Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  After his meeting with Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Nelson requested seven thousand dollars from his publisher—everything available to him, at the time—and made his way to Washington, DC. Someone had put him in contact with a lawyer there who claimed to have access to the FBI’s files. The man in question said he could enter the bureau’s offices, access any dossier in the building, and remove all the incriminating content inside.

  It was a ridiculous story, but Nelson was desperate enough to believe it. His passport application had just been denied again, and the passport division had scheduled an interview for his appeal where he was expected to discuss his past connections to the Communist Party under oath. He was fearful of imprisonment, so he met with the lawyer and gave him fifteen hundred dollars—and it seems they never spoke again.

  A few days later, Jesse Blue left Baltimore, went looking for Nelson, and found him wandering the streets in a fugue—barely able to speak, and too depressed to care for himself. Blue called Amanda and told her that Nelson was sick and needed help, but Amanda did nothing.

  Somehow, Nelson made it to back to Gary by himself, and showed up on Forrest Avenue. His arrival surprised Amanda, and so did his state of mind. He was crying and pleading with her. He asked her to allow him in, and said he had nowhere else to go.

  She agreed, and then he gave her all the money he had left, along with an IOU for the portion of her alimony he had given to the attorney in DC.

  By summer, there was general agreement that Nelson was losing his mind. He spent his time pacing and chain-smoking while muttering to himself. He lay in bed for hours each day, trying to quiet his mind so he could rest, but rarely managed to. When he did drift off, it never lasted long. As soon as he fell into a deep sleep, he woke screaming—“Nooooo! Nooooo!”

  Dave Peltz, Nelson’s friend and neighbor, made a point of visiting regularly to check on Nelson, and once he arrived just after Nelson woke from a nightmare. He entered the house, and in place of a greeting, Nelson said, “Dave, man oh man, are you fucking in trouble but I gotta tell you.”

  “What happened?” Peltz asked.

  I had a dream, Nelson said, “that you were laying right here on this fucking living room floor face down with a hole in your back . . .”

  “It’s your dream, Nelson,” Peltz said. It has nothing to do with me.

  The comment struck Nelson like a revelation, and he jumped out of his chair and lit a cigarette. “Wooooo,” he grunted. “Wooooo.”

  “What the fuck?” he demanded nonsensically. “Who shot me in the back? And why am I bleeding?”

  Amanda observed Nelson’s deterioration closely. She watched him fall apart one piece at a time, and the farther he receded from the world, the more helpless she felt. She told herself for weeks that he would recover on his own, but on the night of August 18, she realized she would have to intervene. Nelson stayed up all night that night, and before dawn he was willing to admit there was something wrong. He was distrustful of doctors and drugs and claimed that he had never even taken aspirin, but by then he hadn’t slept a full night in more than a month, and he was willing to try anything. “Help me,” he pleaded with Amanda. “Help me.”

  She just looked at him. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said later.

  The next morning, Amanda called Neal Rowland and Dave Peltz. They came to the house and found Nelson in a shocking state. He had become preoccupied by an internal dialogue, and didn’t seem to hear them when they spoke to him. After some time, though, he acknowledged Peltz and Rowland and agreed to see a doctor.

  The four of them piled into Peltz’s 1954 Oldsmobile sedan and began driving north—out of Gary, and then through Chicago. After about an hour and a half, the car pulled into the driveway of the North Shore Health Resort in Winnetka, Illinois, and everyone got out. They approached the building—a large four-story with a peaked roof that was surrounded by manicured lawns—climbed the front steps together, and passed through the ivy-framed main entrance.

  But then Nelson recoiled. When he saw the resort’s waiting room, he realized his friends had brought him to an institution, not a doctor’s office, and began screaming—“Noooo! Noooo!” The facility couldn’t treat Nelson unless he signed himself in, so he backed away from the register on the front desk and kept away from the staff.

  Amanda watched him squirm, and felt helpless. Rowland just stood there. But Peltz was out of patience, and he snapped. “Let’s go home already, then,” he said. “Don’t blow my day. Sign it, or don’t.”

  Nelson considered his options then, decided he couldn’t face the prospect of returning home, walked to the desk, picked up a pen, touched it to the register, and wrote: E.

  Then he set the pen down and paced the room while his friends watched and waited. Eventually, he returned to the desk, picked up the pen, and added a letter to the register so that it said: E A.

  Then he set the pen down, paced, returned to the desk, and added two more letters so the register said: E AL R.

  He paced the room some more, then returned—paced, and returned—until finally the register said: NELSON ALGREN.

  Two large men dressed in white entered the room the moment Nelson scribbled the last letter of his name. One of them grabbed his left arm. The other grabbed the right. They lifted him, and then turned toward the far wall of the lobby and began dragging him toward a door that had just opened.

  Nelson started to cry then. He looked at Amanda and said, between sobs, I don’t want to. Then he turned toward Peltz, and begged.

  “Dave,” Nelson pleaded, and then “Daaaaave.” The men in white continued dragging him, and the farther they carried him, the more pathetic and belabored his cries became. Daaaaaaaave, he wailed. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave.

