by Colin Asher
“I believed the world was changing,” he said later, “and I wanted to help change it.”
Story magazine accepted “So Help Me” in July 1934 and published it as their lead feature in August. Nelson’s name appeared on the cover below Zora Neale Hurston’s and above William Faulkner’s. It was a bold way to arrive, and people noticed.
A few days after Story went on sale, Nelson received a letter from a New York publisher called the Vanguard Press. He opened it, and read: “We are interested in a novel on the basis of this piece in Story magazine.” Then he left home. He grabbed an extra shirt, some notepads and pencils, and started walking. He found a spot along one of the highways that ran east from Chicago, stuck out his thumb, and got lucky. Two young guys with a bunch of extra bedding piled in the back seat of their car pulled over for him. They were headed for New York City by way of Niagara Falls, and told Nelson he could ride with them.
Nelson reached Manhattan on September 13. He looked at the return address on the letter he received from Vanguard—100 Fifth Avenue—and went looking for it. He found the building near Union Square Park, went inside, and said he wanted to speak to the person in charge.
He was twenty-four-years old, disheveled, and baggy-eyed. He had one published story to his credit—no appointment, no agent, no manuscript.
Vanguard’s owner agreed to meet anyway. His name was James Henle, and he had been a journalist before he became a publisher. He signed muckrakers after taking over Vanguard, and championed the work of James T. Farrell. The press had published Karl Marx in the past, jeremiads like People vs. Wall Street, and a memoir called I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! A scruffy kid from Chicago was a stretch for them, but not much of one.
Henle invited Nelson into his office and let him talk.
Someone from Vanguard sent me a letter, Nelson explained. And I’m here to answer. I don’t have a book, but I want to write one.
Henle played along. What would you write about? he asked.
I spent last year on the road, Nelson said. I train hopped from Chicago to New Orleans, then spent time in Texas. If I write a book, it will be about drifting. I’ll hop freight trains back to the Rio Grande Valley, sleep in hobo jungles, and write about what I see.
Henle liked the idea. The Depression was lumbering into its fourth year, but no one had written an account of the economic crisis like the one Nelson described.
I’ll give you two hundred dollars to write that book, Henle said. Half in advance.§
Nelson agreed. He had never been paid so much.
What will it cost you to travel south and begin working? Henle asked.
Nelson considered the question. He calculated the price in his head and began to answer, but then checked himself. He figured it would cost less than three dollars, but he decided to set his price high so he could negotiate from a position of strength.
Ten dollars, Nelson said finally. It will cost me ten dollars to get to Texas and start writing. Then he watched in disbelief as Henle reached into his wallet and removed some cash.
Henle sat at his desk after paying Nelson, and typed up a letter identifying its bearer as a Vanguard Press author. He figured it would be an effective defense against a vagrancy charge. He gave Nelson the letter, wished him luck, and showed him the door.
Henle had a formal publishing contract typed up the next day and mailed it to Creston Avenue, in the Bronx, where Nelson was staying with his sister Irene. It read: “This letter will confirm the agreement we reached verbally yesterday afternoon. The Vanguard Press has advanced you $10.00 to finance you in writing your novel tentatively entitled THE GODS GATHER.” Another thirty dollars will be issued when you sign this contract, thirty more will be sent to you in October, and a final installment will arrive in November. We expect you to send us everything you have written in December. “If we feel that we then want to publish your novel when completed, we are to advance you an additional hundred dollars.” Your completed manuscript will be due “on or before March 15, 1934.”
Nelson hopped a freight train after he signed his contract, headed for New Orleans along the Southern Pacific line, and began eavesdropping on the men riding with him. As his train rattled down the rails, Nelson transcribed their conversations on the pages of his notebook in script that peaks awkwardly, fades, and jots off the page.
“At the Mexican line eat at Two Joe’s restaurant,” he scrawled.
“For fools and the unfeeling this is all well enough.”
