Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Jack and his roommates were the core of a loosely defined group Nelson attached himself to that year, but there were others too. One was a pensive man named Bill Hackett who made his living dealing cards; another bought and sold lost dogs. Then there was Richard Majewski, a thief who had done a stretch in Cook County Jail in 1940 and was destined to return in ’49. He looked up to Nelson and wanted to be a writer himself, but once he got on Nelson’s bad side by claiming Native Son didn’t deserve all the praise it received. Nelson laid into him for that, and Majewski backed off. “I consider myself properly squelched (or is it reprimanded?),” he wrote. You “made me read it again by making me doubt my own perceptiveness.”

  Paula Bays was another.# She was maybe twenty-seven years old and physically frail. Her skin was dull and gray and her long, straight hair was usually unwashed, but she had a forceful personality and a gift for storytelling that Nelson found beguiling. She had been supporting herself and her husband, John, by turning tricks since she left the Ohio farm she grew up on, but she desperately wanted to find another way to live.

  There was usually a record spinning on the turntable in Jack’s apartment, maybe a spare can of beans on the shelf, and Nelson—drinking the beers he brought with him, sitting quietly, observing.

  Some of the people who visited the apartment worked in the bars below. A few were thieves. Others had no craft at all—lies, innuendo, myth-making and violence were their trades. They came to escape the elements, hide from the police, or sleep, and when they arrived, they plotted and fought with each other, while Nelson listened and watched. That’s how I wrote my novel, he said later. I put myself in the middle of scenes “in which human beings were involved in conflict.” Then I simply “recorded my own reactions and tried to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and the terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people had been forced into.”

  Days were for writing. Nelson worked at a desk that he had placed in his bedroom, by a window overlooking the Lucky Star saloon. He kept his phone in a drawer with a blanket wrapped around it, drank whiskey and soda, and ignored his friends. “I even got rid of [Bud] Fallon,” he told Amanda, “which was a triumph of skill, wit, daring, and finesse. Once in a while Jack [Conroy] calls up, but keeps his distance.”

  The novel advanced steadily that summer, but not quickly. Nelson had given his protagonist the name Frankie Machine by then and decided that he would die before the end of the book, but he couldn’t decide why or how Frankie would meet his end—so he began rewriting his entire manuscript. “I’m reworking the first couple hundred pages on the assumption that, with that much clarified, I’ll be better able to visualize the last hundred or two,” he told McCormick.

  Beauvoir was four thousand miles away, but when the sun was up, she was Nelson’s primary human contact. He sent her long letters regularly, and she often sent two in return. Their initial meeting had been fueled by passion, but that summer, their relationship deepened and took on new dimensions through their correspondence.

  Nelson sent Beauvoir character sketches based on the people he had been meeting on West Madison Street, and asked her opinion of the titles he was considering. I might call the book Descent to the Edge of the Night, he wrote, or High Yellow and the Dealer. The Dead the Drunk and the Dying might be better. She sent encouragement in return, and told him to work hard while they were apart. “Make it good,” she said.**

  Beauvoir wrote to Nelson about her work as well. She said she was going to put aside “the book about women” so she could write an account of her tour across America. She called it a “potboiler” when she started it, but after the first section was complete, she began to take the travelogue more seriously.†† The greatest challenge presented by the project was the need to balance the relative merits of truth and tact. She wanted to mention Richard Wright in her book, but couldn’t be honest about her impression of his character. He had a paternalistic attitude toward his wife, but she couldn’t say that and remain his friend. Nelson was a bigger problem. She didn’t want to expose their relationship, but couldn’t write about Chicago without writing about him. “I have to find a way of saying the truth without saying it,” she wrote.

  They discussed literature, too, and encouraged each other to broaden their interests. Nelson sent Beauvoir copies of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Kuprin’s Yama, and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma—a landmark study of American race relations that later influenced Beauvoir’s writing. She sent him a copy of her second novel, Le Sang des autres,‡‡ even though he couldn’t read it, and told him to buy Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s No Exit because they had been translated into English.

  But more than anything else, they wrote about love. Beauvoir’s letters are filled with professions of longing. I looked at pictures of us and said tender, loving things, she said. “I can feel my love for you in my fingers when I write.” She called him “my dearest husband,” but she made it clear her loyalties were divided. She told him about traveling with Sartre, and said: “I could never give everything to you.”

  Nelson was not as circumspect. He said he hoped Beauvoir would stay in Chicago permanently when she visited next. He professed his love, too, and in July he said he wanted to marry her.

  She turned him down, but did so gently, and afterward they negotiated an arrangement that accommodated each of their needs. They agreed to visit each other as often as possible, and to work furiously during their separations. When she was in Chicago, they would act like a married couple, and there would be no tears or drama when she left. Then he would visit Paris, and they would pick up where they left off. Monogamy was not required when they were apart.

