by Colin Asher
Guards led Nelson and Kay to the prison’s library, where they were supposed to meet Carter, and Nelson began pacing nervously. Then he looked up, noticed an oil painting of Richard Wright hanging high on a wall, and relaxed. “We were great friends in Chicago,” Nelson told Kay. Then he posed beneath Wright’s portrait, smiling rakishly, and Kay snapped a picture of him.
When Carter entered the library, he and Nelson greeted each other with smiles and a bear hug. Then they dragged two stools close together and conferred about Carter’s appeal in quiet voices. Kay took a picture of them looking relaxed and conspiratorial, and when they were finished speaking, she interviewed Carter.
After she returned from the prison, Kay wrote a series of articles about Carter for the Paterson News. The first one ran on the front page beneath a picture of Nelson and Carter, and a few days later, Nelson was in court.
Nelson’s landlady had been giving him trouble since she realized he was in Paterson to write about Carter, and after Kay’s story was published, she served him with eviction papers. He was sixty-six years old at the time and went to bed at ten o’clock every night, but she claimed his lifestyle was incompatible with the neighborhood. Nelson refused to leave, but on October 6, 1975, a judge ordered him to vacate the premises.
Nelson’s landlady claimed she had evicted Nelson because she wanted to occupy his unit herself, but Kay suspected Nelson’s association with Carter was the real reason. Years later, she reflected on Nelson’s brief tenure in Paterson, and wrote, “The police chief didn’t want [Nelson there]. The county sheriff didn’t want him there. Even the Evening News didn’t want him there. Very few people in Paterson cared about his literary credentials . . . They knew he was in Paterson to write about Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, and that meant digging around for clues that might prove Carter didn’t shoot three people in a bar in 1966. Nelson Algren was trouble.”
Nelson moved into an apartment in a two-family home at 82 Maple Avenue in Hackensack, New Jersey, after his eviction. His new block was quiet and tree-lined, as Quinn Street had been, but his landlord was a history professor and his next-door neighbor was black, so he felt more at ease being a friend of Rubin Carter’s there than he had in Paterson.
Nelson resumed his work after settling in, and in early 1976, he finally came to terms with the fact that he was writing a book, not a series of articles. His manuscript included a detailed account of Carter’s childhood and boxing career by then, as well as the killings at the Lafayette Bar and Grill, the trial, and Carter’s time in prison. It was already four hundred pages long and kept growing, and so did Nelson’s ambition. Sometime that year, he began saying that he wouldn’t sell his story for less than a hundred thousand dollars.
There was good reason for Nelson to think his book would become a sensation. Rubin Carter and John Artis had been obscure figures when Nelson began writing about them, but they, and their case, had since become famous. Bob Dylan had recently recorded a protest song called “Hurricane,” and Muhammad Ali, William Friedkin, Harry Belafonte, and Johnny Cash had all joined an organization called the Hurricane Trust Defense Committee. Interest in Carter and Artis’s case peaked in March 1976, when the Supreme Court of New Jersey overturned its convictions and granted them a new trial. Both men were released on bail, and there was a general consensus among their supporters that a second jury would clear their names.
Henry Kisor, the book editor of the Chicago Daily News, visited Nelson in Hackensack just after Carter and Artis were released, and found him excited about his book and its prospects.
“Do you prefer this kind of work to fiction?” Kisor asked.
“Yes, I like this sort of job very well,” Nelson said, “because it’s a living job. I mean, you don’t know where the end is going to be. You see, two years ago, when I came in, Hurricane wasn’t known, except to old time fight fans. They were the only ones who knew about him. So it’s interesting because the scene keeps changing. The situation keeps changing.”
I hope the book comes out before the trial, Nelson said. He explained that Putnam had rejected the manuscript, but he was happy they had. He had been trying to void his contract with the publisher since they botched the release of The Last Carousel, and now that they had taken a pass on his book about Carter, he was free to sell it to anyone he pleased.
