by Colin Asher
But it was nothing to McCormick. “Well, how about sixty dollars for two years,” he countered.
Nelson liked that idea very much, and he contacted Elizabeth Ingersoll, the literary agent he had recently hired, and asked her to see if Harper & Brothers could match McCormick’s offer. She spoke to Edward Aswell a few days later and pressed him for a large advance, but he couldn’t come up with it. He offered Nelson a bit more than half of what Doubleday had, and one year to write, not two. But he included a personal appeal as well, and the promise of his full attention. “I believe in you as a writer,” he wrote, “and am willing to give you my time without limit—i.e. to help you in every way an editor can.”
It was a persuasive entreaty, but Nelson had run out of money and time while writing his first two books, and didn’t want to repeat that mistake. There was prestige in working with Aswell, but the extra year McCormick promised was worth more, so he signed with Doubleday.
The terms of Nelson’s contract were finalized by late winter, and afterward he went to work revising and expanding his collection of stories. He did little else for the next five months.
Nelson had published eighteen stories since he began writing seriously in 1935, but he selected only seven of them for his collection—his five most recent pieces, and two of the earliest. He also chose an unpublished long short story called “Design for Departure” that he had spent months struggling with while writing Never Come Morning, a pair of stories derived from material he gathered while spending time with the Fallonites, and several unpublished pieces set in Chicago and the South.
Then he turned his attention to the war, and wrote three new stories that offered an alternative to the cliché about virtuous conquering heroes that was being pushed by the government and the press.
“That’s the Way It’s Always Been” is the account of a soldier serving in a medical unit in Europe run by a corps of unscrupulous officers and a spineless colonel who regularly proclaims his valor. “I get frightened sometimes,” he says, “that the war might end before we really get in the thick of it.”
“The Heroes” is the story of two army buddies serving in Germany. One is a “Paleface.” The other is part Mexican and part Native American, but pretends to be full-blooded Osage when he wants to give his subordinates a hard time. They both drink heavily on base, sneak out at night, and rankle at military authority. “Our war was with the second lieutenants, the MPs, and the cooks,” the Paleface says.
The best of the three is the story of a black soldier named Isaac Newton Bailey who has gone AWOL in Marseille. He lives with an Algerian woman, and spends his days hiding from the military police in her apartment. He leaves only when they run out of money or food and is forced to steal surplus, or buy goods at the PX that are easy to resell.
One night, Bailey goes out for supplies and sees some GIs mocking an elderly French drunk who’s clowning for beer. Then he sees a second group harassing a prostitute, “giving her the come-on and then telling her to scram, bum, till, like an obedient dog that comes when called and runs when it’s kicked at, the girl didn’t know whether she was being accepted or rejected.”
I’ll “never feel homesick for Memphis again,” Bailey thinks then. He doesn’t love France, but that night, he realizes he isn’t interested in returning home either. His race will restrict his potential in America, and after serving in the military, he’s unwilling to pander or feign subservience. “He couldn’t play an instrument,” Nelson wrote, “he never clowned, and making berths for the Pullman Company had the same warm appeal for him as shining shoes.”
Nelson finished assembling his collection in July, gave it the title So Help Me, and mailed it to New York City. McCormick accepted the manuscript, but rejected the title. The two men were at loggerheads until Nelson suggested calling his book The Neon Wilderness. McCormick agreed, enthusiastically, and Doubleday set the release date for January 1947.†
Mary Guggenheim arrived last. She knocked on Nelson’s door a few days after he submitted his manuscript, and he invited her inside. They were acquaintances, but not quite friends.
Guggenheim was twenty-eight years old—clever, dark-haired, taut and poised the way dancers train themselves to be, and as much a creature of the world as Nelson was a hometown boy. She was born in Missouri, but spent a good part of her childhood in Switzerland. She returned to the Midwest as a teenager and began hanging around bars in East St. Louis, where she befriended Bud Fallon, Russell Finch, and Wallie Wharton.
