by Colin Asher
Nelson accepted; he had no other options.
Gerson was stunned by the idea. He never finished grade school, and he couldn’t understand the purpose of college, but he didn’t argue. He held Bernice’s opinions in high regard, and at least college would get Nelson out of the house.
Nelson graduated from high school in June 1927, and when he did, Curtis, Zwick, and Hanock realized he had been living a more divided life than they imagined.‡ While it was true that he had been drinking and gambling throughout senior year as they suspected, he had also earned the highest grades of his high school career, become a member of the Civics Club, and helped the varsity basketball team win a city championship.
Nelson had even joined the yearbook committee and been appointed Class Prophet. It was his job to write satirical articles about his classmates’ futures, and he used his position to bid a tender farewell to the friends he had been drifting away from. In a series of news briefs, he predicted each of them would achieve more than they believed themselves capable of. “Benton Charles Curtis has been appointed chief caretaker at the Lincoln Park Zoo,” one story reads. “It is the contractor’s conclusion that the 106-story all-steel structure now under construction . . . will be completed by Oct. 1,” another announces. “Wireless lighting systems are placed exclusively by the Zwick Systems of Lighting.” Jerry Hanock is showing “exceptional ability” in his new position with the Chicago Cubs, another says.
Nelson prophesied a more pedestrian future for himself. Instead of penning an article claiming that he was destined for greatness, he inserted a small, self-effacing advertisement into the yearbook that reads:
TELL YOUR TIRE
TROUBLES
-TO-
Nelson Abraham
VULCANIZING
RETREADING
* This Sidney Yates is the Sidney Yates in Chicago—he became a member of the US House of Representatives later, and remained one for decades.
† Nelson claimed he began visiting Johnson’s in his junior year of high school, but Curtis said Nelson drifted away from his friends in favor of the club in their senior year, and I defer to him here.
‡ Their school had changed buildings and names since they enrolled. It was called Roosevelt High School when they graduated.
Stoic. Academic. Ink-Stained Wretch.
(July 1927–June 17, 1931)
An ROTC inspection at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1927—the year Nelson was a member. ROTC Inspection, courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives
The air was heavy when Nelson reached the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in mid-September, and the sun was deadly. It was unbearably hot the week he arrived, but then a storm raged across campus, thunder shook the ground, lightning lit the plains with evanescent sparks, and the temperature plunged. The first frost of the season fell after the storm passed, and by the time it melted, Nelson was alone. He had fifty dollars in his possession—the cost of tuition—and he knew no one.
Nelson agreed to enroll in college when Bernice suggested it because he had no alternative to offer. But there was another reason as well. He had been harboring a secret ambition to transcend his class for years, and he knew that moving to Urbana-Champaign was his best chance of realizing it. In college, no one would know him as the solicitous child who patched tires in his father’s garage, or the gangly teen who feigned apathy and posed as a gangster. He would be anonymous, and free to reintroduce himself as the person he believed he was capable of becoming.
Nelson made a clean break with his past that year. He stopped walking pigeon-toed and calling himself Swede. He cut off contact with his “brothers” in Chicago, and avoided speaking to his parents. Then he isolated himself on campus, and scheduled his days tightly.* He moved into a single room that cost ten dollars a month, began working—odd jobs at first, then waiting tables and washing dishes—and registered for a heavy load of classes. He took European history, Spanish literature, zoology, fencing, artillery drill, and organic chemistry—and he lived the harried, sleep-deprived life of a working student.
There weren’t many hours remaining in the day after Nelson met his obligations, but he spent what time he had searching for new ideas, and for heroes who could replace the laborers, ballplayers, and gun-toting men he admired as a child.
Marcus Aurelius was Nelson’s first college role model. Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire for almost twenty years and led one of its most successful military campaigns. Machiavelli called him the last of the Five Good Emperors, but Aurelius was also a philosopher who recorded his ideas in a series of essays. He died near modern-day Vienna in 180 AD, and afterward his writings were published under the title Meditations. Seventeen hundred years later, Nelson discovered a translation of that book in southern Illinois and read it in a trance.
Aurelius was a Stoic. He claimed that abstention and physical discipline are virtuous qualities, and argued that personal integrity is more important than social standing or physical comfort. He believed thoughts engender actions, and reasoned that a person who distracts themselves with trivialities will necessarily lead a trivial life. Conversely, he said, anyone who focuses on meaningful subjects has the potential to affect the world in profound ways.
His ideas are simple, powerful, and—within their own context—irrefutable. They thrilled Nelson. He had been raised in a place where labor and violence were the wellsprings of self-respect for men, and intellectual curiosity was suspect. But Aurelius reversed that logic. He argued that every idea is worthy of evaluation, and people should act according to their principles, even when doing so seems irrational. “Do your duty,” he wrote, “—and never mind whether you are shivering or warm . . . dying or doing something else.”