  “I felt like hell,” Peltz said later, “like I betrayed him.”

  Nelson stayed at the clinic for twelve days, and then climbed out of a window, descended a fire-escape ladder, and ran away. A Walk on the Wild Side was still on the best-seller list in Chicago at the time, but he had no money, so he hitchhiked into the city and called Dave Peltz for a ride to Gary. When he returned home, he discovered that Amanda had moved out and the house was empty.

  Nelson’s stay in Winnetka had little therapeutic value and did nothing for his depression. He was diagnosed with “anxiety” while he was there, and a doctor determined that he had a “passive aggressive personality,” but he received no medications or therapies. The doctor who had been assigned to treat him was at a conference when Nelson arrived, and while he was away, the staff gave Nelson baths and left him alone in his room until, one day, they discovered that he had disappeared.

  And yet, admission to the clinic may have been the most fortuitous event of Nelson’s life. Earlier that year, he had scheduled an interview as part of his passport appeal, and he had been planning to make statements under oath that would have constituted perjury. The date for that interview fell during the period he was at Winnetka, though, so his lawyer requested an indefinite postponement. The State Department agreed, and then informed the FBI of Nelson’s whereabouts.

  The bureau decided to use the delay caused by Nelson’s institutionalization to their advantage and began reviewing the evidence they had against him—but when they did so, they found it lacking.

  The most damning document in the bureau’s possession was the letter Howard Rushmore had provided them with—the one in which Nelson calls himself a member of the Party “in good standing”—so they invested time into attempting to verify it. They requested samples of Nelson’s handwriting from Caesar Tabet, Roger Straus, the secretary of the Division Street YMCA, the head of the Harper & Brothers contracts department, the police department in Alpine, Texas, and the registrar of the University of Illinois. Most everyone complied, but none of the samples they provided matched the signature on the Rushmore letter precisely.

  The FBI also found they had problems with their witnesses. They contacted Louis Budenz and asked if he was prepared to testify against Nelson in
court, but he said he was too ill to do so. Things that were clear in my memory in 1950, he told them, no longer are. Howard Rushmore’s testimony had also become problematic. He had recently suffered his own breakdown and become fodder for the tabloids, so the FBI believed he was too tarnished to serve as a witness.

  Consequently, at the end of their review of Nelson’s file, the FBI determined they had neither hard evidence nor compelling testimony that could be used against him in court—so they placed his case on hold.

  Nelson stopped contacting his lawyer when he left the clinic, and his passport appeal was eventually dropped as a result of inactivity. The lawyers Doubleday assigned to have Nelson’s HUAC subpoena quashed had succeeded by then, so by the time Nelson returned home, all of his legal entanglements were either resolved or dormant.

  The FBI continued to track Nelson for the next thirteen years, and during that time they talked regularly with his landlords, neighbors, and employers, but they never prepared charges against him again. It’s likely he would have faced prison time if he had attended his interview and perjured himself, but he remained a free man because he never did.

  It’s also possible to think of Nelson’s admission to the clinic as the most tragic event of his life—not the most fortuitous—and for the same reasons.

  The FBI’s scrutiny had a profound effect on Nelson, but few people ever suspected their involvement. The bureau never gave Nelson the opportunity to become a martyr, so when his career began to falter and his mood turned dark and paranoid, it seemed he was the sole author of his own decline. People extended him little sympathy, and later, when it became possible to resurrect the careers of artists who had suffered during the Red Scare, his name was rarely mentioned.

  No one passed judgment on Nelson more harshly than he did on himself, and that may be the most tragic result of the FBI’s scrutiny. He never knew how many of his friends and professional contacts the bureau had spoken to, or how closely they were watching him, so when publishers began distancing themselves from him, he assumed his work simply wasn’t wanted or wasn’t good enough. He blamed himself for the resulting anxiety and depression, and when he discovered he couldn’t concentrate well enough to write the way he once had, he attributed his trouble to personal weakness—when, in fact, the truth was far more complicated.

  * Nelson commented on this trend regularly, beginning with the interview he gave to the Paris Review. “I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criticism this past summer at a writers’ conference,” he said then, “—into how the avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you can back it up with a PhD.” This tendency is associated with the New Criticism, a movement of academics whose aims are described in A Glossary of Literary Terms as follows: In evaluating a piece of writing, “they eschew reference to the biography and temperament of the author, to the social conditions at the time of its production, or to its psychological and moral effects on the reader; they also tend to minimize recourse to the place of the work in the history of literary forms and subject matter.” For a more in-depth (critical) assessment of this phenomenon, and the accompanying rise in the prominence of creative writing programs, see Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire.

  † That would be about four hundred thousand dollars today.

  ‡ Avon Books eventually released this edition of Somebody in Boots as The Jungle—but Nelson had little to do with it. Someone at Avon marked up the text and Nelson approved the changes, but that was all. He tried to pull out of the deal at the last minute, but couldn’t. He never accepted Ballantine’s offer.

