by Colin Asher
Nelson and Wright became friends soon after they met, and then became coeditors of Left Front.§ They were poor, untried writers, trying to balance their politics and their art, and bound by their desire to succeed. Eventually, they became two of the greatest authors who ever emerged from Chicago, but at the time it wasn’t clear either of them would have a career.
Nelson began dating a soft-spoken woman with dark hair, and by spring he had moved himself into her apartment. It was a cynical arrangement on both sides. The woman was engaged to marry a literature professor, and she wanted a fling before taking her vows. Nelson needed a place to work and access to a typewriter, and he was willing to pay for both with self-esteem. His girlfriend said she enjoyed sleeping with him because he was more sexually naïve than her fiancé, and he laughed it off.¶
The girlfriend worked during the day, and while she was gone Nelson squatted in her apartment and wrestled with his novel. He revised the chapters he wrote in Texas and advanced his narrative, and as he did, the book became more autobiographical. He wrote the Brewster County jail into the story, and described it precisely. Then he sent his narrator to Chicago, and had him visit the World’s Fair. He brought politics to the foreground, and meditated on race. His friendship with Richard Wright and the Communist Party’s message about racial equality had affected him deeply, and their influence is evident in the text. He gave his white protagonist two black friends, and then had him marry a black woman.
As he worked, Nelson’s method changed. He was no longer content to describe the predation he had seen on the road the way he had imagined he would when he pitched his novel to James Henle. Now he wanted to diagnose causes and suggest solutions as well, so he reframed the book’s early chapters as the preamble to an argument for revolution, and inserted propagandistic phrases to make his intention clear.
Chicago is “trying with noise and flags to hide the corruption that private ownership had brought it,” he wrote. And then he warned the wealthy: “Get all you can while yet you may. For the red day will come for your kind, be assured.”
Nelson mailed his manuscript to New York in two installments—the first in June, the next in July. Then he waited.
Vanguard’s response arrived quickly, but wasn’t encouraging. James Henle sent Nelson’s book to James Farrell when he received it and asked for a reader’s report. He was the only other Chicago author on the publisher’s list, so it was a reasonable but unfortunate decision. The two men corresponded about the novel, and then Farrell distilled their concerns into sixteen pages worth of feedback. Collectively, they took issue with everything from the book’s title to its prose and ideas.
Nelson had submitted his manuscript as Native Son, a phrase lifted from a traditional song that begins:
The miners came in ’49
The whores in ’51
They jungled up in Texas
And begot the Native Son.
He thought it suited the novel’s protagonist, and its setting, but Henle rejected it. A California politician was running for office as a “native son” of the state at the time, and he didn’t want to confuse readers.
Henle and Farrell were even more critical of the book’s racial politics. Henle thought it was a mistake for Nelson’s protagonist to marry a “negress.” Farrell agreed. He was a proletarian writer, but not a member of the Communist Party. He had started a riotous argument at the John Reed Club earlier that year by speaking in defense of Joseph Stalin’s main political opponent, Leon Trotsky, and he associated Nelson with his antagonists. He thought the interracial marriage was just a way for Nelson to write “the Party line” into his book.
Nelson resented Vanguard’s feedback, but he ceded to all of their demands. He needed the book to go to print, so he removed the interracial marriage, made the political rhetoric more subdued, and polished the prose.
Nelson’s novel occupied him through the summer, and while he was distracted, the political scene shifted dramatically.
The Chicago John Reed Club hosted the Midwest Writers’ Congress in August, and party members dominated the proceedings. They arrived with an agenda provided by the leadership in New York and Moscow, and Left Front was near the top. They argued that the magazine should be eliminated because it was a waste of resources. They said artists should be more focused on serving the revolution and less concerned with their careers. Writing and painting were fine, they said, but painters should be creating propaganda posters, and writers should focus on leaflets.
