by Colin Asher
Nelson worked on his Hemingway essay through the fall and winter. He told an interviewer for the Chicago Daily News, “Creative writing is dead. There is no one today to replace Faulkner and Hemingway, not even James Baldwin or Joseph Heller.” And then he went east in the spring of 1963 to promote the publication of Who Lost an American?, visit friends, and sit down with a writer named Harold Edward Francis Donohue.
Donohue went by H.E.F., or just “Shag,” and he was thirty-nine years old and married with three children. His dark hair was receding, like Nelson’s, and he wore thick-framed glasses and a thin mustache. He had been raised in New Jersey, but later spent about a decade in Chicago, working and going to college, and while he was there, he fell in love with Nelson’s work. He was a freelance journalist, a short-story writer, and the author of an as-yet-unpublished novel called The Higher Animals—but his major project that spring was interviewing Nelson.
Donohue first stumbled on the idea of meeting with Nelson in early 1962, when the film version of A Walk on the Wild Side reached theaters. The lead roles were being played by major stars—Jane Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, and Laurence Harvey—but the film’s promotional materials made no mention of the fact that it was based on one of Nelson’s novels, and Donohue heard that Nelson had disavowed the film and didn’t stand to benefit from it financially.
If that’s true, it would make a good article, Donohue thought, so he reached out to Nelson through Candida Donadio—his agent, as well as Nelson’s—and she put them in touch.
Nelson agreed to tell Donohue about his experiences with Hollywood, but when they met for their first interview, they ended up talking for two straight days. They agreed to remain in touch afterward, and eventually Donadio suggested that they turn their discussions into a book, and she sold the idea to the publisher Hill & Wang.
By the time Nelson visited New York in the spring of 1963, he and Donohue had already met ten times and corresponded extensively. They spoke in Donohue’s den, with a tape recorder running, three more times before Nelson returned to Chicago, and afterward, there was nothing left to do but transcribe, edit, and arrange their material.
The product of their collaboration was released the following year as Conversations with Nelson Algren. It was later reprinted as a paperback by Berkley Medallion, and then again by the University of Chicago Press. Over the past several decades, nearly seventy thousand copies have been printed and it has become the primary source for most of the biographical writing about Nelson.‡ Donohue claims, in an afterword to the first edition, that the book is so comprehensive, it should have been released with the subtitle Notes toward a Biography. But that claim is misleading because, in truth, the book contains quite a bit of fiction.
When Nelson began meeting with Donohue, he recognized their interviews as another opportunity to shape his legacy, so when he told the story of his life and career, he distorted his history to create a character that resembles the one he had begun writing into his nonfiction—a wilder, coarser, less disciplined, and more callous version of the real Nelson Algren.
“My mother had a candy store,” Nelson began truthfully. My father “was a machinist. He worked at the screw works.” Then Nelson explained that, though most people believed he was Polish, he was really a Swede, and that his father’s father had been the first member of the family to emigrate from Europe.
Then Nelson told Donohue the story of Isaac. He explained that his grandfather had been born in Stockholm, converted to Judaism, traveled through America, and spent time in Jerusalem—and as he did, he placed the greatest emphasis on the wildness of Isaac’s character, the sincerity of his faith, and the depth of the depression he fell into when he lost it. “He decided to take the Old Testament at its literal truth,” Nelson said—no one was “orthodox enough for him.” But eventually, his God failed, and he told his family, “There is no truth, there is no religion, no truth. It is all nothing.”
The arc of Isaac’s life, by Nelson’s account, strongly resembles the arc of his own—a point he hints at repeatedly. “I’ve always felt much closer to . . . this grandfather” than I did to my father, he said. When I became interested in socialism, he said, “I was repeating my grandfather’s life in a way.” To make their connection clearer still, Nelson altered the timing of Isaac’s death. “I was in high school” when my parents “got word” that he died, Nelson claimed. When in fact, Isaac passed away at least a decade before Nelson was born.§
Nelson’s decision to link his own story so closely to his grandfather’s has tantalizing implications. It suggests that Nelson saw his political convictions and faith in literature as almost religious experiences, that their loss was a kind of death, and that he felt so abashed by the earnestness of his early years that he was most comfortable speaking about them in parable, using his grandfather as a stand-in.
The remainder of the biographical material Nelson provided reinforces those impressions, because when Nelson began telling the story of his own life, he minimized his intellect, his courage, his ambition, and his stature. By his account, he had always been an archetype of early-twentieth-century working-class masculinity—a solitary creature who rarely applied himself and therefore couldn’t be disappointed by the recent trajectory of his career.
“I flunked everything in high school,” Nelson claimed. “It took me five years before I could get out.” He discussed his time on the road after college, and becoming a writer, without mentioning the John Reed Club, and he denied being a former member of the Communist Party. He did admit to being involved with the Communist movement, but dated his activity to the start of the Spanish Civil War—several years after he was first involved.
I goofed off all the time when I was in the army, Nelson claimed. “At first I was certainly content to stay stateside,” he said, without mentioning his requests to be sent overseas, or the disappointment he experienced when they were denied.
