by Colin Asher
** Though he referred to it as an article or an essay while he was composing it, Nelson later described Chicago: City on the Make as a prose poem, and that is generally what it is understsood to be.
Nonconformity
(January 1952–October 2, 1953)
Paula Bays couldn’t tolerate her circumstances any longer. She was living in an SRO hotel with her husband, John, and supporting them both by turning tricks. Morphine still dictated the rhythm of her days, and because her habit made her a less-than-responsible parent, her daughter, Constance, was living with relatives in Ohio. She had been married for eleven years and miserable for just as long, but starting over still seemed possible because she wasn’t even thirty yet—so she ran.
Bays went to Nelson’s house in Gary near the end of March, and he welcomed her and said she could live with him for as long as she needed. It was a cold, bleak spring, and so they kept the house’s thick walls between themselves and the world, and for the next several weeks, they rarely left home. When Paula’s absence became pronounced, John Bays spread word that he intended to kill Nelson, but he never did try.
Nelson and Bays had never spent much time alone, and they were surprised to discover they had a natural, unforced comity. When they were hungry, they ate, and when they were tired, they slept. They had sex when they felt the urge, and never argued. They could talk for hours, or sip whiskey silently while gazing through the living-room windows and playing records—jazz, or maybe Bessie Smith, one of Nelson’s favorites, singing, Gimme a reefer and a gang o’ gin / Slay me, ’cause I’m in my sin. Other times, Bays pulled a book off a shelf, sat on the couch, and read while Nelson worked. Occasionally, they smoked the marijuana Nelson harvested from the field near his house and giggled like children.
They were falling in love, but passion wasn’t the thing Bays needed most. She was looking for stability—a straight marriage, a legitimate job, custody of her daughter—and knew Nelson couldn’t provide it.
Nelson said he wanted a quiet life and a family, but his actions betrayed him. City on the Make had been relegated to discount tables, where it was selling for nineteen cents a copy, but he showed little interest in bringing in money. He was spending his time writing an essay about the Red Scare that he wasn’t being paid to compose, and taking ever-greater political risks. He had recently joined an antiwar group in Gary, endorsed a gay public defender named Pearl Hart who was campaigning to become a Chicago alderman, and taken on a leadership role in the campaign to free Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple who had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. Most people considered them traitors, but Nelson believed they were scapegoats.
“I would like to state that this whole business is straight out of Cotton Mather,” he told a crowd gathered to raise funds for the Rosenbergs’ legal appeal.”* It’s “as though, as a nation, our conscience is so troubled that we hope to gain peace of mind by offering the blood of the innocent. It is nothing less than medieval.”
Those weren’t the actions of a man ready to settle into domestic life, so Bays decided to leave. She and Nelson had a mutual friend named Caesar Tabet, and she thought he would be in a better position to help her. He was wealthy, stable, respected—an insurance executive and small-time landlord, but also an orphan who grew up in poverty and regularly extended himself for people in need.
Bays returned to Chicago to see Tabet, but her husband, John, got to her first. He punched her in the face when he found her, and blackened her eye. Then he pounded her body until her ribs fractured, and forced her into a taxi. When it stopped, he threw open the door and shoved her with enough force to send her sprawling on the sidewalk.
Bays escaped, went to a hospital, and then called Nelson and Tabet. They both came to her aid, but only Tabet was in a position to do much. He offered to pay for Bays to enter a recovery program in Kentucky, and Nelson encouraged her to accept. “You hang on to me,” he said, “you’re hanging on to a straw. You hang on to Caesar, you’re hanging on to a rock.” It was the right thing to do, but later he would wonder how his life would have been different if he had clung to Bays more tightly in that moment.
Bays took Nelson’s advice. She entered treatment for the third time that spring, or maybe it was the fourth, and when she returned to Chicago, Tabet found her a job and an apartment. She regained custody of her daughter about a year later, and never used morphine again.
Nelson stopped seeing the other women he had been dating after Bays left, and spent weeks alone in his little house at the edge of the woods. The war in Korea was on his mind, as were Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, and his old friends—the many who held fast to their ideals and lost their careers and freedom as a result, and the few, like Budenz and Rushmore, who betrayed them for lucre.
It was a paranoid time, and dangerous. Most Americans believed the Communist Party was controlling their media and trying to subvert the government. The Cook County state’s attorney was blaming the flood of morphine washing over Chicago on a Communist plot to “destroy” American youth. Republicans were accusing Democrats of treason, and federal agencies were testing the limits of the powers granted to them by the Internal Security Act.† The State Department was denying passports to suspected Communists. The Subversive Activities Control Board was investigating left-wing organizations and individuals to determine whether they should be forced to register as Communist agents. And the Justice Department was compiling a list of people they intended to detain in the event of a national emergency to prevent them from engaging in “acts of espionage or of sabotage.”
Caution was called for, but Nelson exhibited none. He appeared at the Hamilton Hotel in June to address a crowd gathered in support of the Rosenbergs, and spent his writing time polishing his Red Scare essay. He had been invited to speak during a writers’ workshop at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, in the third week of June and intended to read it publicly for the first time there.
