Algren
Page 31
After seventy-one years of wandering, Nelson was home. He loved Sag Harbor—he loved his neighbors and his house. He would bicycle around town, a little awkward with his big tummy poking out through his shirt buttons. On warm days he would go swimming in his blue trunks in Noyac Bay, developing a healthy, Long Island retiree’s tan. Sometimes he would take the train into New York, to meet friends or go to the Aqueduct racetrack, or visit prostitutes in Times Square. One time his Chicago pal Bruce Elliott was in town, and he embarrassed Nelson by running into him just as Nelson was coming out of a nudie show.
Nelson felt appreciated by the other writers in Sag Harbor, and early in the winter of 1981, he felt appreciated again by the world of literature at large. He learned that he had been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and would be inducted on May 20. Kurt Vonnegut had put Nelson up for a medal of merit from the academy in the 1970s, but Nelson had not shown up for the ceremony, saying he had to read at a garden party instead. Nelson had not cared about the gold medal—it was not as good as election. And now election had come at last. “This is the turnaround,” he crowed to Pintauro. “Publishers notice.” He gave Joe a copy of The Last Carousel inscribed with the words “For Joe, the man who put an end to my losing streak.” Reporters from major newspapers started asking for interviews. He finally had two of the three things he had always wanted—a home he loved by the real sea, not a secondhand sea, and respect from his peers. He did not have the love of a good woman—an attempt to French-kiss Gloria Jones was met by a gentle reproof—but two out of three were not bad. Jones did agree to act as his date to the induction ceremony—they found each other extremely funny.
On Saturday, May 2, 1981, Nelson arranged to do a reading at Canio’s. He suggested taking two dollars a person for the reading. It seemed a little strange to Canio to ask for a cover charge, but he agreed, and they were able to get a big crowd. Nelson brought over pillows and cushions from his house to help seat the crowd. There was wine and cheese, and Nelson gave a raucous, unscripted performance of the Nijinsky-and-the-fish-slapping-dance story. It was a great success—the little shop was jammed to the walls with people—and at the end, Canio turned over an envelope with $200 to Nelson. Canio, his wife, and a few others were still left, cleaning up the napkins and wineglasses. “Let’s all go to Capuccino’s,” Nelson said, referring to a nice Italian restaurant down the street. There he spent the money on his friends. The next morning, Nelson went back to the shop to collect his pillows and couch cushions—Canio had spent the night sleeping in the back. “He saw all the pillows on the floor and started rolling around, almost drunk with excitement,” Canio remembered. “He was very pleased with all that attention, because he had for a while been so, you know.” Canio held out his hands wide, expressing the years of neglect of Nelson’s work. “He said don’t forget next week—I’ll see you next week.” Nelson was planning an elegant lawn party at his house—like the parties he had on Evergreen in Chicago but with his Sag Harbor friends—to celebrate his election to the academy. The invitations had been sent—Jan Herman was coming all the way from Chicago.
That next Friday Nelson woke up with a heavy feeling in his chest and called a doctor, who recommended that Nelson be checked out at the local hospital. But there was no time to see a doctor—he had a party to give the next day, and an interview scheduled with the British journalist W. J. Weatherby for the Times of London. Nelson posed for a picture by the bay—tanned, happy, and big bellied. With his thin, unruly white hair, he looked like an old sea captain. He spoke with wild enthusiasm to Weatherby about the changing prostitution business in Times Square, the hostility of the Sicilians in Paterson, and Simone de Beauvoir. He was still angry about Force of Circumstance. “I’ve been in whorehouses all over the world and the women there always close the door…. But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press … God, it was terrible.” He indicated the tin box of letters—maybe he should sell them. “Let’s make it all public!” Algren became so agitated that Weatherby began to worry about his health—Algren had told him about the heaviness in his chest. Weatherby decided it was time to go, and Algren invited him to the party the next day, set for 2:00 pm. “I’ve already bought the liquor,” he said—it may have been the last thing he said to anyone.
