by Colin Asher
Then Morning’s reception took another dramatic turn. A letter arrived at Nelson’s apartment as he was preparing to leave Chicago, and the return address on the envelope said: Martha Gellhorn Hemingway, Finca Vigia, San Francisco De Paula, Cuba. Nelson opened it, and read: “I just want to tell you how terrific your book is, and it ought to be the best of the best sellers if books sold on a basis of their goodness and you ought to get one of the big prizes again if they give them rightly; and if you get none of these things it will be because people are dopes, which is just possible.”
Gellhorn Hemingway was a war correspondent and, compared to Nelson, a veteran in the literary world. She had reported from Spain during the Civil War, and had four books to her credit. She was also married to Ernest Hemingway, and Nelson—who had admired Hemingway’s work for years—must have swooned when he reached the end of her letter and read, “Ernest has been spreading your book around Cuba, and you have many devoted readers here.”
Gellhorn Hemingway wrote a letter to Edward Aswell at Harper’s as well, and sent him a promotional quote for the book that read, “Never Come Morning hasn’t a dull or a useless sentence in it. Nelson Algren has done something wonderfully exciting to words, so that they look and sound new.”
Aswell ordered a second printing of Morning on the basis of Gellhorn Hemingway’s support, but by the time the book went to press, Nelson was living in East St. Louis, paying dues to the Boilermakers & Helpers, Local 363, and trying to master the acetylene torch.
* Wright never said it in so many words, but I interpret this gift as a thank you. Native Son had been the title of Somebody in Boots until Nelson’s publisher objected. Wright remembered the original title, though, and asked Nelson if he could use it. Nelson agreed.
† I have given the New Anvil short shrift—I know it, and regret it. In brief: The magazine was notable for remaining independent when most small magazines were being absorbed into college English departments. It was also the first nationally distributed magazine to publish two important black writers—Margaret Walker and Frank Yerby. Nelson and Conroy rented office space for the magazine from the Institute for Mortuary Research, and they sent rejection slips on institute letterhead. Jack Conroy claimed that he sent one to a young J.D. Salinger, and that Salinger wrote back to say he found the experience discomfiting.
‡ Morris actually married the woman he had been engaged to when he met Bernice.
§ Johnny Paychek was the name of a real Polish fighter from Chicago, so Nelson had to change it. He was worried about getting beaten up, and Aswell was worried about being sued.
¶ Titles were never Nelson’s strength. White Hope is not bad, but his other suggestions were cringeworthy. He wanted to call the book either The Elephants’ Graveyard or Below the Belt for a long time. He also suggested The Lost and the Lonely and He Shoulda Stood in Bed.
“Do It the Hard Way”
(October 1942–July 16, 1943)
The military had a hard time finding soldiers at the beginning of the war. It drafted millions of people and gave them medical exams, and on the basis of those exams, millions had to be rejected—twenty percent had “mental disease,” while ten percent had syphilis. Once it did find men, the military had a hard time keeping them. They often entered the service healthy, had sex on leave, and then developed ulcerated sores on their way back to the front lines. Before penicillin came into vogue, venereal disease was hell—the cure was arsenic, and men receiving treatment couldn’t fight.
The army declared syphilis “military saboteur number one” and launched a major prevention campaign. Officers warned soldiers to avoid “victory girls” and “good-time Charlottes” when they were on leave. The Works Progress Administration created posters to raise awareness—SHE MAY LOOK CLEAN—BUT, one cautioned, while another advised, FOOL THE AXIS—USE PROPHYLAXIS—and major cities started initiatives designed to stop its spread. In Chicago, that job fell to the Health Department.
When Nelson returned to the city after working in East St. Louis for the summer, Jack Conroy told him that the newly formed Venereal Disease Control Project was hiring. Conroy had been laid off when the Writers’ Project shut down a few weeks earlier, and afterward he became an investigator for the Health Department. Nelson applied for the same position, and he was hired as well.
