by Colin Asher
† This description draws from Richard Wright’s memoir American Hunger, and so does the description of club activities that follows.
‡ It’s true that Nelson used the name Nelson Algren when “So Help Me” appeared in Story magazine, but he continued using Abraham afterward—that name appears on his Vanguard contract, and it’s how he introduced himself in Texas. He didn’t drop Abraham entirely until he was released from jail.
§ Wright never mentioned Nelson in his memoirs by name, but in American Hunger he refers to Nelson anonymously as “a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation.”
¶ This woman is one of the few true mysteries in Nelson’s life. He never spoke about her after 1935, and later, none of his friends could remember her name.
# The jail that appears in Boots is, basically, the Brewster County jail. The layout is the same, and the characters in the novel are based on the people Nelson met there. The jail in Boots has “rules” just like Brewster County did, and they are nearly identical—an easy trick because Nelson stole the “Rules of the Court” posted in the Brewster County lockup before he was released.
The Crack-Up
(April 1935–May 25, 1935)
New York City May Day parade, 1935. Though he is not pictured here, it seems Nelson joined this contingent of writers for a portion of the march. Photo by Ben Shahn, courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
Lawrence Lipton’s phone rang at 3 a.m. in early April, and a woman’s voice came through the line when he picked it up. She was upset.
“You don’t know me,” she said, “but I’m the girlfriend of Nelson Algren, and I’ve just come, just discovered, coming home, I find he has a gas pipe in his mouth.” Nelson was barely conscious, she said, and babbling, “The only one, the only one, the only one.” She wanted to take him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go. “I wanted to get in touch with his parents, but who knows who his parents are? Nobody, none of his friends seem to know he ever had any parents.”
Nelson can’t be left alone, she said. “I’m afraid that he’ll, the minute I turn my back and walk out of the house, he’ll do it again.
“He doesn’t want anybody over. He says the only one he’ll talk to is you.”
The call was a surprise. Lipton had met Nelson but didn’t know him—they had spoken once, maybe twice. Lipton was a gregarious man, though, a magnet for strays. He lived in a four-story building at 737 Rush Street on the Near North Side. It had been a boardinghouse before he rented it, and not much changed when he took it over. Friends crashed when they felt like it, friends of friends dropped in, strangers slept off their binges. There were parties and readings every week, and a writers’ group met there on Wednesdays. It was the kind of house people went to when they had nowhere else to go, so Lipton told Nelson’s girlfriend to send him over.
“Put him in a cab,” he said. “I’ll pay for the cab.”
Nelson arrived in a dark mood—still suicidal—and spent the morning telling Lipton his story. My book was stillborn, he said. The magazines I care about ignored it. Others reviewed it poorly. It isn’t selling, and it isn’t going to. I put too much of myself into it, and now I feel like a fool. My relationship is breaking up, and I can’t make anything of my sex life.
When Nelson exhausted himself, Lipton offered him a place to sleep. They resumed their conversation the next day.
Lipton was a round-faced, bespectacled man who spoke with volume and force. He was about ten years older than Nelson, and thought of himself as many things—a writer, a guru, a muse, an amateur therapist. He had read Sigmund Freud, and felt he had a “good deal of knowledge” about psychology because he had been in analysis for years. He believed he could help Nelson, so he kept him talking—first for one night, then many more. He called it “therapy.” He called himself a “healer.”
A week passed, maybe two, and Nelson’s depression deepened. He ruminated over the events of the last few years and tried to find some reason to feel hopeful about the future, but failed. He had applied for hundreds of jobs since he graduated from college, and been rejected by every one—he had slept outside and nearly frozen, traveled thousands of miles, gone hungry, and been incarcerated twice. Becoming an author had been his last hope, but he had failed at that as well.
Nelson’s mood was labile. He was often sad, but he could become angry as well. Sometimes, he raged at Lipton, and other times he withdrew into himself.
When Nelson stopped speaking, Lipton conceded he was out of his depth and decided to find help. Nelson had claimed, when asked, that he had no family, but Lipton discovered that was a lie. He questioned some of their mutual friends, learned that Nelson’s parents were alive, and then went to Troy Street and told Gerson and Goldie everything he knew—the girlfriend, the suicide attempt, the long-simmering rage.
“Your son has been living with me,” he said. He needs your help.
Gerson and Goldie agreed to move Nelson back into their house, but they never had the chance. The following day, Lipton became convinced Nelson was going to attempt suicide again, and he brought him to a psychiatric hospital. The staff took Nelson into custody when he arrived, and locked him inside a padded room with barred windows.
Lipton watched, and then spoke to Nelson through the bars. His voice was pleading, regretful.
I’ll get you into outpatient treatment, he swore. You only have to stay here for a little while.
Nelson just stared at the floor. The hospital released him three days later, and he returned to his parents’ house and moved into his childhood bedroom. His girlfriend tried to visit, but Goldie called her “whore” and chased her away. Lipton stopped by as well, but Nelson refused to speak to him.
At the end of April, Nelson traveled to Manhattan to attend the First American Writers’ Congress. He had been released from the hospital no more than a week earlier, and he was still unstable, but his attendance was expected and he didn’t want to cancel.
