by Colin Asher
Nelson left his job at the shipping company a few weeks after he settled on the idea of writing a tetralogy, and signed up for emergency relief. His plan was to secure a job with the Illinois Writers’ Project, and he knew they would only hire him if he was indigent.
The project was a make-work program created by the federal Works Progress Administration the year before. There was one in each state, and any writer who needed a job was guaranteed employment. Even “near writers” were welcome, and by the time Nelson was hired in September, it seemed every burned-out journalist and struggling novelist in Chicago was on staff. Richard Wright was working there, and so were Abe Aaron and Larry Lipton.
The project was housed in a converted warehouse at 433 East Erie Street, and its main room was large, undivided, and cacophonous. The sound of fingers tapping keys, phones ringing, and pens scratching across sheets of cheap paper stock combined to form a thrum of white noise that drifted toward the high ceiling and then returned as an echo. More than a hundred writers shared the room, and they were a motley crew. Some had never been employed. Others could boast illustrious careers and humiliating layoffs. Hacks who had managed to falsify a record of publications sat next to aspiring sociologists, and John Reed Club alumni and Communist Party organizers spent their work hours trying to form a union.
The writers’ project had one main task—the creation of a travel guide for the state of Illinois—but its mandate was loose. The year before, the head of the Federal Writers’ Project told the New York Times he wanted to give young writers “an education in the American scene,” and in Illinois, his pronouncement was interpreted liberally. Project workers were assigned to collect oral histories, slave narratives, even recipes, and the savviest among them got themselves assigned to tasks they would have undertaken on their own. Richard Wright spent his time writing short stories, and essays about Chicago’s Black Belt. Abe Aaron interviewed postal workers.
Nelson wasn’t given the same leeway, at least not at the beginning. He was hired as a “field worker”—the lowest rung on the ladder—and his first assignment was a travel guide for Galena, a small city 160 miles west of Chicago. Local interviewers performed the research, and Nelson did the writing. It was grunt work, but he took it seriously. During his first months on the job, he wrote a sixty-seven-page narrative of Galena’s history that doesn’t contain a hint of the style he employed in his stories or his novel.
“Galena, nestling against steep hills in the quiet valley of the Galena River, is the oldest city of northern Illinois,” he wrote. “It lies in the northwestern corner of Jo Daviess County six miles below the Illinois–Wisconsin line and four miles from the Mississippi. In 1826, while Chicago still was a swamp village, Galena was a bustling outpost swarming with miners, gamblers, traders, rivermen, and trappers.”
There’s irony to be found in the image of the young firebrand author of Somebody in Boots bent over a typewriter to turn out a bland account of a minor city he would never visit, but Nelson chose to ignore it. He saw the Writers’ Project as a second chance—and felt heartened when he looked around at work and saw dozens of writers who had spent the grimmest years of the Great Depression feeling the “world was against them,” blinking themselves out of a long, depressive slumber.
If it weren’t for this place, Nelson thought, “The suicide rate would” be “much higher.”
Nelson and Amanda were not getting along. For the first year of their relationship, they were so poor, survival was the best they could hope for. But then Amanda started working, Nelson was hired by the Writers’ Project, the remainder of their lives unfurled into the distance, and they were forced to discuss the future. The conversation never ended well.
Amanda had specific ideas about where her life was headed. She had middle-class aspirations and wore them proudly. She wanted a house, nice clothes, children, and a husband who provided for her—the kind of man her father would have been if he hadn’t died so young, or her stepfather could have been if he didn’t drink.
Nelson’s ideal life was a photo negative of Amanda’s. His parents had spent their lives working, having children, buying homes, and starting businesses. But they had nothing to show for their decades of provident labor, not even tenderness, and Nelson wanted a different lifestyle. He intended to make writing his priority—and he wanted a partner, not a housewife. He insisted that he and Amanda share their domestic responsibilities, and offered to pay their rent and bills if she agreed to buy groceries and pay for her own clothes. He thought it was an equitable suggestion, but she was offended by it. “He refused to pay for anything,” she said.
Nelson and Amanda each tried to wring a piece of the life they wanted from the other’s stubbornness in early 1937, but mostly they tried in vain. They exchanged bitter looks across their single room, and their conversations became cool and impersonal. They shared a tiny bed without touching, and Nelson’s absences became pronounced. He watched boxers maul each other beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke each week at the Marigold Gardens, visited White City when it hosted fights, and bet on horses at Maywood Park. He conducted interviews for his books whenever he found willing subjects, and he worked to raise support for the Spanish Republicans.
By then, the civil war in Spain had become an international conflict. Adolph Hitler was sending planes, tanks, and soldiers to fight alongside the Nationalists and stop “Communist barbarism.” So was Benito Mussolini. The USSR and Mexico were backing the Republican government, and Nelson and Wright were raising money for their cause through the League of American Writers. The United States was neutral in the conflict, but hundreds of individuals, including friends of Wright’s and Nelson’s, had volunteered to fight in the International Brigades that were opposing the fascist coup. Oscar Hunter, a John Reed Club alumni, sailed for Spain and enlisted—and so did Oliver Law and Harry Haywood, members of the local Communist Party.†
Amanda was always home when Nelson drifted back to Ontario Street after a meeting, an interview, or a boxing match, and when he came in, they chatted about the news or traded book recommendations. Neither of them was satisfied with the state of their relationship, but they weren’t miserable either—there was something comforting about the predictability of the rhythm they had slipped into. They rarely kissed, and sex was unheard of, but they never fought or raised their voices either.
