by Colin Asher
NEVER A LOVELY SO REAL
The Life and Work ofNELSON ALGREN
Colin Asher
To Nora and Dante—for keeps and a single day
A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.
—Nelson Algren, writing in Nonconformity
I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both.
—Nadine Gordimer, accepting the Nobel Prize in literature
The world’s so big yet so small. It’s one block.
—Nasir Jones, on Olu Dara’s “Jungle Jay”
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. BECOMING SOMEONE IS A SOLITARY PROCESS
The Story of Isaac
Between St. Columbanus and the Wrought-Iron Gate of Oak Woods Cemetery
“Tell Your Tire Troubles to Nelson Abraham”
Stoic. Academic. Ink-Stained Wretch.
The Past Receded Like a Wave Just Spent
“So Help Me”
“What Is a Carpenter without His Tools?”
Somebody in Boots
The Crack Up
II. THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
Two Forlorn Children
Trotskyists, Council Communists, and Mattickites
At Home in Rat Alley
Morning
“Do It the Hard Way”
The Anonymous Man
III. EVERY DAY IS D-DAY UNDER THE EL
Exploring the Neon Wilderness
A Boy from the Provinces
Exile?
“OK, Kid, You Beat Dostoyevsky”
“How Long Does This Sort of Thing Go On?”
Nonconformity
“Riding Day-Coaches to Nowhere”
“They Don’t Exactly Give Me Any Medals for Caution”
A Walk on the Wild Side
A Lightless Cave off a Loveless Hall
IV. WANDER YEARS
“No, No Novel”
A Character Named Nelson Algren
Sea Diary
“On the Ho Chi Minh Trail”
The Last Carousel
“The Sanest Man I’ve Ever Met”
V. EXILE
Paterson, New Jersey
The Devil’s Stocking
“The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All”
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
Nelson Algren in the early 1960s. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-068778; Stephen Deutch, photographer
The first thing you should know about Nelson Algren is that he wrote like this:
The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-room desk.
Yet it wasn’t work that wearied him so and his sleep was harassed by more than a smoke-colored rain. The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he was numbed by his charge sheet’s accusations. For twenty years, upon the same scarred desk, he had been recording larceny and arson, sodomy and simony, boosting, hijacking and shootings in sudden affray: blackmail and terrorism, incest and pauperism, embezzlement and horse theft, tampering and procuring, abduction and quackery, adultery and mackery. Till the finger of guilt, pointed so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all at last and turned, capriciously, to touch the fibers of the dark gray muscle behind the captain’s light gray eyes.
Algren went to great lengths to seem tough. He favored dark suits, affected a limp, and acted brashly when he had an audience—but he could write about romantic relationships with uncommon nuance and insight:
Those first hours together had been no more than those of any side-street solitary, any bar-wise, woman-wise bookie falling in love with any brash young chick from the suburbs wearing white batiste.
It was autumn, but summer came back, a full week, just for them . . .
Marriage was a bit he had never regarded seriously, one bit in which he had never seen himself. Marriage, he had always felt, was a standing joke. He had mocked it. She had slipped onto her finger a ring that he might have found in a box of Crackerjacks. Its stones, as it were, were plastic dice. He had slipped it onto her finger intending mockery, a mock marriage; instead she had put her lips to it. The mockery failed. The summer air had married them.
Algren wrote nonfiction as well—essays, reviews, and articles—and when he turned his attention to social critique he produced insights so trenchant they remain relevant decades after they were written. He wrote these lines describing the United States, for instance, in 1953:
Never has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. In no other country is such great wealth, acquired so purposefully, put to such small purpose. Never has any people driven itself so resolutely toward such diverse goals, to derive so little satisfaction from attainment of any.
Thanks to all that talent, Algren became very famous. He wrote eleven books, and millions of people bought them. His masterpiece, The Man with the Golden Arm, received the first National Book Award, earned a record sum when its paperback rights were sold, and was adapted for stage and screen—its protagonist was played by Robert Loggia and Frank Sinatra, respectively. Algren also received the Time magazine award for the novel, three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the American Academy of Arts (later the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters) Award of Merit. His fourth novel was adapted into a film starring Jane Fonda, and a musical, and inspired the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Algren was influential as well, and if you’re a fan of American literature there’s a good chance he earned the respect of or inspired your favorite author. In 1940, Richard Wright called Algren “the best writer of good prose in the U.S.A.” Ernest Hemingway once said Algren was the second-greatest living American author, after William Faulkner—and later said Algren had topped Faulkner. Ross Macdonald, Martha Gellhorn, Kay Boyle, Jimmy Breslin, Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks, Betty Friedan, Rachel Kushner, and Don DeLillo have all expressed their admiration for Algren’s work, and Cormac McCarthy told Algren, “You were one of the people who influenced me to become a writer.” Simone de Beauvoir wrote Algren into four of her books, and Hunter S. Thompson once told an interviewer, “I admired Algren and still do. I thought at the time [1956] that no living American had written any two books better than The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side.”
