by Colin Asher
Writing was the one thing the storefronts didn’t facilitate. Nelson only worked on his novel after his other obligations were satisfied, so progress was slow. He wrote at night, mostly, and sometimes Amanda lay in bed and listened to him struggle. She could hear music seeping beneath the door separating their rooms, and the thick, percussive sound of fists pounding a heavy bag, the crunch of paper being wadded up and discarded, and the whisper of fresh sheets curling around the typewriter’s platen.
Nelson couldn’t afford any more distractions, but that winter he took on a new project anyway. He, Abe Aaron, and Richard Wright had been talking about starting a magazine like the old Left Front. They thought the literary scene was strong enough to support one, but none of them was interested in becoming its editor, so Nelson sent Jack Conroy a letter and asked if he would.
It was a calculated offer. Conroy had fallen a long way since Nelson and Aaron first sought him out for counsel and encouragement, and they thought he needed rescuing.
Conroy was thirty-eight years old by then, and married with three children—he had a home, a penchant for bear hugs, and a warm smile, but no money, not much of a career, and too much fondness for hard drink.
He had spent years as an object of reverence on the literary left. People called him The Sage from Moberly after his first novel was published in 1934, and it was commonly accepted that his life’s experiences gave him an intimate understanding of the country’s troubles. His talent, and the cachet his life story bestowed on him, even catapulted him into the mainstream for a while. The New York Post made the first Writers’ Congress seem important by reporting that people had clustered around “such famed novelists as Jack Conroy.” The Herald Tribune interviewed him at the event, and the conference’s organizers gave him prominent placement on the agenda because they knew he could draw a crowd.
But then Conroy rushed out a second novel to chase the success of his first, and it was panned. Next, he agreed to merge The Anvil and Partisan Review, and lost control of his magazine. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship, and the prestige that accompanied it lifted his prospects for a while, but by the summer of 1937 it was clear the headiest days of his career were past. He was a “wounded gorilla,” Meridel Le Sueur said, and no one “struggled for him.” When the Second American Writers’ Congress convened that year, he drew no crowds and delivered no speeches because he hadn’t been invited.
That was a dark time for Conroy. He wasn’t earning much by writing, and his wife, Gladys, was working in a shoe factory and drawing a meager wage. They owned a home outright, but there was a chance their children could go hungry.
Conroy needed money desperately, so he went to St. Louis and applied for a job with the Missouri Writers’ Project. He was qualified to become its director, but they offered him a position as a staff writer instead—a great insult, to his mind. He accepted because he had no other options, but after he left his family behind in Moberly and rented a small apartment near his new workplace, his mood soured. He became angry about his circumstances, and sought comfort in a bottle, and in company that reflected his state of mind.
One day, at a union meeting, Conroy met a wild young man with pale blue eyes. His name was Lawrence “Bud” Fallon, and he was a laborer at an aluminum mill who dreamed of becoming a writer. He said he admired Conroy’s first novel, and began calling him “the great arthur” as a sign of respect. Soon, they were inseparable.
Fallon never published any of his writing, but he was famous in the St. Louis area nevertheless. He organized for the Congress of Industrial Organizations before he hired on at the aluminum mill, and people still chanted, “C-I-O, C-I-O, C-I-O” when he entered bars. Then they braced themselves. His rages were legendary, and nothing was sacrosanct when he was in their grip. One morning, he woke in a stranger’s car, naked except for a pair of pants and covered with dried blood. On another occasion, he broke up a party by smashing forty bottles of beer. He became so violent one evening that he left a veteran bartender shaking his head in disbelief. “One man’d go down and the winner would take on somebody else,” the man said later. “Fightin’, fightin’, all night.”
Fallon traveled at the head of a pack, and that added to his mystique. His coworkers Russell Finch, Bill Walker, and Otto “Doc Otty Ollie Snake” Schaefer trailed behind him most nights, and so did a thickly built man named Jesse Blue who carried a gun and sold narcotics. Conroy became a member of Fallon’s retinue as well, and he recruited a man named Wallie Wharton to become the group’s bard. Wharton was a chubby poet with a head full of angelic curls who lived to sully the innocent promise of his face. He cursed creatively, had sex promiscuously though he was married, and recited satirical poems when he went out carousing.