Nelson arrived at the workshop in time to meet with young writers and review manuscripts for a few days, and then, near the end of the conference, he stepped on stage carrying a stack of papers, turned to face his audience, and began to read.
“The struggle to write with profundity of emotion,” he said, “and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person. ‘So I would cease to be a person,’ he planned, ‘kind, just or generous. I would be one with the beady-eyed men who say, ‘Business is business,’ or ‘You should have thought of that before you got into this trouble,’ or ‘I’m sorry, but that just isn’t my department.’ ”
The emotional requirements of his craft diminished Fitzgerald, Nelson said, so he hid from the world and decided that “the natural state of the sentient adult is one of qualified unhappiness.’ ”
Mark Twain suffered a similar fate, Nelson said. He became a caricature of himself, and knew it. Once, late in his career, he turned to a friend after delivering a lecture, and said, “I am demeaning myself. I am becoming a buffoon. I cannot endure it any longer.”
Authorship has always required sacrifice, Nelson said—that’s what Fitzgerald’s life teaches us, and Twain’s—but the cost of honest expression has never been higher than it is today. “For the writer’s lot, like the policeman’s,” he said, “is not a happy one. A hardy life, as the poet says, with a boot as quick as a fiver. But it isn’t till now, in the American Century, as we have so recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.”
The audience was half-receptive, Nelson said later. The year before, he had given a speech warning against the tendency to deify law enforcement agencies, and been booed off the stage. The students gathered to listen to him at Missouri were not as antagonistic, but they must have be
come increasingly uneasy as his critique became more explicit.
Nelson spent fifteen minutes on stage, thirty—more—and his comments developed an elliptical, poetic quality. He sounded, for a while, like a soloist who has lost himself in improvisation. He called American prosperity a myth, and spoke about loyalty tests, Senator McCarthy, the war economy, and the false promise of consumerism. If your life is defined by “no passions and small cares,” he said, it’s not worth living. “[A] whole houseful of gadgets do not of necessity add up to happiness.”
But Nelson collected the strands of his argument near the end of his time on stage, and bound them into a forceful plea for the establishment of a new trend in American literature. Opposition is a writer’s proper role in society, he argued. It’s the writer’s job to defend the weak and the maligned, no matter the cost. “We have too many denouncers of the denounced,” he said. We need to stand with the accused—“guilty or not guilty, with the accused.”
It is not “the writer’s patriotic duty to subserve the private political purpose of members of the U.S. Congress. . . . His loyalty is to his own lights, and to his own lights alone. His only duty is to that woman, however red her legal guilt, who asked the judge in open court, ‘Ain’t nobody on my side?’ ”
The speech sounded like a call to arms as it neared its conclusion, but Nelson ended with a sober thought befitting 1952’s ethos of noble defeat. Chekhov said it best, Nelson told the audience. He understood that writers owe their allegiance to the truth, and that truth serves no political faction. “ ‘We paint life as it is,’ he wrote, ‘and beyond that, even if you lashed us with whips, we could not go. We have no politics, and we do not believe in revolution. We have no God and we do not believe in ghosts. And personally I have no fear of death or blindness.’ ”
Nelson was sitting on a lawn chair near the lagoon behind his house, wearing checked trousers, threadbare canvas shoes, and a gray sweatshirt, when Van Allen Bradley arrived in early September. Steel-framed glasses were perched on his nose and his hair, thinning slightly by then, was tousled.
Bradley was the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, and he was visiting to collect material for a profile. He was a clean-cut man who wore conservative suits and wrote tomes about book collecting, but he had daring literary taste. He admired Nelson’s work so much that he publicly contradicted his paper’s assessment of Chicago: City on the Make by declaring it “a work of genius.”
Nelson led Bradley inside the house and introduced him to Amanda, who was in Gary for a three-week visit. The kitchen table was set with plates of cold chicken, cheese, ham, and vegetables, and the three of them sat down and ate while Nelson and Amanda reminisced. Nelson talked about his time on the road during the Great Depression, and writing his first novel. Amanda told the story of their wedding, and teased Nelson for showing up at City Hall without a ring. Then Bradley got Nelson talking about Never Come Morning, the war, his rise to fame, and the little house he bought on the dunes with his “Hollywood money—that fine Hollywood gold.”
It was a pleasant late-summer afternoon spent in good company, but Bradley must have picked up on how lonely Nelson was feeling that year, because the profile he wrote later was infused with melancholy. The man it describes is both a success who has reached the peak of his chosen field despite incredible odds, and a sad character. Algren is a man of “average height who looks more like a factory hand” than a successful author, Bradley wrote. He was “anything but impressive” when he shuffled toward me.
Nelson had delayed thinking about marriage and children for years so he could dedicate himself to his writing, and afterward he invested all his hopes for the future in Beauvoir. When he realized she would never leave Paris, he tried to find someone who could take her place, but failed, and now he was alone—a forty-three-year-old man living on a dead-end road with a thousand books and two rangy cats.