But despite Algren’s talent, sales, and influence, his name has been obscure for decades because he forswore writing novels a few years after he became famous—that fact is tragic in its own right, but it’s doubly so because the cause of Algren’s disillusionment and decline is being revealed in full only now.
The Man with the Golden Arm was published in 1949, near the height of the Red Scare, and Algren—a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s—used it to insult a pair of former party members who had begun selling information about their erstwhile comrades to the FBI. Those men were named Louis Budenz and Howard Rushmore, and Nelson considered them traitors, so he mocked them in his n
ovel. He reimagined each man as a cheap salesman, and on page 219 of Arm he had his protagonist look up at a pair of billboards that read:
BUDINTZ Coal
One Price to All
RUSHMOORE COAL
Fastest Delivery
Cheapest in Years
No critic mentioned that slight when Arm was released, and no one has in the years since. It’s likely few readers ever noticed it, but unfortunately, it seems Budenz and Rushmore did. A few days after Algren received the National Book Award, Budenz, without being prompted, told an FBI agent that Algren had once been a member of the Communist Party. Rushmore did the same a few months later, and because Algren had also publicly supported the Hollywood Ten and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the FBI launched an investigation into his activities that included surveilling his home, opening his correspondence, recruiting his neighbors and landlords as informants, and requesting information on his activities from family members, friends, publishers, agents, the secretary at the YMCA he frequented, business associates, lawyers, the editor of his local newspaper, former political allies, and a psychiatrist who treated him.
As a result of the FBI’s campaign, Algren was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, barred from obtaining a passport, and investigated—and nearly prosecuted—for perjury and defrauding the government. His publisher suppressed one of his books and then dropped him, and afterward he had a breakdown, attempted suicide, and committed himself to a psychiatric clinic. But though the FBI’s scrutiny had profound effects on his life, Algren remained largely ignorant of their activities. They operated in secret, so Algren blamed himself when his life began falling apart. He presumed the paranoia and depression that began to cripple him in the 1950s were the result of personal weakness, and decided his books were not being published because no one wanted to read them. Eventually, he recovered and returned to form, but by then too much time had passed and he was unable to reclaim his former eminence.
Though it has long been known that the FBI was interested in Algren, the full extent of their involvement in his life has not previously been revealed. And in the absence of a clear explanation for the foreshortening of Algren’s career, people—critics, academics, and fans alike—have relied on speculation to explain it. Some said Algren had writer’s block. Others said he drank and gambled his talent away. A few, based on nothing but the fact that he once wrote a book about morphine addicts, claimed he was a drug abuser. And a select group—distrustful of the fact that Algren’s characters were often inmates, vagabonds, and petty criminals—attacked the merit of his work and diminished the great intellect that had guided its composition. He’s the “bard of the stumblebum,” they said. “An underworld groupie.” A man soaked in “puerile sentimentality.”
But none of that is true, and it is my hope that people will reevaluate his character and work now that a full account of his life is available. It is my desire that readers of this book will come to see Algren as his friends saw him—a man whose death “was a tragic loss to the world of laughter, to the spirit and example of generosity and courage, and an irremediable aching blow” to everyone he was close to. And it is my ambition that people will then seek out his best work and read it in the same spirit in which it was read when it was published: a time when critics compared Algren to Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Sandburg, and said his books deserved to be “read, remembered, and admired”; when he was considered “a writer of parables” capable of suggesting “the whole contour of a human life in a few terse pages”; and when his stories were celebrated for their ability to convey “the dramatic sense of right against wrong and everkindled hopefulness.”
Part I
BECOMING SOMEONE IS A SOLITARY PROCESS
From city to city he went now; there was no standing still and there was no turning back. No place to go, and no place to rest. No time to be idling and nothing to do. He moved, moved, everything moved; men either kept moving or went to jail.
—Somebody in Boots, 1935
The Story of Isaac
(1820–1911)
Nelson Algren—then, Nelson Algren Abraham—about 1909.
Nelson Algren was fifty-three years old in the spring of 1962. Five foot eleven, maybe 185 pounds—famous, but not wealthy. He lived alone in a third-floor walk-up on Chicago’s West Evergreen Avenue, and his lifestyle was idiosyncratic.
