Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Bigger’s employer has a spoiled and reckless daughter, and it’s Bigger’s job to drive her around. She tries to convert him to communism the first time he does so, drinks heavily, and has sex with her boyfriend in the back of the car. She’s too drunk to walk by the time Bigger brings her home, so he carries her to her room and lays her on the bed. He steals a kiss, and before he can slip away, her blind mother approaches. Bigger knows he’ll be accused of rape if he’s found alone with a white woman, so he places his hand over the girl’s mouth to keep her quiet. She squirms when he touches her, so he presses harder, and suffocates her by mistake.

  The police catch Bigger eventually—the courts try him, a jury convicts, and a judge sentences him to death. “They wouldn’t let me live and I killed,” Bigger says before his execution. “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.”

  Nelson spent two days reading Native Son, and when he reached the final page he was sure he had just finished an American classic. The book had the sociological heft of great proletarian writing, and the psychological nuance of the best Russian novels. It transcended politics, trampled over the bounds of polite discourse, and challenged authority the way Nelson believed literature should.

  Nelson typed a letter to Wright when he set the book down.

  I really hadn’t planned on writing you about NATIVE SON, because I’d assumed it was just one more good book in America. I assumed it would deal almost wholly with external situations, would prove, competently, the need for change, would be well-written and get good reviews and be half-forgotten by the time your next appeared. But I’m honestly hit so hard I have to get it off my chest. This isn’t by any means a letter of congratulation. I don’t feel any need to tell you how well-thought out or how well-sustained it is and all that, you’ll hear that all over.

  The most striking thing about the book, Nelson said, was that the story and characters were “such a threat.”

  I mean a personal threat. At first I felt it was just a challenge but it’s more. You’ve done a very, very smart thing. I don’t think any white person could read it without being either frightened or angry at the end. My own reaction happened to be anger more than anything else. I mean when someone’s threatened out of a clear blue sky, he starts getting sore. I don’t mean I’m angry now. I don’t see how anyone could stay angry, assuming he’s got a notion of what it’s all about, because, of course, you’re right, sociologically and psychologically and you can’t stay angry at patent truth.

  Nelson typed until he had filled three pages. When he finished, he folded them, slipped them into an envelope, and dropped it in the mail. Then he prepared to leave Rat Alley. Native Son’s reception made him more confident in the direction of his own work, and emboldened him to abandon the storefronts in favor of a place where he could write without distraction.

  Nelson moved to Chicago’s Northwest Side three weeks after he wrote to Wright, renting two rooms at 1907 West Evergreen Avenue—a quiet building near the heart of Polish Chicago.

  Nelson’s new apartment was smaller and more austere than his last home, but it provided everything he needed: solitude and easy access to sources. None of his friends lived nearby, so it was easier for him to focus. He spent most of his free time in front of a typewriter after he moved, and when he needed a break, he stepped onto the wooden porch attached to the back of his building and watched the city breathe. He could see laundry hanging limp on backyard clotheslines from there, children playing on rooftops, and steam rising from factories. The setting of his novel was just outside his door, so when he needed material, he descended his front stoop. The southern corner of Wicker Park jutted toward his building like the tip of a spear, and the El tracks crossed his street at the end of the block. He regularly spoke with the young toughs who lingered in the crenulated shadows cast by the overhead tracks, and if none of them was around when he visited, he turned down Milwaukee Avenue and walked a few blocks to the Triangle.

  Nelson thought he could complete his novel in ten months if he focused, so he simplified his life. He chose not to have a phone line installed in his apartment, and rarely invited anyone to visit. He even stopped cooking for himself. Instead, he kept a pot on his stove that he never emptied or cleaned. When he got hungry, he added food to whatever remained of his last meal—vegetables, meat, or beans—then poured some water in, turned on the burner, returned to his manuscript, and waited for his concoction to boil.