“I did not deny drinking when asked by the Salvation Army.”
Nelson’s plan was simple. He was going to retrace the route he traveled the year before—New Orleans first, then west into the Rio Grande Valley. The boxcars he rode in and the towns his trains cut through would become the setting for his novel. Dialogue would flit to him on the wind as miles flew past. Characters would emerge fully realized. Scenes would appear. He figured the book would practically write itself, but that’s not the way it worked out.
Nelson made it to New Orleans and caught a westbound train the way he planned, but then he stumbled. He headed toward the Magic Valley, but kept moving when he should have stopped—through the part of southern Texas he knew, then north until he reached El Paso a thousand miles later. He stopped there to reassess, and visited Ciudad Juárez to watch a bullfight because the border was so close.
A toreador fluttered his flag and slashed with his sword inside the arena. A drunken American yelled, “He’ll toss ’em all. This the bes’ ol’ bull ever was in these parts.” The crowd cheered, and the bull died a gory death.
Nelson was as lost when the carnage ended as he had been when it began, so he decided to fall back on what he knew. He returned to El Paso, hopped on a freight rolling east, and headed toward the setting of the novel he promised Henle. He didn’t make it far. Railroad bulls stopped Nelson’s train outside Sanderson, Texas, and walked the snaking line of its cars. They found him inside one, pulled him out, and left him by the side of the tracks.
Nelson was stranded then. He was in the high desert and it was early October. It would be cold when the sun set behind the hills encircling the town, so he started walking. He found US Route 90 and stuck out his thumb. He had been on the road for three weeks, and hadn’t written a word. If he didn’t complete a draft of his novel in two and a half months, he was at risk of losing his contract.
Someone spotted Nelson by the side of the road, pulled over, offered him a ride, drove eighty miles west, and dropped him off in a small city that had been built at the junction of two rail lines. The town was called Alpine. It had three thousand residents, one paved road, a department store, a barbershop, a hotel, two restaurants, and three churches—one Catholic, one Baptist, and one Methodist. There was a small college at the base of a hill on the east side of town.
Nelson decided to stay. He found a rundown ranch at 909 West Avenue that rented rooms to railroad workers, and approached the owner. Her name was Nettleton, and she promised Nelson a clean place to sleep and one hot meal a day for ten dollars a month.
Nelson agreed to her terms and paid her. Then he went to his room. There was a bed inside, a dresser, and a small desk. Light was provided by a bulb attached to a wire dangling from the wood ceiling.
Nelson unpacked his things: pads, pencils, one extra shirt. Then he began writing. First, he created a protagonist—a young, naïve boy from a poor, violent home in Texas. Then he conjured a world so bleak it reads more like an outer circle of hell than a human environment. Finally, he led his protagonist along a narrative path that closely tracks the one he followed himself the year before—away from home in search of work, in and out of relief missions and traumas, through New Orleans and Texas.
Nelson had adopted a dispassionate tone when he wrote “So Help Me,” and his style was almost ethnographic—closely observed and free of judgment. But by the time he began The Gods Gather, he was a revolutionary endeavoring to expose capitalism as a violent and predacious system, and his methods
were blunt and fervent. At the beginning of the book, Nelson’s protagonist discovers a child’s mangled body lying near some train tracks where they had been scavenging coal, and notices an eye hanging “by one long thin wet thread.” Another character is decapitated by a train a few pages later, and then the protagonist, whose face had recently been slashed with a knife, and whose brother had been beaten bloody by their father, leaves home hoping to find safety outside of Texas—and fails.
“From city to city he went now; there was no standing still and there was no turning back,” Nelson wrote. “No place to go, no place to rest. No time to be idling and nothing to do. He moved, moved, everything moved; men either kept moving or went to jail. . . .
“A summer passed, suns passed, clouds passed, rain fell; he begged, he cringed; he lived with a ragged throng.”