  A Lightless Cave off a Loveless Hall

  (September 1, 1956–February 1959)

  Nelson went outside a bit before noon on New Year’s Eve and walked through his backyard toward the lagoon behind his house. It was cold, but not freezing, and the sky was cloudy.

  When he reached the embankment at the edge of his property, he descended toward the water line. There was a sheet of ice covering the lagoon, and Nelson stepped onto it, continued walking, and crossed to the far shore. He climbed the bank on the other side, passed through a stand of trees, stepped into the street, and walked down the block toward a general store called Pignotti’s, where he bought milk and bread.

  Then he retraced his steps, groceries in hand. He walked down the street, between the trees, and back onto the sheet of ice covering the lagoon, but this time, he didn’t take the most direct route. He looked down at the ice as he walked, and noticed the surface was slick where the late-morning sun had begun melting it. There were puddles here and there, and he approached one and gazed into it—a portal between the gray sky and the frigid water beneath.

  By then, it had been months since Nelson had been able to focus well enough to write, and he had begun to question whether he even wanted to. There didn’t seem to be much point. He had returned from the war armed with limitless faith in the power of the written word and dreams of literary greatness, but both had faded since. He had written five books in that time, and seen four of them published, but there was no money in his bank account and no one waiting for him at home, and he no longer believed his writing had changed the world, or ever could.

  Melancholy tinged with regret had been Nelson’s resting state for months, but as he stood at the edge of that puddle and looked down into the frigid water, he felt light-headed, carefree—an odd sensation, given recent events.

  For the first time in seventeen years, Nelson had no publisher. Roger Straus had been pressing him to sell the film rights to A Walk on The Wild Side to a businessman named Lebworth who had never produced a movie. Nelson found the idea repellent and said he intended to focus on writing his next novel and wait for a better offer, but Straus objected. He was tired of hearing about Nelson’s financial problems, and said he would only release an advance for a new novel if Nelson accepted Lebworth’s money. So Nelson ended their relationship. “I feel I may be able to climb out of the financial pit where I now so restlessly abide,” he wrote near the end of the year, “were FS & C to give me a release.”

  Nelson considered the abyss beneath his feet. Then he moved the toe of one of his shoes closer to the puddle—“playing around,” he called it later—and leaned forward. He was still for a moment, and so was the world. It was just him, the indifferent sky above, the bare trees lining the shore, and the container of milk slowly warming in his bag—and then the ice collapsed beneath his feet and the lagoon swallowed him whole.

  Nelson sank, flailed, and then bobbed to the surface and gasped. He grabbed the edge of the sheet of ice and tried to pull himself onto it, but it wouldn’t support his weight, and he slipped back into the water. He tried again and slipped again, and then he started screaming.

  Cold water enveloped Nelson’s body while he waited for help, and his blood vessels reacted by narrowing to preserve the temperature of his heart and brain. He began to feel weak, his breathing slowed, and he became drowsy—but he kept screaming.

  Three brothers who shared the last name Larson were working on the roof of a house about five hundred feet away when a child approached them and said someone was calling for help. The brothers hadn’t noticed anything, but once they knew to listen, they could make out Nelson’s wails. They looked around for their source, but saw nothing, so they descended from the roof and looked again. They still saw nothing, so they piled into a truck, drove to the concrete bridge that crosses the lagoon at Lake Street, and stopped in the middle.

  Finally, they saw Nelson. He was about two blocks away, so they drove toward him, parked at the edge of the lagoon, assessed the ice, and decided it was too weak to cross.

  The Larsons tossed a rope toward Nelson, and when it landed within his reach, he grabbed it. They tugged on it, but it slipped through his numb fingers and slithered toward the shore. They tossed it again, and again, but the result was the same each time.

  Nelson could barely keep himself above water by then. His hands were
mitts, so the Larsons told him to wrap the rope around his arm. They tossed it again, and he did as they said, but when he was finished, he realized his fingers were so numb he couldn’t tie a knot, so he wrapped the rope around himself again, and again, and again.

  The Larsons tugged the line, and this time they pulled Nelson out of the water and onto the ice. He was dead weight, soaking and miserable, and they dragged his body all the way to shore.

  The Larsons drove Nelson home. He was humiliated, and cold. He walked to his front door wearing his wet clothes, and then he stripped. He pulled off his shirt, his shoes, his pants, and his underwear, and left them in a pile outside. Then he crossed his living room naked, climbed into his bed, and burrowed under the blankets.

  Dave Peltz knew something was wrong the moment he turned into Nelson’s driveway. The pile of clothes on the stoop had frozen in place, and when Peltz saw it, he thought, “The damn fool, the miserable mother, he committed suicide.”

  Peltz tried the doorknob, but it was locked—to keep him out, he figured—so he found another way in and entered Nelson’s bedroom, where he found him in bed, shivering.

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Peltz said.

  “Boy, did I have a fucking experience,” Nelson minimized.

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Peltz insisted. “What did you do?”

  I need coffee, Nelson said. So Peltz went into the kitchen and made some and brought it back. “Tell me the truth, Nelson,” he said. “Don’t fuck around. Tell me the truth. Tell me if you tried.”