by Colin Asher
“The town was full, full of guys with arms,” Nelson said. There were British troops, Americans, Canadians, and Senegalese, and because there were few military police to keep them in check, the black market thrived. Brothels operated twenty-four hours a day, poker games went all night, and soldiers were able to trade American cigarettes or oranges for sex or wine. The city was a wild and free place, and Nelson loved it. “Every morning I crept out of my little shelter-half, jumped on a truck without a pass, and spent the whole day living off the black-market,” he explained. “I was responsible to nobody, or anything.”
Nelson lived that way for three months, and later, when he thought back on the weeks he spent trading Eisenhower coats for Chianti and studying the wrecked ships rocking in the port, he recognized them as the “most isolated” but “least despairing” of his life. “I was the anonymous man,” he said. “I was finally myself. When I crept back into my camp” each night “with nothing to show for the long day’s toil but half a bottle of cheap red wine, that, for me, was the happy time.”
But eventually, Nelson began to long for home. “It seemed like it was time,” he said. I had been drifting for years, “first riding the rails and then jumping around, then after that, jumping around with the Army from place to place.” I was ready, he said, to stop moving and “do one thing the rest of my life and live in one place” and “write and simply not be preoccupied either with politics or with anything that wasn’t pertinent to myself.”
* The Aptheker here is, serendipitously, Herbert Aptheker—the Marxist historian who wrote the seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He is also the source for the claim that Colonel Buell Smith was an anti-Semite. Aptheker told the story of meeting Nelson to Robin D. G. Kelley many years later, and it was published in The Journal of American History. In that interview, Aptheker says, “The commanding officer over there was an anti-Semitic fanatic. And I’m Jewish.”
† It’s not clear precisely why Nelson was held back from the front. The army never said it kept transferring him because he was a Communist, but that seems like the most likely explanation. Its scrutiny and the FBI’s are well documented, and Nelson’s army file is clearly marked SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT—even though he was given only menial tasks.
‡ Amazingly, this boy survived.
Part III
EVERY DAY IS D-DAY UNDER THE EL
You can’t make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its great cities to produce artists. It’s in the nature of the overbraided brass to build walls about the minds of men—as it is in the nature of the arts to tear those dark walls down. Today, under the name of “security,” the dark shades are being drawn.
—Chicago: City on the Make, 1951
Exploring the Neon Wilderness
(November 27, 1945–February 20, 1947)
After returning from the war, Nelson often collected material for his stories by visiting Division Street. Photo by Art Shay, courtesy of the Art Shay Archive
The army delivered Nelson to Camp Grant, in Illinois, on a gloomy Tuesday in November, and moved him into a wooden barracks building. It was just above freezing, and snow was falling lightly.
The base was just a couple hundred wooden buildings set on a barren plain north and west of Chicago, and for four days, Nelson did nothing but mark time—something he had grown accustomed to in the service. Then, on his fifth day back in Illinois, he reported to the base’s separation center and accepted $160.60 and an honorable discharge form that said: Private Nelson Algren spent two years four months and seventeen days in the army. He earned two overseas service bars, an American Campaign Medal, a European African Middle Eastern Theater Ribbon with one bronze battle star, and a good conduct medal. He was a “literary writer” when he entered the service, and a “litter bearer” when he left.
When Nelson reached Chicago later that day, he went looking for a flower shop, and when he found one, he bought his mother a dozen roses. Then he located a payphone and dialed Ravenswood 2405. He let it ring for a while, but Goldie didn’t answer.
Nelson wanted to hear a friendly voice, but there weren’t many people left in Chicago for him to call. Amanda was living in California, and most of his friends were gone. Some had chased opportunity east, toward the publishing industry, while he was away; others had drifted west toward Hollywood. Some died in the war, and a few let their radical pretensions die, bought tiny homes in Gary, Indiana, and spent their time trying to earn enough money to make up for the years they dedicated to the revolution.
Nelson tried a few more numbers, but they all rang in vain, so he searched the directory until he found a listing for Margaret Butler, Dorothy Farrell’s widowed mother. He dialed, and Dorothy’s voice came through the line. She and Nelson hadn’t seen each other in years—not since 1939, possibly—but she was happy he called.
Come over, she said.
Nelson found Dorothy’s building on a maple-lined street near the University of Chicago, and when he rang her bell, she invited him inside and told him to make himself at home. Her sister Virginia was visiting as well, and the family apartment was large and comfortable. There was food and liquor on hand, and Nelson spent the day talking about the war, catching up on events in Chicago, and cracking jokes. “He was one of the wittiest men I have ever known,” Dorothy said.
Dorothy and Virginia asked Nelson to stay for dinner, and he accepted. He finally reached Goldie after he finished eating, said his goodbyes, and prepared to leave.
Do you want to take these flowers to your mother? Dorothy asked.
“No, the flowers are for you,” Nelson lied.
