Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Weeks passed, but they felt like months. Prisoners watched trees sway in the wind outside their windows, studied clouds, and played checkers. When they saw someone approaching the building, they pressed their faces to the bars and hollered. Sometimes, they waved. “It was a big event if the sheriff brought in somebody, a federal prisoner, overnight,” Nelson said. “Once they brought in a guy who had been shot—they shot him somewhere—he’d been shot in the back. We killed that day watching him die.”

  Paul Forchheimer, the Sul Ross student Nelson befriended, visited. He stood in the runaround between the stairs and the cells, looked through the bars, and thought, “I don’t think there’s anything worse than being in a jail in Alpine, Texas.” He asked Nelson if he needed food, books, or money, and Nelson said, “No.”

  Nelson walked from the Brewster County Jail to the Brewster County Courthouse on February 21 and met his attorney. The man’s name was Wigfall Van Sickle, and he was a southern gentleman of the old school—polite, verbose, and bearded. He was a lush as well, but no one in Alpine held it against him. Locals called him Judge to show their respect.

  Nelson’s trial began that morning. He and Van Sickle took seats behind the defense table. C. R. Sutton, the judge, presided from the bench. Twelve male jurors sat in the box, and the gallery seats were filled. A local reporter had been assigned to cover the trial, and a Sul Ross professor brought his class. Paul Forchheimer was there.

  There were five names on the docket for the day, so Sutton brought the court to order. Van Sickle entered Nelson’s plea—not guilty—and the district attorney presented his case.

  His name was Roy R. Priest, and his job was easy because the evidence favored him. He had a typed and signed confession, he had witnesses, and he had Nelson’s reputation. Priest heard about the speech Nelson gave before his arrest—the one advocating profanity, and praising radical writers—and used it against him during the trial. Nelson Abraham is guilty, Priest told the jury, but he’s no mere thief. He is a “militant, defiant man” who deserves to be punished harshly.

  When Priest took his seat, Van Sickle rose.

  The jury, the judge, the students in the gallery, and the reporter with the deadline waited to hear Nelson’s defense, but it’s hard to imagine Nelson following along. He knew what he had done, and thought he knew where he was headed. I’m on my way to hell, he told Conroy—he saw prison in his future. A chain gang. The end of a career that had never begun.

  This man is an artist, Van Sickle began, “a youth with a mysterious brain,” not a militant. He was “not stealing because of any criminal intent. In these troubled times of economic depression this man was stealing for the same reason Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread,” he said, “to survive.†

  “You would not be hard on a carpenter or a craftsman if he stole the tools necessary to his livelihood. This man before you stole the means of work to earn his loaf of bread.”

  “What is a carpenter without his tools?” Van Sickle asked at one point. “What is a craftsman without his means and implements of work? What is a writer without the use of a typewriter?”

  Van Sickle’s speech gained momentum as it approached its conclusion, and Nelson, who entered the courtroom expecting conviction, must have been heartened by its eloquence.

  “This young man claims to be a writer,” Van Sickle told the jury. “Whether he is a good one or a poor one rests undiscovered in the lap of the future. Should he become famous in his chosen craft, there would be disgrace to Alpine and Brewster County to be known as the place which lodged in prison the novelist Abraham.”

  Van Sickle finished then, and rested.

  Judge Sutton instructed the jury. “The defendant,” he said, “stands charged by indictment with the offense of theft, to wit: the taking of one typewriter.” If you find him guilty, the judge said, you may impose a penalty of “not less than two nor more than ten years.”

  The jurors didn’t deliberate long because the court was scheduled for a second trial that afternoon. They filed back into the room as one, and then their foreman addressed the court.

  His name was Cas Edwards. “We, the jury,” he said, “find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment and for his punishment a confinement in the penitentiary for a term of two years.” Any hope that Van Sickle’s eloquence might have inspired in Nelson must have died with those words, but before he could lament his fate, Edwards continued. “We further find that the defendant has never before been convicted of a felony in this state or in any other state, and recommend that the sentence be suspended during the good behavior of the defendant.”

