by Colin Asher
Nelson played patriarch at the Friedmans’ house. When he saw the family’s three sons playing near the stove, he took them aside and told them to turn the handles of the pots so they weren’t sticking out. That way you won’t knock anything off and burn yourself, he said. He and Friedman drank at night and discussed their careers, and Friedman later remembered their conversations for their singularity. Most writers, he said, want to talk about women and money—but not Nelson. He was only interested in literature, and when he spoke about his own books and his stature, he was very self-effacing. His work was “iconic,” Friedman said, but if “you listened to him you’d have no idea that he was Nelson Algren.”
And whenever Nelson felt the need, he spoke his mind. One night, Friedman threw a large party—a “Gatsby-like” affair with “lots of drinking and bad behavior,” he said. Nelson flitted about, chatting and telling stories until he noticed Friedman and his wife, Ginger, arguing. They were yelling at each other, and Friedman became so upset that he cut his hand with a bread knife by mistake. Until then, Nelson had had the impression their marriage was a happy one, and when he saw Friedman bleeding, he shook his head, turned away, and said, loudly enough to be heard, “Why do people destroy themselves?”
“That lingers, you know,” Friedman said later. “I remember that moment.”
The Friedmans packed up their things at the end of the week and returned home, but Nelson liked being on Fire Island so much he decided to stay, and moved eleven miles down the peninsula to Davis Park—an even smaller hamlet where nothing was more than a block from the sand.
Nelson’s new summer home was a four-bedroom house that had been rented by six young women for the season. His roommates worked on the mainland from Monday to Friday each week, then swept in for two days each weekend, so for the most part, Nelson was alone. There was no phone in the house, no radio, no television. “Conditions for writing here are so ideal,” Nelson joked in a letter to a friend, “I see no chance of getting anything done at all.”
There was a complication though. There was no electricity at that end of the peninsula yet, but no one had informed Nelson before he agreed to move. If they had, he never would have rented his room. He had a long essay to write for a magazine called Sky, but his typewriter was electric.*
Nelson was reduced to writing in longhand, a form no magazine would accept, so at first he barely worked. He explored the area instead, and discovered a bar called the Casino a short distance from his house. It had a large dining room, a deck built on the beach that faced the Atlantic, and a big, rumbling generator. It was the only place in the area with electric lights, so he began hanging around there at night. He had nothing better to do.
A few days after Nelson arrived in Davis Park, a young man named Donald DeLillo approached Nelson’s house and asked to see him.
DeLillo was not usually so bold. He was twenty-seven years old at the time, and shy—a product of the Bronx, and working class. He had been a copywriter for the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather for the past several years, but recently quit because he was sick of working. He wanted to be a novelist, not an adman, but he had published only one story—a piece called “The River Jordan” that appeared in a college magazine called Epoch—and he had no connection to the literary world. He didn’t know any agents, or publishers, and none of his friends were aspiring writers.
DeLillo was sharing a house with ten other people that summer, and though he was supposed to be writing, he wasn’t. He had been drinking at the Casino instead, and one night while he was there, he noticed a man who looked familiar. “It was odd,” he said later. I knew his face, but couldn’t place him.
Maybe the next day, maybe the day after, DeLillo heard someone say that Nelson Algren was staying in the area. He realized then that the familiar face he spotted at the bar was Nelson’s. I should have “recognized him immediately,” he thought. Then he summoned his nerve and went to find the famous author who had just become his neighbor.
Soon, Nelson and DeLillo were sitting outside Nelson’s house, watching the surf and talking about writing and life.
Nelson told DeLillo about his typewriter problem, and the next time DeLillo visited, he brought along his manual upright. Nelson accepted the loan gratefully, and for the remainder of the summer, he alternated between writing the essay Sky had commissioned—a travel piece about Butte, Montana—and visiting with DeLillo on the front porch, where they watched people emerge from the water.
