Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  “Guess what happened?” he asked. His voice was a mix of fear and mischief. I lost it all, he said.

  Doubleday’s response to Nelson’s manuscript arrived in August in the form of a young editor named Timothy Seldes. He was a character out of the old school of American publishing—he dressed well, spoke the King’s English, and had a nearly religious faith in literature.

  Seldes’s instructions were to shape Nelson’s manuscript so that it would appeal to a broader audience, and he wielded a scalpel while pursuing that goal where others might have swung a hatchet. He moved into the house on Forrest Avenue, and he and Nelson spent long days together, tightening the text, sharpening the arguments, and polishing the prose.

  They finished editing after a week, and decided to call the book A Walk on the Wild Side. Then, before Seldes boarded a plane to carry the manuscript back to New York, Nelson got him high. They were both feeling giddy and proud of their work, and after the drugs they consumed took their effect, they sat around for hours, trying to remember how to pronounce the word quotidian.

  Q-tidian, they said. Qoootidian.

  Quotttidian.

  Otidian.

  Quetidian.

  Nelson had to endure more waiting after Seldes left, and doubt began plaguing him again. Some days, he felt sure his book would be released soon. On other occasions, he doubted it would ever see print. It was the most honest, revealing, and dangerous thing he had ever written, so sometimes he wasn’t sure he even wanted it to be published.

  Nelson had a friend named Maxwell Geismar who was a well-respected literary critic, and when his manuscript was nearly complete, he sent a copy to Geismar for feedback. “I am so depressed at the present political situation in this country,” Geismar replied, “that I think the only reaction must be one of rage and violence: fireworks of revolt; and for that reason I got real pleasure that at least you had done this as it should be done; and this will be one of the first books they will burn: congratulations.”

  In the end, it wasn’t necessary to burn the book. Doubleday finally responded to Nelson’s submission in September and said they didn’t intend to publish the book. They never explained why, except to say that Nelson’s career would be damaged if the book was released.

  Nelson was devastated. Doubleday’s decision seemed like confirmation that dissent was no longer tolerated in America, and by the following month, he was convinced there was no reason to continue writing because the publishing industry would never support him again.††

  An old friend named Millen Brand wrote Nelson an innocuous letter that month—just a hello, really—and Nelson responded with a diatribe. “I’ll tell you what I think is this: that you can’t be a good writer in the States any more,” Nelson wrote. “Not you nor I nor anyone. Because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standards secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn’t do that in the States today, I don’t believe.”

  * Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and a prominent supporter of the Salem witch trials.

  † This act is often referred to as the McCarran Act or the McCarran Internal Security Act.

  ‡ That law prohibited “[p]ersons, regardless of the formal state of their affiliation with the Communist Party, who engage in activities which support the communist movement” from receiving passports.

  § The information provided here—and in every other instance where material contained in Nelson’s FBI file is mentioned—is drawn from a version of that file requested through the Freedom of Information Act on September 23, 2013, and supplied by the National Archives two months later. Most of the information contained in it has never been made public. In the 1980s, a newspaper reporter named Jan Herman and Nelson’s first biographer, Bettina Drew, each requested Nelson’s FBI file and received approximately four hundred heavily redacted pages in response. Others have since requested Nelson’s file and received approximately the same number of pages. The version I was provided with, however, is 886 pages long and very, very lightly redacted.

  ¶ Nelson was especially offended by Yerby’s obsequiousness because they had history. Yerby was then one of the best-selling writers in America—known for his romance novels—but he was a radical in his youth. Nelson and Jack Conroy published Yerby’s first short story in the New Anvil.

  # Worse yet, some thought he was just a pulp writer. A million people owned a paperback version of Never Come Morning sporting cover art that featured three muscle-bound men and a woman clutching her blouse to keep it from falling open.

  ** That is about twenty-seven thousand dollars in today’s money.

  †† This book was never published in Nelson’s lifetime, but excerpts appeared in The Nation, and Seven Stories Press released it as Nonconformity: Writing on Writing in 1996. It hasn’t received much attention since, but it deserves to. The ideas it presents about the purpose of literature remain as relevant now as they were then. Nelson later recycled the title A Walk on the Wild Side, using it for his fourth novel.

  “Riding Day-Coaches to Nowhere”

  (October 3, 1953–September 1955)

  Nelson opened a copy of Somebody in Boots in late 1953 and flipped to the third page, where the story begins. “Why Stub McKay turned out such a devil he himself hardly knew; he himself did not understand what had embittered him,” he read—and then he pressed the tip of a pen to the page and dragged it across the surface.

  Doubleday was paying Nelson to trim the book for a paperback edition, so his mandate was light revision, but he couldn’t constrain himself. The novel’s prose embarrassed him, so he removed extraneous adjectives, phrases, and then whole sentences. He filled the book’s margins with notes scribbled in red, blue, and brown ink, and then he crossed out entire pages. He smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes while he worked, and when he had a fresh idea, he ran a sheet of paper into his typewriter, tapped out a paragraph or two, scissored out the lines he composed, and pasted them into the book where he thought they should appear.

