by Colin Asher
Beauvoir was no more considerate. She asked Nelson if a friend of hers could visit them, and he agreed without knowing what he was agreeing to. The woman Beauvoir invited was an old lover, and they embraced and began kissing when she arrived. The woman expected to sleep with Beauvoir in the cabin, but Nelson couldn’t tolerate that idea, so he rented a room for her in a house about a block away.
The last month of Beauvoir’s visit was stilted and disappointing. She went to Chicago with her friend, and when she returned to Gary, Nelson announced that he was thinking about remarrying Amanda. “So be it,” Beauvoir thought. Then she walked to the edge of the lagoon, threw herself on the grass, and cried. They said little to each other for the remainder of Beauvoir’s visit and never discussed their breakup, but the following year, each of them wrote to the other about how they felt at the end.
“Because I gave you so little, I found [sic] quite fair that you chose to evict me from your heart,” Beauvoir wrote. “But thinking it is fair did not prevent it to be hard.”
And Nelson replied by saying he still loved Beauvoir, but knew they could never be together again. “One can still have the same feelings for someone and still not allow them to rule and disturb one’s life,” he wrote. “To love a woman who does not belong to you, who puts other things and other people before you, without there ever being any question of your taking first place, is something that just isn’t acceptable. I don’t regret a single one of the moments we have had together. But now I want a different kind of life.”
Nelson and Beauvoir returned to Chicago on the final day of her trip and visited the track again. Nelson wagered all the cash in his wallet, lost every cent, and had to borrow money from a friend to pay for a cab ride to the airport. Beauvoir would visit Chicago one final time the following year, but by then they were only friends.
Nelson spent the fall and the winter nesting in his new home in Gary. He installed an oversized mailbox at the end of the driveway and painted the word ALGREN on its side in block letters. He retrieved his typewriter, his books, his records, and a picture of Amanda from his apartment in Chicago, and he paid friends from the city to paint his house, patch the roof, and work in the yard. Then he got a squat cat that waddled instead of walking, and named it Bubu de Montparnasse in honor of the pimp in a French novel.‡
Then Nelson opened his doors. Age had imbued him with the desire to act like a patriarch, but he had no wife and no children, so he lured friends to his little estate with the promise of hospitality. He kept beer on hand, and food. Marijuana grew wild in a field near his house, and he harvested it regularly, sat on his porch sorting seeds and stems into a colander, and then threw the smokable bits in a bowl he kept on his coffee table.
Lovers arrived first. Amanda visited the month after Beauvoir left, and spent three weeks living the domestic life she had been dreaming of since she met Nelson fifteen years earlier. They talked about decorating the cabin together, and then they attended a party thrown by old friends from their Rat Alley days. Music played and people drank, but Nelson just sat and watched Amanda. She was smoking Dunhills, which she held with a thin cigarette holder, and laughing in all the right places. She had been a coy and mysterious character when they met, but ten years in California had transformed her, and Nelson was struck by how confident she had become. He was “wide-eyed,” someone said. A few days later, he raised the possibility of remarrying.
Amanda returned to California without either of them committing, and then Paula Bays replaced her. Nelson and Bays had been seeing each other regularly since her marriage started to fray, and their bond was growing stronger. She was still using morphine and working as a prostitute, but she had made several serious attempts to stop using and he believed she wanted to go straight. They kept late hours when they were together, and sometimes they stayed up through the night, sipping whiskey and trading stories in low, sleepy voices.
Friends visited too. Jack Conroy rode the train south when he needed a break from family life. Art Shay drove down when he and Nelson had business. Neal and Christine Rowland, who had been living in Gary since the end of the war, dropped by regularly. Dave Peltz, an old friend from the Writers’ Project, moved into a house down the road with his family, and started visiting Nelson every Sunday so they could watch boxing on TV. Carl Sandburg stopped by when he was in town, and a progressive Chicago lawyer named Len Despres spent weekends there with his wife, Marian, when he could.
Then word of Nelson’s hospitality spread more widely, and misfits and dissidents began dropping by in search of shelter and support. Bud Fallon, who had been in Florida for the past year or so, moved north when he heard Nelson had bought a house, and he lived there until he found a job. He had mellowed some, and eventually a racetrack hired him as a mutuel clerk. Jesse Blue, the toughest character among the old Fallonites, also came to stay with Nelson, but he was just as wild as ever. He had recently married a much younger woman to “save” her from her abusive father, and he had been taking advantage of her himself ever since. Everyone called the woman Shotsy, and she worked as a prostitute three weeks out of every month so that Blue didn’t have to get a job.
James Blake, a writer Nelson met the year before, also stayed at the Forrest Avenue house several times. He was a Scottish man who moved to Chicago as a child. He attended Northwestern University for a while, but left before graduation so he could play piano professionally. He spent a few years accompanying the spoken-word artist Lord Buckley, and the jazz musicians Stuff Smith and Anita O’Day, but then his career took a dark turn. Benzedrine and marijuana began to play an outsized role in his life, and his job prospects dimmed. He pounded out-of-tune pianos in saloons and strip clubs for a while, and then he graduated to burglary, breaking and entering, robbery—and prison.
