by Colin Asher
The Workers’ Center was crowded, but eventually Amanda and her friend spotted Nelson standing by himself near a table stacked with copies of Somebody in Boots. Rumors about his breakdown were swirling through the audience, but he seemed oblivious. He sold a few books, and signed a few—perked up when people spoke to him, and slumped when they walked away.
“Why,” Amanda’s friend asked, “would an attractive guy like that want to take his life?” Amanda said she didn’t know. Then she added, “He has such a lost look in his eye.”
Nelson walked out alone before the event ended and left an unsold copy of Boots sitting on a table. Amanda and Leekley noticed the book as they were leaving, and brought it home. Then Leekley got Nelson’s number from a friend and called him.
I have your book, Leekley said. You should come get it.
When Nelson returned from Yaddo, Gerson and Goldie were living in a dank basement apartment on Kedzie Avenue and surviving on emergency relief. Their house had been foreclosed on while he was away, and they were destitute—they had no business, no savings, no home.†
They had lost everything, and the weight of that fact had crushed Gerson. He had finally become the failure Goldie had always insisted he was, and his mind was not able to reconcile itself to that fact. After moving to Kedzie, he spent his days pacing and clutching a newspaper he never seemed to read. Like a boxer who has been hit so hard he saw black lights, it was clear he would never be the same. Sometimes when he thought no one could hear, he muttered to himself, “It’s hard to die. It’s hard to die.”
Nelson moved in with his parents because he had nowhere else to go, but he avoided their apartment whenever possible. He visited friends that spring, read history books, looked for a job, and made his appearance at the Workers’ Center. Then he received a call from Richard Leekley, and went to retrieve his misplaced copy of Boots.
When Nelson arrived at Leekley’s apartment, he noticed a woman there. She had milky white skin, and dark, inquisitive eyes. She never spoke, but he could feel her watching him, and that piqued his interest.
Nelson left with his book, but called the apartment later and tried to reach the woman. When she didn’t respond, he called again—and again.
Eventually, she replied. Leekley is out of town, she said. We can meet.
Amanda was twenty-three at the time and Nelson was twenty-six, but they courted like teenagers, furtively. They held hands on double-decker buses and visited the Lincoln Park Zoo. Amanda cracked jokes, and Nelson laughed. They spent warm nights walking along the shore of Lake Michigan, and Nelson made his confession in the small hours of the morning. He told Amanda about the crate he huddled inside as a child when he needed to hide from Goldie, taking cold showers in college, and his time on the road.
My real name is Abraham, he told her. I’m Jewish, and I was recently released from a padded room.
Amanda listened, and thought: He was a lonely child, he still is, and he needs to be loved. Then she gave up her room at the boardinghouse, dumped Leekley, and stopped working.
That summer, Nelson and Amanda visited Gary, Indiana. They hitchhiked south from Chicago and reached the city in the dead of night. The sky was ink-black and starless, and Nelson played the gentleman. He led Amanda through empty streets, down paths, and through a bog.
Nelson’s sister Bernice and her husband, Morris, owned a small cabin on the beach that they had purchased before the stock market crash. They spent summers there with their children, and that year they invited Nelson and Amanda to join them. The family shared meals most days, and then Nelson and Amanda wandered off. They sat on the sand dunes, read, chain-smoked, and went running in hiking boots. Nelson plinked the keys of Bernice’s typewriter occasionally, and when he did, his young nephew became excited.
“Unk,” Robert Joffe said, your next novel is “going to be a best seller.”
“Yeah, right,” Nelson replied.
Bernice and Morris returned to Chicago with their children when summer ended, but Nelson and Amanda stayed on in the cabin. Amanda strolled naked along the edge of the water when no one was watching, and Nelson tried to write. They ate pancakes for a week because there was a sack of flour in the cabin, and when they ran out of food, they hitchhiked back to Chicago. Nelson stole salami from Goldie, and Amanda’s mother gave them potatoes and onions.
They lived in languor as paupers and felt content, but then winter approached and their idyll faded. They had decisions to make. The cabin wasn’t insulated, and there were no jobs in Gary, so they left. They found a basement room in Chicago with a single narrow window high on a street-facing wall. The rent was six dollars a week and they paid it using Amanda’s savings. Years earlier, her mother had given her one hundred dollars, and it was still in the bank. The money would cover their rent through the end of the year if they bought nothing else.
Nelson stole so that they could eat. He slipped into the street each morning around five thirty—before dawn, but after the milkman made his rounds—and filled his arms with bottles of milk and tomato juice that had been delivered to his neighbors. Amanda often woke to the sight of him standing over his haul, looking delighted. In those moments, she saw a man thinking, “You’re trying to do me in, but look; I’ve got the better of you. So you’ve got a Depression. Well, OK, I’m going to get by anyhow.”
Nelson finally found work at a gymnasium. It was his responsibility to hose sweat from the bodies of the gym’s wealthy members when they finished exercising, and though it was a demeaning job, he was glad to have it. The unemployment rate was still north of twenty percent.