On those afternoons, DeLillo told Nelson that he wanted to become a writer, and Nelson rehashed all his usual stories. He told DeLillo about Bob Roberts, Otto Preminger, and Simone de Beauvoir, and though they were tired old tales by then, they seemed fresh and exciting to DeLillo. He could hear bitterness in Nelson’s voice, but not too much, and later, the feeling he associated most with those afternoons, he said, was “longing.”
Nelson had been given a chance to make a comeback that year. He had just signed a three-book deal with G.P. Putnam’s Sons that guaranteed him almost eleven thousand dollars for the book-length essay about Ernest Hemingway that he had begun on the Malaysia Mail—a significant amount for a collection of stories—and another eleven thousand if he wrote a fifth novel.† But he was apprehensive about committing to a serious project, and increasingly interested in exerting his influence on the arts in other ways.
Over the past several years, nurturing young talent had become a significant part of Nelson’s life. He was still trying to help James Blake publish his prison letters, and he had been helping Alston Anderson and Terry Southern with favorable reviews, connections, and recommendations since they interviewed him for the Paris Review in 1955. He was trying to help a friend from East St. Louis named Joan Kadesh get her start as a writer, and he had befriended a young director named Philip Kaufman and appeared in his first film, Goldstein. Nelson “was the voice of a prophet,” Kaufman said later. “[E]verything he wrote about, everything he talked about was true, I think.” Nelson had also given Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 its first rave review, and when the book failed to catch on, he reached out to Heller, met him for lunch, and began a letter-writing and word-of-mouth campaign to promote the book.
Working-class writers had a special place in Nelson’s heart. The year before, he had hired on as an instructor at the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop in Middlebury, Vermont. It was the kind of job he had been relying on for income since returning to Chicago, but not one he felt at home performing—he didn’t fit in among the instructors, and felt most of the students were sheltered and out of touch with the world.
One young man caught his eye that year, though: a twenty-three-year-old pipe fitter from New Hampshire named Russell Banks.
Banks, like DeLillo, wanted to be a writer but didn’t know anything about the literary world. He didn’t even know what a writers’ workshop was, and had only registered because he saw an advertisement promising that Nelson would be teaching.
When Banks arrived, he sat down with Nelson to discuss the manuscript he had submitted when he applied to Bread Loaf.
Nelson began leafing through Banks’s book, and then stopped and said, “This is a good paragraph, kid.” Then he turned about forty more pages, and said the same thing. He turned some more pages, and said, “There’s some nice dialog in here, now all you gotta do is write the rest of it at the same level as those two paragraphs and that bit of dialog and you’ve got a good novel.”
He didn’t do a line edit the way some instructors might, Banks said later, but “he did the thing every young writer needs.” He took the book seriously, and didn’t condescend by pretending it was better than it was. “It was like a laying on of the hands for me.”
When Nelson was done flipping through Banks’s novel, he said, “I see you’ve got some wheels, kid. I’d like to get out of here. This place is driving me nuts, and I’ve only been here a day. Let’s go to the town for some beers.” Banks agreed, and after a few drinks, Nelson suggested they drive to Vermont and visit his friend Pa
ul Goodman, who had recently made a splash with a book called Growing Up Absurd. Goodman was another one of Banks’s heroes at the time, so he agreed to that suggestion as well.
Nelson and Banks spent two days at Goodman’s house, and when they returned to Bread Loaf, Nelson was fired for absconding with a student. He and Banks hung around the conference for a while longer, and then they drove to Banks’s home in New Hampshire and spent two more days drinking, trading stories, and talking about writing. “It was the beginning of a deep education for me, and a crucial crossing over for me from being this isolated adolescent as a writer to becoming an adult writer,” Banks said later.
Nelson and Banks began corresponding after the week they spent together—and after Nelson met DeLillo on Fire Island, he tried to play a similar role in DeLillo’s life.
Nelson introduced DeLillo to Candida Donadio that year, and asked her to read some of DeLillo’s stories and consider representing him. He and DeLillo began corresponding afterward, and when Nelson returned to New York City the following year, he invited DeLillo to visit the apartment of another young working-class writer named Robert Gover.
