by Colin Asher
After the wedding, there was a dinner, and before it ended, Nelson had begun chafing at the civilizing conventions of married life. He seemed uncomfortable wearing a suit, and he was glum and unenthusiastic throughout the meal. At one point, he dripped gravy on his necktie, and when Betty tried to clean it for him, he recoiled. He pulled the tie away defiantly, picked up a salt shaker, seasoned the stain, and then added more gravy to it.
The winter of 1965 was bleak in Chicago—cold, windy, gray, and freezing through March. Betty didn’t know anyone in the city and had nowhere to be, so for weeks at a stretch, she and Nelson were rarely more than a few yards apart. Forced intimacy soon taught her much about her new husband and his lifestyle—most of it surprising to her.
The apartment was Betty’s first shock. Nelson had been living on the third floor of 1958 West Evergreen Avenue for six years by then, and over time, he had transformed the space into a physical extension of his psyche. One room was full of boxing gear, jump ropes, and a used bicycle. Another was reserved for his work. There were stacks of books everywhere, even in the bathroom, and a complete collection of Police Chief—a magazine Nelson subscribed to so that he could “keep an eye on the opposition.” His collages, drawings, framed bits of writing, and mementos, covered the walls all the way to the ceiling.
The apartment was clean and well maintained, Betty said later, but incredibly busy. “It was like living in his studio,” inside his “atelier.”
Betty was also surprised by Nelson’s writing habits. He told her that he would never write another “big” book, but even when he took on minor projects like a review for Harper’s, the Herald Tribune, or Ramparts, he immersed himself in them. He moved about in a daze when he was working, and sat down at the typewriter whenever a clear idea formed in his mind—early morning, noon, evening, or at 3 a.m. Sometimes, he wrote for hours; other times, he tapped the keys of his typewriter for only a few minutes, and then got up and paced and thought. He slept little, and ate whenever he felt hungry—sometimes while standing, and often while working.
Nelson’s financial situation was also a shock. Like many people, Betty had assumed Nelson was wealthy. He was famous, after all. He had published eight books, his work had been the basis for two major films, and he regularly appeared on television and the radio to discuss literature, his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, or his opposition to the death penalty. But as Betty soon learned, Nelson’s high profile didn’t translate directly into income. He had earned about fourteen thousand dollars the year before—a respectable sum—but had spent most of it on meals, travel, and gambling, and he had to work hard to maintain his lifestyle.†
Betty was surprised by Nelson’s attitude toward her as well. He had been charming and chivalrous during their short courtship, but after they married, he became ambivalent about her. They began sleeping in separate rooms almost immediately, and never shared meals. She cooked and ate alone around dinnertime, and then placed her leftovers in the fridge so he could grab them in the middle of the night when he got up to write. She could never predict how he would respond to her presence either. He barely noticed her when he was writing, but when he wasn’t busy, they sat and talked for hours and he went out of his way to make her laugh. “I loved his humor,” Betty said. “He was just terribly funny.”
The marriage seemed destined for a short run, but Betty and Nelson each made accommodations to extend its life. He bought her a car—a red Rambler—and let her remove the paint from their apartment windows so that sunlight would bathe their flat during the day. When she said she wanted a cat, he agreed, and in the same spirit of generosity, she allowed him to name it Stokely in honor of the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. She found a job doing office work for Time Life in Chicago so they would have one steady income, and he made an effort to bring in more money as well.
Nelson had been deliberating over whether to part with his manuscripts and correspondence for years, and when he married Betty, he decided it was finally time to sell them. He began negotiating with a professor named Matthew Bruccoli from the University of Ohio, and by July they had reached an agreement. In exchange for twenty thousand dollars, Nelson would give the university his entire archive—with the exception of Beauvoir’s love letters.‡
The following month, Nelson made an even greater compromise: He got a job. He had been turning down offers to become an instructor at the Iowa Writers Workshop for some time, but when Paul Engle, the workshop’s director, extended his offer again that summer, Nelson accepted—with one condition. He told Engle the university would have to hire Betty as well, and Engle agreed.
__________
Betty rented a large, open flat on the top floor of 1730½ Muscatine Avenue in Iowa City and had their things shipped from Chicago. She and Nelson drove to Iowa together in their red Rambler and settled into their new home. Their apartment was only thirty minutes from campus on foot, and the street out front was lined with trees. Betty loved it, but Nelson couldn’t stand the quiet, missed the city, and immediately regretted accepting his job.
Nelson did not think it was possible to teach people how to write, and consequently, he thought creative writing programs were a hustle. He believed that good writing was derived from life experience, and he doubted that anyone who went straight from college to graduate school would ever write a book worth “rereading.” That conviction was derived from his own experience and the experiences of peers like Wright and Conroy, and he had been espousing it for years—in private, in writing, and in public whenever college English departments invited him to speak.
The administration at the writer’s workshop must have been aware of Nelson’s views, but hired him despite his antagonism toward their program. Maybe they doubted the sincerity of his convictions, or thought he would change his mind when he met their students. Whatever the case, they quickly realized how mistaken they were.