I “felt obliged to abandon further pursuit of literature as a means of subsistence,” Nelson wrote later. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t writing. When he had energy after work, he lingered on street corners with a notepad, watched people, and started conversations with strangers. Then, when he went home, he created character sketches that are reminiscent of “So Help Me” and the time when he first thought he knew something about the world no one else did.
“Frank Mears turned south down Dearborn Street, and no face turned to follow,” one begins. “He went into a tavern where music was, and he’d been drinking four straight days. He banged on a table till they threw him out, and he walked south down Dearborn. On Harrison he stood and swayed: a dollar was all he possessed, and he waved it like a flag.”
Nelson was recovering at the end of 1935, but Amanda was struggling. She sank as he rose. A year earlier, she had had a job, money to spare, and a room of her own. Now she was living in a basement and drinking stolen milk. She needed to feel she was better than her circumstances, so she withdrew the last twenty-five dollars in her bank account, took it downtown, and bought a pair of suede oxfords.
Nelson was incredulous. They were unable to pay their rent in December and had to move as a result, but Amanda was not contrite. She displayed her oxfords proudly on the windowsill, and when she was feeling low she brought her nose close to the suede and took a deep breath.
Nelson and Amanda’s next apartment was smaller and cheaper—a single room on the third floor of a narrow building on Ontario Street. It came with a bed and a chair, but no table. There was one window, a burner for heating food in the closet, and the bathroom was down the hall. The man living in the room next to theirs was an alcoholic whose floor was carpeted with cigarette butts that had been adhered in place by vomit, and the building’s lower floors were occupied by male sex workers who leaned out their front windows to solicit passersby.
“We’re here,” they said in a singsong lilt, “and we’re gay.”
It was a bacchanal, Amanda said later, and Nelson loved it.
Nelson quit the gymnasium, became a laborer for a freight company, and wrote less and less each week. Amanda cleaned houses on occasion, but mostly she just sat home alone because they couldn’t afford for her to do anything else. Once, Richard Wright visited and found them in a sorry state. They tried to be good hosts, but had little they could offer him. Amanda was
embarrassed, and when Wright sensed her discomfort, he put her at ease with a joke. “Jeezus,” he teased, “just like home, beans and spinach.”
Nelson rarely drank, but he returned from work on Christmas Day with a bottle of liquor, a tree, and a gift for Amanda. They opened the bottle, poured, and toasted their first holiday. They laughed, and when their neighbor heard them through their shared wall, he rapped at the door with an empty cup. Nelson invited him inside, filled it, and then they drank to the end of a bleak and dispiriting year.
* Amanda claimed she first saw Nelson when he read from his novel at the John Reed Club in May 1935, but that is impossible—the JRCs had been closed for a year by then. I am confident she really saw him at the Workers’ Center. The timing is right, and this is the only documented appearance Nelson made in relation to the publication of Somebody in Boots.
† A brief tragic aside—the Workers’ Center was one street over from the home Nelson’s family had just lost. It would have been possible for him to see his old backyard from the center’s roof.
Trotskyists, Council Communists, and Mattickites
(January 1936–September 1937)
Nelson spent his days loading trucks in early 1936, and his afternoons wandering the city in search of people he could interview or eavesdrop on. He went home after dark, and tried to write while Amanda read. Sometimes, he perused the daily papers, looking for material he could use in his stories, but he was often disappointed because most of the news that spring and summer was news of war.
Left-wing political parties took power in Spain in March, and 150,000 of their supporters stormed Madrid, waving red flags in celebration. Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland in violation of a peace treaty, and Italy tried to snatch Ethiopia from Emperor Haile Selassie. When the League of Nations called for peace, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini—a bullet-headed fascist who called himself Il Duce—responded coolly. “Equality” between Italy and Ethiopia, he said, “does not exist in the Italian lexicon.” The Italian Army crushed Selassie’s at Maychew before the end of the month, and then followed the battle’s survivors to Lake Ashenge and gassed them.
The German government announced that every German child was required to enroll in Nazi Youth organizations in April, and the following month, Emilio Mola began laying the groundwork for a fascist coup in Spain. In June, on German Day, fifty thousand people gathered in Soldier Field in Chicago to watch children march behind swastika flags while giving stiff-armed Nazi salutes, and Spain was cleaved by civil war in July.
Nelson retreated from the world when he met Amanda, and he had been living a quiet life since. But he reforged his ties to the Communist Party when wars began breaking out. He marched in protest when Italy invaded Ethiopia, and again when the Spanish Civil War began. Then he and Richard Wright founded the Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers and used it to raise money for the fighters opposing the fascist coup.