  Nelson was confused, so he turned to Sutton for an explanation.

  You’re free to go, the judge explained. He said it wasn’t necessary for Nelson to serve his time in Texas. He had to leave the state immediately, but if he returned to Alpine in two years and swore that he had not been in any trouble since his trial, they would consider his sentence complete.

  Nelson was a felon, but he wasn’t going to prison. He walked into the Texas afternoon alone then, and in the morning he went to Holland Avenue and waited by the tracks. A gondola car approached around 10 a.m., and Nelson grabbed onto it as it passed, and hoisted himself aboard.

  Paul Forchheimer watched from the sidewalk. He waved, and Nelson waved back. The train rumbled away from Alpine into the high desert, and before he was out of earshot, Nelson yelled above the din of its passage.

  “So long,” he said. “I’m really leaving this time.”

  * Huntsville is a Texas prison.

  † This reference is to the convict in Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Misérables.

  Somebody in Boots

  (March 1934–April 1935)

  An author photo taken to accompany the release of Nelson’s first novel.

  When Nelson returned from Texas, Gerson Abraham was sixty-six or sixty-seven years old—unemployed, and deeply depressed.

  He had never been out of work, and he had no idea how to fill all the hours in a day. He had farmed his family’s land in Indiana as a child and helped build the Columbian Exposition in 1893. He had worked for Otis Elevator, the Chicago Screw Company, Packard Motor Car, and Yellow Cab. He owned his own garage for fourteen years, and after the economy and his haplessness conspired to shut it down, he felt lost. He ate soup twice a day and read the newspaper. He taught his grandson how to box like the bare-knuckled fighters he’d faced in the ring as a young man, and when he saw his wife, Goldie, he flinched.

  Time had distilled their relationship to its purest form by then. She was the gloved fist, and he was the heavy bag—when she swung, he swayed. “Get out of my sight,” she hollered when she saw him. “You just get downstairs.” And Gerson went. There was a rocking chair near the furnace in the basement, and a bottle of Rock and Rye, and sometimes he spent entire days down there, rocking and drinking, rocking and drinking.

  Nelson couldn’t write at home. It was painful to see his father so diminished, and the house was chaotic and tense. His sister Bernice and her husband, Morris, had moved down to the first floor so that Gerson could rent out the upstairs flat. They had recently had a daughter named Ruth, and their son, Robert, was five and precocious. He regularly agitated Goldie so much she beat him with the handle of a broom, and with Nelson’s encouragement he had begun raising a fist during family meals and chanting, “Long live the proletarian revolution.”

  Nelson sent Jack Conroy a few stories and some verse he wrote in Texas, explained his plight, and asked for advice.

  “You are going to turn out a good book,” Conroy replied. “I am certainly glad to hear you are okay in Chicago.” His first novel, The Disinherited, had just been released, and he promised to send a copy. He asked Nelson to promote it through word of mouth, and reminded him about the application he submitted when he was in Texas. “Ankle around to 1475 S Michigan Ave,” he wrote, “and call on Bill Jordan of Left Front and the John Reed Club.”*

  Nelson said he would, and one day in
late winter, he followed through. The World’s Fair had returned to Chicago, forty years after the Columbian Exposition lured Gerson to the city, and Nelson entered its shadow when he reached Michigan Avenue. One of the steel towers suspending the Sky Ride loomed sixty stories above him to the east, and a stadium, Soldier Field, sprawled at its base. The monolithic Hall of Science building sat like a sentry at rest in the distance, and a pair of oversized flags whiffled in front of the Swedish pavilion. The first Chicago Fair was dignified and austere—the White City. But the second was a riot of colorful buildings that spanned more than four hundred acres of land. It was shuttered for the winter, but some said it would bring enough money into Chicago to end the Depression when it reopened. Others said it already had.