She graduated from the University of Chicago when she was only eighteen, and she remained in the city to study dance. She moved to Los Angeles to study more, and then joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in New York City. She spoke French fluently, so when her dance company folded, the Office of War Information hired her as a translator, and for the next several years she was in regular contact with European intellectuals as they passed through the States. She knew the French poet André Breton, and a stateless author named Jean Malaquais, whom Nelson revered.‡
Nelson and Guggenheim met when he was writing Never Come Morning, but they were never close. He was “such a solitary person,” she said about him then. “I just barely noticed him.” Nelson wrote to Guggenheim when he entered the service, though, and she wrote back. They corresponded for two years, so when she visited Chicago after the war, she went to see him.
Nelson spent two days squiring Guggenheim around. He guided her through his neighborhood, and brought her to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox. It was the first summer after the war, and the city felt loose and liberated. He took her to the movies and the track. They bet on horses together, and when it was time for her to return home, he escorted her to Union Station.
Guggenheim’s train pulled away without event, but before it traveled far, she had a realization. “It just hit me,” she said, “just all of a sudden, that I was wildly in love with him.”
Guggenheim wrote to Nelson when she reached New York, and for the next several months, they were in touch regularly. They didn’t sleep together during her visit, but the letters they exchanged afterward are intimate and flirtatious. They traded pictures at her request, and she sent him sports columns clipped from New York papers. He sent baseball cards and bawdy jokes in return, and teased her for being close to the New York literary set.
“Did I ever tell you what the cornered mouse cried out, in his last moments, as the cat pounced on him? ‘Lord!’ the little fellow moaned, ‘this pussy’s killin’ me.’ ”
“Give my regards to [Philip] Rahv,” he wrote. “When I read his criticism I’m Rahvished.”
By the fall, Nelson knew how his novel should begin. Its protagonist would be a veteran who makes his living dealing cards, and the book would be set in the Near Northwest Side. The lead character would be based on his army buddy—the one who never let anyone else touch the dice because he had a “golden arm”—and there would be a constellation of characters in orbit around him to give the book depth and add a tragic-comic touch. “I’d like to make it lighter, at least in spots,” than my last novel, he told Amanda.
The project was ambitious, and demanding. Nelson haunted the watering holes in his neighborhood the way he had while researching Never Come Morning, but he also began visiting the Near North Side and West Madison Street—Chicago’s skid row. There were nickel beer joints there, cage hotels where the walls of each room were sheets and the ceilings were chicken wire, and flophouses where people paid to sleep under tables. He made friends with strangers in derelict bars and all-night cafeterias, and then walked them back to their rooms and listened to their stories.
Then he went home and tried to turn his notes into identifiable characters and a sustained narrative. It wasn’t an efficient process. He spent hours drafting scenes, and then tore them up and tried again. He wrote dialogue that didn’t fit into his story, set it aside, and prayed he would find a use for it later. And when he ran low on ideas, he watched the column of steam rising from the yeast factory’s chimney in the dista
nce, clicked on his AM radio for distraction, or wrote to Mary Guggenheim to vent his frustrations.
“[I]f you think la vie ici is any less dull than la vie la, it aint,” he told her. “I’ve even abandoned the police lineups: when you begin wishing they’d throw the whole damn lot of them into the bucket for 99 years so they’d quit bothering people it’s time to rest for a while.”
Guggenheim’s response was light and teasing. She wrote to say that Jean Malaquais had been at her apartment for dinner—because she knew Nelson would be impressed—and needled him about his return to print. One of the stories he wrote for The Neon Wilderness appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, and she assumed he would be embarrassed that his work had been published in a glossy magazine. But she was wrong. It had been years since Nelson thought of himself as a radical writer. He was aiming for mainstream recognition now, and the broadest audience he could attract without compromising his work.