It would be a stretch to call the feeling they shared love, but they married anyway. Nelson took a few hours off work on March 1, 1937, and met Amanda at City Hall. He brought two dollars to pay for the marriage license, but no ring. A young prostitute he had been interviewing accompanied him and served as their witness. Amanda had never seen the woman before, and never saw her again.
Nelson didn’t tell his parents about the ceremony, and Amanda didn’t tell hers. He returned to work after the judge presiding over their union declared them man and wife, and she visited her mother. That night, she saw an old friend, and announced casually, “I got married today.”
Friends flitted through the single room on Ontario Street in the spring to see the newlyweds, and even at its beginning, 1937 felt swollen with endings.
Abe Aaron visited, and brought the news that he was thinking about letting his Communist Party responsibilities slide so he could write more. He published under the pen name Tom Butler, but he wasn’t publishing much. There was a long short story on his desk that wanted to become a novel, but never did because he had no time to work on it.
Richard Wright visited, too, and the three old friends read letters that Aaron’s little brother Chester mailed from North Butler, Pennsylvania, and sent back edits. Good paragraph, they wrote. Move that sentence. You should be a writer, they told him.‡
Wright’s visits were part of an extended goodbye. “Most of the young artists and writers with a tinge of talent flee this city as if it were on fire,” he said the year before—and now it was his turn to join them. One of his stories, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” had recently been selected for an anthology, a
nd he was planning to use the attention it brought him to establish himself in New York City. He knew few people there, and had no job or apartment waiting, but he still believed moving east would improve his prospects.
Wright left Chicago on the last Friday in May with forty dollars in his pocket, and made it to New York just in time for the Second American Writers’ Congress—a much different event than the one he attended two years earlier, and a sad coda to the idealistic and creative period that began when he, Aaron, and Nelson became close.
The congress was being held at Carnegie Hall that year, and the audience’s mood was grim. Attendance was one-eighth what it had been the first time, and the Spanish Civil War, not the workers’ revolution, was the main topic of conversation.
When the congress opened on June 4, a statement written by Albert Einstein was read aloud. Then portions of a film shot on the front lines of the fighting in Spain were screened, and Ernest Hemingway took the stage. He had just returned from the war, and the speech he had prepared was his first. He was thirty-six years old, and his wide Midwestern face looked too wholesome for his subject.
“Every time [the fascists] are beaten in the field they salvage that strange thing they call their honor by murdering civilians,” he said. “If I described it, it would only make you vomit. It might make you hate. But we do not want hate. We want a reasoned understanding of the criminality of fascism and how it should be opposed. We must realize that these murders are the gestures of a bully, the great bully of fascism. There is only one way to quell a bully, and that is to thrash him.”
Hemingway was trying to rouse the audience, but they were too scared to be inspired—most knew people who were fighting in Spain at the time, and some had already lost friends to the war. Other speakers followed Hemingway, but their message was so uniform the Times didn’t distinguish between them. “Directly or by implication,” the paper reported, “the speakers, themselves writers, exhorted their fellow craftsmen to join the ‘fight against fascism’ as a matter of self-preservation.”
The single message of the congress was unity, but in the years that followed it was remembered instead as the moment when the literary establishment’s long flirtation with the Communist Party soured.
On the final day of sessions, a group of writers interrupted a meeting to announce they were breaking with the party and siding with a dissident. We are “for Trotsky,”§ they said. As they spoke, Joseph Stalin was dispatching his political rivals in Moscow. A trial at the beginning of the year had ended with thirteen executions—another was under way, and more were expected.¶
The protest was a small thing—just six people standing up in a room—but it set the terms for a conflict that divided the Left for years. It was the moment when dreams about the glorious Soviet homeland and global revolution gave way to flat, calculated declarations about the need for discipline, compromise, and sacrifice.
News of the protest reached Chicago in a letter from Richard Wright, and its arrival fractured both the Writers’ Project and the League of American Writers—the Stalinists in each group lined up on one side, everyone else lined up against them. “It was a quarrelsome situation,” one local writer said.
Abe Aaron found Wright’s account hard to believe. He remained unconvinced the protest would have any effect until the party dismissed a friend of his for having Trotskyist “tendencies” a few weeks later. His faith died then. “I’m letting my Party membership slide and mean to do no more organizational work—at all,” he wrote.
Wright was more sanguine. If the Soviet Union needed to cleanse the party’s ranks in order to remain strong, he felt, then so be it.
Nelson sided with Wright and continued to back the party. He wrote to Howard Rushmore, the editor of the Daily Worker, and asked for information he could use to defend the Moscow trials to his coworkers. When Rushmore responded with several articles, Nelson thanked him.
