by Colin Asher
Nelson responded noncommittally, but then let his guard drop. “I’m ready to marry you this very moment,” he blurted out.
She finally understood what had gone wrong then, and how badly she had hurt him. “I realized,” she wrote later, “I would never be able to harbor rancor in my heart against him for anything ever again; all the wrongs were on my side.” She returned to Paris four days later, not knowing whether she would ever see Nelson again.
There was a letter from Ken McCormick waiting for Nelson when he returned to Chicago in July, and it contained mixed news. “I have read HUSTLER’S HEART with tremendous fascination and approval . . . ,” it said. “I think the book marks a step forward technically but that in submerging yourself in the world of your characters you have lost some of the pace that the reader will require of you. . . . [T]here’s a lot of tightening and drawing together to be done.”
Nelson began revising his manuscript then, and completed a new draft in three months. When it arrived in New York, McCormick sent a telegram in response. I have finished reading your novel, it said, “and although I think there are many things you will want to do with it before we publish it it has the poetry of Faulkner and the doom of Gogol. It is really a great book.” He flew to Chicago a few days later to discuss last-minute changes to the book, and afterward Nelson resumed revising, and gave a copy of his manuscript to his friends on West Madison Street so they could critique its authenticity. The last scene in the novel takes place in March 1949, and he was aiming to complete his manuscript around the same time.
Nelson was usually happiest when he was working the hardest, but not that year. He was in the middle of one of the most productive stretches of his career, but instead of being content, he felt isolated and lonely. His apartment felt like a cage, and he began to think he was a fool for falling in love with someone who lived on the other side of the Atlantic. He longed for companionship, and for a while he toyed with the idea of marrying a woman he met in Chicago. Their relationship was brief, and casual, but significant because of what it suggested about his emotional state.
“I won’t have an affair with this girl, she doesn’t really mean anything to me,” Nelson wrote to Beauvoir. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I still want what she represented to me for two or three months: a place of my own to live in, with a woman of my own and perhaps a child of my own. There’s nothing extraordinary about wanting such things, in fact it’s rather common, it’s just that I’ve never felt like it before. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting close to forty. It’s different for you. You’ve got Sartre and a settled way of life, people, and a vital interest in ideas. You live in the heart of the world of French culture, and every day you draw satisfaction from your work and your life. Whereas Chicago is almost as far away as Uxmal. I lead a sterile existence centered exclusively on myself; and I’m not at all happy about it.”
Nelson said he would visit Paris when his book was finished, as he had promised, but he made it clear the terms of their relationship had changed. “This girl helped me to see the truth about us more clearly,” he wrote. “[L]ast year I would have been afraid of spoiling something by not being faithful to you. Now I know that was foolish, because no arms are warm when they’re on the other side of the ocean; I know that life is too short and too cold for me to reject all warmth for so many months.”
The sense of isolation that plagued Nelson that summer was a product of his relationship and work habits, but it was compounded by the country’s political environment, which was making him feel vulnerable and besieged. While he and Beauvoir were on vacation, the House of Representatives passed a bill called the Internal Security Act, and by the time he returned home, the political left was in full retreat. The act required the Communist Party to divulge the names and addresses of its members, and the criminal penalties for violating its provisions included jail time, fines, and the loss of citizenship.
The Senate never voted on the act, but its passage in the House shifted the boundary of acceptable discourse and action.¶ A month after the House vote, a federal prosecutor in New York charged twelve members of the Communist Party with plotting to overthrow the government, and afterward it seemed everyone in the country either joined the hunt for “reds” or went into hiding. Soviet spies began defecting. People who had spent the Depression years marching to demand emergency relief burned old letters and avoided old friends, and activists betrayed their comrades.