“Far from being ashamed of being published in ‘that rag,’ ” he told Guggenheim, “I’ve been waiting so long simply to be had, at the usual fee, in my little barren room above the traffic’s roar, that I often wonder whether my agent is still procuring in earnest below: I still fear that she’s a little choosey [sic] and doesn’t solicit everybody with a buck to spend and an hour to kill. I keep hollering down: ‘Anybody, honey, anybody;’ but she doesn’t seem to hear.”
Guggenheim flew to Chicago after she received that letter and spent seven days at the Wabansia Avenue flat. She was an elegant woman, and Nelson was proud to be seen with her. He planned their itinerary weeks in advance, and when she arrived, he brought her to Lawrence Avenue to meet Goldie. They went out to dinner and then dessert, and afterward they became lovers. “He was very gallant,” she said.
When Guggenheim went home at the end of the week, she was determined to return to Chicago and pursue a relationship with Nelson—an ambition he did not encourage.
The Neon Wilderness was published with little fanfare in January. Doubleday printed only three thousand copies, and the book’s release party was held in a tiny bookshop called Seven Stairs that attracted customers by keeping salami, coffee, and apples on hand.
Reviews were positive, but sparse. The Tribune praised Nelson for presenting his characters without the distortion of an ideological lens. “A writer of sociological slant would make specimens of them,” their reviewer claimed. “A colorist would emphasize their depravity. . . . But Algren sees them as they are, the product of their birth and environment, warped by ‘a world they never made.’ ” The Saturday Review said “the staccato precision” of Nelson’s “writing must be read, remembered, and admired.” And the Times praised him for his empathy. He is “determined that we should . . . see, as he sees, the personal delinquency of his characters dissolve within the greater, more terrible delinquency of our synthetic society.”
The muted response to the publication of The Neon Wilderness reflects the book’s tone and sensibility. The collection contains twenty-four stories, and as a rule, they are quieter than Nelson’s earlier work—funnier, more meditative. Some are just monologues. A few are character studies. Others are minor-key laments that only reveal themselves completely after repeated readings. The women in the book, in particular, are haunting characters.
In “Depend on Aunt Elly,” the protagonist is arrested on a prostitution charge after sleeping with a soldier. Her name is Sissy, and she began picking up tricks after the defense contractor she worked for closed down. She had been planning to leave the business when she could afford to, but after her arrest, a judge sentences her to prison time and forecloses all of her other options. She earns a furlough by agreeing to make regular payments to the court that convicted her, and then she resumes picking up johns because she can’t earn enough to fulfill her obligations any other way.
The arrangement is exploitative, and eventually she tries to run from her obligations to the court by marrying and leaving the town she had been living in. But the law tracks her down.
“Your best bet is to go back ’n do your time,” her husband counsels. “We’ll start all over when you get out.”
“It’ll be too late then, Baby,” she replies. “You ain’t got three good years left in you. ’N neither have I.”
“It’s too late awready,” he concedes.
Another piece from the collection, “Is Your Name Joe?” is the story of an unnamed woman who unburdens herself to a stranger she calls Specs. She married a man named Joe once, she explains, and he was a religious fanatic who punched her in the face. She began seeing another Joe afterward, and he “talked so smart I’d think whatever I could say’d be all wrong,” she says. That Joe dropped her after a few months, and now she feels lost. “I hate t’ see the spring ’n summer come so bad,” she says. “I just don’t seem so good as other people any more.”
The Neon Wilderness’s reception was underwhelming, but over time its renown and influence grew. Doubleday printed a second edition a year after its release, and many more followed. When Nelson became famous a short while later, people felt he had appeared out of nowhere. They sought out his early books to understand what he was trying to achieve, and as often as not, they found their answer in The Neon Wilderness. The skill of its prose seemed more pronounced with each passing year because the stories held up so well, and later generations celebrated it for documenting a portion of postwar America everyone else had ignored.
Algren can “suggest the whole contour of a human life in a few terse pages,” the critic Maxwell Geismar wrote in 1958. This is the book that secured Algren’s reputation as “one of the few literary originals of his time,” Tom Carson wrote in 1986. So people kept buying. The Neon Wilderness has been through at least seven editions and twelve printings since its release. It sold more than a half million copies in paperback, and it remains in print today.
* Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway had divorced by this time, and she had reverted to her given name.
† This book’s title, Nelson’s name, and the title of each story, appeared in lower case letters when it was published—as in the neon wilderness. I would have reproduced the collection’s title and story titles here the way they appeared in the first edition, but Nelson later allowed it to be reprinted with standard capitalization, and I followed his lead to prevent confusion.
‡ Nelson found a copy of Malaquais’s second book, War Diary, in the library at Camp Maxey and stole it. He talked about it for years afterward, and claimed it was one of the few honest books written about World War II. (It discusses Malaquais’s service in 1939 and ’40—the very beginning of the war.)
A Boy from the Provinces
(February 21–September 23, 1947)
Nelson boarded the El on a Friday evening and rode it toward the Loop—beneath Milwaukee Avenue, through the narrow tunnel under the Chicago River, and then south under State Street. He emerged at Monroe station and began walking east toward the Palmer House—a swank hotel where uniformed porters greeted soigné tourists beneath a gilded awning.
Nelson entered the Palmer House lobby and looked around. The floors were covered with thick carpet woven in intricate geometric designs. The walls were marble, and the ceiling was a mosaic of gold, alabaster, and mint-green tile. Eventually, he spotted the entrance to a cocktail lounge called Le Petit Café and sat at an empty table.
An hour earlier, he had been cooking himself dinner when his phone rang. He answered, heard a heavily accented voice he didn’t recognize, and hung up. He did the same when it rang again. When he picked it up the third time, he hollered, “Wrong number!” He was angry by the fourth ring, but didn’t yell into the mouthpiece because he heard an operator speaking.
“Please be patient and stay on the line for a moment,” she said.
A woman’s voice came through the earpiece then. She said she was visiting Chicago, and asked if he would like to meet. She was speaking broken English with a French accent, and he was about to decline when she mentioned Richard Wright and Mary Gugge
nheim.
“Where are you at?” he asked then. “I’ll come down.”
“Leetle café,” she said. “Palmer House.”
Nelson spotted the woman a few minutes after he entered the lounge. She was pale and trim, about his age. A white coat hung on her shoulders; a green scarf encircled her neck. Her dark hair was pulled up on top of her head, and she was walking in a loop between the café and the lobby—in and out of the bar’s dim light and the warm glow cast by the chandeliers in the main room—and clutching a copy of Partisan Review.
Nelson watched the woman pace, and tried to decide whether or not to introduce himself. She had said her name was Simone de Beauvoir when they spoke on the phone, but that meant little to Nelson. He had read her name only once, in a letter from Mary Guggenheim. A well-regarded French philosopher visited my apartment, Guggenheim had said, and she has a fascinating relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre—they are collaborators, and partners, but both carry on affairs with other people as well.
Nelson made a joke of Guggenheim’s enthusiasm when he replied, the way he usually did. “That Simone Boudoir sounds real chi-chi,” he wrote, “and I’m sure J.-P. Sartre, whoever he may be, is real lucky. I bet she says, J-P honey, bite my little titties. And J-P, the hog, chews her clean tits off.” But now that the woman in question was a few feet away, his attitude changed. She wasn’t just an intellectual making a reputation for herself on the dinner party circuit in New York City, she was also a bundle of energy pacing the floor of a Chicago hotel like a predator.
Nelson finally decided to say hello, and then he invited Beauvoir to join him in the café and bought her a drink. They faced each other across a small table and tried to carry on a conversation, but it was no easy task.
The first problem was language. Nelson’s French was limited to the slang he picked up after the armistice, and he spoke English with a Chicago drawl that was almost indecipherable to Beauvoir. His sentences flowed with a rhythm like a twelve-bar blues, and he sprinkled them with idiomatic phrases that even native speakers found challenging. The lounge was quiet, and they were sitting close together, but she could only understand half of what he said.
