Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  The remainder of December passed languorously, and New Year came and went. Then suddenly, the pace of their lives quickened. They hurried to prepare for their wedding and their trip across the Atlantic, and then Nelson was sidelined by work.

  The speech he delivered in Missouri the summer before had become a small sensation. He read it a second time at Indiana University in July, and afterward a literary magazine called California Quarterly printed it in full. Van Allen Bradley was impressed by it, and decided to print an excerpt in the Chicago Daily News under the title GREAT WRITING BOGGED DOWN IN FEAR, SAYS NOVELIST ALGREN. He expected a torrent of criticism in response, but none arrived, even though the article contained the line “Never has any people been so outwardly confident that God is on its side while being so inwardly terrified lest He be not.” Instead, a reader ordered a hundred copies so he could send them out as Christmas greetings, The Nation reprinted the article, and progressive clergy members read it to their congregations.

  Bradley wanted to release Nelson’s speech as a short book with the help of a local publisher, and he wrote to Ken McCormick to ask for permission. McCormick declined. He decided Doubleday should publish the speech instead, and offered Nelson fifteen hundred dollars to revise it for release as a slim hardcover.

  Nelson accepted the assignment in early January and began writing. He had to finish before SS Liberté sailed on March 24, so he worked frantically, separating the speech into chapters, focusing each section, eliminating some of the repetition in the original, and expanding the scope of his sources to draw from the ideas of people as varied as Judge Learned Hand, John Quincy Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Leo Durocher, Georges Carpentier, and Herbert U. Nelson—the leader of a trade group that lobbied for the interests of the real estate industry.

  Nelson made steady progress through January and February, but he was anxious while he worked. About a week after he began writing, the State Department notified him that his passport application had been delayed for further investigation. They provided no specific reason, so he assumed the worst. He continued writing at a pace that would allow him to complete the book before he was scheduled to sail for Paris, but he told his friends the government wasn’t going to allow him to leave the country.

  The passport division confirmed Nelson’s fears when they sent a second letter in the first week of March. “I regret to inform you,” it said, “that after careful consideration of your application for passport facilities the Department of State is obliged to disapprove your application tentatively on the ground that the granting of such a passport facilities is precluded under the provisions of Section 51.135 of Title 22 of the code of Federal Regulation.”‡

  A funereal atmosphere descended on the house then, and Nelson’s mood turned dark. It “ruined him,” Amanda said later. He became paranoid and began to think of himself as a captive, sealed inside a trap whose exit was guarded by several sentries—the State Department, his writing, his relationship, his home. The ability to travel took on outsized importance in his mind, and he began to fantasize about walking away from everything and starting fresh.

  Nelson and his friends made a grim sort of game out of trying to guess the justification for the passport denial. James Blake was convinced Nelson’s work for the Rosenbergs was the cause—“I wish you would stay out of those loaded issues,” he wrote. “It’s the wrong battle at the wrong time. I love you for it, and for all that you are, but you must try for detachment.” Kenneth Millar thought the portion of Nelson’s speech that ran in The Nation was responsible, and Nelson feared that the evidence against him might go back two decades.

  “[W]hatever I’m accused of I’m guilty,” he told Millar. “So what’s the use. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. I could go there [DC] and perjure myself by saying I was secretly pro-Franco in the thirties and name names. Or I could go there and defy the powers that be. . . . Either way, I’m not going to see my friends in Paris soon again.

  “Everybody in the world, it seems, is innocent of something.”

  Blake, Millar, and Nelson were each partly correct, but none of them suspected the most direct cause of Nelson’s trouble was Louis Budenz—one of the men Nelson mocked in The Man with the Golden Arm. “BUDINTZ COAL,” he wrote. “One Price to All.” Apparently, Budenz didn’t appreciate the slight.

  An FBI agent visited Budenz on April 4, 1950—nineteen days after Nelson received the National Book Award—and asked him to elaborate on a comment he made earlier that year. Budenz had claimed to know the identities of four hundred “concealed Communists” operating within the United States, and the agent wanted to know who they were.

  During the interview, Budenz said he couldn’t remember making that statement, but claimed it was essentially accurate and offered the agent a few names. It wasn’t the first time he had spoken to the FBI, but it was the first time he mentioned Nelson. “I knew Algren well in Chicago,” he said. And it was “reported” to me that he was a “loyal member of the Communist Party.”

  The FBI already had a file on Nelson. They had opened an investigation into his political connections in 1940, but their interest was never acute. They tracked him when he was in the army, but lost his scent after the war. A confidential informant brought his advocacy for the Hollywood Ten to their attention years later, but after investigating that lead, the Chicago office closed his file.

  The bureau’s attitude changed once Budenz’s claims circulated, though. When J. Edgar Hoover heard about them, he personally requested that Nelson be investigated. “You are instructed to reopen this case and bring the activities of the subject up to date,” he ordered in January 1951.