  Beauvoir was relieved when she and Nelson decided to continue their relationship, but she was struggling in other ways. Her life in Paris was unsatisfying and itinerant. She split her time between two different hotel rooms, she was drinking too much, and though she thought about her work constantly, she was barely writing. Some of her trouble could be attributed to missing Nelson, but Sartre deserved blame as well. When they were both in Paris, she was his adjunct—welcome to second his ideas, but rarely acknowledged as an important figure independent of him. She had tolerated that imbalance for years, but after she became involved with Nelson, the arrangement began to feel untenable.

  She decided to get away from Paris to clear her head, and bought a ticket to Chicago. Then she told Nelson to expect her. They decided to keep her visit a secret so no one would intrude on their romance, and they began planning. He offered her a tour of the county jail and a trip to the beach, and she requested time at the stockyards and the Art Institute of Chicago.

  I’ll teach you some French, she said, and we’ll drink whiskey, but most of all, “it is Nelson-seeing I want.”

  Beauvoir’s trip began with a bad omen. Her flight was delayed, and then, after four days of waiting, the plane that was supposed to carry her across the Atlantic fell apart. It lifted off without incident, but then lurched sickeningly while in flight when an engine failed. The plane made an emergency landing for repairs, and when it made its second attempt to cross the ocean, a tire exploded during a refueling stop and caused another delay.

  Beauvoir had requested that Nelson wait for her at his apartment because the airport was too impersonal, so he spent nearly a week looking for her through the window. He had a bottle of Southern Comfort on hand because she preferred it, and stacks of Time magazine and Chicago’s daily papers because she asked him to collect research material for her travelogue.

  Beauvoir was bruised and tired when she finally arrived, but she knew returning had been the right decision when she saw Nelson.

  They drank, she rested, and then they saw the city. They visited the Near North Side so that she could meet some of the 26-girls Nelson had befriended. They attended police lineups and watched suspects take their place beneath glaring lights and announce, I live on “West Madison.” They met up with Willard Motley to talk about
his novel Knock on Any Door, ate dinner in a restaurant where mounted heads stared at them from the walls, and returned to the bars they drank in the night they met. They said hello to the bartender who studied French literature, toured the county jail, visited a psychiatric hospital, and drank Chianti in Little Italy.

  But mostly, they stayed in the apartment Nelson had begun referring to as Rue Wabansia, ate rum cake, and acted out a fantasy. She read his manuscript, and the stack of American books he pushed on her—Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. He listened to her ideas about America, and told her to feel confident about her book because they were valid and insightful. The miles separating her from Paris provided the distance she needed to think about her work objectively, and she began to make plans for her book about women.

  And they fell more deeply in love. They felt satisfied intellectually when they were together—but also physically and emotionally. It was a new experience for each of them. Beauvoir and Sartre had never had a passionate relationship, and Nelson and Amanda had always lived more like roommates than lovers. But Nelson and Beauvoir fell into each other’s arms regularly, and danced across the chipped linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor. They made love on the buckled mattress whenever the notion struck them, and Beauvoir regularly caught Nelson staring at her with an uninhibited grin.

  Nelson asked Beauvoir to remain in Chicago, again, and she turned him down, again, so they settled for fantasizing about traveling together in the spring. She flew back to Paris, and for the next eight months, they lived for the promise of the time they would spend together the following year, and worked tirelessly to earn their reward.

  * Readers beware: My account of this night differs from all other accounts. Beauvoir wrote about it in America Day by Day and After the War: Force of Circumstance, Vol. 1, but neither of those accounts is accurate. She admits in her autobiography, for instance, that she conflated two trips to Chicago when she wrote about them in America Day by Day. Nelson was also interviewed about this visit, and he intentionally obscured several points. To create this account, I gathered every version I could find, checked them against the archival record—correspondence, interview material, and pictures taken on Madison Street during the period in question—and pared away all contradictory details. Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beauvoir was also helpful.

  † This project eventually became The Second Sex—the book that made Beauvoir an international figure.

  ‡ Unfortunately, Guggenheim’s assessment has become part of Nelson’s legacy. She told several people he was “schizoid,” and “scared to death of love”—and several of them repeated it. Tellingly, she minimized the fact that her assessment was formed after she tried to move herself into his apartment without asking. The perception among New York writers that Nelson was unstable is more understandable. Until Nelson’s visit with Beauvoir, the longest stretch he spent in the city was in 1935—during the breakdown that followed his suicide attempt.

  § The game was invented in Chicago, and though it never became popular anywhere else, it was ubiquitous in the city for years. In 1941, the Tribune estimated that there were about five thousand 26-girls in the city. The job was popular because it paid better than anything else available to women—even factory work. The term 26-girl is antiquated and sexist, obviously, but that was accepted nomenclature at the time.

  ¶ The name Jack might be a pseudonym—if it is, it’s one of only two in this book. Nelson gave most of the people he met on skid row pseudonyms when he wrote about them or spoke to interviewers. I have been able to discover many of their legal names, but in Jack’s case, I could not. I could not even determine with certainty whether or not the name Jack is a pseudonym.

  # Nelson gave Paula Bays the pseudonym Margo when he wrote about her later, and he gave Bill Hackett the pseudonym Acker. Every other biographical account of Nelson’s life refers to them using those names.

