Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

“I recognized many old”: Henry Morgan, January 29, 1947, broadcast, https://archive.org/details/TheHenryMorganShowPartOne.

  “like bright lights”: David Peltz, interview by author.

  “in a decision”: Edward Aswell to Algren, February 13, 1946, OSU libraries.

  The details of how Nelson and Amanda decided to divorce are contained in a letter from Eva Mason, who represented Amanda in the sale of her personal letters, to Geoffrey Smith of the OSU libraries, dated September 8, 1992.

  “I know I’ll have to feel”: Algren to Amanda Algren, January 29, 1946, OSU libraries.

  “Probably short of a book”: Algren to Amanda Algren, May 8, 1947, OSU libraries.

  “pavement-colored cap”: Algren, “Stickman’s Laughter,” in Neon Wilderness, 66.

  “the dark at the top”: Algren, “Where Did Everybody Go?,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1972.

  “without the owner’s consent”: Algren, “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” in Neon Wilderness, 26.

  “They lived”: Ibid., 22.

  “Ogden Avenue eyes”: Ibid., 18.

  “community singing”: Algren, “Stickman’s Laughter,” in Neon Wilderness, 65.

  “So nothing important”: Ibid., 72.

  “Lies are a poor man’s pennies”: Algren, “Poor Man’s Pennies,” in Neon Wilderness, 119.

  “wider perils”: Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, January 25, 1947.

  “rugged reading”: Kelsey Guilfoil, “Stories Bare Bitter Truth About Slums,” Chicago Tribune, January 26, 1947.

  “enough horror”: Catherine Meredith Brown, “Chicago Without Tears or Dreams,” Saturday Review, February 8, 1947.

  “Beneath each sordid”: Jack Conroy, publication unknown, OSU libraries.

  “goofy kind of glow”: Studs Terkel, afterword to Algren, Neon Wilderness, 288.

  “Chicago intellectual”: Ron Grossman, “Stuart Brent, 1912–2010: Longtime Influential Bookseller Was Self-Appointed Guardian of Local Literature,” Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2010.

  “the distinction of being”: Brent, The Seven Stairs, 37.

  “a remarkable singleness”: Ibid., 38.

  “the gates of Algren’s”: Wixson, Worker-Writer, 448.

  “out of a Gorky novel”: Brent, Seven Stairs, 39.

  “in a slight smile”: Ibid.

  “I felt an impenetrable wall”: Ibid., 40.

  “Then it occurred to me”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER 7: BELOVED LOCAL YOUTH

  “another deluded broad”: Richard Stern, Still on Call (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 78.

  “You have the wrong”: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 96.

  “hoarse screech”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 181.

  “She wasn’t taking”: Ibid.

  “lit by a light-blue intelligence”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 82.

  “an amalgam”: Art Shay, Chicago’s Nelson Algren (New York: Seven Stories, 2007), xvii.

  “smell of dollars”: Beauvoir, The Mandarins, 325.

  “Land of the Living Dead”: Time, August 29, 1949.

  “Absolutely No Dancing”: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 97.

  “They dance with a joyous”: Ibid., 98.

  “It is beautiful”: Ibid.

  “With us”: Ibid.

  “How is Malraux”: Ibid.

  “burned paper”: Beauvoir, Mandarins, 325.

  “By the time she left”: Algren to Amanda Algren, March 4, 1947, OSU libraries.

  “the prettiest Existentialist”: Janet Flanner, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, February 22, 1947.

  “never understood a word”: Denise DeClue, interview by author, 2015.

  “exter-remists”: Algren letter to Amanda Algren, March 4, 1947, OSU libraries.

  “I think you felt”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, February 23, 1947, in Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, 12.

  “If you do not”: Algren to Simone de Beauvoir, February 27, 1947, in Rowley, Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, 177.

  “Too bad for us”: Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance, 125.

  “I have all my time”: Beauvoir, Mandarins, 332.

  “I didn’t come”: Ibid., 334.

  “a pretty young man”: Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 358.

  “Well, they try, but”: Algren, interview by Fling, January 1963. It’s impossible to be sure which dice girl answered this question—they were common sights in bars in those days.

  “only a boy”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, 340.

  “beloved local youth”: Ibid., 341.

