Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Nelson and Deutch were brothers in every respect but blood by 1970, and they only grew closer with time. Over the course of the next few years, Nelson sold his horse, stopped visiting Belleville, and became a less frequent presence in the city’s bars. Eventually, the women he had been seeing all married or moved away as well, and he filled the breach created by those losses with his relationship to Deutch. “My father loved” Nelson, Carole Deutch said. “They were soul mates,” her sister Katherine agreed.

  Nelson wrote to Kay Boyle at the end of 1971 to say that he was slowing down and slipping into routine. “What I’m doing is what I always do,” he wrote. “Trotting to the supermarket, watching Laugh-In, going to movies, reading a few books, and patching up old short stories in the hope of selling something to Playboy so I can keep on going to the supermarket, watching Laugh-In, etc.”

  Nelson was sixty-two years old when he wrote that letter, and while it’s true he was leading a quieter life than he had in the past, he was exaggerating the point for Boyle’s benefit. In truth, the stories Nelson was “patching up” were part of the most significant writing project he had undertaken since he finished writing A Walk on the Wild Side in 1955.

  Nelson still had two books left to write before his contract with Putnam was fulfilled—a novel and a collection of stories—and he wrote to his editor, Bill Targ, at the beginning of 1971 and said he was finally ready to begin putting the collection together. He asked for two years to complete it, and said he wanted it to be a big book—five hundred pages, at least. Targ agreed.

  Over the course of those months, Nelson worked harder than he had in years, and when he was finished, his manuscript was more than two hundred thousand words long. It wasn’t a collection of his short writings; it was the collection—it contained virtually every uncollected piece he had published in the past fifteen years, as well as his best unpublished work. He submitted the book to Putnam in early 1973, it was accepted, and its release date was scheduled for later the same year.

  Nelson called his book The Last Carousel, and both its title and its content suggest it was intended as a farewell to the literary world. The writing is strikingly good compared to his two previous books. The bitter tone that had defined his recent work is almost entirely absent, and its most affecting characters, appropriately, are master craftsmen approaching the end of their careers and dwelling on their legacies.

  “Dark Came Early in That Country” is the first standout piece. Its protagonist is a veteran boxer named Roger Holly, who, though only thirty-two years old, has been fighting professionally for thirteen years. He’s a minor talent and knows it, so he employs cunning and stoicism to compensate for his lack of skill. He fights dirty enough to give himself an advantage in the ring, but not so dirty that he runs the risk of disqualifying himself from future work, and he has no compunction about taking a dive if the payoff makes it worthwhile.

  Holly lives in Shawneetown, Illinois, with his wife and his ailing father, and though he’s often on the road, he returns to them regularly and sends them money faithfully. Beth, Holly’s wife, is tender and supportive, but never servile. She refuses to stroke Holly’s ego, and on one occasion she reads an article about bush-league fighters who work without managers, sees Holly’s name, and teases him. The story says he’s “the best of a bad lot,” and after reading it, Beth says, “I always knew you were a bad lot, but I never dreamed you were the very best of it.”

  That article raises Holly’s profile, and after its publication, he books the most lucrative fight he has had in years. He expects to win and earn a shot at the title, but instead, he takes a beating and returns home with nothing to “show for getting” his “face punched in for fourteen years” but a “swab stick, the cardboard core of a roll of gauze, the top of a Vaseline jar and a half a bottle of liquid adrenaline.”

  Holly’s career ends with that fight, but unlike Nelson’s other memorable protagonists, his life does not have a tragic conclusion. Instead, he and Beth use the last of his earnings to open a diner, and he spends the remainder of his years tending to customers and reminiscing. In his idle moments, he tries to recall the names of the men he fought during his boxing career, but can’t, so instead, he recounts the names of the arenas he appeared in. “The Marigold in Chicago,” he thinks, “and the Armory A.C. in Wilkes-Barre and the Valley Arena at Holyoke,” he tells himself, “and Joe Chap’s Gym in Brooklyn and the Grotto in Jersey City and . . .”

