Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  One exception was Kay Boyle—a contemporary of Hemingway’s, and part of the Paris café scene before the war. Her first book had been published by Black Sun Press in 1929, and she had written more than two dozen since. She had been a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker for several years while living in Europe, but she was blacklisted when she returned to the United States in the 1950s, and afterward, she became an activist as well as a writer.

  Nelson and Boyle didn’t meet until the mid-sixties, when she read one of his books and wrote to him, but after that first contact, they became close friends. She lived in the Bay Area and he was in Chicago, but for the remainder of Nelson’s life, they leaned on each other for support. They traded books, collaborated on a campaign to end the death penalty, complained about the war and the American government, and griped about the indignities of aging.

  Boyle wrote to Nelson after having surgery in 1968, looking for sympathy, and he provided it. “I’ve had a bad operation,” she said, “and I’m furious with life. I was relieved of about half of my anatomy, and it shows, and I am hideous, and I am going to become a recluse.” Nelson sent a bouquet of flowers in response, and tried to cheer her up by making a joke of his own recent weight gain. “Tough about losing a hunk of your anatomy,” he wrote, “but, as I’ve attached a quarter to mine, nothing has really been lost. It’s just on me instead of you. How about that? Thinking that this fine flabby flesh I’ve gained really belongs to you makes me feel better about everything.”

  Nelson wrote to Boyle about his worries as well. After the chaos of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he said that he was also thinking of becoming a recluse. “I have in mind,” he joked, “a cave in Upper Tibet, where I’ll stay stoned on fermented yak-milk the year round. You may come see me on moonless nights—you’ll know you have the right cave by the sound of dentures clacking, stertorous breathing and an occasional senile giggle in the dark.”

  Then, more seriously, he said, “Actually . . . I don’t know what to do about this fucking country.” I’d like to get away, he said, maybe move to Cuba, but I can’t. “How can I be Cuban even though I would rather—much rather—be? I can’t be a Yugoslav or nothing. I’m stuck with these Forspacious Skies and Beautiful Swift Swords.”

  After campaigning against the war for three years, Nelson asked The Atlantic magazine to sponsor his application for a press credential so he could see it for himself. Then he booked passage on a freighter that left San Francisco on November 14, 1968, and sailed to Japan. He spent a week in Yokohama and Tokyo, and then continued on to Vietnam, where he knew no one and had no connections to draw on.

  When Nelson reached Saigon, he moved into a room at the Hotel Embassy—about half a block from the Presidential Palace. But then he was at a loss. He couldn’t leave the city safely because he hadn’t yet been able to secure a press credential, so instead he spent weeks exploring his surroundings on foot and by jitney. “This is a mean, sick city,” he wrote to a friend. “Poverty, pimpery, parades, Col. Ky, thousands of cowboys on Hondas with nothing to do all day and night but race the streets. And the American GI’s who want to go home. And the people wishing the hell they would go home. The Americans are definitely not liked here.”

  After living near the heart of Saigon for a month, Nelson moved into the Hotel Victoria at 937 Tran Hung-Dao Street in Cholon—a Chinese neighborhood that had been heavily bombed by the US military earlier that year. His room had a desk large enough for a typewriter, a plastic crucifix on the bedroom wall, a Buddhist shrine in the kitchen, and not much else.

  There was only one other American in the hotel—a soldier gone AWOL who was living with a Vietnamese woman—and Nelson had no way to communicate well with anyone else. He sold two stories around the time he moved—one about his ocean passage, and one about Japan—to a magazine called The Critic, but there was no easy way for them to get a check to him, or for him to cash one, so he was soon broke.

  Nelson finally received his press credential at the end of February, and afterward he made a series of forays outside the city. He rode forty miles to the east in a jeep driven by a war correspondent named Don Hirst, and observed a military trial. He flew over the jungle in a plane that was dropping pamphlets as part of a psychological operations program, but never went up a second time because the first plane was shot twice before it landed and he was afraid of dying in a crash. He spent several days interviewing soldiers who were running an amnesty program for Communist fighters called Chieu Hoi—which translates as “open arms”—but by then his interest in the war was fading and he was eager to return home.