“I’ve got a leanin’ toward Lenin these days,” he declaimed. “They tell me a leanin’ like that really pays.”
Conroy dubbed the group the Fallonites and accepted their friendship gratefully while he was in St. Louis. Their esteem was a timid replacement for his once-upon-a-time fame, but it was a welcome alternative to loneliness, so he met up with them after leaving work most evenings. When they started fighting, he returned to his apartment, but when they stuck to drink, he kept up. “I often reeled into the palatial offices of the Writers’ Project,” he wrote, “without having been to bed at all.”
Conroy passed a year that way, and more. He put on weight and his features thickened. He stopped writing, and eventually he slunk home to Moberly, Missouri—a town he described as “just a lot of boxes set on the prairie.” Then he slipped back into poverty in the two-story wood-framed house he shared with his wife and three children. Gladys had been laid off by the shoe factory, and he couldn’t find work.
That’s when Nelson’s letter arrived. You should move to Chicago, it said. You can live with me and Amanda until you get established. The Writers’ Project will hire you, and when we launch our magazine, you can be the editor. We’ll call it the New Anvil.
It was the best offer Conroy had received in a long time, so he accepted.
Jack Conroy boarded a northbound bus in Missouri near the end of March, and looked around for a fellow drinker. He spotted a likely candidate traveling alone, sat down next to him, began talking, and didn’t stop for hours. I rambled like “an old, sad faithful lecher . . . ,” he boasted later. And with my encouragement, my new friend “reeled from the vehicle” every time it paused to take on passengers and “returned with a half-pint of Golden Wedding, of which I contrived to consume three-quarters.”‡
Conroy was drunk from Moberly to Chicago, and he was drunk still when he reached Rat Alley and introduced himself to Amanda. They had never met, and he made a poor first impression. He was in a “bad way,” she said—I thought he was a “pathetic character,” “an alcoholic.”
Nelson was more forgiving. He knew what it was like to despair over the failure of a book, so he greeted his friend warmly and moved him into the apartment’s only bedroom. For the next several months, he and Amanda slept on benches in the living space so Conroy could have the bed.
Conroy was a large presence, and after he moved in, the storefronts began to feel crowded and tense. He spoke to Amanda as though she were his audience, not his host, and when she cooked a meal intended to keep the household fed all week, he finished it in days. Sometimes, she bought herself candies on payday, as an indulgence, and when she forgot to hide them, he ate those too. Nelson was often busy with work or meetings, and in his absence Conroy caroused. The Writers’ Project hired him, and when he began bringing home a salary, he redoubled his drinking. He started an affair with a coworker named Theodora Pikowsky a few weeks into his tenure, and afterward he came and went at unpredictable times. Once, he returned home late, passed out on the living room floor, and woke with coins resting on his eyelids—passage across the River Styx, paid by Nelson and Amanda.
But Nelson and Conroy moved forward with the New Anvil despite Conroy’s drinking. Nelson requested that the League of Americ
an Writers sponsor the magazine, but they didn’t reply. He asked a second time, and when that request went unanswered, he and Conroy realized they would have to raise money themselves.
They decided to stage a play and charge admission. Theodora Pikowsky offered the loft she rented near the Writers’ Project as a performance space, and friends offered to provide musical accompaniment and act. When all the logistical details of the performance were settled, Nelson and Conroy drew advertisements for the event and distributed them around town. They said: The Drunkard’s Warning, by Jack Conroy, will be performed by “an all-star cast” so “ ‘the anvil’ can ring forth again.” Line drawings of overflowing beer mugs framed the announcement, and a single five-pointed star hovered above one playfully.