Then he made his way to the single basement room at 2717 Lawrence Avenue where Goldie was living, greeted her, and settled in among the debris of their family’s past—a framed newspaper dating back to the Civil War, a cuckoo clock, cotton doilies hanging from a hook on the wall, and all the dishes that had once filled the cupboards of their house on North Troy Street.
Spontaneous celebrations erupted all over Chicago when the Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allies in August of 1945. Two elderly women began marching through the streets, banging drums, and thousands of people fell in line behind them. Six young girls dressed as drum majorettes led a separate march through downtown, and a soldier standing on a rooftop at the corner of State and Randolph waved an American flag in each hand while crowds passed below him. Bonfires appeared at intersections, and a motorman drove an El train around the Loop, blowing his whistle the entire way.
Wild abandon ruled for a night, but days of somber reflection followed. This is “a day in which we should all express our eternal debt to those who laid down their lives or suffered wounds or torture that we might continue to be free,” an Illinois senator said. “V-J Day means more than the end of hostilities,” the governor proclaimed. “It means we are about to embark on a new era of peace and restoration.” Sears, Roebuck ran an advertisement claiming that “[h]ope, thought, understanding and love” would safeguard America’s future, and scores of people attended group prayers to reflect on the war and ask searching questions about the future of humankind.
It was an idealistic and heartening moment, but it passed quickly. Over the next few months, survival was reframed as victory and the reflective tone that defined the first days after the war was replaced with triumphalism—and paranoia. The Tribune published a picture of blanket-draped corpses above a caption that read: “German military detainees await hospitalization after mass suicide attempt,” and its headlines became boastful. NAZI GENERAL DIES BEFORE U.S. FIRING SQUAD, they crowed, JAP PRINCE TO FACE TRIAL—and, ominously, RED MEDDLING IN U.S. AFFAIRS UNDER SCRUTINY.
“Love” and “understanding” seemed like quaint ideas by the time Nelson reached Chicago because, by then, mass consumption and status-seeking had supplanted them as guiding principles. “This ‘Peace on Earth’ Christmas give him the diamond ring he wants so much,” advertisements counseled, and “Get Your Post-War Kitchen Now!” Plots of lan
d on the outskirts of town were for sale, and so were prefabricated houses and “strobo-sonic” radios and phonographs. The Fidelity Loan Bank on Clark Street was selling the pawned jewelry it had bought during the war at “liquidation” prices.
The spoils of war were as available to Nelson as to any other veteran with an honorable discharge, but he did not indulge. That winter, he bought a radio, and a secondhand bicycle—but no diamonds, suits, or cars. He could have used his GI benefits to purchase a home on the edge of the city with no money down, but instead, he returned to his old neighborhood and looked for an apartment where he could work without distraction.
In January, he found a cold-water flat that suited him on the second floor of 1523 West Wabansia Avenue. Trash cans piled with refuse lined the sidewalk out front, and stray newspaper pages gathered in the gutters. There was no refrigerator, heat was provided by an oil stove, and the shower was down the hall, but the rent was only ten dollars a month, and the bedroom was large enough to double as an office. There were large windows in each room, and when he gazed through them he saw a street light, a peach tree growing through the sidewalk, a saloon called the Lucky Star that displayed a neon Schlitz sign in its window, and a yeast factory.
Nelson moved into the apartment when it became available. Then he began to reacquaint himself with the city. He watched the bar’s windows, and the strangers passing them on the sidewalk. He could see well enough through the glass brick set in the bar’s front walls to know when people were playing cards inside, and sometimes he joined them. He visited the YMCA to exercise and shower every day, dropped by his old haunts in the Triangle, and began attending police lineups again so he could transcribe the chief detective’s interrogations.
“You’re a jack roller,” he wrote. “No I’m Mexican.”
“Haven’t worked the past year. . . . Just got out of the Bridewell Wednesday.”
People were talking about recovery that winter. They said Chicago was destined to play a prominent role in the American Century, but the city didn’t feel much changed to Nelson. The El still wobbled on uneven rails and sent sparks into the night. There was a housing shortage, and people were having a hard time finding jobs. Massive labor strikes were making headlines, and poverty remained endemic. The city’s newest black residents were crowding into tenements on the South Side because redlining and housing covenants prevented them from moving to more affluent neighborhoods, and the suburban migration that mortgage brokers referred to as the American Dream was, Nelson knew, nothing more than white flight.
The only change Nelson could discern was the story Chicago had begun telling about itself. The city was defined by its industry when he was a child. It transformed into a gangster’s town later, and then a battlefield for the class war. Now it was trying to remake itself as the backdrop to a domestic drama featuring men wearing gray flannel suits and chaste women in neatly pressed housedresses. They took their social cues from Look, Leader, Pageant, and Bazaar, and they believed that virtue and consumption were synonymous. There were Fords in their garages and the Family Circle magazine on their coffee tables.