Random House will publish the book, Nelson told Kisor. I haven’t sent it to them yet, but I know they will.
Nelson arrived in Paterson at 8:45 a.m. on October 5, 1976, and made his way to the courthouse to observe the start of Carter and Artis’s second trial. He remained in the building until the court adjourned, and then returned the next morning, and the next, and the next, through October, and then November, and into December.
The atmosphere in Paterson was poisonous during the trial. The local papers had published more than three hundred stories and editorials about Carter and Artis in the lead-up to the trial, all negative—“Murderer,” they said. “Assassin.” “Killer of white people.” The trial itself only made things worse. The prosecutors had not been able to establish any real motive that could explain why Carter and Artis would have murdered strangers, so they advanced the theory that the shootings at the Lafayette Bar and Grill had been undertaken to exact “racial revenge” for the murder of a black bar owner earlier that night.
But Nelson still felt confident Carter and Artis would be acquitted. There was no physical evidence linking them to the crime, and the only witness who placed them at the scene was Alfred Bello—maybe the least credible man in New Jersey. He had testified at the first trial, recanted his testimony under oath several years later, and then, during the second trial, he recanted his recantation and swore he had been telling the truth during the first trial.
The state rested its case in December, and the jury began their deliberations. They reached a verdict on December 22, 1976, and when they filed into the room to announce their decision, Nelson was present and waiting anxiously. Once the court had come to order, the foreman said: We find that Rubin Carter and John Artis are guilty of murder.
Nelson was dumbstruck. “The verdict was a stunner,” he wrote to a friend, “not only to me. Everyone around there, who wasn’t in uniform, assumed it would be for acquittal.”
Nelson visited Carter at the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton after the trial. He was carrying a magazine and a copy of one of his books when he arrived, but the guards said he wasn’t allowed to give either to Carter. He entered the visiting area after passing through security, poured himself a cup of water, and waited.
There was no bear hug when Carter arrived this time, no smiles. The two men sat facing each other, and Nelson told Carter about his hassle with the guards and made fun of the prison’s rules. He was trying to get a laugh, but none was forthcoming.
“They’re crazy,” Carter said flatly. “This is an insane asylum where the patients have taken over the management.”
Nelson changed the subject. He had come to discuss the case so he could give his book an ending. Your expensive New York lawyer, he said, didn’t do you any good. He turned everyone off because he was an outsider. “But the man who lost your case for you was yourself.”
“How?” Carter asked.
“After ten years of proclaiming your innocence,” Nelson said, “you failed to say it to the jury. It might have made all the difference.”
Carter demurred. He said declining to testify had been the smart move. If he had taken the stand, the prosecution would have been able to impeach him and bring in new witnesses to testify to his character and truthfulness. “It was my own decision, to fall or stand by,” he said. “I’d do it the same way again.”
They talked about the case some more, and Carter’s troubles. He had been accused of assaulting a woman while out on bail, and lost many of his celebrity supporters as a result. Nelson had interviewed the woman, and she told him the attack was unprovoked. He asked Carter for a response, and Carter called it a lovers’ quarrel. She tried to slash
my eye with her nails, he said, so I punched her.
Then Nelson moved on. In The Sixteenth Round, he reminded Carter, you wrote about consulting different aspects of your personality while in your cell—“Rubin, Hurricane and Carter. Hurricane was the one who wanted to throw it all up for grabs. Have you talked to Hurricane lately?”
Carter grinned, and leaned toward Nelson. “Look, man,” he said. “I am Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter. It’s all one man. It’s me. You understand?”
Nelson returned to Hackensack and added a scene describing his final visit with Carter to the end of his manuscript. Then he began revising, but with no sense of urgency.
A Chicago Tribune reporter named Jim Gallagher visited Nelson for an interview three months later, and noticed that Nelson’s typewriter looked like it had not been used in some time. There was a sheet of yellow paper wound around the platen, but it was drooping uselessly.