  Unlike Nelson’s earlier writing, “Dark Came Early in That Country” wasn’t the product of intense research, but he drew on more than forty years of accumulated boxing knowledge, and it’s as detailed and confident as anything he produced before. Its style is distinct though. He wrote the story using spare, journalistic prose that looks forward toward the work of writers like Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, and Raymond Carver instead of employing the lyrical, poetic flourishes he was known for during his heyday in the 1950s.

  Two other stories in the collection share those qualities. The first is a long short story called “Bullring of the Summer Night,” whose protagonist is a jockey named Hollis Floweree—a tiny man with two criminal convictions in his past, two recent falls on the track, and a fast-fading career. He rides a horse called Red’s Big Red that races at a short, steeply banked “bullring” track, and he lives in a trailer with a woman named Kate Mulconnery who is both his employer and his lover.

  Floweree and Mulconnery barely get along, mostly because of Floweree’s ego. He resents working for a woman and gives her steady reminders of his dissatisfaction. When he wakes in a foul mood, she knows what to expect. “He’ll be pecking at me now for my Ozark talk . . . ,” she thinks, “or for being a head taller and half again his size. Or for looking years younger while being years older. Or for being born in the mountains or raised on a river.” And she knows, just as surely, that he’ll never mention the thing that bothers him most: the fact that she bedded his fiercest competitor before she bedded him. “A touchy group, these riders,” she thinks, “whose need of proving themselves could be felt in their mounting of women as well as of horses.”

  Floweree is set on getting away from Mulconnery, so he buys an electrified whip off another jockey, bets on himself, and cheats by using the whip during his next race. As a result, he injures another rider by running him off the track and fails to place. “You’d fuck up a one-car funeral, mister,” Mulconnery says after the race. They never speak again, and Floweree never rides again.

  The next story in the collection, “Moon of the Arfy Darfy,” provides a glimpse of his future. Floweree has moved to Chicago and been reduced to earning his keep by collecting discarded betting slips in the hope of finding a winner someone forgot to claim. But like all Nelson’s best protagonists, he still has his pride. “It’s a big comedown,” he thinks, “from parading in front of the clubhouse in your pretty-day silks, to stooping for tickets people throw away by mistake. But I never stooped until the stands were empty. And nobody I used to know—at Waterford and Evangeline and Ozark Downs—had any idea that Sportsman’s was my playground now.”

  “I’d had my picture in The Form once,” he recalls, “—but who remembers that? I didn’t really care anymore, one way or another. When you come to the end it’s the end, that’s all.”

  Several of The Last Carousel’s less ambitious pieces also hold their own. “Watch Out for Daddy” feels like Nelson’s older work—it’s a dark, tightly focused story whose protagonists, a couple, are junkies bound to each other by their shared addiction and their isolation. It dates back to the period when Nelson was still working on the novel he began about Paula Bay’s life, and the world it describes is governed by contradictory and self-defeating passions. “Poor useless boy,” the wife thinks, “—I’d rather have his hate than some fat square-fig’s love. Love or hate, whatever, it don’t matter so long as it’s real.”

  “The Last Carousel,” the title story, fictionalizes Nelson’s time at the Sinclair station in Texas and his stint worki
ng for the traveling carnival. “What Country Do You Think You’re In?” is set in Vietnam and features an American protagonist who becomes so comfortable in Saigon, he forgets he’s in a war zone and nearly dies in a bombing. “I Never Hollered Cheezit the Cops” is a racetrack story about an illiterate jockey named Rusty de John that’s written with a light, comic touch, and “Ballet for Opening Day” is a deeply researched essay about the Chicago Black Sox scandal.