  ** Any discussion of Nelson and Beauvoir’s correspondence is necessarily stilted. Her letters have been made public, but his, which remain in the possession of Beauvoir’s heir, have not been published.

  †† This book was published as America Day by Day.

  ‡‡ This book was later translated, and published as Blood of Others.

  Exile?

  (September 24, 1947–September 21, 1949)

  Bill Hackett, one of the men who inspired the creation of Frankie Machine, the protagonist of The Man with the Golden Arm, dealing Nelson a four of diamonds. Photo by Art Shay, courtesy of the Art Shay Archive

  Something about Jack and his friends perplexed Nelson. He knew how they earned their money, where they lived, and where they spent their time. He had taken notes about the physical condition of the hotels they stayed in, trained himself to follow the cadence of their speech, and made lists of the idioms they used—“whiz us” meant you should visit; “jump off” meant you should leave. But part of their lives remained enigmatic, and a few of their habits baffled him.

  They carried cigar boxes under their arms when they went to the bathroom, and moved at a pace that was about two clicks slower than the straight world. They rarely drank beer, and never seemed to eat. Once, Nelson offered to buy some food for Jack’s apartment, and a young woman accompanied him to the store. He headed for the butcher shop, but she diverted them to a bakery and asked for chocolate rolls instead.

  “Jesus, that’s dessert,” he said. “Don’t you people eat?”

  “Got a sweet tooth,” she replied.

  Then, one night, Nelson noticed Jack standing behind a curtain that was being used to partition a room and pumping his arm—tightening his bicep, then loosening it; tightening, then loosening. Nelson had been drinking, so he stared at the curtain dumbly, wondering what he was seeing, until someone explained: “Jack is having trouble.”

  Nelson pondered the meaning of that image for a long time before he realized Jack had been trying to find a vein that would accept a needle, and that morphine was the enigma at the center of his friends’ lives. They had been discreet about using in his presence at first, but after he discovered their habit, they began visiting his apartment on Wabansia Avenue when they were nearby and wanted to shoot up.*

  Nelson wasn’t interested in getting high himself, but he wasn’t troubled by the fact that his friends did, because opiates had been commonplace for most of his life. Heroin had been sold over the counter until he was five years old, and remained available as a treatment for diarrhea, arthritis, and anxiety until he was a teenager. Dope developed a sinister reputation when it became associated with black jazz musicians after the war, but it was still a niche product. The Chicago police had just begun a citywide campaign to incarcerate users and dealers, but they were averaging fewer than two arrests per day. The Tribune hadn’t published anything about opiate addiction yet, and within the counterculture, casual use was still understood as a way to communicate a nonchalant attitude toward life.†

  But Nelson’s perspective soon changed. It wasn’t long before he realized the drug was the organizing theme of his friends’ lives, not a recreation, and that most of them had a fraught relationship to their addiction.

  Jack was an advocate for his lifestyle. He was “on it,” Nelson said, “but he was for it, too.” The drummer from Arkansas dealt with his addiction the way a journeyman laborer might approach a pile of rubble—it was a challenge he faced with resignation and stoic resolve. But Jack’s wife was a different case. The drug had consumed her personality and she moved through the world as if she were trapped inside a bank of fog. Bill Hackett, the card dealer, was trying to avoid that fate. He was troubled by his addiction, and was constantly devising schemes that would put him in a good position to get clean.

  Paula Bays was also desperate to quit, and believed that doing so would allow her to restart her life. She had fallen in love with a charismatic stranger when she was a teenager, run off with him, and eloped. Afterward, he introduced her to morphine and put her to work as a prostitute. Her addiction
was the shackle that kept her tied to her husband—not an escape, or a bid for coolness—and she was eager to break it.

  Nelson felt protective of Bays, so he offered to help her kick her habit. He said she could use his apartment as a sanctuary and hide out until she got clean, and she accepted.‡

  Bays arrived on Wabansia Avenue in late October with morphine in her blood, but nothing to shoot when its effect wore off. She climbed into Nelson’s bed and talked to him for a while, but when she felt the first queasy wave of withdrawal symptoms ripple through her body, she sent him away.

  “I don’t want you to see what I look like when I’m kicking,” she said, but she was too weak to insist, so Nelson stayed. She fell asleep, and he watched her. It was midday, light from the street-facing windows filled the room, and she looked tiny and frail.

  Bays had been using morphine for years, so her body was accustomed to receiving regular doses. Each time she injected opiates into her bloodstream, they attached themselves to the mu-receptors in her medulla oblongata and the synaptic membranes of the neurons responsible for transmitting pain signals. This made her feel numb and blissful, and caused her blood pressure to drop, her heart to slow, her breathing to become shallow, and her muscles to relax. But that process reversed itself when the opiates left her system. Her pores opened, and sweat seeped out of them and soaked the mattress. Her skin lost its color, and her muscles contracted. Her stomach tried to empty itself, and she began sobbing like a child who can feel something has gone horribly wrong inside their body, but lacks the vocabulary to explain the sensations.