  “unstable, moody”: Beauvoir, Force, 126.

  “à Simone”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 341.

  “I want life”: Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life, A Love Story, trans. Lisa Nesselson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 80.

  “I am in our Chicago”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, May 21, 1947, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 18.

  “I did not think”: Algren to Simone de Beauvoir, quoted in her letter of July 16, 1947, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 50.

  “essential love”: Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, quoted in Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 158.

  “Do you understand”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, July 23, 1947, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 51.

  “I should like”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, December 2, 1947, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic,113.

  “one of the few writers”: Kurt Vonnegut, 1986 introduction to Algren, Never Come Morning (1996), xvii.

  “Seven Good Frog Commandments”: Algren to Simone de Beauvoir, n.d., quoted in Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 366.

  “dying … laughing”: Donohue and Algren, Conversations, 300.

  “You son-of-a-bitch”: Ibid.

  “Miss de Beauvoir”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, September 26, 1947, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 65.

  “particular acuity”: Beauvoir, Force, 125.

  “I had more kicks”: Algren to Joseph Haas, March 1, 1952, OSU libraries. Reproduced in Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm, 345.

  CHAPTER 8: GOLDEN YEARS

  “Yet why does”: Algren, the poem “The Man with the Golden Arm,” used as an epigraph for the novel of the same name, 341.

  “I still don’t see”: Algren to Ken McCormick, June 7, 1947, OSU libraries.

  “the toughest foe”: Barney Ross, quoted in International News Service, “Little Barney Ross Slays the Giant: Beats Narcotics Habit in Four Months,” January 15, 1947.

  “Jack is having trouble”: Algren, interview, in Cowley, Writers at Work, 212.

  “You want to see”: Ibid.

  “evening country”: Algren, “Afternoon in the Land of the Strange Light Sleep,” in Entrapment, 215.

  “Well, you know”: Algren, interview, in Cowley, Writers at Work, 213.

  “He wasn’t Frankie Machine”: Ibid.

  “I don’t want you to see”: Algren, Last Carousel, 274.

  “a little lame man”: Ibid.

  “I’m a friend of Margo’s”: Ibid., 275.

  “a special grace”: Algren, Nonconformity, 48.

  “that sounds more like”: Algren, “Laughter in Jars—Not as Sandburg Wrote

  It,” Chicago Sun, July 20, 1947.

  “crippled of late”: Algren, Golden Arm, 96.

  “The Dead, the Drunk”: Proposed title mentioned in letter from Stanley Pargellis at the Newberry Library to Algren, January 6, 1948. The other titles come from letters to McCormick and Beauvoir—Algren kept changing his mind.

  “have-you-read-any-good-books-lately”: Chicago Daily News, March 1948, clip in OSU libraries.

  “rough shape but readable”: Algren to Ken McCormick, April 2, 1948, OSU libraries.

  “happened upon a strange”: Algren and Beauvoir’s joint diary, OSU libraries.

  “citizen of the United States”: Ibid.

  “I spent two hours”
: Beauvoir, Force, 155.

  “tongue lolling”: This and the following quotations are from the diary, except where indicated.

  “Bingo Bango Bongo”: Algren to Jack Conroy, June 8, 1948, Newberry Library archives.

  “Oh, all right”: Beauvoir, Force, 158.

  “At the end”: Ibid., 159.

  “Don’t you care”: Ibid.

  “I want you to know”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, July 19, 1948, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 202.

  “No. Too much work”: Quoted in Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, July 23, 1948, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 203.

  “share and share alike”: Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left, 323.

  “a place of my own”: Quoted in Beauvoir, Force, 166.

  “foolish, because no arms are warm”: Ibid., 167.

  “cowboy-and-Indian”: Algren, interview, in Cowley, Writers at Work, 214.

  “Are you alright”: Rowley, Tête-à-Tête, 198.

  “golden Zazu”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 407

  “send Algren to punch”: Ibid., 409.

  “curious strutting macho”: Ibid., 472.

  “seemed an unassuming”: Algren to Ken McCormick, May 20, 1949, OSU libraries.

  “This was not a girl”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 81.

  “frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 408.

  “You do not care”: Algren, Algren at Sea, 82.