Only a few political figures were willing to make common cause with the Left that year, and the biggest name among them was Henry A. Wallace. He was the Progressive Party’s nominee for president, and his platform called for full voting rights for black citizens, the elimination of HUAC, and an end to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that people had begun referring to as a Cold War. He was often barred from speaking in the South because his campaign staff was integrated, and when he did appear, people pelted him with rotten food. He refused to reject the endorsement of the Communist Party when they offered it, and people often called him a traitor.
Wallace’s campaign was quixotic, but Nelson joined it anyway. He spoke at several Wallace campaign events in Illinois, and began signing his correspondence, “Yours for Wallace.” Then he loaned his name to an open letter that offered support to the candidate, criticized the conformist environment in America, and made common cause with Soviet artists. “Our capitalists know the strength of culture,” it said. “They want to point out to us what we must and must not say in defense of their system.”
Politics even found its way into Nelson’s manuscript that year, though subtly. His first novel had addressed its political moment directly, and the effect was often jarring. His second was self-consciously antipolitical—a coming-of-age story that was faithful to the perspective of its characters. Both books took extreme positions, but by the time Nelson began the final draft of his third novel, he was talented enough to comment on the political environment his work was created in without allowing his opinions to invade the foreground of his narrative.
The book makes only one overt nod to the witch hunt under way in Washington, and it’s very sly. At one point, the novel’s protagonist, Frankie Machine, is incarcerated and sent to a prison with an exercise yard that’s laid out like a country garden. One day while he’s watching the yard, he sees four condemned men enter and begin doing calisthenics. The prison wall stands behind them, tall and imposing, and above it two competing billboards are visible.
One says:
BUDINTZ COAL
One Price to All
The other says:
RUSHMOORE COAL
Fastest Delivery
Cheapest in Years
That’s all. The signs appear in the text only once, and Frankie doesn’t comment on them, but the names they bear and the messages they carry meant a great deal to Nelson and the radical writers he had associated with at the beginning of his career. Louis Budenz and Howard Rushmore were former Communists who had begun providing testimony to Congress, and naming names in the press.# Both had accepted money for betraying their former comrades, hence One Price to All and Fastest Delivery—Cheapest in Years.
Budenz was a member of the national committee of the Communist Party and the managing editor of the Daily Worker in the 1930s, but he transformed into a conservative in 1945. He entered academia, wrote anti-Communist books, sold information to the FBI, and testified at several trials and Congressional hearings. He received a small fortune for his revelations, and eventually distilled Red Scare paranoia to its purest rhetorical form by testifying, under oath, that nothing a Communist said could be trusted. The party trains its members to speak in “ ‘Aesopian’ language” designed “to protect the party in its activities before courts of law in America,” he swore. Consequently, he implied, yes can mean no when a Communist is speaking, and an exculpatory statement might really be an admission of guilt.
Nelson knew Budenz well, but he knew Rushmore better. Rushmore had been an
editor at both the original Anvil and the Daily Worker. He was the man Nelson wrote to when he needed information he could use to defend the Moscow show trials, and later he visited Nelson and Amanda in Chicago for a few days. He used their apartment to have sex, and afterward they discovered he had infested their room with bedbugs. He left the Communist Party in 1940, and later he wrote for a gossip magazine, sold information to the FBI, and told HUAC that the film stars Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson were either Communists or fellow travelers.
Nelson’s novel reflected politics in more subtle and affecting ways as well. He had always tried to make sense of the world through the process of writing, and that habit is most evident in a character named Bednar.
Bednar is a police captain with a preternatural talent for recollection. He can recall the name, pseudonym, and crimes of every person booked at the Saloon Street Station. He takes a hard look at everyone who appears before him, considers them briefly, and then judges them harshly. “For a quarter you’d steal the straw out of your mother’s kennel,” he says. “Tell the court that Belgian .22 was to pick your teeth with. Maybe they’ll believe you. I don’t.”
The captain has been on the job for twenty years, and it has taken a toll on him. His mind has begun to drift, and he suspects he has been infected by the sins of the people who parade before him. He feels filled “with the guilt of others” when the novel begins, and as the story progresses, his condition worsens.