  Richard Wright visited Chicago two months after Nelson moved, and found his friend happy and hard at work. The two of them discussed Nelson’s novel, wandered around the city to snap pictures for a photo essay Wright was developing, and then convened a meeting of their old crowd.

  Wright’s visit was a triumphant homecoming. He had published two books since moving away, and had married. Native Son had already sold a quarter of a million copies and Orson Welles had made an offer for the stage rights, but when Wright, Nelson, Aaron, and Conroy got together in a saloon, their conversation focused on the war, not Wright’s accomplishments.

  Germany had been emboldened when Spain fell to Franco the year before, and had invaded Poland, Denmark, and Norway since. France was being carved up as Nelson and his friends talked and drank—one piece to the Germans, one to the Italians, and one to a German puppet regime in Vichy—and everyone knew Britain was next. The only question was how America would respond.

  Wright didn’t think the war would reach the United States, and he had no intention of fighting if it did. He grew up in the Jim Crow south and didn’t feel he owed the country a thing. He planned to run if he got drafted, probably to Mexico, and told his friends America should let the Germans have England. The British Empire would crumble if London fell, he argued, thus freeing large portions of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It wasn’t clear to him that German expansion in Europe would be worse than allowing the British to retain control of most of the Southern Hemisphere, and he couldn’t forgive Britain’s refusal to support the Republicans in Spain.

  When bombs began sailing across the English Channel, Wright hoped everyone tracking their approach would remember the fall of Madrid. “I think the English will make damn good Nazis,” he told Nelson.

  Abe Aaron wasn’t as cavalier. He didn’t think there was any chance Hitler would stop after London, and he reasoned that it would be better to fight the German army on European soil than the American coast. Everyone gathered that day had reason to worry about a fascist invasion, but Aaron’s fear was a living thing. He came from a long line of European Jews, and the terror of pogroms was part of his genetic inheritance. Before his family emigrated, a Russian cossack gutted one of his aunts, and—according to family legend—stuffed her abdomen with sawdust while her younger brother watched.

  Aaron said he planned to enlist in the army if America entered the war, and to ask for a combat posting.

  Nelson was more concerned about his own government than the German Reich. Paranoia ends lives more slowly than bullets, but just as surely, and it had already begun taking hold in America. The House Committee on Un-American Activities—known as the Dies Committee—had been investigating radicals and subversives for the past two years, and had already forced the leaders of the Communist Party and the League of American Writers to testify.

  “I’m on the books,” Nelson told Wright—meaning he was a subversive in the government’s eyes. It was only a suspicion on his part, but he was right. His name had already been mentioned to the Dies Committee five times. A letter he signed had been entered into the Congressional record, and someone told the committee Nelson was part of a Communist “antiseptic squad.” Soon, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, learned about the testimony and ordered his agents to investigate Nelson as a threat to internal security.

  Wright, Nelson, Aaron and Conroy had been supporting and competing against each other for six years by then, but their lives began moving along different trajectories when Wright’s visit ende
d, and they never met again as a group.

  Aaron turned inward that year and became paranoid. He left Chicago a few months after Wright’s visit, and tried, and failed, to enlist in the army. Then he cut ties with his friends. He was convinced the FBI was spying on him, and didn’t want to put anyone he loved at risk. He burned most of his papers, and he signed correspondence with “Better destroy this letter. Best luck.” He moved to New York and then California, married, became an accountant, and had three children who grew up believing their father was a reticent, apolitical man. He never told them about the years he spent in Chicago, or his famous friends Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.

  Conroy slipped into obscurity. He never wrote another novel, and for the next several years, he drank ever harder. “I feel pretty goddamn bad looking at Jack,” Aaron wrote, “for it’s a sad thing to see a man like him breaking up.” Conroy and Nelson remained friends, but they were never competitors again. He spent the next forty years writing children’s books, editing an encyclopedia, and rehashing his glory days.