Alpine was watching Nelson. The town was accustomed to drifters coming through on the trains, but they had never had one stay so long or adopt such odd habits. People saw Nelson walk through downtown carrying a stack of papers every morning, make his way to the campus of Sul Ross State Teachers College, disappear inside for hours, and then retrace his route in the evening and return to the Nettleton house.
Nelson had approached the school’s president, asked for permission to use the typewriters on campus, and received it. To seal the deal, he flashed the letter Henle had given him, and afterward rumors spread. Students heard that the drifter hanging around campus was really a writer under contract with a New York publisher, and their curiosity was piqued. They watched Nelson more closely than anyone, and the more they scrutinized him, the more interesting he seemed—he rarely took breaks from writing, and wore the same pair of khaki pants every day. He bought tobacco and coffee in town, but ate sandwiches he scrounged from campus trash cans for lunch.
Eventually, a redhead named Paul Forchheimer found the courage to approach Nelson. He wanted to become a writer, so he went to the Nettleton house and knocked at the door. He was surprised when Nelson greeted him warmly and welcomed him inside.
Nelson and Forchheimer were only a few years apart in age, but a world of experience separated them. Forchheimer had lived in Alpine his entire life, and was in awe of his host. They spent a long time discussing life and literature the night they met. Nelson said writing had the power to change the world, and talked about the months he spent on the road and the role they played in his work. He explained that he was under pressure to finish his book so he could collect the rest of his advance, and said he wouldn’t be in Alpine much longer.
Forchheimer returned later with friends, and soon Nelson had his first taste of fame. He offered his visitors tea when they came to the boardinghouse, and began meeting with them in a café downtown. He read some of his work to them, and spun yarns while they drank Coca-Cola and coffee. He claimed to be Theodore Dreiser’s nephew, and said his work had appeared in “various eastern magazines.” I’ve been a “truck driver, a dough-mixer, a hobo, a court-reporter, and a coffee salesman,” he said. They believed every word.
Nelson was running out of money and time, and knew he wasn’t going to finish his book by his December deadline. He had written maybe two hundred pages, but he didn’t want to send them to Henle because they needed work. “I didn’t have a novel,” he said. “I had a heap of typing.”
Nelson told Jack Conroy that he was heading north, and Conroy advised him to join the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club so he would have somewhere to write when he arrived. Nelson thought it was a good idea, so he applied. He wrote a story about a man who lacks the courage to tell his wife he has been laid off, and gave it the title “American Diary.” He wrote “submitted for adm. to club” in pencil at the top of the cover page when he finished his manuscript, and put the story in the mail.
Then he worked on his novel through the holidays.
The Sul Ross Writers’ Club invited Nelson to speak on January 15, and he agreed. His rent was only paid through the end of the month, and it would be a nice way to say goodbye to Alpine.
The meeting was held in the home of a woman named Audrey Lewis, and fifteen people attended. Sandwiches, cookies, cocoa, and coffee were served. A reporter was on hand to cover the event.
Nelson had never given a speech before, but he acquitted himself with the confidence of a zealous convert. The title of his talk was “The Culture of the Proletariat,” and he held forth like a man who had been immersed in his subject for years.
“The literature of the proletariat originated just prior to the World War, and has gradually gained recognition since that time,” he said. Then he explained that every other form of literature—everything popular at the time—was trivial in comparison. When the history of American letters was written, he predicted, Jack Conroy’s writing would be held in higher regard than Sinclair Lewis’s, or any other contemporary.
Then he discussed style, and censorship. “If I’m writing a story about a railroad construction gang, and a man gets hit hard with a hammer,” Nelson said, “he’s not going to say, ‘Goodness gracious.’ He’s going to say, ‘Son of a bitch!’ ”
Nelson returned to his room after his speech, and a few days later he wrote a poem that begins “All night one night I heard your voice, my city.” It was time for him to go home.
__________
Nelson walked up the hill toward Sul Ross at about 6 p.m. on January 25. The sun had already set, and the school was closed. He walked through the building’s south entrance and headed for the typing room. He tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. Then he noticed an office. He gave the door a push, and it opened.