  On March 28, 1969, Nelson turned sixty in Cholon, and by then, he was spending more time trying to earn money in the informal economy than he was writing.

  Soon after he arrived in Vietnam, Nelson realized that most people bought their food, liquor, clothes, and electronics on the black market, and after a few months, he devised a scheme to take advantage of the situation. The exchange rate was his angle. If he could get American cash into the country, he could use it to buy Vietnamese piastres on the black market at rates that far exceeded the official exchange rate. Then, because he was American and had a military-issued ID, he could purchase military payment certificates with the piastres, and these in turn could be used to buy products at the post exchange (PX) at reduced prices—tripling or quadrupling his money with each transaction.

  Nelson put his plan into action around his birthday, and for a while, it worked well. He had friends send him cash wrapped in carbon paper through the mail—then exchanged it twice, bought consumer goods that he stored in his room, and went into the streets near his hotel to spread the word about his wares. Soon, he had a store of goods and maybe a thousand dollars in cash, maybe more. But his luck didn’t last. He was an aging American living in a Chinese neighborhood of a Vietnamese city during one of the most violent periods of one of the most violent conflicts of the twentieth century. He couldn’t have possibly been more out of place or vulnerable, and there was never any chance of him emerging unscathed.

  At some point in April, Nelson entered into a negotiation with two local men. The three of them had a disagreement, maybe over a price, and Nelson’s trading partners decided to settle it with violence. They hit him in the face hard enough to break his dentures, and then they took his merchandise and bankroll, leaving him with nothing.

  A few days later, Nelson booked passage on a ship sailing for Hong Kong on May 2 and told a friend he was “counting the days till I get out of this pit.” He had maybe forty pages of notes to show for his five months in the country, but nothing much written. “I’d like to get it into some coherent shape and send it to Atlantic,” he said. “But I’ll never get it coherent in this chaos, I’m sure.”

  __________

  Nelson took his time returning home. He stopped in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kobe, Yokohama, Ngoya, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles. He reached Chicago in early August—ten months after he left town—and began going through the notes he took in Saigon. “[I]t simmers down to very little. . . . ,” he told a friend. “You never realize how little you have, or how close you came, till after you’ve left a place. But I sure as hell ain’t going back.”

  Helen Corbett was one of the first people to notice Nelson’s return. She was his landlady, and when she realized he was finally home, she called the Chicago field office of the FBI and let them know.

  Sometime after Nelson and Betty married, the bureau had learned that Nelson had been speaking against the war, and it decided to reopen his file. Eventually, it determined that he was a “key” organizer of the antiwar movement, and gathered his new passport photo from the State Department, informed the Iowa City sheriff’s office that Nelson was moving to town, and asked the administration at the Writers’ Workshop for his information. Then it called Helen Corbett, who proved eager to cooperate. She told them how much Nelson paid in rent, kept them abreast of his travel plans, a
nd told them all about Betty—she dyes her hair, Corbett said, and she wears long skirts because she thinks her legs are too thick.

  Corbett spoke with the FBI on six separate occasions while Nelson was overseas, but the call she placed in August of 1969 was the last. The FBI closed Nelson’s file four days later, and never reopened it. They had been following him, on and off, for twenty-nine years, and in that time, they had amassed a six-volume file that totaled 886 pages—all without proving he had done a thing to warrant their scrutiny.

  * Betty appeared on several early television shows, including The Goldbergs, The Edge of Night, and Mr. District Attorney. Her name is sometimes misspelled “Bendyke.”

  † That was about three times the country’s median family income in 1964, or about a hundred thousand dollars in today’s dollars.

  ‡ That would be about $150,000 today.