  Wright settled into his fame, and built on it. He was working on a photo essay and a piece about developing Native Son, and over the course of the next few years, he married a second time, had two children, took up residence in Paris, and transformed himself into an international figure. By the time he died, his work was an acknowledged tenet of the American literary canon.

  And, for the first time, Nelson dedicated himself solely to his writing. He stopped editing the New Anvil,† cut his ties with the League of American Writers, and avoided Rat Alley. He kept Conroy at a distance—there are “too many parties” in his life, he said, “too many pals”—and he finally accepted help that Wright had been offering for months.

  Wright was signed to Harper & Brothers. He earned a lot of credibility there after Native Son’s success, and earlier that year he spent some of it on Nelson’s behalf. He told his editor, Edward Aswell, that Nelson’s unfinished book was going to be remarkable, so Aswell wrote to Nelson and asked for a copy of his manuscript. Nelson declined. He was wary of allowing an editor to read his work before it was finished, and didn’t want to be rushed. He had written Somebody in Boots quickly, and believed it would have been much better if he had had more time.

  Aswell persisted though. He wrote to Nelson again, and when Nelson turned him down a second time, Wright stepped in. Aswell is trustworthy, he told Nelson. “He is young, and he is new at the place. So far, he has been successful enough to bag three good writers, writers who can write and at the same time sell. If they take your stuff, they will push it. You can be assured of that.”

  Nelson relented then. He sent the first three hundred pages of his book to Aswell the month after Wright’s visit, and mailed the same portion to Wright for his feedback. Then he went to North Park to spend some time with his sister before she died.

  Bernice had been bedridden for months and had been keeping herself busy by translating books into braille. She continued working until she grew too weak, and then she received visitors. Gerson and Goldie stayed close to their daughter in the last weeks of her life, and so did her two children, her husband, Morris, and Nelson. When she died on August 9, 1940, she was well loved.

  The family buried Bernice in Memorial Park Cemetery three days later, and then they scattered. The force of Bernice’s charisma had been the only thing binding the Abraham and Joffe families, and they drifted apart the moment she died. Morris began courting a new wife, remarried quickly, and began traveling widely for work—sometimes as much as ten months in a year.‡ Irene, Bernice’s older sister, remained in New York and rarely visited Chicago. Gerson and Goldie stepped in to raise Bernice’s children in Morris’s absence, and Nelson receded further from the family and immersed himself in his writing.

  The first draft of Nelson’s novel was a gorgeous mess. There was dialogue that went on for pages, and thousands of words dedicated to describing the inner workings of a brothel. The style of interrogation employed by the Chicago police was reproduced in exacting detail, and characters who served no narrative purpose appeared just long enough to say evocative things. Children played in shadows and dreamed. Rain fell, and puddles refracted flickering neon lights.

  The result was often beautiful, but it wasn’t a book. The manuscript Nelson sent to Aswell and Wright had no plot and no real protagonist. It opens in an East St. Louis brothel, but then, after a few dozen pages, the action shifts to Chicago. A boxer named Pacek—better known as “Paycheck”—appears and commandeers the narrative for a hundred pages, but then the story returns to East St Louis. The book’s only consistent elements are Nelson’s perspective and the strength of his prose. They weren’t enough.

  Richard Wright sent Nelson feedback on his manuscript a few weeks after he received it. He lavished praise on the quality of its dialogue and settings, but took issue with its lack of sustained narrative. “I read page after page for the sheer poetry in them for the sheer way in which you make those folks talk and react to their environment,” he wrote.

  But the book’s structure “puzzles me a little,” Wright said. “I read 263 pages and I could not tell in what direction the story was moving.” He argued that Nelson should develop Paycheck’s character, and use him to weave the story’s divergent narratives together. If you do that, your book will “flow without any breaks,” he said, and you’ll be able to “create a sense of sympathy, pity, and sorrow in the readers’ mind for the whole lost crowd you depict.” If you can pull that off, you’ll have written something “utterly different than anything anybody is now writing, something new.”