Nelson and Conroy worked out of 56 West Hubbard Street, near the Chicago River. People visited their office to be tested for syphilis and gonorrhea, and if their tests came back positive, Nelson and Conroy asked for the names of their sexual partners, made a list of those names, and then tracked down every person on it and delivered the bad news. “You have been exposed to an infectious disease,” they said.
Leads were often slim, so the job involved a lot of detective work. Sometimes, Nelson and Conroy had nothing to go on but a description and a favorite saloon, and it took them weeks to find their target. They visited boardinghouses and questioned desk clerks, stood around on street corners, interrogated bartenders, and then chased the tips they collected wherever they led.
Responses to their arrival varied. Some people pretended they weren’t home; others ran, and a few became violent. A pimp came after Conroy once with a knife, and a woman swung a baseball bat at them. Many were unsurprised. “I was waitin’ to see how she come out,” a mechanic named Anton told Nelson with philosophical calm. Denial was common. “Not sick,” one woman insisted. “When I feel weak, I go to doctor. Health Department not care when I on relief and baby sick, they not come then, why come now?”
Conroy hated the job, but Nelson loved it. “He was very sympathetic,” Conroy remembered. He would sit and talk to people if they were interested, and wouldn’t report them to the Health Department if they pleaded.
On occasion, pleasant news from the publishing world interrupted the monotony of infectious disease. The New Republic named Never Come Morning one of the fifteen best works of fiction published in 1942—along with books by Steinbeck and Faulkner—“Biceps,” a selection from the novel, was adapted for the radio and included in the Best American Short Stories collection, and the Chicago Fiction Guild invited Nelson to deliver a speech at the Hamilton Hotel.
Then, in March, the magazine The Writer published an essay Nelson wrote. It had commissioned the piece six months earlier with the request that he write something about naturalistic fiction, and because it was a loosely defined assignment, he went beyond his mandate.
Nelson had been asking himself what purpose literature serves ever since Boots failed and proletarian writing faded. Why do people write? he asked. Why should they? Trying to answer those questions was one of the more enduring projects of his life, and for the next three decades he circled back to them periodically and updated his response—reiterating some points, adapting his ideas, and shifting the emphasis of his arguments. The essay he submitted to The Writer was the first draft of his answer. He called the piece “Do It the Hard Way,” and in it he argues that literature is a social institution, not an academic or artistic one.
No tool at a writer’s disposal—not symbolism, allusion, or motif—has any value outside the context of the broader world, Nelson said, and when authors use them in service of inconsequential ideas, their work is destined for irrelevance. “Their books—and we see them on the best seller lists every day—are artful dodges,” he wrote, “tours de force which say nothing gracefully, or nothing lyrically, or nothing nostalgically, or—best of all—nothing mystically. But still: nothing. Like eating cotton candy—a mouthful of the stuff and wisp—nothing left but a sweetish taste and a clinging coat on the tongue.”
Work that lasts grows out of experience, Nelson argued—but not necessarily the writer’s own. He rejected the idea of writing in service of a political movement, and counseled authors to describe the world without making any concession for the way they would like things to be. “Feel” your way into a story, he wrote; don’t “regard it from the sidelines by some formal outline.” The trick is simply to be in touch with the w
orld, Nelson said. “All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first hand.”
The literary vision Nelson describes in his essay is transgressive, but also profoundly democratic and optimistic. Writers are obliged to confront society with evidence of its shortcomings, he argues, but they can do so and still find a large audience. “There isn’t a solid publisher going who won’t take a book dealing with any strata of any society so long as it is a true book,” he says. “The truth still holds that great rewards do, at last, come to the boldest; to those who permit neither avarice nor shame to modify what they truly feel and truly know.”
Fatefully, Nelson believed it was possible for a writer to be famous, well paid, and uncompromising all at once.
In the spring, Amanda reentered Nelson’s life. Russ Finch had recently been drafted and sent overseas, and when Nelson heard Amanda was living alone again, he visited her apartment. They had sex that day, and afterward they began seeing each other casually.