About the McCarthy period, Nelson said only, “I didn’t really do much.” He didn’t mention slighting Louis Budenz and Howard Rushmore in The Man with the Golden Arm, raising money for the Hollywood Ten, the political essay Doubleday refused to publish, or the subpoena he received from the House Un-American Activities Committee. He couldn’t deny the work he did for the Rosenberg Committee, because it had been widely reported, but he minimized his contributions by saying, “All I did was lose my passport.”
Many writers would have seen a book-length interview as a forum for self-aggrandizement, but Nelson did not. Instead, he referred to himself as a “loser” and insisted that he was not a novelist. “I consider myself a free-lance journalist,” he said.¶
Collectively, Nelson’s fabrications, elisions, and diminishments obscure some of the greatest disappointments of his life: the failure of the political movement to which he dedicated himself in his twenties, the fact that he never saw combat in the war, his victimization during the Red Scare, the foreshortening of his career and his inability to regain his former renown, and, most poignantly, the fact that his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir never became what he wanted it to be.
The volume of Beauvoir’s autobiography that covers the postwar period had been published by the time Nelson and Donohue concluded their interviews, and in it, she discusses her relationship with Nelson in great detail. In that book, she presents Nelson as a charming, intelligent, and loving man—but also vulnerable, and hurt by her ambivalence toward him. Nelson felt the book was an even greater violation of his trust than The Mandarins had been, and from that point forward, he downplayed Beauvoir’s importance in his life in every forum available, insulted her writing, demeaned her, and consequently, made himself seem shallow and sexist.
Our relationship “assumed the secondary status of the female in relation to the male,” Nelson told Donohue. Beauvoir, he claimed, “is a rather puritanical woman. She understood that in the relationship between a man and a woman the man is the dominant factor specifically.”#
The most engaging sections
of Conversations with Nelson Algren are the portions dedicated to Nelson’s ideas about politics and literature. In them, he comes across as an independent, irreverent, and rebellious thinker—if sometimes offensive by the standards of later generations.
Nelson championed the civil rights movement in the South as “the only movement that goes against the trend toward the right . . . the only movement that sustains the old American radical tradition, sustains the original idea of the country.” But he dismissed the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X because they were offering, to his mind, a conservative version of resistance—“No jazz, no joy, and no juice, no smoking, no drinking, no gambling,” he said. “It’s a horror.”
Nelson accused America of being an “Imperialist son-of-a-bitch” as well, proclaimed himself an atheist, said he reserved the right to be a Communist one day and an anarchist the next, and endorsed interracial marriage. If I had my way, he said, “I’d mix things up as much as possible—I mean racially.” But he also betrayed some homophobia. When pressed by Donohue, he said, “I prefer masculinity in writing, simply because it’s stronger. And I like a country to be masculine. It’s a weakening thing. I’m not talking about morality. I’m talking about the kind of thinking that goes with homosexuality—it is a very inferior kind of thinking because it’s a very cold way of thinking.”
Nelson also provided Donohue with a provocative definition of American literature that broke with his earlier attempts to define the institution. Though still focused on advocating for society’s outcasts, he claimed that literature is not the sole purview of authors—it is any defiant utterance or act meant to challenge the powerful.
American literature, Nelson said, “is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, ‘Isn’t anybody on my side?’ ” It’s also “the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, ‘Put me in the electric chair—my mother can watch me burn.’ ” And it’s the “thirty-five-year-old Negro who told me recently, ‘The only times I ever felt human is when I’ve been in jail.’ The other times he’s been on guard, on guard day and night.”**
“I think American literature consists of these people,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t consist of the, of the contrivers of literature who, after a certain number of years on campus, are entitled to grow a beard to look like Hemingway although they opposed Hemingway all the time he was alive.”
Conversations with Nelson Algren was published in October 1964, and with its release, Nelson acquired a public persona that was both misleading and enduring. For the remainder of his life, and for decades afterward, he was the man he presented himself to be in that book—a shallower, tougher, more careless, more misogynistic, less ideological, and less intellectual person than he had ever truly been.
The book received spare, but positive reviews. A writer for the New York Times called it an “extraordinary book.” The Chicago Daily News said it was a “totally delightful, irreverent, mad, sensible, acid, hilarious talkathon.” The Tribune proclaimed it “a remarkably lively document, less ordered and selective yet enormously more revealing than a formal biography or an essay in critical evaluation.”
Nelson appreciated the attention the book received, but as always, he cared most about the judgments of other writers. Of all the notes generated by the book’s release, he saved only one: a letter Candida Donadio had received from one of her youngest clients and forwarded to Nelson. That writer’s name was Thomas Pynchon, and his letter reads: “I know he [Nelson] is behind a great deal of what I do. . . . I only wish I had not read the book right at this time because it raises certain inescapable truths about writing, being a writer in America, that I’ve been trying to avoid, like knowing the number of bars on a jail cell for one thing, the whole business of reconstruction, contrivance, as against naturalism in its American, its best sense.”