Gallagher questioned whether there was any chance of selling a book that argued for Carter’s innocence, and Nelson insisted he would see his project through.
“I’ve gone this far with it so I’ll finish it,” he said. He had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts so that he could afford to continue writing, but he allowed that his book might never see print. “It’s possible, I suppose, that I’ll never publish another book,” he said, “but so what? That’ll mean just one less book in the world.”
Nelson completed his manuscript later that year, and gave it the title The Other Carter. He sent it to Candida Donadio so she could try to sell it, and then he visited Chicago and spent six weeks with Stephen and Helene Deutch. Donadio began shopping the book while Nelson was on vacation and continued doing so for more than a year, but never received any offers. As Gallagher prophesied, no one was interested in publishing a book that cast doubt on the guilt of a man who had been convicted of murder not once, but twice.
The Devil’s Stocking
(August 1977–August 1980)
Nelson lived alone on a dead-end street in Hackensack and made no effort to establish himself in the city. He was friendly with his landlord and said hello to his neighbors. He joined the YMCA and knew the regulars at the OTB downtown, but that was the extent of his contact with Hackensack.
That sounds like a lonely way to live, but it wasn’t. Fred Hogan and Stephen Deutch called regularly, and every few months, Nelson threw a party, and friends from New York City crossed the Hudson River to attend. The painter Richard Merkin came to one, and the actors Geraldine Page and Rip Torn dropped by another.
Nelson and Page had known each other since 1955, when she was visiting Chicago to appear in a play and he was trying to divorce Amanda. They met in Page’s hotel room regularly for the length of Page’s run, but they never became lovers because Nelson never tried. She had the impression that he believed it was louche for a man to make the first move on a woman, and she was too shy to take charge. Page had felt close to Nelson since, and she was happy to find him in good spirits at his party—smiling while everyone cavorted, and occasionally silencing the room to tell a joke or a story.
Two men in particular kept a close watch on Nelson in the aftermath of the Carter case: Roger Groening and Roy Finer.
Groening was the owner of a bookstore in Saratoga, New York. He had written a fan letter to Nelson in the early 1960s and they had been corresponding since. It was a casual friendship for about a decade, but then Groening’s wife left him and took their child, and he attempted suicide, and was confined to a psychiatric hospital.
When Nelson learned where Groening was, he visited—and after he returned to Chicago, he called the hospital every day. I tried to kill myself once too, he told Groening. I survived, and you will too. He hadn’t admitted as much to anyone in decades.
Groening did recover, and afterward, he was devoted to Nelson. The two men wrote to each other regularly for years, and when Nelson moved east, Groening made a habit of driving to New Jersey to make sure Nelson was safe and had everything he needed. He invited Nelson to Saratoga as well, and introduced him to Roy Finer.
Finer was a New York City homicide detective whom Nelson referred to as “the big cop.” He was more than six and a half feet tall, but looked even larger because his hair was a jumble of thick black curls and his body was broad and powerful. He carried a gun on his waist and another on his ankle, and he walked with a lumbering kind of swagger.
Finer and Groening had been friends since grade school. They were almost family, and when Groening told Finer what Nelson had done for him, Nelson became family too. Finer visited Nelson in Hackensack, and sometimes he allowed Nelson to shadow him at work, or brought him to the medical examiner’s office to observe autopsies.
Nelson boarded a bus in downtown Hackensack in May 1978 and rode it into Manhattan. He got off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and walked north and east until he reached the Mansfield Hotel at 12 West Forty-fourth Street, where he paid twenty dollars for a room without a television.
The next morning, he woke early, put on a dark red shirt without buttoning it all the way, draped a blue jacket over his shoulders, and walked outside. It was 8 a.m., and when he left the hotel and stepped onto the sidewalk, an Irishman with graying hair and thick dark eyebrows approached him. “You owe us another one,” he said, meaning a book.
“I don’t owe anything,” Nelson said.