That image seemed dangerously dishonest to Nelson, and the emphasis of his work shifted in response to it. He had been planning to write a series of novels set in neighborhoods defined by their dominant ethnic group, but after he returned home from the war, he began thinking in grander terms. Chicago, he realized, was a perfect synecdoche for the country—a place so in love with the idea of its virtue that it was willing to disavow, in the name of the common good, anyone who failed to meet its narrow and exacting standards. It had great symbolic value for that reason, and Nelson decided that using his work to undermine that image would be more impactful than continuing to develop the naturalistic novels he outlined years earlier.
This project defined the next decade of Nelson’s career. He used his fictional writing to create a counternarrative by humanizing the people who had “failed before the radio commercials” and fallen short of the “standards of every self-respecting magazine.” And he addressed the country’s shortcomings directly in his nonfiction writing. Despite what you’ve been told, he wrote, millions of Americans still “live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love. They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves.”
“Every day is D-Day under the El,” he proclaimed.
And the lucky few who manage to climb the social ladder derive little satisfaction from their reward. “Never has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities,” he wrote. “In no other country is such great wealth, acquired so purposefully, put to such small purpose. Never has any people driven itself so resolutely toward such diverse goals, to derive so little satisfaction from attainment of any.”
Nelson didn’t seek companionship when he returned to Chicago. Instead, he worked on the collection of stories he had begun on Evergreen Avenue, pedaled around the city on his bike to collect material, and waited for the world to knock on his door.
Amanda arrived first. She was living in Los Angeles at the time, and working as a secretary for the National Labor Relations Board. She was in a serious relationship with another man, but when Nelson returned to Chicago, she traveled east and moved into his apartment for a week. They shared a bed and referred to each other as husband and wife for the length of her stay, and when Martha Gellhorn dropped by the Wabansia Avenue flat, they greeted her as a couple.*
Nelson and Gellhorn had been in touch throughout the war. He wrote to her occasionally to let her know he was alive, and she encouraged him to get back to work when the service released him. “I’d like to see the short stories between hard covers,” she said. He sent her a letter when the army returned him to the States, and she visited Chicago soon afterward and decided she wanted to meet him.
Nelson offered Gellhorn a tour of his neighborhood when she arrived. He brought her across the street to the Lucky Star tavern, and then guided her and Amanda south toward the Triangle. It was cold and raining, but they stayed out for hours. They visited a barbershop that was alive with the sound of fiddles and singing canaries, walked through quiet streets that reminded Gellhorn of European villages, and then passed a church society dance. Music seeping from the building stopped them, and they stood in the damp on the sidewalk and listened to it drift past.
Gellhorn left that night, and sent a letter of thanks soon afterward. “I love your Siberian country up there,” she wrote, “your own country that is, not the melted chocolate ice cream with oil sauce which is Chicago.” I am as glad to have seen it as “I was to have seen the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean, a small far off place as clean and perfect and untouched as the world must have been when it began.”
“It seems to me you are as good as your writing,” she said, “and this is a very serious statement. Something as rare as it is serious moreover.”
Nelson and Amanda resumed their tryst when Gellhorn left, but neither harbored any illusions about their future as a couple. He was committed to his work, and she, despite her sojourn on Wabansia Avenue, was serious about the other man. Their lives had always been moving along separate tracks, and after ten years of on-again, off-again romance, they finally made their peace with that fact and agreed to divorce.
Amanda stayed on at Nelson’s apartment after the decision was made. They continued sleeping together, and one night when they were in bed, she asked if he would ever marry again. It was late, and he was barely awake. He mumbled something incoherent and drifted off, but after she returned to Los Angeles, he sent a proper response.
“It occurs to me that I’ll probably stay single unless you get hooked up,” he wrote. “Not necessarily, but, even with a divorce and legal freedom, I know I’ll have to feel that you’re taken care of, and reasonably happy in the process, before I’ll be able to consider another plunge. If I ever do, I
fancy it’ll be just about when the yarn’s all unraveled. Say, ten years from now. I would be very happy if you ever achieved, with someone else, what I somehow never truly provided: a place of your own.”
Kenneth McCormick arrived next. He was a thirty-eight-year-old man from New Jersey with a long face and a lantern jaw. He wore sensible glasses and parted his hair to the right side. He looked like an English schoolmaster, but he was really the editor-in-chief at Doubleday and Company, the country’s largest publisher.
McCormick had received a copy of Never Come Morning from a friend, read it, loved it, and written to Nelson to say so. They corresponded briefly, and when McCormick passed through Chicago in February, he visited Nelson and asked what he was working on.
Nelson said he was almost finished putting together a collection of stories, and that he had an idea for his third novel. He wanted to write an account of the war that took place after the armistice. His protagonist would be a soldier living off the black market in Marseille when the book began, and then the narrative would shift to Chicago and the book would catalog the soldier’s struggle to readjust to civilian life and a changing world.
McCormick was interested in both books, and asked Nelson how much he wanted for them.
I want enough to live on for a year, Nelson said.
“What do you call enough to live on?” McCormick asked.
“Fifty dollars [a week],” Nelson said. It seemed like an impossible sum. The total, after a year’s worth of payments, would be more than he had earned for his first two books and every magazine story he ever sold—combined, and then doubled.