A few weeks after Nelson and Amanda reconnected, Nelson was jumped by two men who tore his coat and stole six dollars from him. The assault took place after midnight, but Nelson went to Amanda’s apartment immediately to tell her about it. His hair was askew when he arrived, and his eyes were wild. The police had given him a card that guaranteed him admission to show-ups at the detective division when he reported the crime, and that meant he would be able to see who was arrested each week and hear the police question them. The possibilities excited him, and he wanted to tell Amanda about his good fortune immediately. She let him in that morning, and soon afterward she moved into his apartment.
Amanda was working as an administrator for a labor law firm at the time, and her days were long—twelve hours in a shift, sometimes more. She wasn’t home much, but Nelson doted on her when she was. He made coffee, oatmeal, and poached eggs every morning, saw her to the door, and did the dishes before she returned. Amanda thought he was making a point—as if to say, “Now I can give you the life you wanted when we first met.” “He had an awful lot of guilt in relation to me,” she said.
The war dictated Chicago’s rhythm that year. Gas, butter, coffee, beans, juice, sugar, and oil were all being rationed. Cars were puttering along at thirty-five miles per hour to extend the life of their tires, and people were being advised to eat lima beans because there wasn’t enough meat to go around. But Nelson and Amanda floated above the strife in a lovers’ bliss. They visited the racetrack and bet horses. They watched the police show-ups at 1121 South State Street and held hands while the chief detective questioned that week’s batch of suspects. Amanda bought her clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue, and when Nelson received a royalty check from Harper’s, he used the money to buy Amanda a honeydew melon—a rare luxury at the time.
The environment in Nelson’s apartment had been free and easy since he returned from East St. Louis. He was working on a few short stories—one set in a Chicago vagabond hotel, one in a west Texas jail, another about a boxer—but he didn’t have a big project in mind, so he let people drop by to play cards, scrounge a meal, or gossip. After Amanda moved in, though, Nelson began chiding his guests. Watch your language around her, he said. “She’s a nice girl.”
People soon stopped visiting, and when that happened, Nelson asked Amanda to move out so he could have the apartment to himself again. He didn’t want to break up, but didn’t communicate that well, and his request hurt her feelings.
Amanda didn’t protest or start a fight though. Instead, she approached her boss and requested a transfer to the firm’s San Francisco office. She bought a one-way train ticket when it was approved, and then she went home and told Nelson she was leaving.
Nelson tried to convince her to stay in Chicago, but couldn’t. He asked if he could escort her to Union Station instead, but she refused, so they said their goodbyes in the West Evergreen Avenue apartment. He gave her a copy of Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, as a parting gift, and then she walked through the front door and down the high front steps.
Six years and eleven months had passed since Nelson met Amanda, and though he knew they had no business being married, he had a hard time letting go of her. After she left, he rambled through the apartment and found a Kontowicz coffee-sugar ration book in the upper right-hand dresser drawer, along with a stack of recipes and a picture of Amanda at her high school graduation. He went to the track later, and bet on the horses she would have bet on, and then he wrote to her. “The fact of your being gone away left me feeling hollow and—I might as well admit it—a little afraid. Of what I don’t know. Just like all of a sudden the world had gotten too big and too dark. . . .
“I still feel, at heart, that from where you’re sitting, going to S.F. is a hundred to one chance that you’ll eventually find more happiness than with me. By 100 to 1 I guess I meant 1 to 100. I mean the odds are all in your favor. . . . And yet it feels tough, very tough.”
The months after Amanda left were a lonely and anxious time for Nelson. The war was turning Chicago into a city of widows and orphans, most of his friends were overseas or about to leave, and he suspected his draft number would be called soon. His fate was in the hands of generals whose armies were slaughtering their way across continents he had never visited, but there was nothing he could do but wait, and worry. He went to work and tried to write. He checked the mail for letters bearing government seals and scanned the papers for news from the front. YANK BOMBERS BATTER THREE JAP WARSHIPS, the Tribune announced. M’ARTHUR AIRFORCE POUNDS MUNDA, KAHILI, the paper gloated, and on July 15 it ran a margin-to-margin headline that read CAPTURE 12,000 IN SICILY!