  § Nelson was right about Nieh. She has written more than thirty books to date—poetry, essays, and novels—and founded the International Writing Program, also based in Iowa. She later married Paul Engle, and changed her name to Hualing Nieh Engle.

  ¶ This account is based largely on an essay Burns Ellison wrote after Nelson’s death. It was published by the Iowa Review in 1988, and it’s called “The First Annual Nelson Algren Memorial Poker Game.” It’s a tender, loving, and well-written piece.

  # They divorced officially on January 30, 1968—about a year and a half after Betty moved back to New York. Nelson arranged everything, even witnesses, and Betty later said that he had a friend fabricate details about their relationship because there was no such thing as a no-fault divorce at the time. Betty claimed, in an interview, that someone testified during the divorce proceedings that Nelson was physically abusive. But, Betty said, the claim was false.

  ** In the past, this speech has always been described as a comic routine. That’s because Nelson—in keeping with his tendency to present himself as a bumbling and cynical character at this point in his life—told friends he clowned around on stage and spent his time talking about Batman. That description held up for years because there was no record of the speech itself, but a transcript recently turned up in the archives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they reveal that it was, in fact, a very serious address. (It does contain a joke about Batman, but that’s hardly the focus.)

  The Last Carousel

  (September 1969–November 1973)

  Nelson spent the first six decades of his life trying, and mostly failing, to balance a long list of competing and contradictory desires. He wanted respect and accolades from the literary establishment, and the freedom to express controversial ideas. He wanted fame, and money enough to avoid writing for pay alone. He wanted to go out and hear music whenever he pleased, and he wanted to see the world—but he also yearned for devoted friends and the stability and comfort of a home, a wife, and children.

  Chasing those urges had left Nelson feeling lonely and regretful, and around the time he turned sixty, he reconciled with that fact and adjusted his expectations. After returning from Vietnam, he rejected accolades when they were offered, turned down money if he didn’t absolutely need it, made peace with the fact that he was not meant to have anything resembling a traditional home life, and created a division of labor to satisfy his social and emotional needs.

  For companionship, Nelson established relationships with several different women and arranged for each of them to visit him weekly on an agreed-upon night. Two of the women were sisters, and his relationships with them were either chaste or nearly so. Another was an editor who had two young children Nelson enjoyed spending time with. And one was a writer who stripped down every time she visited Nelson’s apartment so he could bathe her and they could talk.

  When Nelson craved more platonic attention, he went out. Sometimes, he visited the Three Corners—a local bar still frequented by the neighborhood’s Polish residents. Other times, he joined the city’s reporters and editors as they made their rounds after work. It was customary for the newspaper crowd to eat dinner at Riccardo’s on Rush Street after they filed their last stories, move on to O’Rourke’s Pub on North Avenue, and then visit the Old Town Ale House. Nelson routinely appeared at some point along that route and mixed into the crowd. He went to see Studs Terkel, Roger Ebert, and the columnist Mike Royko, but also to be around the generation of reporters that was just coming up. He befriended young local writers like Michaela Touhy, and the editors of an underground paper called the Chicago Free Press.

  To stay in touch with the underworld, Nelson spent his summers in Belleville, Illinois, with a big powerful man named Stanley Kowalski—a former pimp who was married to a former prostitute everyone called Flat Top. Kowalski owned a share of Nelson’s horse, Jellious Widow, and a large limestone ranch house that he safeguarded by chaining angry dogs in his front yard. He lived about fifteen miles from the Cahokia Downs racetrack, and Nelson spent about a month with him every year—looking after their horse, drinking in the bars frequented by local jockeys, getting high, and collecting stories.*

  “Law & Order has never gotten a firm grasp on the natives” of Belleville, Nelson once wrote to a friend while at Kowalski’s house. “A youth who dropped in here Sunday is carrying a recently healed bullet-scar on his left cheek, inflicted during a robbery. He is seriously thinking of suing the victim because, he contends, ‘there was no necessity of shooting me.’ (He was doing the sticking-up.)”