Nelson read and reread Meditations, and then remade himself in Aurelius’s image. He began by forsaking indulgences. He abstained from sex and avoided masturbation. Wood alcohol was sometimes available on campus, but he declined to drink it. He believed that he did not deserve to consume more calories than his body required, so he never touched sweets. He limited his sleep, and remained silent when possible to encourage the formation of profound thoughts.
Then he gave form to Aurelius’s ideas by imposing structure on his life. He woke at six o’clock every morning and took a cold shower. Breakfast was oatmeal flavored with a dash of salt, and when it was time to leave for work or class, he traveled from his room to his destination along the most efficient route possible. He was reading Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Byron at the time, and he forced himself to dwell on their ideas in his idle moments—“Life is short, and art long,” he might have thought on his way to work. “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” and “Man marks the earth with ruin.”
The Urbana-Champaign campus had a feel that was both majestic and jocular. Brick buildings with white-framed windows surrounded a large quad laced with walking paths, and tall oaks provided shade when the school’s twenty thousand students traveled between classes. But at the beginning of the school year, crowds gathered around bonfires fueled by wood that freshmen had scavenged from the neighborhoods surrounding the university. Fraternity pledges raced each other around a city block wearing pajamas, and hundreds of students draped themselves in rags and meandered through the streets, banging drums and playing fiddles—the “Hobo Parade,” they called it.
But Nelson was immune to his classmates’ boisterous attitudes. He chose to move about campus like a phantom—quiet and expressionless. He avoided student gatherings, made no friends, and refused to observe social niceties. When people greeted him, he responded using the fewest number of words possible. “Good morning,” he said, or “Good afternoon.” But that was all. If someone tried to engage him in small talk after saying hello, he paused to weigh the worthiness of their comment. If it deserved an answer, he provided one; if it was trivial, he said nothing.
Soon, Nelson developed a reputation for being aloof and superior. Students rolled their eyes when he approached. They whispered, and he d
istracted himself from their judgment by parsing the ideas of dead men. When people snickered, perhaps Byron’s lament for the fates of great thinkers comforted him:
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his lifetime each was deemed a bore.
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages;
This they must bear with and perhaps much more.
Nelson was famously gregarious later in life. In Chicago, in the 1960s, he hung out at a bar called O’Rourke’s with Studs Terkel and Roger Ebert, and drank at Riccardo’s with a progressive councilman named Len Despres. He was a familiar face at every racetrack within easy reach of the city, and his apartment was a landmark. Visiting was a rite of passage for local artists, and for writers from across the country. When William Styron and Terry Southern visited in 1964, Nelson met them at O’Hare, brought them back to his flat, and kept them up drinking and talking until Southern passed out on a cot, clutching a glass of bourbon. The next morning, Nelson put his visitors in a cab and directed it to the Cook County Jail. The warden was a friend of his, so they were invited inside and offered a tour.
Nelson’s abstemious college regime seemed bizarre and out of character to everyone who knew him afterward, so when it came up, he felt obliged to explain himself. He claimed that Stoicism appealed to him for two reasons, and the first was the parallel between Aurelius’s ideas and the lifestyle of his namesake, Nils Ahlgren—the man who became Isaac Ben Abraham.
Most of what Nelson knew about Isaac came from Goldie. Gerson rarely spoke about his father, but Goldie often did. She saw Isaac’s life as one long cautionary tale, and she employed anecdotes from his travels like cudgels to beat her children into line when she feared they were beginning to indulge bohemian notions.
Goldie’s favorite story about Isaac took place on the ship that carried the Abraham family from Jerusalem to America.† By her telling, Isaac grew restless at sea. He was accustomed to the adoration of crowds, but on the boat, only his family knew him and they were no longer interested in his pontifications. Before long, he became desperate for distractions and began digging through his family’s belongings. Eventually, he found some cash Jette had hidden in her bags, removed the bills, and studied them. He looked at George Washington’s portrait, and thought about Exodus. He remembered that God told Israel, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them . . .” And then he realized what his faith demanded.
Isaac carried Jette’s money to the ship’s deck, walked to the railing facing the sea, and began to preach. He was a bearded old man with a fistful of bills, and he was ranting into the wind. “Man is made in the image of God . . . so it’s a crime to have money,” he said.
Passengers gathered to listen. They watched expectantly.
Isaac rambled until his audience was large and eager, and then he threw the bills overboard. They flitted through the air toward the surface of the water, landed, and then sank into the ocean. When they disappeared, the Abraham family was destitute.
The moral of the sea-voyage story was obvious to Goldie: If you allow ideas to get in the way of common sense, they will ruin you, and they will ruin your family. But after Nelson discovered Meditations, his grandfather’s life took on new meaning. He saw virtue and idealism in Isaac’s actions, and felt a strong connection to his legacy.
The year Nelson remade himself as a Stoic, he also began signing his writing assignments “Nelson ben Algren” in Isaac’s honor. And later, he told an interviewer, “For the first time I understood my father was not my father: my grandfather was my father. A sense of identity with him became so strong that it dawned on me: I was him.”