After the John Reed Clubs were disbanded the year before, Nelson had agreed to sign an open letter calling for a congress to convene, and a new organization called the League of American Writers to be created. Jack Conroy signed too—so did Langston Hughes, Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, and fifty-nine other “established” writers.
It began, “The capitalist system crumbles so rapidly before our eyes that, whereas ten years ago scarcely more than a handful of writers were sufficiently far-sighted and courageous to take a stand for proletarian revolution, today hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists recognize the necessity of personally helping to accelerate the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of workers’ government.”
It took almost a year to organize the congress, but when it finally came together at the Mecca Temple on West Fifty-fifth Street, no one complained about the wait. Two hundred and sixteen writers from twenty-six states were arranged on the main stage when the proceedings began on April 26. Another 150 looked on from the floor, and an audience of four thousand sat beneath the arabesque tile mosaic covering the ceiling, and watched. The room was lit by chandeliers.
A German writer named Friedrich Wolf had been selected to speak first. When the appointed time arrived, he walked to the lectern and began.
I have traveled all the way from Europe, he said, because “we felt that in the capitalist world, the American writers are one of the most important outposts in the battle against war and fascism, determined as our comrade Anatole France said, ‘to be the conscience of the world.’ ”
The congress should have been a vindication for Nelson—of his politics, his writing, and his choices since college—but he didn’t feel that way. He was there, but not present.
Nelson sat on a panel with Jack Conroy and a young Midwestern writer named Meridel Le Sueur on the first day of sessions. The subject was the proletarian novel, the room was full, and Mike Gold, author of Jews without Money, was moderating. He began to introduce the s
peakers arranged on the stage, and while he spoke, Le Sueur looked at Nelson and thought, “He’s going to vomit.”
Nelson rose slowly when Gold finished, and moved toward center stage. He was shaking as he walked, and shaking when he reached the lectern. He looked at Gold, and Gold looked at him. The room was silent. Le Sueur thought Nelson was about to collapse, so she ran up and put a hand on him. Gold caught on. He put an arm around Nelson, and began prompting him with questions.
Nelson mumbled his responses. His voice was so low no one could hear him when he began, but it rose and steadied as he spoke. Sam Ross, a writer who knew Nelson from Chicago, was in the audience, and after a few minutes he could hear what Nelson was saying.
My book was a failure, Nelson said. Please, buy my book.
How embarrassing, Ross thought.
Eventually, Jack Conroy stepped in. He walked to the lectern, moved Nelson aside, pulled a speech out of his pocket, and began to read it without introducing himself.
The congress ended on April 28, and during the final plenary, Richard Wright spoke from the floor. The audience was mostly white, and he wanted them to know how isolated he felt as a black writer. How hurt he had been when the John Reed Clubs were shuttered. “You may not understand it. I don’t think you can unless you feel it. You can understand the causes, and oppose them, but the human results are tragic in peculiar ways,” he said. “Some of the more obvious results are lack of contact with other writers, a lack of personal culture, a tendency toward escape mechanisms of ingenious, insidious kinds.”
The League of American Writers was officially founded after Wright finished, and Nelson was elected to its national council. As the congress closed, someone on the floor yelled, “Everything remains to be said. Everything remains to be done. Let us get to work.” The audience responded with riotous applause, and when it died down, James Farrell spoke.
We should sing the “The Internationale,” he said. So everyone did.
“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!” they sang. “Arise, ye wretched of the earth!”
New York City hosted two May Day parades in 1935—one socialist, and one Communist. Nelson joined the Communists. He marched along Fifth Avenue from Madison Square Park to Thirty-second Street, then across town and down.
The crowd was pocked with banners. FIGHT AGAINST IMPERIALIST WAR, one said. EVERY ARTIST AN ORGANIZED ARTIST, another proclaimed. Sailors visiting from the Soviet Union marched in uniform. The Irish Workers Clubs carried shillelaghs and shouted “Free Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys.” And a two-story-tall papier-mâché giant carrying a massive copy of the Daily Worker coasted down the street on a float.
Nelson marched with a group of writers that included Conroy, Mike Gold, and James Farrell. They were walking behind a Harlem spiritual leader called the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, who was seated in a white limousine, flanked by young women banging tambourines, and someone in Nelson’s group raised his fist and hollered, “We write for the working class.” The atmosphere was festive, but Nelson was not. At one point, he spotted a writer named Jack Balch and glared at him. He looked “malevolent,” Conroy said. Balch had made a comment at the congress that Nelson resented, and the year before, in Chicago, he called Nelson’s writing “dark and gloomy.” Nelson approached Balch at the march and said, “How does it feel to be a dirty rat, Jack?” The two never spoke again.
Richard Wright thought Nelson was losing his mind, so he went to James Farrell for help. Farrell agreed to see if there was anything he could do, and he met Nelson on May 5. They spent the day wandering the city, and as they walked, Nelson rambled. Boots was on his mind, the end of his relationship, the future. He ruminated on those subjects for hours, but they all seemed beside the point to Farrell. Whatever Nelson’s problem is, he thought, it started years ago. It’s deep seated.