Gover’s first book, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, had been a best seller a few years earlier, and he had used its proceeds to buy an apartment on the tenth floor of a luxury building on the West Side of Manhattan. He had invited Nelson to live with him for a week, and they had been staying up late together, drinking martinis and talking about the literary world.‡ DeLillo visited Nelson at Gover’s apartment, and afterward Nelson gave him feedback on some of his stories and his first novel, Americana. He didn’t pull any punches with his criticism, DeLillo said later, and his forthrightness was appreciated.
Nelson retuned to Chicago at the end of the summer of 1964 with the story he owed Sky magazine in hand, and a book to write. Putnam wanted the Hemingway essay by January.
Nelson had begun writing about Hemingway just after the man shot himself in July 1961, and had been doing so intermittently ever since. He didn’t have enough material for a book yet, though, so he decided to pad his critical writing on Hemingway with travel essays he had written about his trip on the Malaysia Mail two years earlier.§ The book created by that mash-up conforms to the pattern Nelson established with Who Lost an American? It has a solid core of well-reasoned, articulate critique, a shell of comic writing, and a series of suggestions that readers shouldn’t take it, or its author, seriously.
“An essay on Ernest Hemingway was a labor to which I felt compelled,” Nelson began. “Everyone else was acting so compulsively I had to do something compulsive too or I wouldn’t get invited to any more parties.” That sarcastic statement is juxtaposed with a serious critique of the current emphasis of literary criticism, which is then followed by a statement intended to undercut its effect. I wrote this book, Nelson says, because I thought it would be “a fresh contribution to write the same old thing at sea. I would be the inventor of the very first essay on Hemingway smelling of salt!”
Nelson writes beautifully about Hemingway and his work, saying he “had felt his life fluttered like a pocket-handkerchief by the wind of death. In the watches of the night he had heard retreat beaten. Out of dreams like Dostoyevsky’s, endured in nights wherein he had lost his life yet had not died. Hemingway forged an ancestral wisdom in terms usable by modern man: that he who gains his life shall lose it and he who loses it shall save it; into a prose magically woven between sleep and waking.”
But as the narrative progresses, Nelson introduces travelogues and memoirs that hopelessly muddle the book’s feel and purpose. Soon after the passage about Hemingway’s “ancestral wisdom,” Nelson begins reminiscing about a county fair performer he saw as a child—a scene that transitions into a series of interviews with the caged prostitutes of Kamathipura, and then into a fictionalized account of an argument Nelson once had with James Baldwin. Another lengthy passage about Hemingway appears next, but when it concludes, Nelson begins writing about the Bay of Bengal, and a fight he had with a member of the Malaysia Mail’s crew.
Nelson completed his book in early 1965, and it was published as Notes on a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way in August of the same year.
Most of its reviewers, predictably, were harsh. The book has “brilliant bursts” that are “so honest and incisive that one finally finds it offensive” to find them buried “here with all the coyness,” a reviewer for the Tribune said. This book’s “arch, arbitrary” tone is the only thing binding it together, a reviewer for the Times wrote, and even Van Allen Bradley—the Chicago Daily News editor who called Nelson brilliant in 1951, profiled him, and published a portion of Nelson’s anti-McCarthy speech—trashed the book. I take a “back seat to nobody as a card-carrying member of the Algren Fan Club,” he wrote—but “the question remains: Why did Mr. Algren write this appalling book?”
In an earlier phase of his career, reviews like those would have destroyed Nelson, but by all accounts, they didn’t bother him in 1965. He never expected the book to be well reviewed, and it seems he may have even designed it that way. Nelson’s draft of the Hemingway essay could have been expanded to fulfill the book contract he had with Putnam, so he had no compelling reason to add the travelogue material—except, possibly, to ensure that no one took the book seriously.¶
* This magazine folded before its first issue was scheduled to appear late in 1964.
† That would be about eighty thousand dollars today.