  The collection has flaws as well. Nelson makes no distinction between nonfiction and fiction, so there’s no way to tell which pieces are supposed to be truthful, and the stories are arranged without any discernable logic. Three pieces included for spiteful reasons—one each insulting Otto Preminger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alfred Kazin—are bitter and ill conceived.† Two essays that appear sequentially contain overlapping material, and the Vietnam stories are politically astute but marred by stereotypical and dismissive descriptions—the Chinese in Vietnam have “class,” Nelson says, while the Vietnamese have a “listless, dispirited air.”

  But when The Last Carousel was released in November 1973, most reviewers were willing to overlook the book’s faults. “It’s about time!” the New York Times review begins. “When we’ve got a living American writer as sure-footed and as fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it’s almost criminal not to have something of his in hard covers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in.” The reviewer lavished praise on the collection’s best work, told readers not to take everything in the book seriously, and concluded by saying, “Anyone daring to review Nelson Algren today stands in grave danger of being a ‘past-poster’—a party who puts down a heavy bet on a horse that has already won.”

  “What an exhilarating experience it is to read Nelson Algren’s new collection of stories!” Max Geismar began his review in the Chicago Sun-Times. “I lived it all day long and could not wait to get back to it the next day and read and reread the best in it with a great sense of pleasure and delight.”

  “[O]nce you begin reading it,” the Tribune’s reviewer said, “you will not be able to put it aside.”

  Those were the best reviews Nelson had received in years, and they were accompanied by other promotions as well. The Chicago Daily News profiled him, and so did the Pacific Sun and Publishers Weekly. All that attention for a collection of stories made Nelson hopeful, and he began to think the book might really sell—unlike his last two—so he contacted Bill Targ and asked about Putnam’s promotional strategy. That’s when he learned that there was none. The publisher had low expectations, and had not budgeted for a launch party or an advertising campaign.

  One of Nelson’s fans—a man from Detroit that he had never met—heard about the situation and offered to pay for a signing party. He hired Nelson’s friend Van Allen Bradley to organize it, and Bradley coordinated with Nelson, rented a space, and ordered books. But when the appointed date arrived, Bradley had no books to sell because they were never delivered. Putnam had delayed The Last Carousel’s release date by three weeks without telling Nelson, Bradley, or the local papers. The best reviews the book was going to receive had already been published, but there wasn’t a store in Chicago with a copy to sell.

  Nelson, alerted to the situation by Bradley, arrived for his signing carrying fifty copies of The Last Carousel taken from his personal store of author’s copies. He sold every one of them, and believed he could have sold twice as many if there had been enough on hand.

  Putnam began distributing the book in December—a month after reviews began appearing—but bungled that as well. They printed a small batch of books, it sold out before Christmas, and they didn’t get more on the shelves until early the following year.

  The following spring, while Nelson was still seething over the botched release of The Last Carousel, Kurt Vonnegut nominated him for the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts—a prestigious prize only presented once every five years. At the time, six writers had received it: Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, John O’Hara, and Vladimir Nabokov.

  Nelson hadn’t written a novel in almost twenty years, but the other members of the academy welcomed the nomination. There was no campaigning necessary, Vonnegut said; everyone agreed.

  The academy announced that Nelson had been granted the award in March. It was among the greatest honors a writer could ask for at the time, and the greatest Nelson would ever receive, but accolades meant little to him by then—he was just a journalist, or so he said, and he didn’t think any honor, presented so belatedly, could save his career.

  The awards ceremony was scheduled for May, in New York City, and Nelson told Vonnegut not to expect him. He wrote a terse acceptance speech for Vonnegut to read in his stead, but when Vonnegut suggested it was in bad taste, Nelson agreed to cut it.

  When Vonnegut stepped on stage to accept the award on Nelson’s behalf, he said simply, “Thank you.”