Richard Wright fought the proposal. He argued that culture was a necessary component of the class struggle, and that Left Front was an important part of the club’s work. His objections made no difference, though, and when he realized he was going to lose the argument, he decided to end with a rhetorical jab.
If you kill the magazine, he asked, why not get rid of the John Reed Club entirely?
The party faithful gave Wright a tongue-lashing for his insolence and accused him of “defeatism.” But the next month, at the Second National John Reed Club Congress, they did precisely what he suggested.
The club had twelve hundred members nationwide by then, but the party leadership had decided it no longer served the movement’s interests. They were looking toward Hitler’s rise in Germany with apprehension, and preparing for war. They needed organizers in America, and high-profile supporters—not unpublished bohemians—so they announced that the club was going to be dissolved, and that a new organization called the League of American Writers would replace it. The move was presented as a means of making writers more relevant to the cause, but it was imposed by fiat and most members resented the change.
Wright was devastated. “The club was my first contact with the modern world,” he wrote later. “I had lived so utterly isolated a life that the club filled me with a need that could not be imagined by the white members.” He tried to keep the club and Left Front going without the party’s support, but couldn’t raise the funds. Bills piled up, and rent came due. He lost the meeting space, and the magazine folded.
Nelson resubmitted his manuscript to Vanguard in November, and emerged from his seclusion. That’s when he realized that there was no club for him to return to, no magazine to edit. He had no other obligations, so he directed all of his energy toward promoting his book. Vanguard entitled the novel Somebody in Boots, and scheduled its release for the third week of March 1935—four months after the manuscript was accepted, and within days of Nelson’s twenty-sixth birthday. That didn’t leave much time for promotion, but Nelson managed to place excerpts in American Mercury, The Anvil, Calithump, Masses, Partisan Review, the Windsor Quarterly, and Sanctuary.
The book’s augury seemed bright, but then a troubling omen appeared. The Windsor Quarterly had accepted a section of the novel set in a jail cell and entitled “Thundermug.” They slotted it into their winter issue and printed it, but the college that sponsored the publication seized the edition and destroyed it before it could be distributed. Then they printed a second run. Nelson’s name is listed in the index of that version, but when readers turned to the page where his story was supposed to appear, they found only four words:
Censored by
Commonwealth College
A note at the end of the magazine explained the blank page. “Thundermug” was removed, it said, because it “violates ancient taboos”—a reference, presumably, to the story’s description of sexual predation in the jail where it is set.
Commonwealth’s censorship should have lowered Nelson’s expectations for his novel, but it didn’t. He began telling people he had written a sensation—a singular account of American poverty, and a piece of gospel truth that was bound to become a best seller. He was half right.
Somebody in Boots is the story of Cass McKay, a “sickly” semi-literate who was raised in a Texas shack without a mother. His father, Stuart “Stub” McKay, is a Bible-thumping teetotaler whose only passions are “fighting and hymning.” His brother Bryan was disabled by gas while fighting at St.
Mihiel during World War I, and his sister Nancy is feral. She lives in a “sloping windowless cavern” separated from the shack’s common room by a strip of cheesecloth, and brawls in the streets. “She grew in light, unattended,” Nelson wrote.
Poverty and ignorance define Cass’s life. He’s underfed, slouches badly, and doesn’t attend school because his father won’t allow him to be taught by a Mexican woman. His mind is plodding and inflexible, but occasionally something catches his eye and he has a spark of inspiration. “A sudden light would flash within his brain,” Nelson wrote, “illuminating earth and sky.” Those moments only sharpen the despair he feels for the balance of his days, though, because he is regularly confronted by gruesome images—the sight of a mangled body lying beside the freight tracks, Bryan tearing a cat’s head off, or Stub beating Bryan until his features run “together like water.”
Cass enters a trance after Bryan’s beating and walks away from home with escape on his mind. He boards a boxcar when a train passes, and rides out of town perched on its roof. “He was going somewhere now where men were somehow less cruel,” Nelson wrote.