  Edward Aswell agreed. He offered Nelson five hundred dollars for his unfinished novel—with provisions. He wanted Nelson to restructure the manuscript along the lines Wright suggested, give it a plot, move the entire narrative to Chicago, and rename some characters because they were too closely patterned on real people.

  Aswell offered Nelson eight months to revise, and one hundred dollars in advance. Nelson agreed, and when the terms were settled, Aswell mailed him a check and a sarcastically encouraging note. “Nothing remains but to finish the book,” he wrote. “It sounds easy doesn’t it? I know, though, that it isn’t.”

  Nelson embedded himself in his neighborhood after signing his contract and devoted himself to improving his novel. He turned his boxer into a proper protagonist and renamed him Bruno “Lefty Biceps” Bicek—also known as Lefty, also known as Bunny.§ He moved all of the action to Chicago, and conjured a hermetically sealed version of the Triangle that’s awash in shadow and testosterone, and thrumming with impotent violence. Then he populated it with a sprawling cast of characters who are so diverse and finely wrought they stand up to anything in Dickens or Dostoyevsky. Their names are Finger, Bibleback, Catfoot, Fireball, and Mama T., and Nelson got to know them so well, he could sketch the whole sweep of their lives in just a few sentences.

  Fireball had “once pitched a shutout for St. John’s over St. Bonifacius,” Nelson wrote, “when he’d weighed a hundred and ninety-two pounds; calling him anything but Fireball now implied that he was no longer the man he had been that afternoon; it would be the same as asking him what was the matter with him. And there was nothing the matter with him—said Fireball. He was just taking off a little fat from around the waist was all. ‘I’m on the whisky cure,’ he would say bitterly, and drain a half pint without taking his lips from the bottle.”

  “I’m just temp’rar’ly stranded is all myself,” Mama T. swears. “I’ve got friends, real friends. Boosters I bailed out, free-lance hustlers I paid their rent for—I got a friend a precinct captain I perjured myself for. I c’d go to him t’night . . . I just don’t like to ask.”

  And an inmate proclaims, “Let them radios holler. Let them dice shakers shake. Let them boozers booze. I’m lettin’ everythin’ go.”

  Nelson worked on his revision for a year, then more. His deadline came, and went, and though he tried to maintain a steady pace, adversity and trauma kept interrupting his
writing process. He was forced to register for the draft, and became preoccupied by the idea that he would be called up by the army before his novel was finished. He was laid off by the Writers’ Project for four months, a close friend named Alexander Bergman killed himself, and then his father became ill.

  After Bernice died, Gerson Abraham lost his will to live. He had a minor operation in the spring of 1941 and never recovered—chose not to, his grandson Robert always corrected. Pneumonia was the official cause of death when he passed, but Gerson’s family said he was killed by a broken heart. He had lost his business, his property, his wife’s love, his home, his son’s respect, and a daughter. He had nothing to live for at the end, and death was almost a mercy.

  Goldie and Nelson were both at Gerson’s bedside when he died on August 24, 1941. She never shed a tear, and he rarely spoke about the events of that day afterward. They buried Gerson in the same cemetery as Bernice, and then Nelson went back to work. He submitted his manuscript to Harper & Brothers three weeks later.

  Edward Aswell was stunned by the book Nelson sent him. “Everyone [at Harper’s] who needed to read your novel has now done so, including myself,” he wrote. “There is enthusiastic unanimity of opinion about it. It’s a book of great integrity and unmistakable power. I myself am amazed at the skill you have shown in revising it.”

  He requested about a dozen minor changes to the novel—most concerned material that could be considered libelous, or indecent, and none required much work. Then he gave the book a worthy title. Nelson had been calling his manuscript White Hope, but when Aswell read it, he discovered a few lines of text buried in a dream sequence that suggest the entire arc of the book’s narrative:¶