That night, Farrell wrote in his diary, “A going almost insane.” The next day, he made some calls. James Henle at Vanguard Press offered some money, and Elizabeth Ames, the director of the Yaddo artists’ colony, offered Nelson a place to stay. Farrell’s ex-wife Dorothy was working at the colony, so she could act as a caretaker.
Farrell put Nelson on a northbound train that afternoon. A Polish writer named Nathan Asch was also headed to the colony, and he served as an escort. Dorothy Farrell met the men at the Saratoga Springs station and drove them to a bar owned by the gangster Lucky Luciano. The three of them shared a drink, and then Dorothy delivered the men to Yaddo—a four-hundred-acre estate of manicured lawns, fountains, and gardens, organized around a mansion.
Nelson moved into a studio, and Dorothy brought him his meals. “He wasn’t doing anything,” she said later. “He was just alive.”
Elizabeth Ames dictated a letter to James Farrell the day after Nelson arrived. “I have not had the chance to see young Algren,” she said, “but Dorothy . . . seems satisfied that he will find himself at home, and probably get from Yaddo what you had hoped he might.”
Ames set the letter aside when it was finished. She planned to mail it in the morning, but Nelson was gone before she did.
He tried to sneak away in the night, but Dorothy Farrell caught him. She begged him to stay, but he refused.
I got some bad news from home, he said. I have to leave. Then he walked out, made his way to Albany, and caught a bus to Chicago. He never returned to Yaddo.
Part II
THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
The 26-girl and the handsome drummer
Will be sleeping in separate beds come summer
The checkroom nifty has quit to knit lisle
The bouncer’s bad eye will defer him a while—
So let’s hear the How Long Blues once again,
Play it over and over while stirring your gin—
—“How Long Blues,” Poetry magazine, September 1941
Two Forlorn Children
(May 26–December 1935)
Amanda Leocadia Kontowicz had what was once called a “difficult” childhood. Her father emigrated from Poland when he was an infant, grew up in Milwaukee, married young, and had children—a boy, and then, two years later, a girl. He was a striver of the classic American type, a factory worker who owned a plot of land where he planned to build his family a home when he could afford to. Then he went to work one day, joined some friends for a game of baseball on his lunch break, and was hit in the head. His head still hurt the next morning, and a month later he was dead.
Amanda was six months old when her father died, and afterward she lived with her mother, her older brother, and her maternal grandmother. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Her grandmother spent her days reading the Bible.
Amanda’s mother remarried thirteen years after her first husband died, and chose a drunk who moved the family to Chicago. Amanda was fourteen at the time, and lonesome. Her brother played in the street with other young boys, but never invited her to join them. She wasn’t allowed to bring friends to the house, either, so words became her life. She bought the New Republic at department stores in the Loop, and read Conan Doyle and J. S. Fletcher at the library. Solitude wasn’t a choice, but she owned it without shame and used it like a shield. I prefer being alone, she said. “I’m an observer.”
Amanda’s stepfather lost his job eventually, but kept his routine. He left the house each morning, drank the day away, and then returned home at night. The family’s money didn’t last.
When Amanda graduated from high school, she wore a white dress and posed for a photograph holding her diploma. Then she found a job, rented a room in a boardinghouse near the Biograph Theater, said goodbye to her mother, and dipped her toes into the adult world. She spent her wages on movie tickets and expensive clothes, and she began smoking heavily, drinking lightly, and dating widely.
Amanda was a beauty—dark, quiet, and mysterious—so she had no trouble attracting suitors. She had her first kiss when she was nineteen, and the following year she fell in love with a charming older man named Richard Leekley. He was married and h
ad a child, but he lived alone and told Amanda he intended to get a divorce as soon as he could afford to. She believed him.
Amanda was attracted to Leekley mainly because he was a poet. Writers gathered in his apartment each week to discuss their work, and she often attended as well, to eavesdrop and play host. She met Richard Wright there, and babysat for Meridel Le Sueur. Late one night, she and Leekley went to the offices of Poetry magazine and slipped some of his verse under their door. When it was published a few months later, she felt very proud.
Amanda got pregnant in 1935, and Leekley pressured her to get an abortion. She did, but reluctantly. The relationship ended with the pregnancy, but Leekley wouldn’t let it go. He said he would kill himself if Amanda left him, so she stayed—even when “I was attached to someone else,” she reflected later. “I was alone.”
Summer started early in Chicago that year. Amanda was working in a General Electric factory at the time, and by May it was an oven. A few of her coworkers collapsed from the heat, and she avoided their fate by wearing silk summer dresses and light shoes. She was a remarkable sight—an indomitable woman, blossoming as the city wilted—and Leekley knew it. He begged her not to leave him, took her on dates to regain her favor, and invited her to join him at the Workers’ Center on Kedzie Avenue to hear a young writer named Nelson Algren read from his first novel.*
Amanda and Leekley arrived at Nelson’s reading together on May 26. They chatted for a while, and then she drifted off with a friend and found a quiet spot where they could watch the room without being conspicuous. They heard Eugene Bechtold give a lecture entitled “Ten Years of Workers’ Literature” and listened to a band.