The Irishman was a Daily News columnist named Jimmy Breslin, and after he and Nelson greeted each other, they walked across the street, entered a coffee shop, and sat down at an uncleared table.
Breslin was planning to write a feature about Nelson for the next day’s paper, so he began interviewing. “When was the last time you were in Chicago?” he asked. “How long have you been around here?” For a while, they just chatted, but before the interview was over, Breslin pressed Nelson hard on the one question he was really interested in: “So, why don’t you sit down and start a fiction book, use Carter as a basis, use anybody? Why don’t you start an Algren novel?”
Nelson squirmed. “People say to me,” he said, “ ‘When are you going to give us the big one?’ I say, ‘When you start reading the little ones.’ ”
Breslin’s Daily News column the following day was maybe the kindest thing ever written about Nelson. “When you say today that Nelson Algren is a great American writer,” it read, “there are not enough people, particularly young people, who have heard of that name. This is something that should not be.” To make his point, Breslin quoted the first two paragraphs of The Man with the Golden Arm in full.
Then Breslin proclaimed, “He should be a wealthy man. Fifty years from now, he will be studied in schools as perhaps one-two-three in his time, and a student will wonder how this man lived with all his riches.”
Nelson had given up on his book about Carter by then, but a few weeks after he sat down with Breslin, he returned to his manuscript and began to fictionalize Carter’s story—just as Breslin suggested, and contrary to his promise that he would never write another novel. Nelson applied for a Guggenheim fellowship in July to finance the project, and used Breslin as a reference. The book, he said, will be called The Fighter. He changed the title to Chinatown later, and later still, he settled on The Devil’s Stocking.
Nelson devoted the next year and a half of his life to that project. At first, he made minor changes to the text. He changed Rubin Carter’s name to Ruby Calhoun, and changed Fred Hogan’s name to Barney Kerrigan. The Lafayette Bar and Grill became the Melody Bar and Grill—but much of the chronology, some of the dialogue, and most of the settings remained the same.
Eventually, Nelson began to break away from his source material, and he developed the novel so that it was related to the story of Carter’s conviction and incarceration, but distinct from it. He removed John Artis’s character from the book, and created two new ones—Dovie-Jean Dawkins and Red Haloways. He moved a portion of the novel’s action to Times Square, and he wrote a prison riot into the plot and based it, in part, on the A
ttica prison uprising in 1971.
In some ways, the book is the most conservative Nelson ever wrote. It is tightly plotted, and the prose is restrained. The cast of characters is small, there are few lengthy sociological digressions, and more words are spent rendering dialogue than creating atmosphere. Though Nelson had first become famous for the lyricism of his prose, he tells Carter’s story using economical, journalistic sentences that propel the narrative without drawing attention to themselves. Lines like these, describing Ruby Calhoun’s prison: “The hundred-odd men who report every morning for sick call don’t get physical examinations. Chronic physical or emotional disabilities are not assessed. If a prisoner appears seriously ill, he is sent back to his cell. If not quite sick to death, he is given a pill. He retains the privilege of complaining loudly and bitterly. So long as he does not sustain his complaint too long, too loudly, or too bitterly, he is tolerated.”
In other respects, though, the novel is incredibly bold. Though written by a white man nearing seventy, its protagonists are black and its subjects are race, the criminal justice system, and dislocation. After Nelson broke from the constraints of nonfiction, he created characters that embody the fear and bigotry he observed in Paterson and used them to give voice to hateful ideas no one had been willing to express when he interviewed them. The white man who shot and killed the black bartender on the same night that the murders in the Lafayette Bar and Grill were committed, for instance, describes his actions this way in The Devil’s Stocking: “I went down there and I took my shotgun. Oh yeah. Just one crack out of that redheaded nigger and he’s going to get it. Oh yeah.
“The redhead ain’t there. So I shoot the old man instead. One is as good as another, they’re all alike, makes no difference which one you shoot. You think I won’t talk to a jury the way I talk to you now? The jury will love me.”