  Nelson worked that way for weeks before he finally admitted he was writing a new novel, realized he should create a proper manuscript, and picked up a stray piece of paper. There was an advertisement for a record on the front—a company called Freedom Discs was selling LPs containing the Senate testimony of a journalist named William Mendel, who accused Joseph McCarthy of leading a “witch hunt” while he was under oath—but the back of the page was blank, so Nelson wound it around his typewriter’s platen and began to write his seventh book.*

  He typed “Angel’s Trade” at the top of the page, hit return several times, and began describing a rundown restaurant in Texas. “[T]he last of the sun threw an unreal light on Puerta’s decaying walls,” he wrote, and then he resigned himself, reluctantly, to the fact that the book would take at least a year to write. He wouldn’t have even started the project if he had had a choice.

  Nelson had sold his first four books before writing them, but his luck had been failing him since. Doubleday never released the photo book he assembled with Art Shay. It bought Chicago: City on the Make after it was already complete, and declined to publish his book-length essay. He had begun writing a haunting, closely observed novel based loosely on Paula Bays’s life the summer before, but when he asked Doubleday for an advance to complete it, they refused. Instead, they offered to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a revision of Boots—payments to stop after a year.†

  Nelson accepted the contract because he had no other options, and he made it seem tolerable by telling himself it was a means to an end, but when he decided Boots needed a complete rewrite, he began to despair. He felt trapped, and for several months he couldn’t decide whether to complete the book or walk away from his obligations.

  Sometimes, Nelson worked frantically, and productively, on the rewrite of Boots for days. The novel was challenging because it required him to write about the past—something he had never done—but he adapted. He added surreal elements t
o the novel, and gave it a darkly comic feel to leaven its often-brutal content. He turned the story into a parable about the futility of pursuing the American Dream, and he changed the style of his prose to give his sentences a meditative rhythm that made his narrative less reliant on the accretion of reported detail than his other books had been.

  But there were other times when the project so disgusted Nelson that he flirted with the idea of running away from his life entirely. He asked Amanda for a divorce, and when she refused to grant him one, he started riding the train into Chicago and disappearing for days. Sometimes, he stayed in the basement of a mansion on Lake Shore Drive where he and a man named Jack Potter hosted a weekly poker game.‡ He often acted as the game’s dealer, and found that he could earn as much in a night at the table as Doubleday was paying him for a week of writing. It was a case of life imitating art, and occasionally he considered abandoning his craft and becoming a professional card player.

  On other days, Nelson sequestered himself in his room and fantasized. He told Beauvoir that he would leave for Paris with nothing but a typewriter if he could get a passport, and live like a pauper while he wrote something important. He nurtured that dream for months, tweaking it slightly each time his mind returned to it, so that sometimes he pictured himself living in a house on stilts in Port au Prince, Haiti, and on other occasions, he dreamed about the cobblestone streets in Marseille.

  But eventually, Nelson made peace with his circumstances and decided to finish his novel so he would have the funds he needed to complete the book he wanted to write—the one about Paula Bays’s life. It was the first time he had agreed to write something he didn’t believe in, and he judged himself harshly for it.

  Everyone in my generation has fallen short of their ideals, he told his friend Max Geismar in April, and I’m no better. “I think that the writers of the twenties were sounder of heart; they took scars but they stayed.” The writers who got their start in the thirties are a different sort, though, Nelson said. They “came in on themselves: gave up, quit cold, snitched, reneged, begged off, sold out and copped out, denied all and ran.” Jack Conroy, Millen Brand, Leonard Ehrlich, Richard Wright, and Meridel Le Sueur all wrote good books, Nelson said. “But when the thirties were done, they were done.”

  It was a harsh assessment, and it ignored how the Red Scare had sidelined his generation of writers, but there was truth in it. Conroy was editing an encyclopedia. Millen Brand was working in publishing. Ehrlich hadn’t finished a book since God’s Angry Man in 1932. Wright had just published an embarrassing potboiler because he was desperate for money, and Le Sueur was waiting tables and struggling to manage that much—the FBI was tracking her as well, and agents visited every diner that hired her, informed them she was a Communist, and got her fired.

  Kenneth Fearing, Nelson continued, was “the truest poet, for my money, of the decade,” but he began repeating himself. “Now he’s hacking, Ben Appel is hacking. I’m hacking too. Nobody stayed.”§

  Nelson preferred to focus solely on his writing when he was working on a major project—digging in like a mole, he called it—but that was no longer an option. Although he had asked Amanda for a divorce and offered her significant alimony, she was refusing to leave the house on Forrest Avenue. He resented her for that and found he couldn’t work when she was around, so he found ways to put distance between them.

  The beach was Nelson’s first refuge. When the weather permitted, he gathered up his portable typewriter and his manuscript and carried them to the dunes. Then he found a quiet place to sit, and, with the sand beneath him and the white thrum of water lapping the lake’s shore in the background, he worked until the light failed and he was forced to go home. But eventually, Nelson decided the dunes were too close to home, so he made plans to visit the American South—the setting of his novel.