* Friedkin later became famous as the director of The French Connection, The Exorcist, and To Live and Die in L.A. (among others), but at the time he was working for television station WGN.
† Keen-eyed readers might recognize that these events resemble a scene in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift—there’s a reason for that. Dave Peltz was a friend of Bellow’s, and after he met with Moretti, he described the experience in a letter to Bellow. Later, Bellow wrote a fictionalized version of the events into Humboldt’s Gift. In the book, Peltz is a character named George Swiebel and Moretti is Rinaldo Cantabile. For a discussion of the conflict Bellow’s appropriation created with Peltz, see James Atlas’s Bellow: A Biography.
‡ Donohue provided this estimate. He claimed the book’s initial run was fifteen hundred, and that the Berkley Medallion edition was sixty thousand copies. The University of Chicago edition brings the total close to seventy thousand.
§ Nelson’s claims about Isaac’s death have always been reported as fact, and because it is difficult to verify (or disprove) events that happened almost a century ago, I should acknowledge that I may be mistaken. That said, it seems unlikely. A census taker recorded in 1880 that Isaac was 60 years old that summer—meaning he was born around 1820, and he would have been about 103 years old when Nelson entered high school. Additionally, Jette Abraham began listing herself as a widow on the census in 1900—nine years before Nelson was born—and continued doing so for the remainder of her life. There’s also the fact that Nelson was named for his grandfather—Isaac was born Nils Ahlgren—and by tradition, Jewish families name their children in honor of deceased relatives, not living ones.
¶ There has long been some question about whether these fabrications can be attributed to transcription error, or confusion on Donohue’s part. That question can now be answered. Hill & Wang was eventually purchased by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and they later transferred Hill & Wang’s archives to the New York Public Library. A review of those records shows that Nelson read and approved Donohue’s entire manuscript before publication.
# The irony here, of course, is that one of the first things that attracted Beauvoir to Nelson was the fact that he treated her like an equal at a point when Sartre and his cohort did not.
** During this period, Nelson wrote two other definitions of literature that echo this idea. In the first, written in 1961, he argues: “I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” The second, written around the same time, reads: “Any challenge to laws made by people on top, in the interest of people below, is literature.”
Sea Diary
(July 1964–January 1965)
“Boys,” Bruce Jay Friedman told his three sons, “a Great Writer is coming to stay with us.” It was July 1964, and Friedman and his family were vacationing in the Fair Harbor section of New York’s Fire Island—a tiny hamlet on a thin peninsula sandwiched between the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Friedman’s second novel, A Mother’s Kisses, had just become a best seller, and he had decided to celebrate by renting a vacation house large enough to accommodate his family, a housekeeper named Mrs. Sullivan, and Nelson.
Nelson and Friedman didn’t know each other well. Nelson had spotted a copy of Friedman’s first novel, Stern, on his agent’s desk a couple years earlier, picked it up, read it, and liked it so much that he wrote a glowing review in The Nation. He claimed Friedman’s work was more interesting than Philip Roth’s, Saul Bellow’s, or Bernard Malamud’s, and later he included one of Friedman’s stories in the collection Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters. He and Friedman became friends afterward, but mostly through correspondence.
Friedman’s oldest son, Josh, was eight years old at the time, and his father’s announcement intrigued him. “I wondered what a Great Writer would look like,” he said later, “how he might talk and dress, and how old you had to be to become such a person. It seemed like a statue was coming, some figure upon a horse.”
The man who arrived on Fire Island that summer was nothing like Josh imagined. He was a fifty-five-year-old Midwe
sterner who wore clothes that had been softened by years of use, and who arrived by ferry, carrying a suitcase in one hand and a typewriter case in the other. He walked with a pigeon-toed shuffle, and his laugh was an uninhibited cackle, but in later years Josh always remembered him as a great man nonetheless.
Nelson only stayed with the Friedmans for a week, but his visit was the source of several enduring anecdotes. Mostly, the family was struck by how unabashedly himself Nelson was—a man who was at once fatherly, pugnacious, and wise.
Every morning that week, Nelson got up before dawn and began writing. He broke away from his work when the family woke, and before long, he was sitting with Mrs. Sullivan—a middle-aged Irish woman with gray hair and a thick brogue. The family saw her as the help, but Nelson spent hours with her each day, listening to her stories, telling his own, and flirting shamelessly.
The house the Friedmans rented was less than a block from the beach, and it was hot that summer, so everyone spent time by the water. The family liked to lounge on the sand or play volleyball in the afternoons, and Nelson often sat outside and watched them. And occasionally, he walked along the shore by himself while they played, and listened to the waves.
Once, Nelson climbed a sand dune to get a better view of the ocean. He was standing there peacefully, looking at the water, when a man emerged from a nearby house and began yelling. That’s my land, he said—get off. So Nelson left and went to find Friedman—a big, muscular guy at the time—and then he returned to the sand dune and turned toward the yelling man’s house. Nelson called the man outside, and then did his own yelling. “Where I stand is where I live,” he said.