When the semester began, Nelson was not on campus. He wasn’t even in the state. Philip Kaufman had offered him a part in a film called Fearless Frank, so he was in Chicago, acting. He returned to Iowa the following week without making any excuse for his absence, and when the administration asked him to speak at a faculty banquet, he delivered a jeremiad against the Vietnam War instead of talking about literature.
Nelson’s attitude in class was no less dismissive. There are conventions that dictate the way writing workshops are taught, and he abided by none of them. Students expect that their stories will be read and discussed in class, but Nelson saw no point to that. He didn’t think most of his students wrote well enough to warrant consideration, so instead, he circulated stories written by Terry Southern and Joseph Heller. He believed only one of his students was gifted—a woman named Hualing Nieh—and he used class time to praise her writing and compare it favorably to everyone else’s.§ He often arrived in class carrying a stack of magazines, newspapers, and book reviews, and encouraged his students to help themselves. He told them that they would need to read if they wanted to be writers, and they would need to experience the world outside of the academy.
Drop out, he told them. Get a job. Go to Vietnam. Go to South America. Go anywhere but here.
Nelson began the semester with eighty students in his lecture course, but within weeks, that number had decreased by half, and when his classes got smaller, he made them shorter as well. He often arrived late, read something by Hemingway or Southern, relayed one of his well-worn anecdotes, and then dismissed class and went to the student union.
Students soon realized it was best to approach Nelson outside of the classroom. He hated teaching but loved people and conversation, so when young writers handed him their work in public places, or at his home, he often held forth until they excused themselves and slipped away. Sometimes, he invited his students to the bar after cutting his class short, talked to them more earnestly than he ever did on campus, and then paid for everyone’s drinks.
It was in casual meetings like those, where people spoke freely, that Nel
son got to know his students and confirmed, he wrote later, the dismal opinion he had always had of writing programs. “The longer I hang on here the longer I stay out of Vietnam,” one student told Nelson.
“It’s a respectable way of dropping out,” another said. “There isn’t anything I really want to do—but hanging on here makes it look to my folks like I do.”
Nelson soon found ways to fill the time he wasn’t spending in the classroom. He became friends with, and began hanging around, a writer named Kurt Vonnegut Jr., whose fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, had just been released, and whose sixth, Slaughterhouse-Five, would soon make him famous. He wrote a lengthy anti-Vietnam speech, reviewed books, and gambled heavily.
Iowa City had an active poker scene. There were two big games at the time, and many of the university’s students and some of its professors played in them. One was held at the lodge of the Loyal Order of the Moose. The other was in the basement of a shoe salesman named Gilroy—a man in his mid-twenties who was already bald as a cue ball. He charged three dollars a head for a seat at the table, and in exchange, players were welcome to stay through the night and into the next day. His wife, very pregnant that winter and spring, supplied sandwiches throughout.
Gilroy’s basement was Nelson’s game. He would arrive on Thursday nights with a thermos full of coffee laced with brandy and strip to his undershirt. He had quit smoking cigarettes by then, but he still enjoyed a cigar occasionally, and when he sat down at Gilroy’s table, he would light one, place it between his teeth, hunch his broad shoulders forward to cast a shadow over his cards, and take a drink. Then, all night long and into the next day, he rambled, cajoled, and played more recklessly than anyone else—and enjoyed himself more.
The regular crowd at Gilroy’s was eccentric. There was a poet named James Thede who sported a handlebar mustache, wore a green three-piece suit, and carried a briefcase that contained nothing but a bottle of Irish whiskey. There was a tough whom everyone called the Cincinnati Kid who arrived each week with a “moll” who never spoke. There was also a writer named Pablo, who claimed to be Anaïs Nin’s godson, and another poet named Micky Hagen. The biggest loser each week was a local everyone called John the Barber. He usually went broke quickly, and then spent hours sitting at Nelson’s elbow, studying his play. Donald Justice, a poet and professor, played most weeks as well—and so did a young man named Burns Ellison, who had been attending the writers’ workshop, on and off, for years and had returned to the Midwest specifically to register for Nelson’s class.¶
Nelson had been glum since he arrived in Iowa because he regretted marrying Betty and resented his job—but he came alive in Gilroy’s basement. He started talking as soon as the cards were dealt, and didn’t stop until the table cleared. He relayed intricate stories while other players calculated percentages, told bad jokes, and placed wagers without looking at his cards.
Once, during a game of lowball where the worst hand wins, Nelson raised the stakes with a pair of kings showing. He raised again, and when someone called, he said, sarcastically, “You gotta be kidding. You say the game is lowball! No, don’t tell me that.”—and flipped over two more kings.
The game lasted all night that week, and through midday on Friday. It stopped at 6 p.m., and by that time, Nelson had lost twelve hundred dollars—about three months’ wages for the average American family that year.
It went on like that through the winter and into the spring of 1966, and by the end of Nelson’s term at Iowa, rumors of his exploits and crushing losses had proliferated. Some people said he gambled away every cent of his salary. Others said he lost half of what he made. Betty, who would know, claimed the total was five thousand dollars. But no one ever said Nelson seemed upset by his losses.