Blake was thirty, but seemed much older. He was missing some teeth, and his face was bloated and mottled, so he looked like a jack-o’-lantern when he smiled. He spoke a pidgin that combined slang from Chicago slums and Southern chain gangs, but there was a gifted and intelligent man beneath that ragged facade. He played piano well when he wasn’t high, and he was a talented writer. He was perennially struggling with a novel, and sometimes dabbled in short fiction, but his natural medium was the epistle. He corresponded widely whenever he was incarcerated, and the letters he produced were beautiful, confessional, funny, and salacious.
I just left prison, he wrote to Nelson, and when I walked away, “I did not, for a fact, know whether I had been cast out of Heaven or Hell . . . but when I crossed the bridge over the river and the road took a sharp turn, I was in the world I had not been able to see from behind the fences. I took a deep breath and said to myself, ready or not motherfuckers, here I come, and felt exhilaration on top of the apprehension.”
I had a black lover in prison once, he wrote. “Our arrangement was an eminently workable one. We were aware that the powerful attraction we felt was because we were bizarre to one another, and we were also aware that hate was just as much present as love in our relationship. That was a really swinging affair, no nonsense at all. Not a hell of a lot of conversation, but then there wasn’t much time for it either.”
Nelson felt protective of Blake, and looked after him despite the odds. He allowed Blake to live with him at least twice, and sent him money, clothes, books, a typewriter, and a radio during his various incarcerations. Once, he even mailed Blake an envelope filled with cash so that he could pay off a guard and escape from a Florida chain gang. But most importantly, he championed Blake’s work. He had Blake’s letters published in Les Temps modernes, connected him with an agent and a publisher, and helped him revise a collection of correspondence that Doubleday eventually published as The Joint in 1971.§
The fall of 1950 rolled into the winter, and Nelson nestled behind the thick walls of his cabin while the lagoon behind his house froze and snow covered his lawn in a blanket of sacral white. Then winter melted into spring, and he began to wonder what had happened to all the work he’d lined up
after he returned from California.
Most of it had disappeared. The film adaptation of The Man with the Golden Arm was dead. Bob Roberts had fled the country after being blacklisted, and no one expected him to return. John Garfield was hiding out in New York and unable to work. The House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating him, and he died of a heart attack before they finished. He was only thirty-nine years old.
The photo book Nelson and Art Shay collaborated on had also fallen through. They applied for a Guggenheim grant to fund the project, but their application was denied. Shay submitted some of the photos they collected to Life magazine and thought they were going to be published, but they were pulled at the last minute, and afterward Doubleday shelved the book.¶
The Holiday essay was the only new project Nelson had left, so he invested all of his time and energy in it. He had been commissioned to write a history of Chicago, but the parameters of the assignment were loose, so he used the space he had been promised to advance some of the ideas he had been developing since he returned from the war.
The account of Chicago’s history that Nelson wrote that year begins when the Pottawattamie tribe controlled the area. “To the east were the moving waters as far as eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach,” he wrote. The area was peaceful, by Nelson’s account, until Europeans arrived, constructed a fort, and began laying down roads. The white men encircled themselves with walls, and drank, and raged, while the Pottawattomies mourned beside the river. “And heard, in the uproar in the hotel, the first sounds of a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to roll boulevards down out of pig-wallows and roll its dark river uphill.”
The essay toggles fluidly between perspectives, time periods, and styles from that point forward, and presents the city’s history in a series of anecdotes. One man listed his vocation as “generous sport” in the first city directory, Nelson reports. An alderman named Hinky Dink Kenna, one of Chicago’s most famous, traded meals for votes without shame. A robber named Dwight L. Moody used to prowl the streets wearing a black clerical collar, and before he robbed anyone, he always asked, “Are you a Christian?” Jane Addams and the do-gooders who follow her lead “go doggedly forward” year after year, Nelson says, but the game is rigged against them and always will be.
Chicago is all of these people, Nelson says. It was founded by men who “slept till noon and scolded the Indians for being lazy,” and it has been populated by grifters, thieves, and reformers who never had a chance ever since. It’s a hustler’s city and always will be, never mind the fact that our leaders have begun wearing “the colorless gray of self-made executive types playing the percentages from the inside.”
The essay reads like an indictment, but then the narrative shifts and Nelson begins to argue that the conflict between the grand ambitions of Chicago’s residents and their sinful natures is the thing that defines the city. The frisson created when those impulses clash, he says, is the thing that drives the city—its imperfections are its greatest virtue, not a flaw.
You can spend your entire life in a single neighborhood here and still be forgotten the week after you leave, he writes. “Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”#
The tension in the essay feels resolved, but then Nelson brings the timeline to the present day and advances his argument further. Some of the finest poets, singers, sculptors, and painters the country ever produced came from Chicago, he wrote, but that won’t be the case for much longer because everything that made this city great is being denied. Our history is being whitewashed, and everyone is under pressure to conform.
“[W]e stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara,” he wrote.