Pikowsky opened the doors of her fourth-floor loft at 8 p.m. on May 16. The room filled quickly, and soon everyone was warm and drunk. Nelson spotted his dark-haired ex-girlfriend in the crowd, and introduced her to Amanda. Then he worked the room while the two women chatted. He saw project employees drinking and becoming convivial, and league members chatting with bohemians from Rat Alley. A blues guitarist named Oscar White mingled, and Maxwell Bodenheim stumbled around. He was supposed to read some poems before the play began, but he was too drunk to stand, so Amanda took him to an empty bedroom and forced coffee on him.
The Drunkard’s Warning was written as a satire of the temperance movement, but it took on new dimensions each time it was staged. It was more a happening than a play, and Conroy used its Chicago debut to advance his long-standing assault on the person and career of James T. Farrell—one of the only writers to give his first novel a bad review.
Conroy stepped onto the makeshift stage in Pikowsky’s loft when the crowd quieted, and announced he was playing the role of James T. Barrelhouse—a mawkish drunk. There was an actress on stage as well, but when he tried to engage her in dialogue, she forgot her lines and wandered off. A man named Red Kruck added a farcical touch to the performance when he entered the drama wearing a skirt that was too short to conceal his hairy legs. Someone struck a sheet of metal to simulate thunder—thoom, thoom, thoom—and Nelson meandered around the stage, mumbling nonsense. “You Goldblatt,” he proclaimed, “bargain in a Marshall Field topcoat!”
The performance wasn’t professional, but it was a good time, and everyone was high and happy for a while. Then a Trotskyist arrived.
The conflict that had begun when six dissidents spoke out against Stalin at the Second American Writers’ Congress the year before was still raging in Chicago. The Stalinists Nelson associated with saw Trotsky’s supporters as heretics, so Red Kruck stopped performing when he saw the man, and attacked. The stage emptied then, and the fight spread through the crowded room. Nelson beat someone in the head with a broom handle, and then a gun went off and people ran.
The police arrived a few minutes later. They asked who was in charge, and arrested Nelson, Conroy, and Pikowsky.
Nelson was released the next morning, but the night had other consequences. Amanda confronted him about his recklessness, and so did the party. A few days after his arrest, he received a letter from Franklin Folsom, the executive secretary of the League of American Writers. It said: “I have heard very distressing rumors about your conduct and Conroy’s about which I should have complete and official information so that no injustice will be done as a result of having doubts raised by rumors. I am sure you know that I am referring to charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct.”
Folsom instructed Nelson and Conroy to meet with a local party leader to discuss the fundraiser and provide “proper information” about the melee at Pikowsky’s. It wasn’t a suggestion. A man named Frank Meyer got in touch next, and ordered them to report to his office in downtown Chicago.
Nelson and Conroy arrived for their meeting on time, but Meyer left them sitting in his waiting room. He emerged from his office after an hour, invited them inside, and then told them to take a seat. He was a severe-looking man with high cheekbones and a tight smile, and he spoke using the tone of a principal scolding wayward students. You are casting “bad reflections on the radical movement,” he said.
Nelson didn’t take it well. He resented Folsom and Meyer, but in the weeks that followed, he developed real loathing for the snitch. Someone had seen him drunk and written to New York to report him, and he was disgusted by that idea. He was willing to defend Stalin and the Moscow show trials because the Soviet government sent guns and money into Spain to fight fascism, but he couldn’t abide being told how to act. I thought that’s what “we were fighting the war against,” he said.
Nelson didn’t split with the party after that interview, at least not immediately. He continued working with the League of American Writers until 1940, but he was more mutineer than soldier after Frank Meyer lectured him. He defended dissidents when he attended meetings, spoke up when he disagreed, and made writing his priority.
Two years before Jack Conroy moved to the city, Nelson had decided to write a series of novels that provided an “accurate description” of Chicago, but he had not been focused on the project for most of that time. He changed his priorities that spring though. He freed up time by neglecting his obligations to the League of American Writers, and used it to collect material by wandering around with a notebook in hand. This time, though, he traveled with company.