One night, the captain hears a defrocked priest proclaim, “I believe we are all members of one another,” and afterward he feels compelled to walk into a cell of his own and “confess the thousand sins he had committed in his heart.” He realizes he’s “guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others,” and his faith slips. He wonders whether the men he has judged so harshly might really be “his own kind,” and the implications of that thought terrify him: “if they were anything less than enemies he had betrayed himself a thousand fold,” Nelson wrote.
The captain’s moment of introspection doesn’t last long. He can’t face the prospect of atoning for his sins so—like Budenz, a man so warped he’s willing to claim every person he betrays is confirming their guilt each time they proclaim their innocence—he projects the contempt he feels for himself back on the world. Punishment is always justified, he decides, because “every man was secretly against the law in his heart . . . and it was the heart that mattered. There were no men innocent of intent to transgress. If they were human—look out. What was needed he had learned long ago, was higher walls and stronger bars—there was no limit to what they were capable of.”
Nelson finished revising in February 1949, and mailed his book to New York. Ken McCormick accepted the manuscript when it arrived, and then he and Nelson began their customary haggling over titles. Nelson suggested The Long Nightmare, The Monkey’s Kiss, Some Cats Swing Like That, and The Man with the Golden Arm. McCormick only considered the last idea seriously, so it became the book’s title.**
Nelson prepared to leave for Paris then. He left Chicago carrying enough baggage for a family, and made his way to New York City. He went to lower Manhattan on May 4, found Pier 92, crossed a gangplank, and boarded RMS Mauretania—a 772-foot ocean liner with a jet-black hull, a whitewashed deck, and two red steam funnels. The ship began its journey across the Atlantic the same day, and Nelson must have felt relieved when the American shore disappeared. Every mile of ocean he crossed was a mile separating him from his tiny apartment, a mile closer to Beauvoir, and a step toward the next chapter of his career.
Beauvoir was eager to make her reunion with Nelson memorable, so she put on the white coat she had been wearing the day they met, and went to Gare Saint-Lazare to wait for his train to arrive. She was standing on the platform when it pulled in and discharged its passengers, but she didn’t see Nelson. She waited until the train seemed empty, and then returned to her apartment at 11, rue de la Bûcherie.
She slumped into a chair when she arrived, lit a cigarette, and told herself Nelson would be on the next train. She was still sitting there a half hour later, smoking and worrying, when she heard an American voice outside. She looked through her window and saw a man festooned with bags wander into the Café des Amis five stories below, then emerge and head for her door.
Nelson and Beauvoir enjoyed a sweet reunion in her apartment. He had seen her waiting on the platform, he explained, but he had checked so much luggage that she was gone by the time he collected it all. Then he opened his bags and presented her with a housecoat, chocolates, whiskey, and a stack of books.
Nelson had seen Paris only once, when he was on leave at the end of the war, so Beauvoir spent several days showing him the city. She was eager to make him happy after their sad parting in New York, so she kept checking his face for signs of displeasure, but she never saw any. “[H]is face was always radiant,” she wrote later, and everything about Paris seemed to delight him—the crazy drivers, the van Goghs at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, and the architecture.
Beauvoir introduced Nelson to her friends after he acclimated, and soon he felt more at ease in Paris than he did in Chicago. He met Sartre and his secretary, Jean Cau, whose first novel was about to be released. He swapped army stories with the journalist Jacques-Laurent Bost, and charmed Bost’s wife, Olga, with tales about West Madison Street. He listened to jazz at Club Saint-Germain, had dinner in a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, and went to a party at the publisher Gallimard, where he was approached by several people interested in translating his novel. He and Beauvoir went out with Michelle Vian and the journalist Robert Scipion one night, visited every neighborhood street dance they could find, and didn’t stop moving until seven the next morning.