  Agents began circling Nelson. They collected his clippings to track the progress of his career and his political activity, and interviewed sources who knew him when he was working with the League of American Writers. Confidential informants in Chicago reported on what he was saying when he spoke in defense of the Rosenbergs, and informants in Gary kept an eye on his house. Gary’s postmaster logged Nelson’s mail at the FBI’s request, and when he forwarded them a list of Nelson’s correspondents, agents investigated every one of them.

  When an agent had no other way of finding Nelson, they called Goldie. Once, believing that the agent she was speaking to was a friend of Nelson’s, she bragged about her son’s accomplishments at length. And on December 18, 1952, she picked up the phone and said, He’ll be over for dinner at 6 p.m.

  The intensity of the bureau’s scrutiny increased when Nelson applied for a passport. Soon afterward, an agent named William J. Davis walked down Forrest Avenue and peered at Nelson’s house, and a man who identified himself as “Agent Z” called the bureau while drunk and claimed Nelson was a Communist in the thirties. When he called a second time, agents arranged to meet him in Chicago, at the corner of State and Van Buren, and tried to wring more damaging information out of him. Then the city editor of the Gary Post-Tribune informed on Nelson, and so did the man living next door at 6216 Forrest Avenue. A neighbor across the street began providing regular updates on Nelson’s whereabouts, and the bureau used the provisions of the Internal Security Act to add Nelson’s name to the list of people eligible for “apprehension or detention” during national emergencies.

  Then the second man Nelson insulted in The Man with the Golden Arm informed on him. Howard Rushmore was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s research director when an FBI agent named Angelo Robbe sat down with him in the spring of 1953. They were supposed to be speaking about a different investigation, but Rushmore offered Nelson’s name spontaneously. He claimed to have heard that Nelson had recently denied being a Communist, and said he could prove that was false. Then he showed Robbe a letter dated July 30, 1937. Nelson was the author, and the subject was the Moscow show trials. The content was relatively benign, but the third paragraph contained a damning sentence. It began “Politically, speaking as a party member . . .”§

  That was all the justification the FBI needed to continue i
ts surveillance and begin laying the groundwork for legal charges. They could go after Nelson for failing to register as a Communist agent if they chose, suggest his name to the House Un-American Activities Committee, or just wait for him to appeal his passport denial. If he denied being a Communist under oath at any point, they could prosecute him for perjury or defrauding the government.

  Amanda opened the door to her new Chevrolet Deluxe on March 16, 1953, slid behind the wheel, and turned over the engine. Nelson sat beside her. She peered over the car’s steel dashboard and down the hood toward the bug-eye headlights, and then pulled out of the driveway, turned onto Forrest Avenue, turned left on Lake at the end of the block, and then merged onto the highway and headed north.

  Amanda parked in the Loop, and then she and Nelson walked to Randolph Street and entered City Hall—an imposing granite building fronted, on that side, by a colonnade of nine Corinthian columns. They met Paula Bays and Caesar Tabet, and then the four of them entered the Marriage and Civil Union Court.

  Nelson and Amanda waited for their turn before the judge with something less than giddy anticipation. The stress of Nelson’s passport denial had driven them apart, and though they were still living under the same roof, they were barely speaking. He was marrying her because, many years ago, she had cared for him when no one else had—and, as she later admitted, she was marrying him because she was tired of living alone.

  The judge called them, and they stepped forward. Bays and Tabet moved with them, and lingered nearby to serve as witnesses. The judge recited the vows, and paused.

  “I do,” Nelson said. “I do,” Amanda said. Then they considered each other for a tense moment. Tradition demanded that Nelson kiss Amanda, but instead he turned his head and kissed Bays.

  Amanda responded casually. “My turn this time,” she said. Then she looked up and kissed Nelson. The taste of Bays’s mouth was still on his lips.

  Tabet took everyone to dinner after the ceremony, and they ate and drank. It should have been a joyful occasion, but it wasn’t. Nelson made sure of that. He spent the meal staring at Bays with “wonder” in his eyes, and Amanda barely spoke. She wanted to leave when she finished eating, but he wanted to stay, so she drove home alone and went to sleep by herself in her single bed near the back of the house.

  A few days later, Nelson wrote to Beauvoir and told her he had made a horrible mistake. He said he had fallen in love with someone after proposing to Amanda, and that he had not had the courage to admit his error and break off the engagement. He said the fault was all his, but he didn’t know how to fix the situation. He wrote again the following month, and by then he had begun to see his personal misfortune as a reflection of the world’s troubles. When the war in Korea ends, he told Beauvoir, I will slip into a deep depression. It will last for ten or twelve years, and when I come out of it, another war will begin.

  Nelson dedicated himself to his essay that spring, shunning everything else. He worked by night and slept by day, and when Amanda woke each morning, she found his manuscript waiting for her—covered with corrections and deletions. She retyped portions of the text each day, and on the rare occasion she eliminated an adjective, or changed a comma to a semicolon to conform to the rules of grammar, he noticed and reversed the change the following evening. The book was that important to him.

  Nelson had conceived of the essay after the Hollywood Ten convictions and thought of it as an act of protest, but as he revised, he inserted more personal and confessional elements—a declaration of his ideals, a perceptive critique of American culture, an implicit admission that writing left him feeling isolated and lonely, and the clearest explanation he would ever provide for dedicating his career to documenting the lives of people not normally considered worthy literary subjects.