Nelson’s apartment was a canvas—an unmediated expression of his psyche. The air smelled of smoke, and blues records spun on the turntable. There were pictures of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, and Joan Baez on display in the living room—as well as a German Mauser, and a blue helmet that had been recovered from the corpse of a soldier who died during the Ardennes Counteroffensive in 1944. Huge collages composed of newspaper and magazine images depicting boxers, racehorses, and baseball players covered the walls, and there were books everywhere—thousands and thousands of them. Their weight made the shelves lining the apartment’s walls sag, and piles of them had taken root in the wood floors and started growing toward the ceiling like stalagmites. There was boxing equipment lying around as well, a blue Schwinn, and a metal bread box stuffed with love letters written by Simone de Beauvoir.
Time meant little to Nelson, so he enforced no structure on his days. He sat down at his typewriter when he felt the urge to write, and rose when he felt like stopping. Sometimes he worked just long enough to string together a pair of clauses. Other times he wrote in manic bursts that kept him up through the night—typing, smoking, and slashing at his manuscripts with a felt-tipped pen. He visited the Luxor Turkish Baths on North Avenue when he wanted to relax, and swam at the YMCA on Division Street when he needed exercise. He dropped by Jazz Ltd. and sat near the bandstand when he wanted company, and when his phone rang, he lifted the receiver and waited. He didn’t speak until he was certain the person on the other end of the line was not an FBI agent.
Nelson had once been among the most renowned writers in America, but that time had passed. His last novel was six years old and he swore he would never write another because he had been too badly used. “No, no novel,” he said. “I’d as soon attempt that as I would to open a pizza joint on Chicago’s Westside without getting protection first.” He wrote whatever he wanted now, or for whoever was paying—short pieces, for the most part, and that was fine. Even if his work never appeared between hard covers again, he would always be the author of Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, The Man with the Golden Arm, Chicago: City on the Make, and A Walk on the Wild Side. Millions of people had read his books. He had done enough.
Even though Nelson’s fortunes were in decline, interviewers still sought him out. They were young writers, mostly—aspirants bearing dog-eared paperbacks and sheepish looks—and when they arrived, Nelson invited them into his front room and offered them bourbon. He signed their books, raked his fingers through his hair, and waited for their questions.
Is it true Hollywood cheated you out of millions? they asked. Did Hemingway really say you were the second-greatest American writer? When were you in jail? What is Simone de Beauvoir like? And what do you think of Saul Bellow’s work?
Interviewing Nelson was tough, but rewarding. He chewed on a cigar while he spoke, and he used its stump to punctuate his remarks. His hands danced, his brown eyes twinkled mischievously, and he regularly broke into belly laughs that left him gasping. He frequently responded to direct questions with bawdy jokes or long, loping stories that never concluded, but he always loaded his guests down with the sort of spiky quotes editors love.
Chicago is a “great gray sub-civilization,” he said.
“I’m not second best to anybody. Either I’ve lapped the field or I’m nowhere.”
“The American way isn’t living for the moment,” he pronounced. “It is to be insured for twenty years, and then when you are forty or fifty to retire. But by that time you can’t enjoy anything.”
“I don’t know of one writer who has taken a university job who is able to continue
to write seriously,” he said about Bellow.
Nelson would indulge any question asked respectfully, but as he settled into the long twilight of his career, he began taking charge of his interviews. Legacy was on his mind, so he brushed past questions about Beauvoir and Hemingway and dragged his interviewers into the past—through his childhood, and his father’s, and his grandfather’s. He had spent his life telling other peoples’ stories, and now it was time to tell his own.
“My mother had a candy store,” Nelson said. My father “was a machinist. He worked at the screw works,” and later, he worked for the Packard Motor Car Company. Everyone thinks I’m Polish, Nelson said, but I’m not. “My father’s father” was a Swede.
Nelson’s paternal grandfather was named Nils Ahlgren, and he was born in Sweden around 1820. His parents were merchants, and the family lived in Stockholm—then a city of seventy-five thousand, built on fourteen islands surrounded by the Baltic Sea. A Gothic cathedral dominated the skyline at the time, and stone buildings with peaked roofs faced each other across narrow alleys that sliced through the city like cracks spider-webbing across old porcelain. The air smelled of salt, and ships bobbed in the harbor: three-masted clippers, and dinghies heavy with the weight of lumber, fish, and people.
Sweden was in decline when Nils was young—an empire on the dark side of its meridian. There was a recession, and peasants were fleeing the countryside and overwhelming the cities. But despite the country’s turmoil, Nils enjoyed a privileged childhood. His eyes were blue as a cloudless sky, and he was healthy, and curious. He worked for the family business and had enough leisure time to read, dream, and develop respect for the power of words.
The Ahlgrens belonged to the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran denomination, because it was the state religion. Nils became a member at birth and remained one through his teens and into his twenties, but near the end of his third decade he became a skeptic.