The standard Nelson set for himself in college was impossibly high, and that was the second reason he found Stoicism appealing. “It was an interesting kind of struggle,” he said. He regularly fell short of his ascetic ideal, but the challenge of trying to achieve it reframed an unremarkable stretch of life into an extended contest between sin and virtue. “It wasn’t a passive thing,” he said. “I was always perpetually falling off this grand plane that I had arranged.”
The Urbana-Champaign campus didn’t advertise any tempting vices. There was a movie theater, but the law required it to close on Sundays. Liquor was hard to find, and student life was tightly regulated by the Dean of Men, Thomas Arkle Clark—a celebrated paternalist who wrote a cliché-laden column for the student paper. “You can’t build a structure of any importance without giving attention to the foundation,” he proclaimed. “[I]t is a tendency of human nature to follow the leader.”
Clark advocated celibacy, religiosity, and prohibition, and he maintained a network of student informers who helped him enforce the college’s code of discipline. Expulsions were common under his tenure, and even automobiles were controversial—“The parlor sofa isn’t what it used to be,” one student editorial cautioned. “It’s made of black leather now, and it’s set right behind the steering wheel.”
But ten blocks west of campus, in Champaign, none of those prohibitions existed. There was a red-light district on that side of town that boasted speakeasies, gambling parlors, and a network of brothels, all operating with the consent of the city’s political infrastructure. A madam named Bess Maxwell owned one of those establishments, and after she left the trade, she told a reporter that she had remained in business by making payments to a local law firm. The firm handed a portion of her money to a man named Herman “Blue” Klemick, and he delivered it to the mayor. She received protection in return, and so did all of the other brothels in the area. They had so little fear of prosecution that they operated a free shuttle service that ran between Walnut Street—the heart of the red-light district—and the campus’s fraternities.‡ On any given night, seventy percent of the johns in Champaign were university students.
Gambling and liquor didn’t appeal to Nelson the way they had in Chicago, but women did. After he learned about the brothels along Walnut Street, resisting the urge to visit became a nightly struggle. He told himself to stay in his room and read. He tried to “think of nothing but Marcus Aurelius,” but sometimes his resistance crumbled and he rose in the early hours of the morning and began walking toward Champaign.
Once, he left his room and headed west. He was alone, and lustful, and he moved furtively. He entered an unfamiliar part of town, passed several warehouses, and continued. When he reached a dimly lit house, he told himself he had found the place he was looking for, and he stopped. He stood outside for a while, and then knocked at the door.
A woman answered. What do you want? she asked.
“Well, I’ve got a couple dollars to spend,” Nelson said.
The woman turned and hollered to a man inside the building. Before the man appeared, Nelson ran away.
It wasn’t the last time Nelson visited Walnut Street, but every trip ended the same. He never entered a brothel in the district, but each attempt gave him “a very oppressive sense of sin,” and he judged himself as harshly for his failures as he would have if he had succeeded.
Nelson didn’t abandon Stoicism because he fell short of his ideals. He held faith with Aurelius’s ideas as well as he could, though it pained him to do so, until he found new ones to replace them.
In the spring semester of his sophomore year, Nelson took a class taught by a criminologist named Donald R. Taft. It was called Social Control, and it forced Nelson to reevaluate everything Meditations had taught him.
Taft was a handsome man with progressive politics, and a tight smile. He wore eyeglasses with thick round frames, and he spoke in metaphor. “Crime is an art which society has made punishable by law,” he told a group of students the year Nelson met him. “As educated people, we should not lose our perspective. If we hastily think of murderers and robbers as our most dangerous foes, we may overlook other people who really threaten us more.”
That point of view was novel for Nelson, and so were the other ideas Taft exposed him to in class. William Ogburn’s writ
ing, in particular, forced Nelson to reevaluate the way he thought about sin and personal responsibility.
Ogburn’s most famous book is Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, and in it he argues that human behavior can only be explained by considering biological inheritance, economics, and political factors. “[S]ocial conditions may become so rigorous in their impositions or effects upon human nature that behavior we call crime will be resorted to,” he wrote. “In periods of economic desperation there is more temptation to violate laws regarding property.”
Nelson decided to become a sociologist after taking Taft’s class. He was excited to discover a system of thought that acknowledged the power that institutions had to influence individuals, and tried to understand antisocial behavior instead of simply condemning it. But he still saw value in the Stoic ideal, and Aurelius’s ideas continued to influence him for the rest of his life. They played a role in shaping his lifestyle and personality, and they informed his writing as well.
Nelson’s fiction is often diminished because of his obvious sympathy for the poor, prisoners, prostitutes, and addicts. Critics sometimes bowdlerize it as apologia.§ But in truth, Nelson was a moralist, and his characters are a complex mix of discipline and resignation. They feel constrained by society and unfairly used, but they maintain what Carl Sandburg called “a strange midnight dignity.” There is no self-pity in them, and when they are accused of breaking the law, they question the moral authority of the people who condemn them instead of begging for forgiveness.