  * Kowalski is one of the few real mysteries in Nelson’s life. He had very little contact with the legitimate world and left a thin paper trail. It’s unclear how Kowalski and Nelson met, but Nelson told Betty that Kowalski had been arrested for murder earlier in his life. He also liked to say Kowalski led a mutiny after being drafted into the Navy during World War II. I can’t confirm either story, but I can report that Kowalski supplied the dynamite used in the 1981 assassination of a St. Louis mob figure named George Faheen. Details of his involvement are included in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision United States of America v. Raymond H. Flynn.

  † This sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. A friend of Nelson’s suggested that these three pieces should not have been included in the collection, and Nelson responded by saying, “You’re right about the Kazin and de Beauvoir and a couple other pieces—also the Preminger, being spiteful. You’re also wrong about omitting them. You’re [sic] feeling is based upon a false assumption: namely, that the writer is a literary dude of great detachment, intent upon producing Literature. . . . So the point of those stories wasn’t to impress the reader but to knock the smile off Kazin, Preminger, et al. . . . The cost in literary reputation is trivial.”

  “The Sanest Man I’ve Ever Met”

  (December 1973–March 13, 1975)

  Nelson traveled to New York City in December 1973, checked into the Chelsea Hotel, crossed beneath the Hudson River by train, and stepped off in Newark, New Jersey, where he met an investigator named Fred Hogan.

  Hogan was young, pugnacious, inquisitive, and a little wild. He drank hard and he could become manic when he was excited, but he took his work seriously and he held faith with quaint ideas about right and wrong, good and bad. He had grown up in Bayonne, graduated from high school, and then served in the army. He joined the police force in a small town called Atlantic Highlands after he left the service, and when he grew bored of a beat cop’s routines, he went to work for the office of the public defender.

  Hogan often found himself inside Rahway State Prison after he switched to the defense side—a massive red-brick complex with a domed roof, and miles of chain link and razor wire surrounding it. He went there to interview clients and witnesses, and sometimes, before he left for the day, though it had nothing to do with his job, he asked the prison’s guards to produce Rubin “Hurricane” Carter as well.

  Carter was a short, thickly built black man who wore a neatly trimmed beard and kept his head shaved clean. From 1961 to 1966, he had been a professional boxer best known for his glower and his unrelenting offense. He was a masterful intimidator in the ring, a hard man to catch with a punch, and a tenacious brawler—and that combination propelled him to the top of the rankings.

  Carter even fought for the middleweight title once, in 1964. That match went the distance—fifteen rounds, all told—and when it went to the judges, they gave the victory to Carter’s opponent, Joey Giardello. Many fight watchers believed Giardello had been allowed to keep his title because he was white and Carter was black. It was presumed th
at Carter and Giardello would fight again, but then Carter got arrested.

  Early in the morning of June 17, 1966, Carter and a young man named John Artis were driving through Paterson, New Jersey, in a white Dodge sedan when the police pulled them over. Earlier that morning, two men had entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill on East Eighteenth Street in Paterson, pulled out a gun each—one shotgun, one pistol—began firing, and hit four people. Two of their victims died that night, one held on for a month before succumbing, and one survived, even though he had been shot in the head.

  The police released Carter and Artis, but soon afterward, they were stopped a second time and brought to the scene of the shooting for identification. No one recognized them, but the police brought them to the station anyway, questioned them extensively, and then released them without charges.

  Months passed. Then two men who admitted they were near the Lafayette Bar and Grill on the night of the shooting because they intended to rob a nearby warehouse—Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley—told the police that Rubin Carter was one of the shooters.

  The police arrested Carter and Artis and charged them with murder. They went to trial the following year, in 1967. The fact that Carter was a professional fighter and had a juvenile criminal record helped the district attorney’s case, and the jury ultimately found both men guilty of triple murder.

  None of that—not Carter’s reputation as a fighter, and not his life sentences—intimidated Fred Hogan. He had been an amateur boxer in high school, and he had met Carter at a training camp one summer. He had looked up to the older man then, and when he heard that Carter had been found guilty of murder many years later, he presumed Carter had been wrongfully convicted.