Amanda was the only woman left in Nelson’s life, so he decided to ask her to marry him a second time. Love didn’t factor in the decision much, and romance played no part in their courtship. They knew each other too well for that. They discussed marriage while Amanda was in Gary, and when she returned to California, Nelson sent her a sarcastic letter of proposal.
“When am I going to ask you?” he wrote. “Of all the silly nerve, with me waiting for you to ask me! Leap year, silly. 1952. And I’m not getting any younger.”
Amanda accepted, and they started to plan. Nelson suggested she begin shipping her books, and aim to arrive in Gary before Christmas. Amanda said she wanted to sell her car and fly east, and Nelson promised to buy her a new one when she arrived. They decided to marry at City Hall, again, and then honeymoon in Paris and spend six months traveling through Europe. Beauvoir, who was dating an actor named Claude Lanzmann at the time, said she was eager for them to visit.
Amanda packed and cleaned out her apartment, and Nelson applied for a new passport and placed a deposit on an outside cabin on SS Liberté. He had been joking about playing Russian roulette since Eisenhower was elected president, and he was eager to get overseas. “[I]t strikes me we’re kind of smart to get out of the country,” he told Amanda. “By the time we get back we’ll at least be part of the way toward 1956.”
The details of Amanda’s move were settled a few weeks after she accepted Nelson’s proposal, but by then, he had already realized that remarrying was a mistake. He kept thinking about Paula Bays, and how content and relaxed he had been when they were together earlier that year. He realized he was happier with Bays than with any other woman in his life, and that she was the woman he should be marrying, but he didn’t dare propose. She would have said yes, and he couldn’t tolerate the thought of disappointing Amanda. Their lives had been linked for seventeen years, and he still felt guilty for not providing her with the lifestyle she expected when they first married, so he went forward with the engagement.
Amanda flew into O’Hare Airport in December, carrying a few bags and a cat in a carrier. She expected to be married by spring, well acquainted with the best Parisian cafés by summer, and pregnant before she returned to America. She visited Kaiser Hospital before leaving California to ask about giving birth, and a doctor there told her she wasn’t too old.
Nelson was waiting at the airport with Neal and Christine Rowland when Amanda’s plane landed. They had given him a lift because he didn’t drive, and after the four old friends exchanged greetings, they made their way to the Rowlands’ car and loaded Amanda’s bags and cat in the back.
Neal Rowland pulled into traffic and began driving south and east. Gary was only fifty miles away, but everyone was miserable long before they arrived. It was cold outside and the car had no heater, so soon everyone was shivering, and stiff from being crammed together.
“You wanna get a drink?” someone asked, to break the tension.
The question was posed to the group, but Nelson responded as if it had been directed at him. No, he snapped, I don’t have any money.
Rowland pulled over anyway. Amanda handed Nelson some cash when the car stopped outside a liquor store, and he went inside and bought a bottle. He was surly when he returned; everyone could tell.
Rowland continued south, and tried to make conversation. “How long you staying, Amanda?” he asked. “Are you here for a vacation?”
Amanda was stunned by the question. She had presumed the Rowlands knew she was moving to Gary, and couldn’t think of any reason why Nelson hadn’t told them. It seemed like a dark omen, and she began to question the logic of walking away from her life in California.
The atmosphere in the car was tense for the remainder of the trip. Rowland entered Gary, and then turned onto Forrest Avenue and drove to the end of the block.
Amanda stepped out of the car when it lurched to a stop, and looked around. The ground had been covered with brightly colored leaves when she visited three months earlier, and birds had serenaded her from the branches of the trees in the backyard. The air blowing off the lake and over the
dunes had still been warm when it reached the chairs on the side porch. But now the grass was dead, the birds had flown south, and the air was so cold it stung bare skin.
The Rowlands pulled away, and Nelson and Amanda went inside. Fortunately, the house felt as familiar to Amanda as the car ride had been foreboding. She noticed furniture she had selected when they moved to Rat Alley, a framed picture of herself, and the simple comforts she had associated with him over the course of their long romance: shelves overflowing with books, a typewriter, manuscripts stacked in irregular pillars, a record player, and piles of vinyl.
Amanda readjusted her expectations over the next several weeks and overcame her initial disappointment. She and Nelson relaxed into each other’s company, and eventually found equilibrium. Their relationship wasn’t what she had expected, but it provided what she needed. He bought her a new Chevrolet Deluxe as he had promised, she didn’t have to work, and Nelson didn’t object when she began sleeping in the second bedroom. She had always been happiest alone, and there was no reason for them to share a bed. They had sex once that winter, twice at the most.
In some ways, the arrangement was better than Amanda had expected. She and Nelson lived more like roommates than lovers, so they had no reason to argue or maintain pretenses. She had known him since she was a married man’s shy mistress and he was a frail boy who lacked the nerve to speak at his own book release party. He was the only close friend she had ever had, and preserving that relationship seemed like reason enough to marry. She began to think about what life would be like when they got old, and decided it would be ideal because she was never bored when he was around.