Boots meanders along without a plot for 150 pages, and during that time Cass is more witness than protagonist—a camera turned toward Depression-era America and set to record. He goes to New Orleans and gets slashed by a knife, then returns home to find fires raging through town, nearly starves, goes back on the road, and becomes anonymous. He sells discarded newspapers in Brooklyn, sleeps on the street in Chicago, participates in a gang rape, and eats unidentifiable meat swimming in “diarrheal brown gravy” at a relief mission in San Antonio.
But then Cass gets arrested, and Somebody in Boots transforms into an extended examination of the constraints poverty imposes on character and morality. Freed, by his incarceration, from the need to feed himself and find shelter each night, Cass realizes he can decide what type of man he wants to become and begins experimenting with the archetypes available to him.#
First, Cass embraces nihilism, and criminality. In jail, he meets an inmate named Nubby O’Neill—a one-handed bigot who claims to hate black men so much his “left nut gets tight” when he sees one. O’Neill threatens to whip Cass for betraying his race when he learns Cass was arrested along with a black man he had befriended on the road. But Cass saves himself by betraying his friend, and becomes O’Neill’s acolyte. “Why, ah hates them ugly black sonsabitches,” he lies.
Cass and O’Neill are released from jail around the same time, and they meet in Chicago. They share a room in a flophouse, go dancing, and drink heavily. Then, when they run out of money, they break into a butcher shop. The burglary goes awry, and Cass runs off with the money he stole and goes into hiding.
Next, Cass tries love. He falls for a prostitute named Norah Egan, and they manage to build something approximating a life together. She teaches him to read, and her affection transforms him. “He realized now that heretofore he had been ill. He had been ill and he had not known. His head had been clogged with darkness, and now it was clear.” The couple lives together for two blissful seasons, but their lives are always tenuous. Neither can find legitimate work, so they commit robberies as a team, and eventually Cass is arrested and sent to Cook County Jail.
When Cass is released, he can’t find Norah. He’s too scared to commit another robbery, so he goes to work for a burlesque called Hauser’s Little Rialto Theater. Then he rents a single room and begins saving money so he’ll be able to take care of Norah when they reunite.
Cass is a pitiful creature when he hires on at the theater. He has a sallow complexion, an unruly shock of ginger hair, and a Texas drawl that marks him as an outsider. But work has a positive effect on him, and over time he becomes healthier and more confident.
Cass spends his days pacing in front of the Little Rialto Theater wearing a red cardboard hat and carrying a blue megaphone. An endless trickle of pedestrians flows past, and he advertises the theater’s offerings to them. It’s a demeaning job, but he enjoys being useful and finds small pleasures in his daily tasks.
Occasionally, a speaker mounted above Cass’s head comes to life and threatens to drown out his voice. The World’s Fair is in town, and the mayor and the president each use the speaker to make announcements intended to boost attendance. “I am fully convinced that this exposition will aid in the strengthening of national morale,” the president says.
Cass is neither intelligent nor curious, but even he feels insulted by the pablum coming out of the speaker, so he raises his voice to compete with the president’s. “All she wears is sleeves an’ two beads o’ perspiration,” he hollers. “She got the stuff that makes the young men old an’ the old men young!” His protest is ineffectual, of course, but he finds it thrilling to yell at a more powerful man without fear of consequence.
The Little Rialto Theater is also where Cass meets Dill Doak—a shrewd showman, a reader, a revolutionary, and a black man who refuses to speak to white men “with servility.” Doak begins walking Cass home after work, and talking to him about politics and world events. “To hell with humility, meekness—I believe in fighting,” he says. He invites Cass to join him for a rally in Washington Park, and when Cass agrees, they recline on the grass together and watch men and women mount a stage to address a large interracial crowd.
“Ah’ve worked in sweat-shops since ah been twelve,” one says. “Africa or America,” another proclaims, “it doesn’t matter where the Negro lives, he will be exploited.”
