by Colin Asher
Preminger’s film “has me breathing in short, sharp pants,” Nelson told a friend. “I’m also having trouble with small red mists, which keep floating across the typewriter keys. In all seriousness, it’s hard to work feeling so victimized. I don’t know another word for it. And who wants to be a victim?”
Nelson left Jesse Blue at the house in Playland Estates three days before Christmas, traveled to Miami, and rented a hotel room. Then he went for a walk, spotted a movie theater, and sat through a Walt Disney documentary called The African Lion. The next day, he went to the port of Miami, paid forty-two dollars for a ticket on SS Florida, boarded, and began sailing toward Cuba—the farthest point from American shores he could reach without a passport.
The ship arrived in Havana on Christmas Eve, and Nelson stepped on shore and spent the day wandering. The capital, which was still under the control of Fulgencio Batista, was thick with casinos, bars, and prostitutes, and it reminded Nelson of Marseille after the war—wild and free.
When the sun set, Nelson found a phone directory, looked up the number for Ernest Hemingway’s house, and dialed. Hemingway got on the line and said he was sick, but told Nelson to come for a visit anyway.
So Nelson hired a car and rode for twelve miles until he reached the long driveway that led to La Finca Vigía—a large white mansion with a colonnaded entrance.
Hemingway was lying in bed, wearing a white baseball cap and rimless glasses, when Nelson entered his room. He had a short beard of white whiskers that made him look like Santa Claus, an aged professor, or some combination of the two. He had survived a plane crash the year before—and then another. He injured his head the first time, and injured it more seriously the second, along with his back, his shoulder, a kidney, and his liver. Newspapers reported that he had died in the crash, and it’s possible he might have preferred it if he had. He was badly burned in a brush fire a few months after the second plane crash, and his face, arms, and torso had all been singed. His hair caught fire, too, and for a while, he was bald.
There was a sheet draped over Hemingway’s torso when he greeted Nelson, but his abdomen was so distended that its swelling was obvious nevertheless. He wasn’t supposed to be drinking, but there was a glass of whiskey within reach of his bed, and he told Nelson he was allowed a certain number of shots each hour.
Nelson and Hemingway had never met, but each man admired the other. Hemingway had loved and promoted both Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm, and Nelson had been looking to Hemingway’s work for inspiration for most of his career. He respected the man’s prose, but also saw him as a kindred spirit—a writer whose work made no accommodation to literary critics or trends.
“Sorry to see you down,” Nelson said when he found his words.
“I’m not down,” Hemingway replied curtly.
Nelson accepted a glass of whiskey, and realized he wasn’t going to be receiving any learned counsel that evening. Hemingway was not feeling loquacious. He had been consuming a shot of liquor every hour all day long, and there was a pain throbbing behind his eyes that had been lingering for months.
Nelson had a second drink, and then he tried to fill the silence. He remembered the film he had seen two days earlier, and began telling Hemingway about Africa. When a lioness needs to feed her cubs, she’ll knock an impala down and then kill it, he said. Cheetahs are the fastest things on four legs, and they chase down their prey to exhaust them.
Telling the story excited Nelson, and he began waving his glass to simulate the grace and athleticism of the animals he was describing. Impalas leap such great distances when they reach top speed, he explained, it looks like they’re flying.
Hemingway listened, patient and bemused, and allowed his guest to ramble.
Eventually, Nelson took a breath and looked around the room. Behind him, high on a wall, hung the stuffed head of a water buffalo Hemingway had killed in Africa.
Nelson boarded the Florida alone on Christmas Day, and began making his way home. He stepped onto American soil the next morning, was back in Chicago by the afternoon, and reached Gary before midnight. He had agreed to let Amanda live in the house on Forrest Avenue by herself until their divorce was finalized, but when he showed up on the doorstep, broke and exhausted, she allowed him inside.
For the next two weeks, Nelson and Amanda lived together but barely spoke. She went to work each day for a company installing sewer lines, and he reviewed the page proofs for his novel. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy was also concerned about the book’s content, and so he spent his time removing all the overt references to sex or genitalia from the text to avoid the condemnation of censors.
At 5 a.m. on January 16, 1956, Nelson entered Amanda’s room and stood at the foot of her bed. Dave Peltz, their neighbor, lingered nearby to provide moral support. Later that day, Nelson and Amanda were due in court to finalize their divorce, but he was having second thoughts.
“Look,” he said, “let’s forget about the whole thing.”
Amanda didn’t even get up. “I think it’s a little late for that now,” she said.
Nelson moved into Chicago after divorcing Amanda so that she could have the house to herself, and he rented a single room without a bathroom at 1817 West Division Street. Then he began plotting his escape from America. He wanted to leave when he received his first royalty check from A Walk on the Wild Side, so he reapplied for a passport with a letter of support from his literary agent—and the State Department turned him down again.
Nelson moved again two months later, and began residing, rent-free, in an apartment owned by his friend Caesar Tabet. Then he hired a lawyer and appealed his latest passport denial. It was his fourth try, or maybe his fifth, and this time, he signed his name to the statement the State Department had been demanding he make since his first application in 1953. “I wish to affirm and take oath that I am not at present a member of the Communist Party,” he wrote, “nor have been a member of that party in the past.”