  And when Nelson wanted to feel the warm, steadying embrace of family, he visited Stephen Deutch and his wife, Helene. Deutch was a photographer and sculptor who spoke with a thick eastern European accent and rationed his words carefully. He had been born in Budapest in 1908, and left school after completing the eighth grade to become a wood-carver’s apprentice. When he was twenty-three years old, he moved to Paris to make his name as a sculptor, and went broke. His work was featured in several galleries but never sold, and his only income came from selling faux antiques.

  Deutch was poorer than most, but luckier, too, and before he starved, he had the good fortune to meet a young woman from Transylvania named Helene. She had studied photography at the Sorbonne and then gone to work shooting for Vogue Paris. She taught Deutch how to take photographs as well, and soon they married and had a daughter and named her Annick. They moved to Chicago in 1936, during the Great Depression, and then they had two more daughters—Katherine, and Carole.

  At first, the Deutches were radicals. Stephen joined the Communist Party during the same period Nelson was active, and he considered fighting in Spain during the Civil War. He became friends with Studs Terkel and Ben Burns, the editor of the Chicago Defender, and once he was beaten by a group of men while he was handing out propaganda flyers—maybe because he was a Communist, or maybe because he was Jewish. Woody Guthrie sang in the family’s living room, and they supported Henry Wallace for president during the Red Scare.

  The Deutches started a commercial photography studio after the Depression, and soon it was among the most respected in the Midwest. Helene ran the business, and Stephen took the photographs. Their clients were newspapers, slick magazines, department stores, and advertising agencies. They worked long hours and operated without assistants to save money, and they were rewarded for their labor. They bought a house in the suburbs and a summer home in Sawyer, Michigan, and their two eldest daughters attended the private Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park.

  Stephen Deutch never forgot the poverty of his childhood or lost touch with his radicalism, though, so he spent his spare time ensuring that his daughters understood what the world was like for people who couldn’t afford to live where they lived. He drove them through Chicago’s slums so they wouldn’t think of them as foreign lands, and brought them to the stockyards so they would know what physical labor looked like. One time, he drove them into the forest and down a fire road until he reached a logging camp. Then everyone watched lumberjacks fell trees, turn them into logs, roll them down a hillside, and load them onto
trucks.

  All of the attention Deutch dedicated to his work and his family precluded him from making friends. So, when his daughters began to move away for college and marry, he grew lonely. That’s when he met Nelson.

  Deutch and Nelson were introduced in 1960, when a small publisher called Angel Island hired Deutch to take pictures for a new edition of Chicago: City on the Make. Nelson dropped by Deutch’s studio to have his portrait taken, and while he was there, he inspected the photographs on display. In addition to his commercial work, Deutch was an experienced street photographer, and as Nelson walked by the prints produced by those sessions, he nodded his head approvingly and smiled. From that moment forward, the two men were bound to each other. I don’t know “what made me feel a kind of warmth toward him,” Deutch said later, “but that was instantaneous.”

  Nelson and Deutch went to lunch after the shoot, and continued doing so about once every month, provided Nelson was in town, for the next several years. They had little to say to each other at first because they had lived such different lives, but something bonded them and they began spending progressively more and more time together. Sometimes, they met at Riccardo’s for lunch and sat in the overstuffed booth seats and talked for hours—about family, politics, books, fighters, or horses. Other times, they met for dinner at one of their homes or the other, or made trips to the bar. Nelson started bringing Deutch along as his date when he made public appearances, and when he needed to relax, he went to the Deutches’ house and spent an evening listening to opera, chamber music, or blues—drinking with Stephen, and trying to make Helene laugh. Eventually, their house became Nelson’s second home, and when they vacationed at their place in Sawyer, Michigan, Nelson often tagged along.