  “I’d be afraid”: Drew, Nelson Algren, 206. Author’s note: I rendered as dialogue something Algren remembered saying.

  “his potentialities, along with”: Algren, Chicago, 53.

  “Tough it out, Jack”: Ibid., 54.

  “lives in sedate comfort”: Algren to Amanda Algren, May 1949, OSU libraries.

  “Tell him I have”: Algren, Last Carousel, 141–142. Algren makes much of Beauvoir’s humorlessness in this story, but hers is one of the funniest lines in it.

  “tell him to keep”: Algren to Goldie Abraham, July 2, 1949, OSU libraries.

  “moron”: Algren, Golden Arm, 7.

  “It’s all in the wrist”: Ibid., 9.

  “the great, secret”: Ibid., 19.

  “heart-shaped face”: Ibid., 28.

  “one of the most”: Giles, Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren, 60.

  “God has forgotten”: Algren, Golden Arm, 99.

  “There through the starless”: Ibid., 94.

  “It was made right”: Ibid., 141.

  “literal or symbolic prisons”: Giles, Confronting the Horror, 60.

  “into one big worry”: Algren, Golden Arm, 260.

  “He weighs thirty-five pounds”: Ibid., 259.

  “we are all members”: Ibid., 196. From St. Paul’s letters to the Romans, Romans 12:5: “For just as in one body we have many members, yet all the members have not the same function, so we, the many, are one body in Christ, but severally members one of another.”

  “an iron heart”: Ibid., 290.

  “I’d drive in the nails”: Ibid., 66.

  “triumph”: “The Lower Depths,” Time, September 12, 1949.

  “surely there is no writer”: Kelsey Guilfoil, “Novel of the Damned Puts Chicagoan in First Rank,” Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1949.

  “will be missing much”: A. C. Spectorsky, “Saloon Street, Chicago,” New York Times, September 11, 1949.

  “morbid, dirty”: Extension, quoted in a letter from T. W. Tanaka to Jack Conroy, November 3, 1949, OSU libraries.

  “I didn’t know anybody”: Mitchell Wisniewski, interview by author, 2013.

  “Into a world”: Ernest Hemingway to Algren, October 18, 1949, OSU libraries, reprinted in multiple places, including Drew, Nelson Algren, 210.

  CHAPTER 9: THE WALLS BEGIN TO CLOSE

  A note on the contract negotiations: Details of these negotiations come from correspondence with Ken McCormick in the OSU libraries and a recently discovered letter by Madeleine Brennan in a private collection of Algren’s papers belonging to Gloria Moroni. The November 11, 1949, letter tells of how Irving Lazar mistakenly thought he was authorized to sell the book if he could get no better offer, Roberts thought he had sold it, and Brennan had to get a lawyer on the phone to make clear to Roberts that his offer had not been accepted.

  The details about Amanda’s attempts at self-improvement come from a letter among a cache of Nelson’s papers belonging to Gloria Moroni.

  “flying saucer”: Algren, Chicago, 46.

  “Land of Hollow Laughter”: Algren, appendix to Nonconformity, 118.

  “Everybody here is a millionaire”: Algren to Jack Conroy, February 5, 1950, OSU libraries.

  “Ten-Day-Hollywood-Hospitality”: Algren, appendix to Nonconformity, 115.

  “Just for a handful”: David Dempsey, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times, March 26, 1950.

  “pushy Jew”: Shay, interview by author.

  “it was a pretty good”: Ibid.

  “You don’t want me”: Shay, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, xvii.

  “night people”: Ibid., xvi.

  “Bad idea”: Ibid., xx.

  “How about ‘Chicago’”: Shay, interview by author.

  “Is this really … He goofed”: Ibid.

  “The only emotion”: Algren, review of An American Dream Girl, by James Farrell, Saturday Review of Literature, December 9, 1950.

  “the house that Doubleday built”: Algren to Ken McCormick, 1950, OSU libraries.

  “Algren’s folly”: Ibid.

  “There’s a difference”: DeClue, interview by author.

  “good count”: The following quotations are from the unused screenplay of The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren and Paul Trivers, OSU libraries.

  “your practicing a little”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, December 7, 1949, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 309.

  “bullshit”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 416.

  “a bunch of silly women”: Ibid.