* Southern later became famous for writing The Magic Christian, and screenplays for movies such as Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. But Anderson is an obscure figure. He published a widely praised collection of stories called Lover Man in 1959, and a novel called All God’s Children in 1965, but then he faded into obscurity and died a pauper in 2008. Nelson remained in touch with both men after this interview, and assisted their careers.
† This is the book Nelson was writing about Paula Bays’s life.
‡ It’s true that Nelson and Seldes once got high, but that was out of character for Seldes—so out of character, in fact, that he talked about it for decades afterward.
§ In the letter this account is based on, Jesse Blue is identified as “Whitey.” “Blackie” is almost certainly a pseudonym, but this man’s legal name has been lost to history.
A Walk on the Wild Side
(May 21, 1956–August 31, 1956)
On Monday, May 21, Nelson entered the University Club of Chicago, wearing a dark suit and a polka-dotted tie, and joined a luncheon that had been organized to celebrate the release of his novel. He found a seat waiting for him next to his publisher, Roger Straus, and for the next couple hours, he and Straus held court—shaking hands, posing for pictures, and offering perfunctory smiles. There was a cake sitting in front of him that had been carved in the shape of a hardcover book and decorated to look like a copy of A Walk on the Wild Side, and the room was full of well-wishers and hangers-on.
The event had been billed as a celebration of the “birth” of Nelson’s fourth novel, but the room was thrumming with gossip instead of congratulation. Preminger’s film—a movie Nelson saw once, and dismissed as inauthentic—was one topic of conversation. The quarter-million-dollar lawsuit Nelson had recently filed against the man was another, and Simone de Beauvoir’s latest novel, The Mandarins, was the third. It had been released in English that week, with a drawing on its cover that resembled Nelson, it was dedicated to him, and it credited a character patterned after him with giving
Beauvoir’s fictional counterpart her first “complete orgasm.”
When the lunch ended, Nelson and Straus moved on to Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore, where Nelson signed copies of his novel until his hand cramped, and then they attended a cocktail party. The following day, he signed books at an event that had been promoted with the promise that attendees could “see him! meet him!” and for the remainder of the week he maintained that frenetic pace—two radio appearances, two TV appearances, a speech at the Sun-Times book and author luncheon, and a party organized by Jack Conroy and Studs Terkel.
None of Nelson’s earlier books had been promoted so well, and the effort that went into the release of A Walk on the Wild Side paid off. It appeared on the Tribune’s best-seller list at number six after a week of sales, and then it moved up to number three. It entered the New York Times best-seller list next, stayed there for fifteen weeks, and remained a top seller on the West Coast and in the Midwest through the summer.
But the novel’s commercial success did nothing for Nelson’s state of mind—he was distraught, and promoting the book felt like a grim ceremony. He had begun obsessing over Preminger’s film and the way his story had been taken from him, and he was offended that Beauvoir had revealed so much about their time together. He felt betrayed by her, and when a reporter asked him to comment on her book, he said, “I think Madame de Beauvoir has invaded her own privacy.”
Nelson was also distressed by the reviews A Walk on the Wild Side had received. Despite its strong sales, it was getting mixed notices—some enthusiastic, some tepid, and a few nasty.
The book had a solid core of fans, some of whom saw it as an innovation that built on Nelson’s earlier novels and suggested a new direction for his writing. Maxwell Geismar called it “an ironical parody of the American success story” in The Nation, and lauded its prose. James T. Farrell called it “the product of a distinguished American writer” in the New Republic, and a reviewer for the Saturday Review declared, “The Chicago School of Realism has a new headmaster who frames his materials in back-country balladry and earthy lyricism.”
“The point Algren sought to make,” a review in the Tribune said, “was that lost people who have suffered, ‘little’ people often are the biggest human beings. He has made the point with crushing impact.”
As a rule, though, the novel’s detractors were more influential. Alfred Kazin, writing in the New York Times, accused Nelson of “puerile sentimentality,” and said, “I don’t think his book has anything real about it whatever.” Orville Prescott, also writing in the Times, called the book’s characters “human monsters” and said the story was nothing more than “a series of offenses against decency.” What Algren wants to say, Norman Podhoretz wrote in The New Yorker, “is that we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectables.” In The Reporter, Leslie Fiedler declared that Algren was “a museum piece—the last of the proletarian writers.”
