by Colin Asher
Nelson and Curtis had been eating nothing but raw tomatoes for some time, so they agreed and went to work. They spent the next several days shelling beans and pouring them into Mason jars. They sealed the jars when they were full, stacked them neatly, grabbed an empty jar, and then repeated the process. They kept at their task until they ran out of beans one day and Luther Luther failed to return with a fresh load.
That night, Nelson and Curtis heard an unfamiliar sound and got out of their cots. It seemed to be coming from the pumps, but it was too dark to tell. Nelson called out, but heard no reply, so he and Curtis closed the station door and went back to sleep.
They realized what had happened the next morning. Luther Luther had returned in the dark, siphoned off as much gas as the Studebaker’s tank would hold, and driven away. He was not coming back. He had been selling the black-eyed peas at a ridiculously low price to ensure they sold quickly, and pocketing all of the money. He hadn’t been paying the farmers, and when they began looking for him, he ran off.¶
“We’re known to be with him,” Nelson said. We need to leave. If we don’t, “we’ll wake up with a knife in our backs.”
Curtis agreed and returned to Chicago, but Nelson remained on the road.
Nelson followed the freight lines north and west after leaving the station, and began to write long, winding letters about his time on the road. It was a form of catharsis. He wrote about sleeping outside, going hungry, all the prostitutes he saw working the streets in New Orleans, the Luthers, the beauty parlor racket, the Sinclair station, and the black-eyed peas. “I gave the whole Confederacy hell” in those letters, he said.
And as Nelson wrote, he drifted toward home.
In La Feria, Texas, a traveling carnival hired Nelson to be a shill. It was his job to linger by a crooked roulette wheel and lure suckers by pretending to win and broadcasting his triumphs. He was paid in hot dogs, and when he spotted an opportunity, he ran away with some of the carnival’s money and hopped a train.
In El Paso, Nelson played craps with the cash he stole, and went bust. The police arrested him for vagrancy, and he spent a few days in jail. When he was released, he continued moving north, and by December he had made it as far as Oklahoma—seven hundred miles from the gas station outside Rio Hondo where he started running, but still seven hundred miles from home. “I remember going through Tulsa around the first of the year and it was cold,” he said later. “It was snowing. I remember eating at a kind of home—I don’t think it was a Salvation Army home . . . but a smaller outfit—Army Veterans’ God’s Blessing Station, or something like that. I remember. I remember it must have been around Christmas and that it was awful cold.”
* It seems incredible, but Nelson claimed he was unaware of the Depression until graduation. “I didn’t even know when I got out of school in thirty-one that there was a depression,” he told an interviewer. “You found out then?” the man asked. “Yeah, I found that out,” Nelson replied. “It was sort of a bring-down.”
† The numbers are breathtaking, actually. There were 408 Communist Party demonstrations in Chicago in 1931, and 566 in 1932.
‡ Nelson sometimes said he stayed at the YMCA in Minneapolis, but in the story this account is based on—an unpublished piece of first-person prose, unlabeled except for a title, but apparently a memoir—he describes his housing situation as I describe it here.
§ Rock and Rye is a treacly mixture of rock candy syrup and rye whiskey that was popular during Prohibition because doctors could prescribe it as a tonic.
¶ A note for Algren fans: If you think the version of events presented here contradicts one you have read in the past, you are correct. Nelson discussed these events in “So Help Me,” “The Last Carousel,” the introduction to the 1965 edition of Somebody in Boots, and “The Art of Fiction No. 11” published in Paris Review—as well as Conversations with Nelson Algren, Nelson Algren by Martha Heasley Cox and Wayne Chatterton, and unpublished writings held in his archive. He altered his account of the time he spent on the road during the Great Depression each time he told it—often drastically—so this account does not align perfectly with any of its antecedents. I composed it by checking Algren’s writings and interviews against the historical and archival record, comparing them to an interview with Benton Curtis, and then creating the most reliable composite possible. In some cases, obviously, Nelson is the only possible source. I rely on him in those instances, but omit contradictory details. For instance: in one account, Nelson claimed that black butterflies descended on the Sinclair station. Elsewhere, he said they were white. Those accounts can’t be reconciled, so I (reluctantly) left the butterflies out. Also, when Curtis’s version of events contradicts Nelson’s, I defer to Curtis. As it happens, Nelson never acknowledged that Curtis traveled to Texas.