These will become “part of my arsenal of arguments for use against the guys who are ‘more left than the Communists,’ ” Nelson wrote. “Incidentally, we have a flock of such in the office of the fed. writers project where I work. . . . In fact, we have about one of every variety: Trotskyists, Mattickite, Council Communists, United Worker’s Party, one National Socialist.”
* Fifteen proletarian novels were published in the United States in 1935—in 1936, there were six, and in 1937, only five.
† Nelson claimed people were surprised that he didn’t volunteer to fight in Spain. “My defense when asked why aren’t you there was that I don’t want to get killed,” he said.
‡ I should note that Chester Aaron took their advice. After a stint in World War II, he wrote a novel called About Us that was published in 1967 to rave reviews. Twenty-three more books followed.
§ This group included Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Fred Dupee, Eleanor Clark, and Philip Rahv and William Phillips, the editors of the Partisan Review.
¶ This period is now called “The Great Purge,” but at the time it wasn’t yet clear to most Americans that Stalin was killing innocents. Even the United States government thought the trials were fair. Ambassador Joseph Davies reported, “It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.”
At Home in Rat Alley
(October 1937–February 1940)
Nelson, Jack Conroy, and their friends distributed these fliers to advertise the inaugural Chicago performance of The Drunkard’s Warning.
Nelson and Amanda had been living in their single room for nearly two years when they decided to move. He had become a supervisor at the Writers’ Project, and she had been hired to take a census of the homeless population in Lincoln Park. They could finally afford more space, so they visited the South Side to look at some storefronts people had begun converting into studios.
The buildings faced each other across an unnamed alley behind Cottage Grove Avenue. They were constructed for the 1893 World’s Fair and designed so that men wearing bowlers could parade the gauntlet of their display windows in the company of corseted women, but time had degraded them. Businesses had struggled, and closed. Paint had peeled, wood floors had warped, rats had moved in, and the surrounding neighborhood had developed a lawless feel. Police cruisers began screaming down the avenue past abandoned buildings, and a pair of bars called Jolly John’s and The Old Bowery began serving sugary wine into the small hours of the morning.
Then bohemians and radicals christened the area Rat Alley and claimed it for themselves. Gilbert Rocke, a painter and John Reed Club alumnus, rented one of the storefronts, and a muralist named Mitchell Siporin moved into another. The poet Frank Marshall Davis had an apartment around the corner, and young Marxists established a commune at the end of the block where they lived along utopian lines and installed petty tyrants to oversee chores—the kitchen commissar, comrade commissar for the second-floor bathroom, czar of trash disposal, and so on. A writer named Frankie Lemon lived there, and so did the actor Lou “Gigi” Gilbert. Nelson knew both from work, and he knew their upstairs neighbors, Neal and Christine Rowland, because they raised money for the fight in Spain.
Two adjacent storefronts were unoccupied. They were connected by a door through their shared wall and the cost for both was only twenty-five dollars a month, but they were rundown and unlivable.
Nelson and Amanda rented them anyway. They paid to have a toilet, a sink, and a stove installed, and then bought drapes to cover the seven-foot-tall display windows, and painted their floors Copen blue. They put a bed in one unit and filled the other with used couches and chairs. Nelson bought a maple writing desk. Amanda bought a dining-room set. Then they built benches by the windows and hung a punching bag from the ceiling so Nelson had something to hit when his writing was not going well.
When they finished, they had their first comfortable home, and Nelson had a suitable base for the next act of his career. He was moving in several distinct c
ircles at the time, and the storefronts put him near the center of each.
The Writers’ Project was a short trolley ride north, and by then Nelson was a fixture in the office. After he completed the Galena guide, he wrote an economic history of Illinois and a regional cookbook.* They were inglorious assignments, but he submitted them without complaint, and in the process he earned the respect of the aspiring authors on staff. Saul Bellow had begun admiring Nelson from afar, though Nelson never noticed him, and Margaret Walker, the youngest writer in the office, began asking Nelson for feedback on her poetry.
Nelson was secretary of the Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers as well, and the storefronts allowed him to host meetings. During his tenure, an impressive list of literary figures gathered in them. Two editors from Esquire and an associate editor at the New Republic visited. So did George Dillon and Peter DeVries from Poetry magazine, and the black writers Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, and Ted Ward. The league was Nelson’s primary contact with the political world by then, but he also maintained a working relationship with the Communist Party. The party regulated the league’s membership, so Nelson remained a public supporter long after he began expressing misgivings in private.† He spoke at a party fundraiser in 1937, and later he signed a statement defending the worst Moscow show trial—the one that inspired Arthur Koestler to write Darkness at Noon.
Living in Rat Alley also put Nelson at the center of a social scene. He commuted north with his neighbors in the mornings, worked his shift at the Writers’ Project surrounded by friends, and clocked out alongside comrades while debating Stalin’s Popular Front strategy. He might host a meeting or drop into a benefit at the commune afterward, and when it ended, he could rejoin the afternoon’s debate at Jolly John’s and keep it going until the bartender hit the lights and cleared the room.