Joining the Communist movement is Cass’s last, and most promising, option. Among the paths available to him, becoming an activist and fighting to change the political system seems like the safest bet. He attends more rallies with Doak, and for a time it seems the movement will give him direction and purpose. But then the world imposes its will on him.
Nubby O’Neill reappears near the end of the book and beats Cass savagely for befriending “a nigger so black he looks like a raincloud comin’ down the street.” Then Norah returns, and rejects him. She has become a prostitute again, and no longer trusts any man. Cass begs her to take him back, but she shakes him off with the news that she’s ill. “I’m sick, Red,” she says. “Bad sick. You’d catch something from me.”
Cass is as miserable when the book ends as he was when it began. He decides to rejoin Nubby, and they plan to leave Chicago together. “Ah reck’n ah’ll take out o’ this pesthole direc’ly,” he tells himself. By then, all of his ambitions have died but one—he wants the words “Hell-Blazer” tattooed across his chest.
The purpose of Boots is clear only after the last of Cass’s dignity is stripped away. The book is a self-consciously futile act of protest, not a celebration of the outlaw’s life, a homily for the redemptive power of love, or a call to arms. It’s Nelson’s version of pacing the sidewalk with a blue megaphone in hand, trying to shout loudly enough to drown out the voices of the president and mayor.
This country is uncivilized, he says. The railroad tracks are lined with bodies. The American Dream is dead, and the World’s Fair has as much chance of ending the Depression as a stripper has of reversing the aging process. The city is “a whore, selling a tin souvenir.”
Nelson’s mother never read Somebody in Boots, but she said it was a piece of trash. Other reviewers were kinder.
Jack Conroy praised the novel in New Masses, and the New York Sun called it a “powerful, disturbing book.” The Washington Post said it had “narcotic beauty” and proclaimed it “an important social document and a frankly brutal mirror of our time and people.” The Washington Herald said it should be “read, reread, and studied.”
But the best notice was written by H. W. Boynton, and it appeared in the New York Times. He was turned off by McKay and the book’s political content, but he accorded both a grudging sort of respect. “Like it or not, one must take this book as in many ways a book of the hour,” he wrote.
Boynton found much more merit in Nelson’s craft, and he was perceptive enough to see through the radical patina
of his writing. “There is a creative impulse at work here that declines to be subdued,” he wrote. “The book as a whole has the bitterness not of revolutionary zealotry but of disillusioned youth, of a sensitive soul which has visited the seventh circle of the damned and aches with a pity for the shapeless and hopeless creatures it has found there.”
That review was a coup for Nelson, but it wasn’t enough—he needed the book to sell, and it never did. Some readers thought it was too violent; others too sexual. Its political passages scared away the mainstream, but radicals felt Nelson didn’t go far enough. The book suggests poverty and racism may have foreclosed any chance of a revolution in America, and that felt like betrayal to true believers.
Five hundred people bought Boots, then six, then seven hundred. Sixty more, then no one. It didn’t even earn back its advance.
Nelson’s friends began to worry about him when they learned about the book’s sales. They knew how badly he needed money, and soon after Boots was released, they began to hear distressing rumors about his mental state. People said he was barely functioning, and Bill Jordan, the head of the John Reed Club, heard that Nelson had hiked into the woods alone and tried to get lost so he would starve to death.
Abe Aaron was visiting his family in Pennsylvania when he began to suspect something was wrong, and he wrote to Jack Conroy to express his concern. “Had a letter from the guy [Nelson] about two weeks ago,” he wrote. “He’s not feeling so hot; feels he hasn’t done as good a job as he ought, I guess. He’s a fine fellow. . . . [I]f you know him at all you know that he’s damn serious about his work, and there aren’t too many such. I hope he has some luck.”
* Some published chronologies date Nelson’s membership with the John Reed Club to 1933, not 1934. The mistake is understandable. The letter quoted here—which definitively establishes his introduction to the club—is not held among Nelson’s correspondence at his archive because he pasted it into a scrapbook that was placed in a box of uncatalogued material.