Nelson worked, too, though not much. Gallimard had commissioned a French edition of Never Come Morning, and Nelson met with the book’s translator, René Guyonnet, to help him work through its tangle of slang. He reviewed the page proofs for The Man with the Golden Arm as well, and tried to convince his editors at Gallimard to release French editions of Jack Conroy’s books.
Nelson felt carefree in Paris with Beauvoir, but he could sense tension everywhere they went. The American government had just offered France an infusion of cash as part of the Marshall Plan, and there was lively debate about whether the country should accept. They need the money, Nelson wrote to Carl Sandburg, but they don’t like the terms being offered. “They know it is not out of kindness that any nation acts—there is always a bill, and the bill seems to be a willingness to accept the status of being an American colony and the attendant provision of supplying troops to back up the North Atlantic pact.”
The country feels trapped between America and the Soviet Union, Nelson wrote, and it’s so evenly divided it’ll be stuck in limbo until its hand is forced. The French “seem to be looking about for someone to tell them whether they won or lost the last war,” he wrote. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone to tell them, and no way of finding out. So they go on welcoming the American tourist with open arms while at the same time despising him a bit for having so much after suffering so little.”
Nelson was also disturbed by all the Americans he saw in Paris. He had no problem with the tourists, but he was disappointed to learn that the city was home to a large and growing expatriate population of actors, musicians, and writers. Nelson disdained them, as a group, for choosing to flee the United States when resistance was called for, and the more talented they were, the more he resented their presence in Paris. To his mind, Richard Wright was the worst of the group because his ideas were needed most back home.
Nelson and Wright hadn’t spoken since Nelson was stationed at Camp Maxey, but Beauvoir had been keeping each man up to date on how the other was doing. Wright was living in a large apartment at 14, rue Monsieur le Prince with his wife, Ellen, their two daughters, and a maid who handled the cooking and cleaning. Beauvoir had been over to his home for dinner and had seen him around town. He always praised Nelson in her presence, and he was exci
ted when she said Nelson was coming to Paris.
Nelson and Wright met only once during Nelson’s trip, though, and their reunion did not go well. Wright assumed Nelson was moving to Paris, so he greeted him warmly and welcomed him to his new home.
Nelson recoiled. I’m only visiting, he said, and I’ll never leave the States. “I’d be afraid to do that for fear of losing contact with my roots.”
The comment hurt Wright deeply because it cut so close to the truth. He hadn’t been able to complete a novel since Native Son, and he had barely written a thing since moving to Paris, so he responded defensively.
“Don’t you realize that some of the greatest novels have been written in exile?” he said. “Look at Dostoevsky.”
They were talking past each other. Wright left America because he and his family couldn’t live there in peace. His wife, Ellen, was white, their children were biracial, and when he was home, he could feel the country’s collective judgment like a weight pressing down on him. He had dreamed about moving to the countryside after making his fortune, but when he heard about a spate of lynchings in rural towns, he decided it was too dangerous. He and Ellen settled on the idea of moving to a liberal New England town instead, but the owners of the house they wanted to buy refused to sell to them. So they left for Europe.
Nelson knew none of that. When he looked at his old friend, he saw a man who had run from the most important political conflict of his generation, installed himself in a luxury apartment on the other side of the ocean, and begun spending his days sipping coffee with expatriates instead of putting his immense talent to use.
It makes a great difference, Nelson replied flatly, whether you’ve been exiled or exiled yourself.
He and Wright parted then, and never spoke again. It was a sad end to a sixteen-year friendship.
Nelson and Beauvoir decided it was time to leave Paris. His meeting with Wright upset him, and she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable in the city. The first volume of The Second Sex had just been published, and it caused a sensation. The book sold twenty thousand copies in its first week, and fans and detractors had begun seeking her out. Some people approached her on the street and complimented her work, but others were enraged by the fact that she had criticized the church and written frankly about female sexuality. They sent threatening letters to her apartment, and once, while she and Nelson were making their way through a crowded street, a man began screaming, “You have no right to be here!”