“You can live in a natural home,” he warned, “with pictures on the walls, or you can live in a fort; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch you can’t live in both. 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.”
Nelson’s editors at Holiday were not expecting the story he submitted. They pushed him to insert himself into the text to soften its tone, and write a disclaimer they could print ahead of the main essay. He added a section of memoir to make his account more personal, as they requested, and agreed to write a short preamble—but he never backed away from the political portions of the text.
So the editors at Holiday did so for him.
Nelson submitted his manuscript ahead of deadline and it was accepted for publication, but the magazine’s staff altered it before laying it out for print. They cut the text by half, and removed all of the political content without consulting Nelson. He was furious when he received a copy of the magazine, and accused his editor of “seriously handicapped” judgment. He attributed the conflict to a lack of professionalism at the time, but later he would see Holiday’s censorship in a more malicious light.
Ken McCormick, luckily, was bolder than Holiday’s editors. He read the complete essay in manuscript form, and decided to publish it in its entirety. Doubleday released the essay as a slim hardcover called Chicago: City on the Make in October 1951, but very few people noticed.** The first print run was only five thousand copies, and virtually nothing was spent promoting it. Nelson was only invited to two signings, and reviews were sparse and—for the first time in his career—starkly divided.
The Saturday Review claimed, “It is necessary to go back to the ‘Chicago Poems’ of Carl Sandburg . . . to find a book about the city comparable to Algren’s.” The literary editor of the Chicago Daily News was quoted saying it was a “work of genius and absolutely the greatest piece of writing contemporary Chicago has produced,” but his paper ran a savage critique that called for “Ra(n)t Control” and said Nelson’s “poetic license” should be revoked. The Nation said the prose was “kaleidoscopic and somewhat adolescent,” and the New Republic called it “an embarrassment.”
The book survived its reception, though, and like The Neon Wilderness, its renown grew over time. A second edition was released in 1961, and then others in ’68, ’83, and 2001, and somewhere along the line, it entered the Midwestern canon as the Third Coast’s answer to E. B. White’s Here Is New York. People buy copies when they move to Chicago now, so that they can quote its most famous lines while drinking in dimly lit bars. Local reporters flip through its pages when they need to add color to their stories, and portions of the text appear online regularly.
Chicago is “an October sort of city even in spring,” they read. You’ll know the city “by nights when the yellow salamanders of the El bend all the one way and the cold rain runs with the red-lit rain. By the way the city’s million wires are burdened only by the lightest snow; and the old year yet lighter upon them. When chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and arc-lamps are all dimmed.” In Chicago, “our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted.”
City on the Make was a bold declaration when it was written. I intend to challenge authority with my writing, Nelson was saying—expose hypocrisy, and “tear” down the “dark walls” that are being constructed around “the minds of men.” But it’s remembered now for its metaphors, poetic phrasing, and descriptions of Chicago. It has survived the cultural moment that it was written to challenge and outlasted the people it attacks, and it has managed, over the course of several decades, to permanently alter the way people think about, and write about, its subject. No one could ever ask more from a piece of literature.
* That would be about five thousand dollars today.
† The name of this street has since been changed to Forest Avenue.
‡ The novel in question was written by Charles-Louis Philippe, and its pr
otagonists were a pimp and a prostitute. Nelson thought the female character’s name was Bubu de Montparnasse, but he was wrong. He later learned that he had given his female cat a pimp’s name, but he saw the humor in that and decided not to change it.
§ Blake’s career was perennially derailed by his incarcerations, but he broke into the publishing world in the 1970s when the Paris Review published some of his letters and a piece of his fiction. The Joint was released the same year, and was praised effusively. Blake was poised to become a star, but then he developed cancer and died before he completed a second book.
¶ This book’s fate has always been hazy. Nelson and Ken McCormick discussed it regularly in their letters, but then they stopped, and there is no mention in the surviving letters of why the book was shelved. The failure of the Life article seems like a likely cause, but even that’s shaky. Art Shay always claimed that Life unexpectedly sent him out to obtain a photo release from a woman who appeared in one of his pictures, and that he expected the story to run after he got it. “I got the release, but meanwhile Life used its essay space that week for a story on a Mexican prison with marriage privileges,” he told me. His account has been printed as fact repeatedly, but it’s at least partly false. Life ran no such story. It did run an article called “Mexican Prisons Allow Conjugal Visits in Jail,” but it was published on October 27, 1941—about eight years before Nelson and Shay met.
# The title of the book you’re holding comes from this passage. I chose it because the sentiment it expresses—that our imperfections are often the wellspring of our virtues—is beautiful, and it nicely describes the tension between Algren’s flaws and his immense talent. The use of the term lovely gave me pause, however. Referring to a woman as “a lovely” was tame misogyny by 1951 standards, but today it would be considered offensive. I decided to entitle this book Never a Lovely So Real despite that concern for two reasons: firstly, and most personally, because I was introduced to Algren’s work when my mother quoted this line to me; and secondly, because it seemed there was some justice involved in using the line to describe its creator, and referring to Algren as “a lovely.”