He sat down at a desk behind a typewriter and pecked out a few words. He felt nervous, shaky. He wasn’t sure why he was there. He typed for about fifteen minutes, then stopped. He found the machine’s dust cover and slipped it on. Then he opened a drawer and lifted the typewriter. He had intended to put it away, but instead he slipped it under his arm and carried it back to the Nettleton house.
Nelson packed the typewriter in a crate that night, brought it to Alpine’s freight depot in the morning, and mailed it to his parents, charges reversed. Then he walked to the edge of town and waited for the train, which was scheduled to arrive at 10:15.
Nelson hopped aboard when it rumbled past and rode east—toward San Antonio, and eventually a ride north toward home. The freight took on water in Sanderson about an hour later, and Nelson hopped off and rolled a cigarette. He had a chill, so he leaned against a wall a few yards from the tracks, basked in the sun, and smoked.
He was the image of repose when the police spotted him. They were close by the time he noticed them, so he didn’t bother running.
“Good morning,” he said when they were within earshot.
They asked his name. He replied: Nelson Abraham.
The sheriff took Nelson into custody then, brought him back to Alpine, and delivered him to the Brewster County courthouse. The sheriff there told Nelson he was being charged with a felony, and before the day was over, Nelson had written and signed a full confession.
“I wanted a typewriter very bad because I am a writer by profession,” he wrote. I need one but don’t own one, and never have, so I took one from the college. “There is nothing that is more vital to my mere existence as a typewriter, it is the only means I have to earn a living.”
* The letter this story was based on has been lost, unfortunately, as have all the others Nelson wrote while train hopping home from Texas.
† These men were, respectively: a farmer, a mill worker, and a farmer who moonlighted as a publisher.
‡ Joining the Communist Party was a source of pride for writers at the time. Malcolm Cowley, then the literary editor of The New Republic and later a respected critic, remembered the party’s appeal this way: “There was an enormous prestige at that time for people who belonged to the party. They were listened to as if they had received advice straight from God.”
§ That’s a bit less than four thousand dollars in today’s dollars.<
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“What Is a Carpenter without His Tools?”
(January 27–February 1934)
The Brewster County jail comprised four cells on the second floor of a red brick building, a common toilet that was flushed using a bucket, and thin vertical windows. The sheriff and his family lived in an apartment beneath the lockup. There was a porch outside their door, and chairs for sitting and entertaining. They left the inmates alone, and expected the same in return.
The jail provided no distractions, so each man inside killed time in his own way. A rodeo rider named Jess spent hours pacing and singing—I kissed her and I named the day, he crooned, that I would marry sweet Kitty Wells. He was a shrewd sociopath. He killed a Mexican man in Texas, and fled south before being arrested. Then he killed a Mexican woman in Mexico, recrossed the border, and turned himself in. He knew he would be punished less harshly for killing a Mexican in America than he would in Mexico.
A one-handed drifter spent his days bragging and bullying. He talked about his sexual conquests, and claimed to be the actor Art Acord’s brother. They looked alike, so it wasn’t the worst lie. When he had nothing else to do, the drifter thickened the callus on the stump where his hand had been. He used it like a pommel to bend tobacco tins, and he used it to fight. The inmates had devised their own set of rules, independent of the sheriff, and the drifter enforced them. “Every man must wash his face and hands before handling food,” they said. “Any man found guilty of marking on the wall will be given 20 licks on rectum west.”
Nelson wrote and drew. He sketched the cowboy and the drifter, and recorded the cowboy’s song. He had been allowed to keep his notebook, and he used a page to write to Jack Conroy. “I’m on my way to Huntsville,” he said.* He sent a letter to his family as well, but didn’t tell them he had been arrested. Near the back of his pad, he began a note to James Henle, but never finished. “I’ve gotten myself into an unholy scrape down here,” it said.