  Nelson packed a bag in July and boarded a Delta Air Lines flight bound for Brownsville, Texas. When the plane landed, he headed west and went looking for the Sinclair station he operated in the summer of 1932. His writing career began with the letters he wrote after fleeing the station, so the visit was both a means of collecting material for his novel and a pilgrimage back in time to a period of his life when writing was pure—but it was a failure on both accounts.

  The station had been run down when Nelson and Luther Luther discovered it on their way to the border twenty years earlier, but it had disappeared entirely in the years since. The garage was gone, and the gas tanks were dry. The wild boars that scavenged under their floorboards had moved on or been killed, and there was no sign of the creek where he had collected drinking water. The land had been leveled and a field of cotton had been planted, and now there was nothing to see but neat lines of brittle plants hoisting their white blossoms toward the sky.

  Nelson surveyed the area in dismay, and then returned to Brownsville, defeated and directionless. He sulked for a while, and then he caught a bus across the Mexican border and entered Matamoros.

  The center of the city was full of tourists heading for the bull ring, so Nelson avoided it and wandered until he found a marketplace. He bought a wood carving of Don Quixote, paid a barber three pesos to cut his hair, and entered a saloon called Jess’s Place.

  He ordered a beer without asking the price, and when a bottle appeared in front of him, he pulled a handful of change from his pocket and extended it toward the bartender.

  The man plucked a half dollar from Nelson’s palm and left him to his thoughts.

  There’s little chance they were pleasant. The First National Bank had just closed Nelson’s account because it had been overdrawn too many times. Doubleday was about to send its last advance check, and Nelson was so desperate to get overseas that he was considering perjury. If he couldn’t get a passport by any other means, he planned to sign a sworn statement asserting he had never been a Communist and pray that the State Department lacked the evidence to prove he was lying.

  Nelson ordered a second beer when his bottle was empty, and extended his hand again. There was a half dollar in it, a quarter, and a nickel. This time, the bartender removed a quarter.

  When Nelson’s second bottle was empty, he ordered a third beer. This time the bartender removed the nickel.

  Nelson was amused. “Is beer a half dollar or a quarter?” he asked.

  “It is only a nickel, Senor,” the bartender replied.

  “Why did you take a half dollar and a quarter then instead?”

  “Because it is all one,” the bartender said, “a quarter or a half dollar, Senor. That is why I only took a nickel.”

  Nelson returned to Brownsville that night feeling homesick. He wanted to return to Gary, but couldn’t tolerate the idea of living with Amanda, so he resolved to stay on the move until his book was complete. He knew being on the road so long would turn his life into a blur of buses, trains, and cheap hotels—months, as he later described them, of “riding day-coaches to nowhere”—but he didn’t believe he had any choice.

  Nelson began his journey the next day, and from the beginning, it seemed ill fated. He traveled to New Orleans first, got sick, and spent two days lying in bed with a fever and staring at a crack in the wall of his hotel room. Then he flew to Chicago, and moved in with Jack Conroy and his family for three weeks.¶ He returned to Gary then because he was running low on money, but nightmares plagued him while he was at home, so he left after a few days. He returned to New Orleans and spent the weekend with a writer named Tom Sancton, and then he moved on again—a bag, his manuscript, and his typewriter in tow.

  Nelson’s last stop of the year was East St. Louis. He reached the city just before Christmas, moved in with his friend Jesse Blue, and accompanied him to a bar for a holiday party. He spotted an empty seat near two acquaintances when he entered, and claimed it. He was at the end of a long, regrettable, and tiring year, so he began drinking—and didn’t stop for hours. He and the men he was sitting with consumed three gallons of egg nog, and then poured a layer of Budweiser on top of it
. They ate steak, ham, and eggs to keep their strength up, and then they began sloshing scotch over ice, and continued pouring until four in the morning.

  Nelson had known Jesse Blue for almost fifteen years by then, but they had never been close. He had used Blue’s life—and Bud Fallon’s—to inform the characters in Never Come Morning, but he had always maintained a distance between himself, Blue, Fallon, and their old gang. He didn’t drink the way they did, and while they embraced wild abandon, he found sanctuary in his work. He avoided them diligently after the war, but he felt drawn to Blue now that his life was collapsing. His days were defined by worry and regret, but Blue and his friends seemed to have neither. They made no plans for the future and placed no faith in respectability or careerism, and that made them seem free, unencumbered, alive.

  Nelson had to return to Gary after the party because he had nowhere else to go, and when he got there, he would have to finish writing a book he didn’t want to write just to secure the privilege of writing one he did want to write—but if he returned to the bar the following week, he believed, he would find his companions where he had left them, feeling just as content.

  “I can’t tell you how right it it [sic] seems to me to live—even for an evening—among men and women off the legit,” Nelson wrote to Max Geismar after the party. “What true, solid people pimps and whores can be—I’m serious. So much more natural, right and sound than business people. I sat the whole evening opposite five women, ranging in age from 25 to 38 and in income from a hundred a week to four and five hundred. Of two I know little—but of the other three I can honestly say they are happily married and that I don’t know three business-man’s wives who are. All three of these women have been with the same men for years—one for twenty-two. Between them and their husbands is honest to god love.