The following day, Nelson’s induction form arrived in the mail. It said he was going to be an army man.
The Anonymous Man
(July 17, 1943–November 26, 1945)
A very fit Nelson posing for Amanda at Camp Maxey in 1944. Photo by Amanda Algren, courtesy of Rick Kinsinger
The army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was organized chaos under open skies when Nelson arrived. Fog rolled between loblolly pines and single-story barracks in the mornings, and when buglers blasted reveille, one hundred thousand men wiped sleep from their eyes and stood at attention while American flags rose through the mist. During the day, the air was dense and clingy. Soldiers saluted in limp uniforms, and the snare roll of semiautomatic rifle fire buzzed in the background. Mortars exploded and infantrymen drifted toward sandy soil on parachutes made from the nylon of recycled stockings.
The army transformed Nelson into Private Abraham, serial number 36679611, gave him a cot, and assigned him to an artillery battalion where he became one small piece of a finely tuned machine.
Nelson’s unit woke before dawn each day and did calisthenics. Then they boxed, marched through the scrub pine forest, rolled logs to build strength, and practiced shooting. They visited the rifle range, tucked the stocks of their M-1 carbines into the fleshy spot beneath their clavicles, and pulled their triggers—over and over—and they fired four-inch shells through the seven-foot barrels of their 105-millimeter howitzers and sent them flying for seven miles. Then, at night, they stood sentry beneath dark, insomniac skies.
Jack Conroy sent Nelson news from Chicago and the Fallonites when there was news to deliver, and Nelson reciprocated with the details of an infantryman’s routines. “[T]hey play for keeps down here,” he wrote. “I don’t know yet whether it’s killing or curing me—sometimes it feels like the one and sometimes like the other.”
Martha Gellhorn Hemingway wrote to Nelson as well, and so did Geraldine Brooks from Poetry magazine. Nelson told them both there was nothing to tell—his life was repetition, the base was his world. “We put in so much time, with so little let-up that we don’t get a chance to think or wonder about the war itself at all,” he wrote. “I haven’t seen a newspaper for a week and probably wouldn’t bother reading it if I did.”
Nelson did not consider himself a brave man, physically, but he became
eager to get overseas after the army taught him to fight. The war was the defining event of his generation, so he wanted to see it firsthand, and as his training dragged on, his eagerness transformed into anxiety. The war seemed to be winding down, and he feared it would end before he shipped out. While he was stuck firing .30 bullets at paper targets in North Carolina, the Allies were bombing Berlin, and the Italian navy was dieseling toward Malta to surrender.
Nelson’s anxiety continued to build until his unit received its orders in December, and then disappointment and confusion replaced it. They were being sent to the front, but he was going to Texas.
The army reassigned Nelson to the 758th Field Artillery Battalion and ordered him to report to Camp Maxey, a small military base on the Gulf Coastal Plain, just north of Paris, Texas, that had a Norman Rockwell feel. There was a movie theater on site, a barbershop, a whitewashed guest house overlooking a lake, and a faux German town emblazoned with swastikas where soldiers practiced sweeping streets and kicking down doors.
Nelson tried to leave Camp Maxey just after he arrived. He asked the army to send him to the front, but they denied his request. He tried again, and when they rejected him a second time, he changed tactics. He requested a transfer to a medical unit because medics were in high demand overseas, and when that request was denied, he began making a joke of his zeal. “Not that I’m feeling particularly sanguine these days,” he wrote to a friend, “it’s just that the endless tedium of doing right face and left face for six months could make anyone prefer to take his chances in action.”
Nelson puzzled over the riddle of his denials. Three out of every four US soldiers were being sent overseas that year, but not him—not even when he volunteered; not even when he volunteered twice; not even when he offered to accept a less glamorous position. Eventually, he developed a theory: He thought he was being denied the chance to fight because he was Jewish. The man who ran Camp Maxey was a notorious anti-Semite named Buell Smith, and in the army, Nelson was Private Abraham, not Nelson Algren. He hadn’t used his legal name in a decade, and when he convinced himself it was keeping him out of the war, he petitioned to have it changed.