Nelson’s work had always courted controversy. He was first censored in 1935 when the Windsor Quarterly—at the insistence of their college sponsor—printed blank pages in their magazine where one of his stories was supposed to appear. The Chicago Public Library had refused to purchase copies of Never Come Morning, and Holiday magazine removed all of the political content from his essay on Chicago. But the literary community had reliably supported Nelson. Reviewers were rarely critical of his work, and never questioned his motivation for writing about “bums and tramps,” because they identified his fiction, as he did, with a long tradition of American writers who used outsiders as a means of commenting on society’s imperfections. That tendency included Nelson’s contemporaries, like Wright and John Steinbeck, but also writers from earlier generations such as Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, and Walt Whitman, who wrote, I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, / And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
The terms of debate within the literary world had shifted dramatically in the years since Nelson’s last novel was published. Just as painters were moving away from realism and toward abstract expressionism, writers were abandoning “social novels” in favor of technique-driven works that placed more emphasis on metaphor, irony, and paradox than on research, compassion, or story. A book’s social relevance no longer mattered to many reviewers, and the quality of Nelson’s work that had earned him the greatest praise for the first twenty-one years of his career was suddenly a liability.*
After a week of promoting A Walk on the Wild Side in Chicago, Nelson visited his home in Gary, packed a bag, labeled it “Paris,” and then flew to New York and moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in the West Village. The apartment had two large bedrooms and a sundeck, and it rose above the neighboring buildings so that when Nelson looked through his windows toward downtown at night, he saw “lights like candle-lamps burning all about.”
A few days after he moved in, Nelson walked to the Cherry Lane Theater on Commerce Street to attend the inaugural theatrical performance of The Man with the Golden Arm. Jack Kirkland had been planning to open his play on Broadway, but he lost most of his funding when Preminger’s film reached theaters, and afterward the Cherry Lane was the best venue he could find.
Nelson was in the audience and watching intently when Robert Loggia took the stage to make his debut as Frankie Machine on opening night. Kirkland’s production of the play was a low-budget affair, scheduled for a short run and never well attended, but it was faithful to the original story and Nelson found it deeply affecting. He saw the show at least five times, and on each occasion, he scrutinized the performers on stage and compared their version of their characters to the image in his mind.
Nelson spent six weeks in New York, seeing friends, attending cocktail parties, appearing on the radio to promote his novel, and visiting clubs to hear jazz—but then he had to face the inevitable. He had flown east primarily to reckon with his finances, and on July 18, he, his lawyer, and his agents gathered in Roger Straus’s office near Union Square Park to discuss the matter.
The news Nelson received that day was worse than he had imagined. A Walk on the Wild Side was on best-seller lists in at least three cities at the time, the Associated Press had just selected Nelson as their author of the week, and a paperback publisher that had already sold a half million copies of The Neon Wilderness was preparing a new edition—but despite all his success, Nelson was in debt and unlikely to break even anytime soon.
Much of Nelson’s trouble—and later, his regret—could be traced to a single miscalculation. He had been offered $32,500 for the paperback rights to A Walk on the Wild Side before it was published, but turned it down because his agent told him to hold out for more.† Then Alfred Kazin’s review appeared in the New York Times, the initial offer was withdrawn, and the highest offer that came in afterward was only ten thousand dollars—of which Nelson was entitled to half. Roger Straus had been working with Nelson’s agents to raise money to make up for the shortfall, and they had had some success, but not enough. They received an offer to reprint Somebody in Boots as a paperback, and Ballantine Books also offered Nelson twenty-five hundred dollars for unpublished material they could release as a pocket book—but that was all.‡
Nelson had access to a little more than eleven thousand dollars when all was said and done, but he owed far more than that. He had promised Amanda seven thousand in their divorce agreement. Doubleday was demanding more than eight thousand as repayment of their advances, and he owed money to a Chicago lawyer who represented him during his divorce, the lawyer he was paying to represent him for his passport appeal, and the lawyer he hired to sue Preminger, whom he had agreed to pay whether or not she ever secured a settlement; her fee, already large, would eventually come close to eight thousand.
Nelson’s financial troubles had many causes. His agent’s bad advice contributed, as did Bob Roberts’ treachery and the three thousand dollars Nelson lost playing cards after his firs
t passport application was denied. The nasty reviews A Walk on the Wild Side received damaged his confidence, and the FBI’s scrutiny was beginning to cause him to act irrationally—but Nelson blamed only himself and his sentimental attachment to Amanda.
When he realized how desperate his financial situation was that summer, Nelson wrote a confessional letter to his friend Max Geismar that attributed all of his troubles to a failure of will. He said that he had been working for the last two years just to make enough money to support himself while he wrote the novel he wanted to be writing, but that all of that time had been wasted.
When I began that one I was just beginning to write—I had the place to write it, the emotion for it, and the people about whom to write it. I have a bad, bad pang, at the moment of writing this for not holding on to that place, the emotion and the people. All I had to do was to be willing to live lonely—the way I prefer—for a couple years. I didn’t.
Up to that time I did everything right—blindly, but in some way becoming somebody. Only one little thing, very deep, was wrong—and that was the shadow of guilt toward the girl [Amanda] I got married to a long time ago, and who wanted to try again. I tried every way of getting out of letting this happen—but I never quite cut the knot. I never said ‘No.’ I let it happen. . . .
Now I’m down, and kicking. What I’m kicking about is that, in my hands, was the luckiest chance ever given an American writer—I mean that without exaggeration, for this reason: I made myself a voice for those who are counted out, and I did this because of compassion and not for what was in it. All I had to do was keep my nose clean. I didn’t. My devotion was to the outcasts, that was the real thing—the girl [Amanda] was just a kind of obligation I thought I was supposed to fulfill.