Early the next morning, Nelson went into his bathroom and suffered a massive heart attack. When he fell he smashed the dial of his watch—setting the time of death at 6:05 am. It was Roy Finer, the big, tough, curly-haired homicide detective, who found him first. Not able to get in touch with Algren and knowing about the 1979 heart attack, Finer had cut open the screen door and found him lying on the bathroom floor. Herman came to the house and found Finer slumped and wretched on the couch. Kurt Vonnegut learned the news by phone—he had called to see if he and Jill could bring their weekend guest, Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who had been happy with Algren’s intelligent review of Midnight’s Children. The police were there to turn the other guests away. It was like a final Algren joke, Pintauro thought, to die just before people got dressed up and came to his house for a party.
The next day Joe found out that Nelson’s body had mistakenly been shipped fifty miles west. Joe realized that no one was taking charge—so he would do it. With Studs Terkel helping out by phone, they were able to arrange for Nelson’s niece, Ruth Sherman, to release the body and send it back to Sag Harbor. Joe arranged for a funeral and burial at the old Oakland whaling cemetery—Gloria Jones recommended a spot under the trees. Walking around with the undertaker on a rainy Mother’s Day, Joe found a spot among the oak trees where a red azalea was in bloom. It seemed to Joe like a good omen because red and yellow were Nelson’s favorite colors, like blood and the sun. The gravesite is, in the words of poet Andrew Marvell, “a fine and private place.” Carol Phillips, the Clinique founder, who lived in town, offered to pay for everything. But Candida Donadio knew Nelson better—he would want to pick up this tab himself, and he needed a plain pine box. Most of the expenses were covered by the US Army.
Everything was in bloom. Steve Deutch and his daughter came from Chicago, and joined friends from town at the cemetery, all carrying flowering branches to place in and around the grave. “People picked branches from their trees—apple blossoms, pear blossoms, cherry blossoms—it looked like the most fabulous funeral ever,” Joe remembered. Candida read aloud from his poem “Tricks out of Times Long Gone,” which begins:
Again that hour when taxis start deadheading home
Before the trolley buses start to run
A golden-haired woman stood with the other mourners as beautiful as a visiting angel, dressed completely in black except for metallic, golden sandals. When Joe asked who she was, she said simply, “My name is Regina. I’m just a fan.”
In Paris Simone’s sister, Hélène, called her with the news, but Simone said she felt nothing. “Why should I?” she asked. “What did he feel for me, that he could have written those horrible things?” Pintauro said she had occasion to be in Long Island a few years later, and did not want to visit his grave.
Yet she was buried wearing his ring.
-
Nelson’s gravestone is carved with a line by Willa Cather, suggested by Candida, The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All. The ground in front of it is mossy, soft as a bed, and somebody has stuck pencils into it. Along the top, visitors have laid stones.
When Algren died his work was out of print. Back in Chicago an attempt to name a stretch of Evergreen Street “Algren Street” was put down by neighbors, who were afraid it would confuse the postman. But since 1981 attitudes about Algren have started to shift. In 1984 Dan Simon, who later founded New York’s Seven Stories Press, shocked that Algren was so long out of print despite his high reputation, started pursuing the rights to Algren’s works and reprinting them in paperback. Simon does not think Algren has been understood in his own country. “American society is a winner’s society and Algren loved the losers,” Simon said. “We�
��d rather not know the things he had to tell us.”
The rediscovery of Algren has continued. In 1981 Chicago magazine started the Nelson Algren Awards for short stories, an annual prize administered by the Tribune since 1986 that helped recognize early work by Louise Erdrich and Julia Glass. Giles’s Confronting the Horror, analyzing Algren’s fiction in the traditions of naturalism and existentialism, was published in 1989. Bettina Drew wrote her well-received biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side the same year, a book that helped create a resurgence of interest in Algren’s work, according to Algren expert Bill Savage.