  Nelson entered a building just north of the rail bridge that crosses Michigan Avenue, climbed a dimly lit flight of stairs, and found a door bearing the words: THE CHICAGO JOHN REED CLUB. He entered and saw a large, dingy room encircled by benches. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and crumpled papers. Copies of New Masses, the country’s largest proletarian magazine, were available, and so was a Soviet publication called International Literature. The walls were covered with murals, and they were as brash as the rest of the space was drab. One depicted working people—stern, powerful, idealized figures—dominating a huge metropolis. Another showed thousands marching behind red banners, their mouths open in screams or chants.†

  The room filled to capacity most Saturdays for public events, and guest speakers took the stage. John Strachey, the British anti-fascist and future Secretary of State for War, spoke once. So did the sociologists Louis Wirth and Ernest Burgess. Maxwell Bodenheim, a bohemian novelist and former Chicago newspaperman, appeared as well. He read some poetry while sipping from his flask, and stopped when he got too soused to stand.

  Members filled the room on Tuesdays, and held meetings where they organized art exhibits and drafted political statements. A proletarian magazine called Left Front was edited on site, and sometimes people were recruited from the audience to join demonstrations or visit labor unions to advocate for revolutionary politics and art.

  Meetings adjourned with a rendition of “The Internationale.”

  “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!” members sang. “Arise, ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation: A better world’s in birth!”

  The World’s Fair was visible through the room’s east-facing windows, and if club members were so inclined, they could gaze on the fairgrounds while they sang, and marvel at the power and ingenuity of the system they hoped to dismantle.

  The Brewster County jail was Nelson’s crucible. He entered the lockup a dispirited child who dabbled in radical ideas and indulged literary dreams, but he emerged a committed revolutionary—and like his father and his grandfather before him, he renamed himself to celebrate his transformation.‡

  Nelson introduced himself as Nelson Algren when he joined the John Reed Club—not Nelson Abraham, Swede, or Nelson ben Algren—and when people asked about his family or his past, he claimed to be an orphan. “I don’t have any parents,” he said. Most club members doubted Nelson’s story, but they accepted him on his own terms and celebrated his membership. Jack Conroy’s friend Bill Jordan read “So Help Me” during a meeting, and a short notice announcing Nelson’s involvement with the club appeared in the May/June issue of Left Front.

  People thought of Nelson as a mysterious figure, but he did little to nurture their curiosity. He was “shy, inarticulate, diffident” and “modest in outward expression,” one member said. He had a “gangling, shuffling” way of walking, another remembered, and he chuckled about the world’s ironies and contradictions under his breath. One perceptive woman suspected Nelson had suffered some kind of trauma, but she didn’t take the matter to heart because, at the time, it seemed everyone had. We were all “on the verge of suicide,” she said. “We had no jobs. We had no food.”

  Nelson stood out at the club for his talent as a writer and the depth of his political convictions. “He had a very conscious political orientation,” someone said—he was a Communist, pro-Soviet—and he had unmitigated disdain for anyone who was not. Some club members said they intended to get rich by writing, not to foment a revolution, and in response, Nelson spread word that he had no respect for them. “Nelson was death on anyone who regarded literature in terms so impure,” someone said.

  Nelson hadn’t made a close friend since he moved to Albany Park in 1923 and met the “brothers” he attended high school with, but he ended that lonely streak at the John Reed Club. Two young writers named Abraham Aaron and Richard Wright were soon his confidants.

  Aaron was from a little town in Pennsylvania called North Butler, where his family owned a general store. There was a porch attached to the front of their shop, where customers—coal miners and steelworkers, mostly—ate, and talked. It would have been a bucolic scene if the family hadn’t been so poor, or the area so homogeneous. The Aarons were the only Jews in town, and by the 1930s, locals had begun harassing their only daughter and painting swastikas on their windows in the night.