  “concealed Communist”: from an office memorandum dated July 11, 1950, Algren FBI file, National Archives.

  “greeted her casually”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 422.

  “We’ll have a nice”: Beauvoir, Force, 226.

  “it seemed to me”: Beauvoir, Mandarins, 545.

  “Why are you all”: Beauvoir, Force, 226.

  “You naughty man”: Shay, interview by author.

  “Help!”: Beauvoir, Force, 226.

  “friendship flamed into life”: Ibid., 227.

  “I have lost”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, September 30, 1950, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 370.

  “Nelson was swept”: David Peltz, interview by author.

  “Don’t worry about not”: Algren to Amanda Algren, October 3, 1950, OSU libraries.

  “to determine for ourselves”: New York Times, January 15, 1951.

  “just feeling around”: Algren, quoted in “Headliners and Bestsellers,” New York Times, June 11, 1950.

  “If you have any”: Dalton Trumbo to Algren, June 15, 1951, OSU libraries.

  “I’ve always thought”: Shay, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, xix.

  “victory lap”: Bill Savage, interview by author, 2012.

  “more majesty”: Algren, Chicago, 48.

  “spreading itself all over”: Ibid.

  “rigged ball game”: Ibid., 14.

  “The Negro is not”: Ibid., 45.

  “on the rim of ”: Ibid., 54.

  “slipping out of used”: Ibid., 10.

  “an October sort”: Ibid., 72.

  “a drafty hustler’s junction”: Ibid., 46.

  “sort of mottled”: Ibid., 47.

  “Giants lived here once”: Ibid., 52.

  “leaving you loving”: Ibid., 49.

  “loving a woman with”: Ibid., 23.

  “much too square”: Ibid., 77.

  “while we shall leave”: Ibid.

  “book unlikely”: Quoted in John Blades, “‘Rotten Reviews’ Bring Sweet Revenge to Writers,” Tribune
Books, Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1986.

  “fine poetry”: Emmett Dedmon, review of Chicago: City on the Make, Chicago Sun-Times, undated clipping, OSU libraries.

  “degree of distortion”: Budd Schulberg, review of Chicago: City on the Make, New York Times, October 21, 1951.

  “Nelson’s use of language”: Rick Kogan, interview by author, 2013.

  “love-hate poem”: Studs Terkel, interview by author, 2005.

  “kings of the world”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, July 13, 1951, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 428.

  “the fanciest all-around”: Algren, Chicago, 48.

  “He doesn’t speak”: Beauvoir, Force, 250.

  “nark-squad hero”: Algren, Last Carousel, 275.

  “part of the natural environment”: Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York. E. P. Dutton, 1971) 108.

  “his face crumpled”: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 430. This version of the story, told to Bair in interviews in the 1980s, differs from the version Beauvoir tells in Force of Circumstance, when Algren confesses his love just as she is about to leave.

  “It’s not friendship”: Beauvoir, Force, 250.

  “I am just a poor”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, October 30, 1951, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 436.

  “To love a woman”: Beauvoir, Force, 251.

  “Well, that’s that”: Ibid., 254.

  “He was gentle”: Doris Peltz, interview by author, 2005.

  “housekeepers”: Dave Witter, interview by author, 2015.

  “Why don’t you marry”: Simone de Beauvoir to Algren, April 2, 1952, in Beauvoir, Transatlantic, 464.

  “raggedy, a stray cat”: Drew, A Life on the Wild Side, 284.

  “That poor son-of-a-bitch”: Shay, interview by author.

  “Bubu came out”: Algren, autobiographical fragment, OSU libraries.

  “It was himself ”: David Peltz, interview by author.

  “He defended his streetboy’s”: William Pechter, “Abraham Polonsky and ‘Force of Evil,’” Film Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Spring 1962): 53.

  CHAPTER 10: THE NONCONFORMIST

  “Hollywood! It’s like”: “Sylvia Sidney,” IMDB, www.imdb.com/name/nm0796662/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm.

  “bag of dead bones”: Algren, autobiographical fragment, OSU libraries.

  “the whole business is”: Daily Worker, March 3, 1952, in Algren FBI file, National Archives.

  “a very good guy”: Terkel, quoted in FBI memorandum, May 21, 1951, Algren FBI file, National Archives.