“So Help Me”
(February 1933—January 26, 1934)
The first issue of Jack Conroy’s magazine, The Anvil, published in May 1933.
The only things Nelson possessed when he returned to Chicago were the story of his time on the road and a consuming desire to tell it. He witnessed “thousands of little scenes” during his travels, and when he moved back into his parents’ house, those moments “piled up into something” that made him “not just want to write,” he said, “but to really say it.”
The urge Nelson felt was creative—but evangelistic too. He had been raised to believe America was a place where men like him could earn degrees, find steady jobs, and buy homes using loans at reasonable rates. But by the winter of 1933, he had become convinced the meritocratic ideal was a fraud, that everyone who placed their faith in it had been fooled, and that he was obliged to reveal that deception. “Everything I’d been told was wrong,” he said. “. . . I’d been assured that it was a strive-and-succeed world . . . But this was not what America was. America was not socialized and I resented very deeply that I’d been lied to.”
Nelson had decided the American archetype was not a man who reports to work at a family-owned newspaper for twenty years and then enjoys a comfortable retirement—it was the teenager he met along the Southern Railroad, begging for soap. The youth had an outfielder’s mitt attached to the waist of his pants, and a contract in his pocket promising him a position with the Tallahassee Grays. The league he expected to play in had been disbanded, but no one had told the boy. He would learn when he reached Florida, but until then he carried himself with a threadbare sort of pride.
And if that boy wasn’t America, then it was a woman sitting “before a whiskey glass with a false bottom” and pleading for her dignity in the same breath she used to offer her company. “Don’t get the wrong idea, Mister. I’m no whoo-er,” she insisted. “But at the moment I don’t have a place to sleep.”
It was “the tens of thousands of Americans literally milling around . . . trying to survive,” Nelson said, and “all the whores in New Orleans.” It was four hungry people “sitting around a little kitchen” holding empty bowls, waiting to receive thin soup that was being ladled from a common pot. They saw that there was only one piece of ham floating in the broth, and every one of them prayed the other three would go hungry. It was the boy Nelson saw fall beneath the wheels of a moving train—and a gaunt man chain-smoking through black Texas nights while plotting against his bunkmates.
Nelson had never read a story or a book that described the America he had experienced over the past year and a half, so he felt compelled to commit his stories to the page. The problem he had to confront was how. He could write, but didn’t know anyone else who could, and had no idea where to send his work. He didn’t even own a typewriter.
The advertisement appeared in a small magazine, maybe the Saturday Review of Literature, and Nelson read it eagerly.
The Writers’ Circle is looking for new members, it said, and anyone interested should bring their work to the Jewish People’s Institute in Lawndale and ask for Murray Gitlin.
Nelson boarded a Kedzie Avenue trolley car one day that winter, rode it
eight miles south, and then walked west until he arrived at a sturdy four-story building clad in tan bricks. He went inside, found Murray Gitlin’s office, and addressed him deferentially.
I would like to join your group, he said.
Gitlin was a kind, avuncular man. The Writers’ Circle was a sideline for him. He earned his living as a social worker at the institute, but he took both roles seriously. He wrote seriously too. He had just completed a play called There Are 87 Million, and a few years later his work would appear in Scribner’s and Esquire.
Gitlin listened to Nelson and thought, This is a nice young man. I like him. “Well,” he said, “let me see some of your things.”
Nelson produced one of the letters he had written after the fiasco at the gas station in Texas. Gitlin read while Nelson waited, and was impressed. He thought Nelson had a natural talent for composition and a keen ear for dialogue.