When Nelson returned to the political fold, he discovered, again, that the landscape had shifted since he was last involved. Energy that had once gone into reversing evictions and marching to demand full employment was being directed instead toward Spain, and toward challenging fascists in America. The Communist Party was forging alliances with liberals and progressives, and proletarian literature was an afterthought. Leaflets and pamphlets hold the power to “strike a blow, hammer against the minds of the workers,” Jack Conroy proclaimed in 1935. It was a powerful idea, but its shelf life was short—only a year later, it felt hopelessly naïve. Words could not save Madrid or keep Hitler from marching on Stalingrad, so the proletarian writers’ movement lost momentum and coasted back toward the margins of the literary world.*
That last change was the most significant for Nelson. It liberated him. He had published in proletariat journals, and benefited from his connection to the John Reed Club, but his work never fit the genre—he wrote about the poor, not the working class—and his accommodations to the form were clumsy and insincere. Two sections of Somebody in Boots are introduced by quotations from the Communist Manifesto, and in one of his early short stories a character sings, Rise up, workers, farmers / To battle! Those feints embarrassed him later, and when the party lost interest in literature, he accepted their disregard as a gift—from that point forward, he was a Communist at protests and political meetings, but he wrote on his own terms.
When Nelson wasn’t working, organizing, or marching that spring, he was reading. His taste was omnivorous. He read and reread Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Stephen Crane—and discovered new levels of meaning each time. He admired the way Dostoevsky claimed all of St. Petersburg as his subject, and was in awe of Kuprin’s dedication to accuracy. Kuprin’s most controversial novel was a detailed account of life inside a Russian brothel entitled Yama. The research took years, and Kuprin conducted it by living among the women he wrote about. Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets also became a touchstone for Nelson. It’s a brutal thing—as unsparing in its depiction of poverty as Somebody in Boots, but free of rhetoric. Crane paid to print the book himself because no publisher would touch the material, and Nelson admired him for that.
Nelson also read through the works of the generation of Chicago writers who preceded him, and drank in their mash of naturalistic observation and lyricism. Theodore Dreiser achieved something lasting with Sister Carrie because he was brave enough to write “without fear of public censure,” Nelson thought. Carl Sandburg’s poetry entranced him. It was so beautiful, it could reverse the natural order of things. Stormy, husky, brawling / City of the Big Shoulders, Sandburg wrote. Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle. And afterward, Chicago raced to become the place he described.
“Life is in ourselves and not in the external. To be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter—this is what life is, herein lies its task,” Dostoevsky wrote. Crane said, “Environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives.” The chasm between those positions echoes the conflict Nelson first wrestled with in college—Stoicism and personal responsibility to the right, the constraints of society to the left. Kuprin wrote to persuade. He hoped Yama would hasten the abolition of prostitution, a trade he described as “a worse evil than war or famine.” Sandburg made no grand pronouncements.
Nelson decided the single thread connecting his literary heroes’ work was perspective—each had discovered the truth about their society among the “born-to-be-doomed.” That insight raised novel questions for Nelson, and he answered them, in time, using a vernacular of his own construction. Good writing comes from the gut, he began saying, and the greatest literary works open “a wedge for the inarticulate of the world.”
How to write, Nelson began to think, is a less meaningful question than why. Literature must challenge authority and defy demagoguery, he decided. It is born in fidelity to the truth and crumbles into incoherence in its absence. The writer’s job, he wrote, is to put down the “world of reality” by working “without haste, as the story grows within, regardless of all social and moral ideas, regardless of whom your report may please or offend, regardless of whether the critics stand up and cheer for a month or take hammer and tongs after you, or simply ignore you—regardless of all forms, of all institutions, of all set ways of conduct and thought. Regardless, chiefly, of what the writer himself prefers to believe, know, think or feel.”
The emphasis of Nelson’s work changed again that year. His first publications are largely autobiographical—“So Help Me” is the story of the Luthers; Boots is, loosely, the chronicle of his vagabondage, imprisonment, and politicization—but in 1936, Nelson began following Kuprin’s lead by immersing himself in unfamiliar parts of the city.
“I was just going around Chicago,” he said later—watching, listening, recording. Property owners demolished buildings by the hundreds to avoid paying taxes that year, and scab-kneed children play
ed in debris-strewn lots. Squatters occupied condemned buildings along South State Street, and families slept in parks. The Illinois Workers Alliance marched on City Hall to demand jobs. A union leader was shotgunned in the street. Three women were beaten to death with hammers in their hotel rooms. A man walked into Humboldt Park, shot himself in the head, and had his pocket picked before his body cooled—and Nelson tried to absorb it all.
“I went to a Walkathon, one of these three-day, I mean everlasting dance marathons. I spent a couple days there,” he said, and “started a whole series of stories about the cheap hotels on South State Street.” He visited brothels and flophouses, walked through the parks, listened to barkers calling outside dime burlesques, and by summer he had formed the genesis of the idea that eventually defined his career: He was going to write a series of books that would provide an “accurate description of” the city. The first would be set in Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, close to the neighborhood where Amanda was raised. Three more would follow.
He described his plan in a fellowship application a few years later:
This project would attempt to relate the economy of a representative cultural pocket to incidence of delinquency therein. It would attempt presentation of economic and political factors making toward juvenile criminality among 300,000 Poles inhabiting a clearly-defined-geographic area. . . .
Its presentation would be through the methods of naturalism, and its scope confined to a fictionalized portrayal of some forty-five case histories. . . .
Volume two [will deal] with the Italian areas centering around Halsted and Taylor Streets, volume three with the Negro belt between 47th and 35th Streets, and the final volume with the Mexican section of East Chicago and Gary.