  Aaron was an aloof and impassive character. He wore crisp shirts and well-pressed pants even when money was tight, and he spoke in confident tones. Some people thought he could be condescending, but his siblings felt he had earned the right to act superior. He had always been bright, and he worked hard to get an education. He hired on at a tire factory after high school, and then at Jones and Laughlin Steel. It took three years, but eventually he saved enough money to move to Illinois and begin attending the University of Chicago.

  Chemistry was Aaron’s major, but it couldn’t hold his attention. He took on part-time jobs to cover the cost of tuition, and wrote fiction in his free time when he should have been studying. His characters were based on the miners and factory workers he’d met growing up in North Butler, but only because they were all he knew. “I was a proletarian writer without meaning to be,” he said.

  Aaron discovered an early copy of The Anvil in the university library, read it eagerly, and then wrote to Jack Conroy. When Conroy accepted one of his stories, Aaron dropped out of college so he would have more time to write, joined the John Reed Club, and picked up a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

  “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis . . . ,” he read. “[T]he labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself.”

  When Aaron finished reading Marx, he joined the Communist Party. He believed the workers’ revolution was nigh, and wanted to establish himself on the right side of history. He planned to lash the bourgeoisie with his pen and send the masses flooding into the streets with his metaphors. But it didn’t work out that way because the party had more use for him as a propagandist and foot soldier. They sent him to the stockyards to write profiles of the men who worked there, and sent him to South Chicago, where he squared off against the police during eviction protests—and he complied, but grudgingly.

  Nelson resisted that kind of pressure, and Aaron admired him for that. Soon after they met, they began spending nights at a cafeteria called Pixley & Ehlers, where they debated politics and literature over bowls of baked beans and mugs of burnt coffee.

  They shared a core set of beliefs, but disagreed about the relationship between art and ideology. Aaron wrote with a political purpose in mind that dictated the content of his stories—a “directive image,” he called it. Nelson thought that was a mistake. If “you write something and it works and it’s whole then it’s a story,” he said. He argued that the unadorned truth serves the revolutionary cause better than propaganda. “He wanted to depict what he saw as he saw it, let the chips fall as they may,” Aaron said.

  Aaron and Nelson each believed writing was the best chance they had to find meaning in their
lives, and they bonded with Richard Wright over their common lack of prospects.

  Wright was born on John Rucker’s plantation, in Mississippi—the same piece of land his grandfather worked as a slave two generations earlier. His family relocated to Memphis when he was three, and things began falling apart soon afterward. His father stopped coming home, his mother went to work, and Wright and his brother Leon went unsupervised during the day. When he was five, Wright began venturing out alone. He wandered into a bar and cadged drinks, and went into the streets and begged. His mother told him to stop rambling—then she beat him, and prayed.

  Wright finished eighth grade at the top of his class, but then dropped out of school and went to work. He was hired as a laborer, a porter in a clothing store, and then a messenger for an optical company. In 1927, he fled north and moved into a tenement apartment in Chicago with his aunt. Then he went back to work. He washed dishes in a diner, dug ditches, and cleaned animal cages for a medical center. When he had free time, he tried to write.

  Wright met Aaron when they were both working for the post office as temporary clerks. Aaron invited Wright to his hotel room when he learned they shared an interest in literature, and soon they were meeting there every week. Other writers came as well, and they stayed up late, smoking, drinking, and eating latkes.

  Wright followed Aaron to the John Reed Club in 1933. He was shy when he first visited—quiet, round-faced, skeptical. “What on earth of importance could transpire in so dingy a place?” he thought. He wondered why the mostly white audience welcomed him, and he never stopped. “In the end I had to admit that they were glad to have me . . . ,” he wrote. “But I still doubted their motives.” Nevertheless, he continued attending. There was no other integrated organization in the city that would admit him, or entrust him with authority. He became executive secretary of the Chicago chapter a few months after he first attended, and then he joined the Communist Party.