  The book begins with a satirical account of Nelson’s negotiations with Bob Roberts in Hollywood. The scene is written as a comedy, but Nelson draws a lesson from it. My trouble, he says, is just a small example of the challenges every artist faces when they try to make a living in a society whose first concern is capital. Roberts had a genuine desire to “do a creative job of work,” Nelson wrote, and it “pulled him hard. But the demands of the bank financing that impulse pulled him the other way, and harder.”

  The scene with Roberts is brief, and when it ends, the book’s tone becomes more serious. Nelson describes the emotional toll of honest expression using the same examples he used in his speech the summer before, and warns that the “tribal pressure” to conform has been increasing.

  However, he says, no matter how high the cost of resistance becomes, the cost of conforming will always be higher. The people demanding obedience have plans for the country that make no allowance for minority rights or democratic processes, and their logic is dangerous and seductive. Dozens of journalists have already accepted it, and they’re busy now, “hawking the alarm on every newsstand that only by napalm and thunder-jet may the American way of life be saved. That no man may now call himself loyal who will not pledge allegiance to the commander of the closest American Legion Post and to that mob-mindedness for which he stands. That by placing economic boycotts on dissenters we thereby ensure the liberties of conformists.”

  Authors unwilling to challenge authority with their work are no less complicit, Nelson argues. Consider Frank Yerby, who said recently, “I try to give pleasure to the reading public. The novelist has no right to impose his views on race and religion and politics upon his reader.”¶ Or take the example of James T. Farrell, a novelist who has documented the lives of poor people in a score of novels without ever identifying with them personally. Both men feel so comfortable in mainstream society, Nelson says, and approach their work so cautiously, that they will never create anything lasting.

  Contrast them with Fitzgerald, Nelson says, whose “art triumphed” because he was willing to destroy himself in the process of creating it, or Dostoevsky, who drew vitality from “degradation,” and you’ll understand that authorship is an essentially antisocial endeavor. “If you belong to things as they are,” Nelson wrote, “you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either.”

  Then Nelson places his body of work within the context of his ideas about writing and the period he was working in. We were promised prosperity and fulfillment after the war, he says, but we received “spiritual desolation” instead. Now we’re a country of people who own nothing we want in our hearts, and possess only those things we’ve been taught to desire. We’ve drifted so far from shore, even our rebels have no idea where to direct their anger. They want “to be of real use to the world,” but fear being used by it even more—so they drink their days away, or spend them shooting dope. They want to live, but don’t know how. “That’s the trap,” Nelson says, that’s the “American disease.”

  Near the end of the book, Nelson grows defensive. When he began writing, authors willing to write about the poor and the marginalized were celebrated. Their names were John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and James Agee—Richard Wright, and then Nelson Algren. But the American literary scene changed after the war, and criticism developed a more patrician character. The number of acceptable subjects had diminished since, the value placed on social context had declined, and artful, symbol-laden books seemed to receive consistently high praise, no matter their relevance.

  Nelson’s work had begun to seem anachronistic in that context—a throwback to a time before suburbs and gray flannel suits—and critics had begun sniping at him and referring to his characters as freaks.#

  Nelson addresses those critics in the final section of his book, indirectly, by revisiting the ideas he introduced in its first section. Any author who wants to write honestly about America, he argues, must be willing to risk their career, shake off their sense of superiority, lose their neatly hewn ideas about literature and morality, and engage honestly with people living at the fringes of society.

  The well-bein
g of a country’s least powerful people is the only true measure of its moral character, he argues. Even though America has grown wealthy, people still live in slums and sleep behind billboards. “It is there that the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself,” Nelson says. “And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.”

  Nelson completed his manuscript near the end of June and mailed it to Ken McCormick, and while he waited to receive Doubleday’s verdict, he receded from the world. He felt emotionally exhausted as a result of his work, but also by the political climate and his personal life. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had just been executed, and he had recently appealed his passport denial and been rejected a second time.

  Nelson felt beset upon, and he responded by acting recklessly. Jesse Blue, his wife, Trixie, Bud Fallon, and James Blake all visited Nelson and Amanda that summer, and while they were there, Nelson woke late and wrote little. He joined whoever was living in the house at the time on the side porch in the afternoons to get high, and for weeks he did nothing but drink, smoke, and gamble.

  Nelson had been careful with the money he made from writing The Man with the Golden Arm. He bought government bonds with some of it, and instructed Doubleday to release the remainder slowly so that he wouldn’t feel pressure to produce a new novel too quickly. They had been sending him $250 a month for years, and he still had about three thousand dollars on account—then he didn’t.** While Nelson was waiting to hear what Ken McCormick thought of his book, he requested a thousand dollars from Doubleday, and then he did it again, and again.

  The longer Nelson waited for Doubleday to respond to his submission, the more careless he became. He gambled constantly, and he once brought a thousand dollars to a card game and left with nothing. Amanda was already awake by the time he returned home, and she knew something was wrong the moment he entered because he looked green and sickly.