Nelson had gambled that heavily only once before—in 1953, after his passport application was denied. He lost his savings then and felt sick because he knew he had damaged his chances of finishing the novel he had begun writing about Paula Bays. But by 1966, he had stopped making plans for the future, and he was happier for it. He told everyone he was a freelance journalist, not a novelist, and that money comes and money goes.
Nelson and Betty drove back to Chicago together when the workshop’s semester ended in June, and when they arrived at the flat on West Evergreen Avenue, Betty asked for a divorce. Nelson acted surprised, but she didn’t believe he really was. They had slept in separate bedrooms in Iowa and barely seen each other, and she suspected he had gambled irresponsibly to force her hand. “He was giving me leverage,” she said, and he didn’t object to the divorce.
Nelson and Betty had barely known each other when they married, and they barely knew each other still, so parting amicably wasn’t difficult. Nelson spent the summer with a friend in Belleville, Illinois, and Betty stayed in the apartment. She drove to New York that fall with Stokely, and afterward she and Nelson became what they always should have been—friends.# For the next ten years, they met up for dinner and sometimes spent the night together whenever they were in the same city, and in between visits, she wrote him long letters, addressing them “Father Confessor and Listener to My Woes.”
After Betty left, Nelson’s major preoccupation was Vietnam. America had been involved in the conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam for a decade by then, but for the majority of that time, the military’s commitment was minimal. That changed in early 1965, when President Johnson assigned thirty-five hundred marines to protect US Air Force bases in South Vietnam, and before the end of the year, more than two hundred thousand US troops were stationed in the country.
Nelson first delivered a speech opposing American involvement in the war when he arrived at the writers’ workshop in 1965, and he did so many more times in the months afterward. In an average year, he lectured on college campuses, perhaps, ten times—but that year, he made many more stops. Being on staff at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had raised his profile, and in the spring of 1966, he appeared on fourteen campuses. He went back on the road that fall, and again in the spring of 1967, and by the end of his speaking tour, he had delivered his speech maybe twenty times. He called it “Going on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
There was a problem though. When colleges invited Nelson to speak, they expected him to discuss literature, not the war, and so he was often forced to find creative ways to justify delivering the speech he wanted to deliver.
Once, at the Carolina Symposium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Nelson stepped on stage and said, “I’m scheduled to examine the relationship, sometimes strained, between myths and mores. Well I feel obliged to whatever heroes or heroesses, as the case may be, who inserted that ‘sometimes strained’ as I feel there is a strain between our myths and our minds and it is rather ominous.”
Then, having nodded in the direction of the topic he had been assigned, he edged toward the subject of Vietnam. He linked the word strain, very tenuously, to restraint, and then, a few lines later, he demanded: I wonder whether calling for an additional four hundred million dollars to “widen the war in order to bring to us all the wondrous works of peace” was an example of restraint. “Or perhaps it was in perpetuating a myth that we are in Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese people.”
Then he was off and running. As a result of the war, Nelson said, “I think that between ourselves and the Great Society there now stands a great weight of dead souls and I think that the more we pile up the heavier the reckoning that the generation to come will have to pay.” And for the next hour, Nelson continued to prosecute his case. This conflict, he argued, is “basically a cowardly war being fought in a cowardly fashion” and its true purpose has nothing to do with spreading democracy. When you have a defense industry as large as America’s, he said, “you have to have an enemy.”**
The Vietnam War had broad public support when Nelson began his speaking tour in 1965, but less than half the country approved of the way America was handling the conflict in 1966. Antiwar protests were growing larger steadily, but counterin
tuitively, Nelson felt progressively more isolated and powerless as the antiwar movement grew, not less. He spoke at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that May, and afterward, he wrote a disheartened letter to Don DeLillo. I’ve been announcing that “we are now in World War III” for over a year now, he said, but “I don’t have any illusions any longer that I’m doing something socially useful by talking against the war. I just go for the check and fly home.”
Nelson’s isolation was a function of his age, and a changing culture. His politics were at least as far left as the younger generation that was out in the streets, but there was no place for him in a movement whose watchwords were “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” He was a fifty-eight-year-old man who favored hanging around racetracks and poker rooms. His first three books were published before the average college student had been born, and he made frequent reference to Solly Levitt—a boxer whose career peaked in 1948. There weren’t many people left in the world who remembered him from his time in the Communist movement, and when he finished speaking, as often as not, he got the impression that no one in attendance had been listening. His audiences didn’t ask about the war when it was time for questions. Instead, they asked, “What did you think of Sinatra in the movie?”
Nelson felt even more isolated among his own generation of radicals because there were so few left. Richard Wright was dead, and no one had heard from Abe Aaron in more than twenty years. Jack Conroy, whom Nelson wasn’t speaking to, had retired and returned to Moberly, Missouri, and everyone else had either joined him in obscurity or switched sides. John Dos Passos, one of the most important left-wing writers of the thirties, had become a conservative and a Richard Nixon supporter. John Steinbeck had recently traveled to Vietnam and sent back dispatches praising the war effort. Even Frank Meyer—the Communist Party functionary who scolded Nelson for lacking discipline in 1940—had become a contributor to the National Review and a close friend of William F. Buckley’s.