‡ In keeping with his habit of coarsening his image, Nelson lied about his time at Gover’s. In a letter to a friend, Nelson claimed that he read an unpublished novel of Gover’s during his visit, and savaged it so cruelly that Gover went pale with fury. “The guy’s eyes,” Nelson wrote, “when he took his baby back, were ice-green.” That letter has been used in the past to make Nelson seem like a nasty and uncharitable man, but no one ever verified it. When I spoke to Gover on November 10, 2013, and read the letter to him, he was shocked. He said nothing like the events Nelson described took place. We “enjoyed each other,” Gover said, “had some nice meals, some nice conversations.” Three years later, Gover saw Nelson at a writers’ conference and they had dinner several times, once with James Dickey (the author of Deliverance).
§ Nelson told Robert Gover that he merged the Hemingway book with his travel essays so that he could write the cost of his trip off as a business expense on his taxes. I’m not sure how seriously to take that comment, but it seems plausible given his state of mind at the time.
¶ The Putnam contract called for a book about Hemingway—not a travelogue—of approximately forty thousand words. The published book was approximately twice that length.
“On the Ho Chi Minh Trail”
(February 1965–August 1969)
Nelson submitted this image to the passport division of the State Department in 1968, and it, in turn, sent the image to the FBI, which reproduced it and placed copies in Nelson’s file. By that point, the FBI had been surveilling Nelson for more than a quarter of a century.
Betty Ann Bendyk arrived in Chicago by train in February 1965 with a bag in hand and no apartment to return to in Manhattan, where she had been living until the day before. She was a forty-year-old woman with a Hollywood smile, big, innocent eyes, and the ability to find humor in any situation. She laughed often, and when she did, it was hard for anyone within earshot to retain their composure. There was real joy in it.
Despite her relative youth, Betty had already been many things—a wife at nineteen and then a widow at twenty, a student at the Community Theater in Milwaukee, a stage actress in New York, a minor television star, an educator, and an office worker. Now she was about to take on a new role in Chicago: wife of famous novelist.*
Betty had read A Walk on the Wild Side in 1964 and fallen in love with it. Everything about the book seemed remarkable, she said later—“the images, everything”—so she wrote Nelson a fan letter. He replied, and when he visited New York City that summer, he invited her out for a drink. She
agreed, and enjoyed herself so much she decided to see him the next night as well, and the next.
They went on maybe five dates that week, and before Nelson returned to Chicago, he proposed marriage. Betty declined, but he wasn’t hurt when she did. They were walking to her apartment on Lexington Avenue at the time, and he said: Visit me anyway, I’ll show you the electric chair in the Cook County Jail.
Betty was originally from Milwaukee, and in February 1965, she decided to visit her parents. When she learned she would be changing trains in Chicago, she told Nelson. He met her at Union Station—just “to hear her laugh again,” he told Don DeLillo—and before she continued her trip north, he suggested marriage a second time.
Betty was surprised by Nelson’s persistence, and smitten, so she said yes. It was a “whirlwind romance,” she said later. “I thought that was terrific.”
Nelson’s proposal wouldn’t have flattered Betty so much if she had known him better. Suggesting marriage had become habit for him since he returned to Chicago. He did so playfully, flirtatiously, whenever he felt a connection to a woman—romantic, or not—and he had raised the issue with at least a half dozen people in recent years: a painter named Lily Harmon, whom he dated briefly; a woman he met in London before visiting Beauvoir in 1960; the Canadian student he had been seeing; Bruce Jay Friedman’s housekeeper, Mrs. Sullivan; his agent; and others.
Betty didn’t know that, though, so she took his proposal seriously and proceeded with confidence and purpose after she accepted. She told her parents she was engaged when she arrived at their house, and then she returned to Manhattan and quit her job. She began planning her wedding then, cleared out her apartment, and bought a one-way ticket on a Chicago-bound train.
Nelson and Betty were married at St. Pauls United Church of Christ in Lincoln Park on February 27, 1965—about two weeks after they were engaged. An Episcopal minister named James Garrard Jones—a former Freedom Rider, and a chaplain at Chicago’s Bridewell Jail—performed the rites, and the church’s pews were full. Betty’s extended family had all traveled from Milwaukee for the ceremony, and they shared the pews with a few of Nelson’s friends.