“You don’t need my help,” Gitlin said when he finished the letter. “You’re a writer already, just go do it.” You should turn this letter into a story and begin submitting it, he said. “If one magazine turns it down just go to another one, that’s all there is to it.”
Nelson appreciated the encouragement, but eventually confessed that he needed more tangible help. He had nowhere to write, and no typewriter, so Gitlin found an unused room at the institute and told Nelson he could come and go as he pleased.
Afterward, the two men barely spoke. Sometimes, Nelson dropped by Gitlin’s office to say hello, but mostly he kept to himself and worked.
Nelson wrote four stories that winter, and the best was based on a letter he composed after leaving the Sinclair station in Texas. It began as a faithful account of events, but transformed into a work of fiction as Nelson revised. He made Luther Luther the story’s protagonist, renamed his own fictional counterpart “the Jew kid,” and wrote himself into a supporting role. He brought Luther’s plan to rob the Jitney Jungle to the foreground, and then imagined what would have happened if he and Luther Luther had participated. The robbery gets botched in the fictional version, the trio flees in a Chrysler they carjacked, and the police chase them into an orange grove. They hide there, and then they board a train. Eventually, one of the Luthers shoots the “Jew kid” with a sawed-off shotgun.
Nelson’s decision to have his antagonist narrate the story of his time in the South was an inspired choice. It transformed a self-pitying account of unemployment and homelessness into the portrait of a man who has abandoned any hope of conventional success. And it allowed Nelson to use Luther Luther’s sociopathic perspective to communicate the corrosive effect poverty has on morality without preaching to his readers or condescending to his characters.
“A dollar woman come by and give us the eye . . . ,” Nelson wrote. “We all three of us went down to the Mex bootlegger an’ give him three bucks for the long cut short.” And “the moonlight was on his face like I seen it on the dead faces at Cantigny.”
Nelson’s story was a gorgeous, plotless thing when he finished revising—a study of atmosphere and character written in a voice with no literary precedent. Luther Luther is the only person who speaks. He has been arrested for robbing the Jitney Jungle and killing the “Jew kid,” and the story’s narrative is the self-serving version of events he offers to his attorney. His account begins with this rangy sentence and continues in the same vein for twelve pages.
Now perhaps you will think that I am just lying to you and maybe you will even think that Fort really wanted to get rid of the Jew kid so’s we would oney have two ways to split instead of three, but you know, Mr. Breckenridge, guys like me can’t never get away with bull like that to big-league lawyers like yourself, so you can just take my word for it Fort didn’t really mean to hurt the Jew kid a-tall, and that’s the truth so help me.
Nelson brought his story to Murray Gitlin when it was finished, and asked for feedback. Gitlin loved it. You should start submitting this around, he said, begin with Story magazine. Nelson gave his manuscript the title “So Help Me,” and then he put a copy in the mail the way Gitlin suggested.*
While Nelson waited to hear back from Story, he read. The last time he’d studied literature seriously, he was a college freshman, and enamored with English writers like Byron and Chaucer. Now he was interested in orienting himself within the current scene, and discovering writers who had something to say about the Depression.
He found what he was looking for that spring when he bought the first issue of The Anvil: Stories for Workers—a twenty-four-page magazine that sold for fifteen cents. He opened its cover and found an editorial that promised the magazine would publish only “vital, vigorous material drawn from the farms, mines, mills, factories and offices of America.” Then he continued reading, and discovered stories by obscure figures named H. H. Lewis and Joseph Kalar and B. C. Hagglund that described unemployment, homelessness, and plowing fields.† The prose in them was chunky and turgid, but they excited Nelson because they were brash and confrontational.
“The hunger beast pounced upon me, chewed me up, digested the sweet juices of my egotism, and dumped me down and out, phew, to reek on the social veldt,” Nelson read. And “Our throats were raw with cursing the world and our minds were sick with buffoonery and we ached painfully for a cold clean wind to come hurtling upon us like an invisible broom, sweeping out cobwebs of despair.”