In 1998 Chicago erected a Victorian-style, wrought-iron fountain in Algren’s memory in the “Polish Triangle” park formed by Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee. The dedication on its base reads: “For the masses who do the city’s labor also keep the city’s heart.” Representatives of the Polish Roman Catholic Union attended the dedication ceremony. At the center of an increasingly wealthy neighborhood, attractive to young people and professionals, the fountain is sometimes the focus of protesters—in 2015 a group of young people upset at police killings of unarmed black men gathered there to chant, “Black lives matter.”
Kent State University professor Brooke Horvath published a reader-friendly analysis of Algren’s fiction called Understanding Nelson Algren in 2005. A collection of critical essays about Algren was edited by Robert Ward in 2007. And in 2014 not one but two documentaries about Algren premiered in Chicago—Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All and Algren: The Movie, the latter featuring many photos by Art Shay. Since 1989 Chicago’s Nelson Algren Committee has held an annual birthday party, with readings and speeches, and a Miller, Indiana, society started in 2015 to host events dedicated to keeping his memory alive.
Savage, who teaches courses on Algren and other Chicago writers at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library, said that one of the reasons why Algren did not get rediscovered sooner has to do with race and gender politics in current literary studies. “Frankly, they didn’t need another dead white guy,” Savage said. “He really did get passed over unjustly.”
Blades was not sure if Algren will ever really come back and be part of the literary canon, the way Fitzgerald and Hemingway are. The language of the books is often difficult, and Algren’s take on America is very dark—and America prefers to think well of itself. But as Studs Terkel once pointed out, Algren fans surface in odd places—a Welsh miner Terkel met in London, an elevator operator in New York, a Kentucky woman on welfare who saw herself in the books. Billy Corgan, the lead singer of the rock band the Smashing Pumpkins, is a fan. So are film directors John Sayles and Philip Kaufman, who both cite Algren as an influence. Maybe not everyone reads Algren, but many of those who do respond with art.
Three years ago, I was covering the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in Chicago for Reuters. Around the Federal Reserve Bank at LaSalle and Jackson, crowds of mostly young people complained about the inequality of income in the United States and the federal government’s failure to punish bankers whose actions helped lead to the 2008 recession. The protesters’ complaints echoed Algren’s—that people were being cheated, that they had been lied to, that justice was being perverted by money and racism, and that the poor were made to feel ashamed for not living up to the promises of the billboards. One of the young people I interviewed was a former Las Vegas card dealer who said that now that he was in Chicago, he wanted to read a book he had heard about that dealt with gambling and the underclass. The book was The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren may not be taught in classrooms alongside Hawthorne and Austen, but in backpacks across America, Algren still lives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people gave their time and attention to this project, and they have my great thanks for this. They include John Blades, Mark Blottner, Peter Bohan, Michael Caplan, Chris Chandler, Andy Austin Cohen, Denise DeClue, Bruce Elliott, James Giles, Jan Herman, Fred Hogan; Lisa Iacobellis, Rebecca Jewett, and the helpful staff of the Ohio State University archives; Hugh Iglarsh, Heide Kehler, Henry Kisor, Rick Kogan, Warren Leming, Jan Lorys at the Polish Roman Catholic Union, Gloria Moroni, Susan Licciardi at Roosevelt High School, the Nelson Algren Society of Chicago, Suzanne McNear, Denis Mueller, Thomas Napierkowski, Neil Olson, Dominic Pacyga, Canio Pavone, Joe Pintauro, Lisa Reardon at Chicago Review Press; Tony, Kate, Aubrey, and Jo Sanfilippo for the Columbus, Ohio, hospitality; Bill Savage, Art Shay, Yvette Shields, Morag Walsh, and all the staff at the Chicago Public Library main and Independence Park branches; my mother, Bonny Wisniewski, for her insights into the old neighborhood, and Dave Witter for his insights into Miller. I also thank my former bosses at Thomson Reuters for granting me a leave of absence to complete this book, including Paul Thomasch and David Greising. I am also grateful to those who helped and have passed on, including Jon Anderson, Dave and Doris Peltz, Studs Terkel, and my father, Mitchell Wisniewski. Special thanks goes to my husband, Jim O’Malley, for both his moral support and indispensable technical help with backing up and storing records, and to my daughters, Zosia, Lucy, and Grace, for their encouragement.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: CHILDHOOD DAYS
“secondhand sea”: Ibid., 10.