First, he attached himself to Jack Conroy, and used his friend’s charisma to gain entrance to spaces he was too shy to visit alone. They had been assigned to collect oral histories for the Writers’ Project, so they spent their days in bars on North Clark Street, interviewing inebriates, prostitutes, and unemployed laborers. Their evenings were more of the same. They shot dice in the back rooms of saloons, and became the only white members of the True American Business and Social Club—a black organization on the South Side where Nelson played cards and mooned over a waitress named Zenobia Gibson.
Nelson thought of the weeks he spent carousing with Conroy as research, but they were also more enjoyable than any since his childhood. His life had been defined by abstention, poverty, and political convictions since college, and he had been hiding behind a stern and over-serious mask for just as long, but there was no chance of maintaining that pretense with Conroy, and no reason to—the force of Conroy’s personality was too strong to resist, and submitting to his will was reliably rewarding.
One night, they left the True American Business and Social Club early in the morning and began walking north toward the Cottage Grove storefronts. On the corner of Thirty-fifth Street, they spotted a street preacher hollering above the din of passing cars, and stopped to listen. When the man paused for breath, Conroy requested a wedding.
Marry me and my friend, he demanded in his well-lubricated Missouri drawl.
The man refused. He said he was saving souls, not damning them, and quoted Leviticus 18:22: “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”
Conroy would not be denied, though, and eventually the preacher relented and proclaimed Nelson and Conroy husband and husband. Passing cars sanctified the occasion by strafing the new couple with their headlights, and the moon was their witness.
Then the Fallonites arrived. They swept into Chicago a few months after Conroy relocated, and soon they were as notorious as they had been in St. Louis. They proclaimed themselves “hipsters in artistic revolt against the establishment,” and tried to lay claim to a leadership role within the cultural left—but in truth, they were just clever, violent drunks, and people were drawn to them for their novelty, not their intellectual pretensions.
Chicago had never experienced anything like the Fallonites. They were mill workers who claimed to be writers, and brawlers who followed the Communist Party’s internal debates and mocked its leaders. They moved by dusk to the sound of breaking bottles and epithets, and dark rumors swirled around them. They called themselves “lost” men because they had once stolen a slot machine from a Mafia-owned gambling parlor, and one o
f them claimed he had raped a dog. They took pride in riding roughly through the home of anyone foolish enough to permit them entrance, and despite their ties to the political left, they treated women with open disdain. “Tell all them kunts [sic] to rinch [sic] out good before I come up,” Fallon wrote before visiting Chicago. Then, during a party, he led his gang into a back room of Meyer Levin’s house, where they had group sex with a woman named Rose. He left when they finished, bought an armload of ice cream cones, and passed out on a sidewalk while clutching them to his chest.§
Conroy and Fallon had a complicated and symbiotic relationship, and when Fallon began visiting Chicago, they revived and deepened it. They rehashed their escapades in St. Louis endlessly, and developed a unique patois that allowed them to make reference to liquors, political figures, and the female anatomy without being understood. Each of them had constructed an image of himself that relied on his relationship to the other, and as a result they clung to each other more tightly all the time. Conroy still felt like a star because Fallon said he was, and Fallon flattered himself with the notion that he was something more than a violent drunk because his best friend was a once-famous writer.
Nelson also began hanging around Fallon that year, but their relationship was much simpler. Nelson was fascinated by Fallon, and thought of him as a valuable source—a man whose biography was both unique and emblematic of their generation. He was a union man who disdained labor, a utopian who had slathered himself with a high-proof veneer of cynicism rather than hold fast to his ideals, and a frustrated man-child who insisted, a bit too stridently, that the world was against him.
Nelson spent a fall, a winter, and a spring following the Fallonites around with a notebook in hand. He trailed them when they visited Chicago, and then back to Missouri when he could. He transcribed their drunken babble, transformed their meanderings into scenes, and went to great lengths to fit in with them. He wore black suits when they were around, talked out the side of his mouth, and made a spectacle of himself. Whenever music began playing, he swung his arms in wide arcs, spun on his toes, and convulsed off beat. There was something balletic about his dancing, something pained—he looked like a man toe-stepping his way across an electrified floor, or a blind boxer swinging haymakers at threatening shadows.