On page 15, Nelson read, “I saw millions of farmers forced to the last ditch, mortgage holders fighting them with a piece of paper and a sheriff, in the name of law and order,” and then he set the magazine aside, composed a letter to its editor, and mailed it to:
Jack Conroy
Rural Route Four
Moberly, Mo.
Conroy was a tall, broad-chested man whose biography included everything that should be expected of the founder of a magazine like The Anvil. He had been raised near the coal mine his father worked and died in. He became an apprentice in a railroad shop when he was thirteen, stayed on the job for nine years, tried college, and then dropped out. He married a farmer’s daughter named Gladys Kelly, had children, and went to work in an automobile factory. Then he resumed his education using correspondence courses, and transformed himself into a writer. By the time Nelson’s letter reached him, he was about to complete his first novel, and had already edited two previous magazines—Unrest and Rebel Poet.
Nelson wrote to Conroy looking for a publisher, but he found a mentor instead. Conroy didn’t accept any of Nelson’s stories, but through their correspondence, and the material he published in The Anvil, he introduced Nelson to the proletarian literature movement—the milieu that defined the beginning of Nelson’s career.
The proletarian writers were an idiosyncratic group. Herman Spector was one. He was a shipping clerk who bragged that he had never been farther west than Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and he used verse to document his poverty and discontent. “I am the bastard in the ragged suit,” he wrote, “who spits, with bitterness and malice to all.” Josephine Herbst was another. She was raised in Iowa, spent time with Ernest Hemingway in Europe, and wrote about the privations of farm life. Another one of their number composed terse sentences like this: “I was a little savage and lover of the street.” His name was Mike Gold, and he was famous for writing a best-selling bildungsroman about life in a Lower East Side tenement called Jews without Money. James T. Farrell was one of the youngest authors on the scene. He recently made his mark with a novel called Young Lonigan that was set just north of Nelson’s childhood home in Chicago.
Spector, a high school dropout, wrote with the fiercely competitive spirit of a man intent on wresting accolades from an ambivalent world. Herbst devoted three novels to chronicling her family’s economic struggles and eventual ruin. Gold was proud that his book helped “hundreds of thousands of people” understand “that not all Jews are millionaire bankers.” And Farrell said he wanted to document the life of a “normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction” who lived and was educated in “spiritual pover
ty.”
There wasn’t much connecting the motivations of the proletarian writers, but they had a unifying goal: they wrote to broaden the scope of American literature so that working-class characters could assume prominent roles, and most understood that effort as part of a larger struggle. They believed their writing had the potential to change the world, and the Communist Party USA—the proletarian literature movement’s greatest benefactor—encouraged them to embrace that possibility.
The party had been quick to understand the Depression’s potential. They began organizing among the unemployed and within labor unions soon after the crash, but also invested in a cultural offensive. They opened the pages of their largest magazine, New Masses, to working-class writers, and funded a national arts organization called the John Reed Club—so named for an American journalist who witnessed the Russian Revolution, wrote about it, and then founded a Communist organization. They paid to create new proletarian magazines, supported independent projects like The Anvil by distributing them, and managed to buy a significant amount of influence among young, disaffected creative types.‡
Authors are revered in the Soviet Union, the party said. The state pays them salaries and publishes their work. “Art is a class weapon,” and authors are agents of history. Your lives are the proper focus of culture, they said. The Depression isn’t your problem—capitalism is.
Nelson was attracted to the party’s ideas, and its aggressive tactics. They had spilled blood the year before while fighting Adolph Hitler in Germany, and fought with the police in Chicago and forced the mayor to issue a moratorium on evictions. No other group could say the same, so Nelson joined the movement.
He began corresponding with members of the Communist Party that summer, and soon he was referring to himself as a “proletarian writer” and a “revolutionary artist.” He said that America’s slums had to be destroyed, and only a revolution could destroy them.