“Not all the damned fools”: Algren, The Last Carousel, 304.
“the screw works”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations with Nelson Algren, 4.
“That was Uncle Theodore”: Ibid., 5.
“My brave boy sleeps”: Author unknown, Civil War song believed to be adapted for the Spanish-American War, retrieved from www.bluegrasslyrics.com.
“prosy family”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 11.
“knocked themselves out to repudiate”: Ibid., 12.
“Father & Son”: Algren, Last Carousel, 313.
“Ich bin klein”: Algren, Algren at Sea: Notes from a Sea Diary and Who Lost an American?, 199.
“When he did, it drove him bonkers”: Algren, Last Carousel, 211.
“He was an intellectual before his time”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 8.
“Hey! I’m coming with you!”: Ibid., 9.
“writer and a lecturer”: El Paso Herald-Post, date unknown but about 1956, loose clipping in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University libraries (hereafter OSU libraries).
“There is no truth”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 10.
“a fixer of machinery”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 197.
“some picket would take him aside”: Ibid.
“Garden Plots to Kaiser Blot”: Duis, Challenging Chicago, 128 and 141.
“It’s those Irish bums again”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 15.
“ought to go and learn something”: Ibid.
“He gave us nothing”: Ibid., 14.
“talked money through their noses”: Rudyard Kipling in “From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel,” quoted in Pierce, As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673–1933, 252.
“It became a Jesuit kite”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 188.
“Then let him look at his ass”: Ibid., 189.
“a dirty old man”: Ann Esch to Algren, Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1972.
“Go back from whence”: Algren, Last Carousel, 313.
“When he walked into the kitchen”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 196.
“lived under an oppression”: Ibid., 197.
“America, I Love You”: Ibid., 193.
“Why can’t you be a good boy”: Algren, Last Carousel, 290.
“I’m as reckless”: Ren Shields and Kerry Mills, “Take Me Out for a Joy Ride,” quoted in Algren, Last Carousel, 303.
“loving, concerned mother”: David Peltz, interview by author, 2005.
“straight as an arrow”: Ibid.
“Never eat at a place called Mom’s”: Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side, 312.
“pregrant”: Cox and Chatterton, Nelson Algren, 19.
“Electrocuted, Mother”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 17.
“In
the darkness shapes”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Night and Day,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 82.
“Don’t Treat Me Like”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 191.
“You send valentines”: Ibid., 192.
“Everything inside”: Ibid., 199.
“like a strip of raw meat”: Ibid.
“Snow White is fairer far”: Algren to Ann Esch, Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1972.
“Baseball was the most”: Jim Gallagher, “Literary ‘Exile’ Pleasant for Algren,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1977.
“We all make mistakes”: Algren, Chicago, 38.
“Dearest, sweetest, funniest”: Autograph book, OSU libraries.
“Nelson Abraham’s great height”: The Lantern, Roosevelt High School yearbook.
“I can’t charge more”: Algren, unpublished memoir, OSU libraries.
“A cop can’t do that”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 18.
“Yet I’d feel a pang of shame”: Algren, unpublished memoir, OSU libraries.
“Kum-Inn”: The Lantern, Roosevelt High School yearbook.
“Tell your tire troubles”: Ibid.
“Open it yourself “: Algren, unpublished memoir, OSU libraries.
CHAPTER 2: COLLEGE AND THE CRASH
“Had the faculty tolerated me”: Cox and Chatterton, Nelson Algren, 19.
“She was the only one”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 16.
“nowhere can a man”: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 4, section 3, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36.
“Give this country four more years”: Will Rogers, quoted in Ellis, A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929–1939, 43.
“healthy attitude”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 28.
“certainly a mixed-up kid”: Cox and Chatterton, Nelson Algren, 20.