement in 1975 that he was leaving Chicago, the city most identified with his writing, hit the local newspaper and literary community like a tornado. Why would he leave Chicago, the backdrop to his own legend, for Paterson, of all the woebegone places in the world? Nelson gave various explanations, often joking, sometimes bitter. In a joke interview with Studs Terkel, he explained portentously that Paterson was an up-and-coming community, a new leader in welfare cases. He claimed to Steve Deutch that this all had to do with his long-standing desire to move to San Francisco. “I am only two hours from New York harbor now where I can get a ship to Barcelona or Marseille, and from there to a Greek or Cretian port, hence the Persian Gulf and down to the Indian Ocean around Yokohama and Tokyo. I won’t stop in Korea because that would be going out of my way. And from Japan to Manila is a comparatively short distance. Any fre
ight ship can make San Diego from Manila. In two weeks. Then I am only 45 minutes by air from San Francisco. So it all fits exactly as I planned.” He told Mike Royko over dinner that he was moving because he felt like moving.

  In other venues he was more theatrically gloomy. In a Chicago magazine article, he recalled the past glories of Carl Sandburg and Richard Wright, Barney Ross and Tony Zale, and the now-vanished Riverview and White City amusement parks. Kids these days who wanted to be writers went to creative writing school, instead of living life, he groused. He saw a city of consumption for its own sake, with men honoring the phony glories of Playboy. He did not mention, in this article, his own hurt at not being invited to Playboy’s twentieth anniversary party, which had been filled with other writers. McNear said the snub had been a serious blow. But in public Algren preferred to look like he did not care what Playboy or anyone else thought of him. He pretended not to care, and did not mention that all his books except a paperback edition of The Last Carousel were out of print in 1975. Even the new independent publisher Chicago Review Press had to regretfully turn down Nelson and Studs’s request to bring them out again. “So say sayonara and then goodbye, old broken-nose-whore of a city in whose arms I’ve slept ten thousand nights,” Nelson wrote. “I won’t sleep in them again.”

  In another interview he compared Chicago to a woman who looked good when you married her but after twenty-five years looked like hell. The city had changed. His old neighborhood had changed—the Poles were moving out, up farther northwest along Milwaukee Avenue or to the suburbs, being replaced by Puerto Ricans. “I’m out of touch with the people now. The Puerto Ricans don’t talk,” he told a young reporter. He knew less Polish than Spanish, so the trouble was that he had stopped trying. He had also lost Mary Corley, his housekeeper—his friend Stuart McCarrell said her death had been terribly upsetting.