Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Roberts was in the middle of lecturing Nelson on his obligations one day when he switched tacks.

  You’re a good guy, he said. Here, have a bottle of whiskey. He shoved the bottle under Nelson’s arm, and then the doorbell rang.

  Roberts answered it. “Hey, Algren,” he said, “here is a fan of yours, a superior fan.”

  The man who rang the bell entered the room and approached Nelson. “Am I speaking to Nelson Algren who writes books?” he asked.

  You are, Nelson said. Then the man shoved a stack of summonses under Nelson’s arm and left. Nelson had a bottle of liquor under one arm and the sheaf of papers under the other, and couldn’t get at either without letting something drop.

  Roberts began pacing to keep away from Nelson. “Why do you make me act like such a shit?” he asked.

  “I don’t know why,” Nelson replied archly. “Why do I make you act like such a shit?” He followed Roberts around the room with his arms pinned against his torso, and then he set the whiskey bottle down and grabbed the summonses with his free arm. He had been served with an injunction that prevented him from offering the film rights to Arm to any other producer.

  “I’d rather give the money to you than to the lawyers,” Roberts added with a final condescending flourish.

  The Chateau Marmont presented Nelson with a bill soon afterward. Roberts had promised to pay for Nelson’s accommodations, but after legal proceedings began, he told the hotel he wasn’t responsible for the rent. Nelson paid the tab, and then he helped Hackett find a furnished room in Hollywood, and he moved into Amanda’s apartment in Echo Park.

  Nelson and Roberts settled their dispute within the week, and Nelson got what he had been demanding. He hired a Hollywood agent named George Willner to assist him, and the final terms guaranteed him fifteen thousand dollars up front and five percent of the film’s profits. It was a victory of sorts, but also a disappointing end to the run of luck that had begun with Arm’s publication five months earlier.

  Then good news arrived. Ken McCormick called to tell Nelson he was going to receive the National Book Award for fiction. The Man with the Golden Arm had been released after the deadline for submissions, but an exception was made. The award had recently been created by three publishing trade groups, and the organizers wanted to set the standard for winners as high as possible.

  Nelson was forbidden from revealing the news, so he bought a ticket to New York and flew east alone.

  The award ceremony was held in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan on March 16, 1950. There were more than a thousand people in attendance. The women wore gowns and the men wore tuxedos, and together they constituted the largest group of “critics, book editors, and famous authors ever gathered under one roof,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

  When the proceedings began, Clifton Fadiman took the stage. He was a writer who spoke with a broadcaster’s honey-slick voice, so he was serving as the event’s emcee. He welcomed everyone, and then he began bringing guests on stage. Eleanor Roosevelt, a US senator from Illinois named Paul Douglas, and the editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine each addressed the crowd, and then Fadiman returned and took control of the microphone.

  William Carlos Williams has been awarded the prize for poetry, Fadiman said. Ralph L. Rusk has written the best nonfiction book of the year.

  Nelson rose when he heard his name, and walked toward the stage wearing a tuxedo. He had never owned one before, and though it was cut well enough, he looked like a man wearing someone else’s skin. He stepped to the microphone when he reached the stage and thanked Fadiman for his introduction, and for years afterward he wondered why he had. “I’m going around thanking the hanger-on for hanging on!” he joked.

  Eleanor Roosevelt joined the three winners on stage after the ceremony concluded. She kissed Nelson, and flashbulbs began popping.

  One image taken in that moment captures the scene, and Nelson’s mood, nicely. In it, Williams is staring at the ceiling and Rusk is looking down toward the audience, but Nelson and Roosevelt are turned toward each other. A thousand people were watching them, but they look as relaxed as old friends sharing an inside joke. She’s smiling so widely you can see her teeth, and he’s holding the plaque Fadiman handed him with both hands, the way a father might display a newborn child.

  * In his book The Seven Stairs, Stuart Brent claimed that he sold a thousand copies of Arm that first night, but contemporaneous correspondence contradicts that claim.

  † Malcolm Cowley made a similar point in a perceptive essay called “Personalism: A New School of Fiction.”

  ‡ This mention of malt-hop trucks is a reference to Nelson’s childhood, and there are other references to his life scattered throughout the text. At one point Sparrow remembers collecting beer corks the way Nelson did as a child, and on another occasion a bit of graffiti mentions “Dr. Jesse Blue’s Bay Rum.” At the end of the book, a coroner named William Hackett—the name of one of the men Frankie Machine is modeled after—makes an inquest, and an officer named Otto Schaeffer—the name of one of the Fallonites—testifies.

  § Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Man with the Golden Arm were released three months apart—the first in June 1949, the second in September.

  ¶ Nelson gave Roberts the pseudonym Moxon when he discussed him in Conversations with Nelson Algren.

  # In Conversations with Nelson Algren, Nelson says they left from the LaSalle Street Station, but that’s not accurate. The Super Chief—the train they boarded—only left from Dearborn.

  ** That was the total—it breaks down to five thousand for the option to make the film, and ten thousand for the rights. That would come to about $150,000 today.

  “How Long Does This Sort of Thing Go On?”

  (March 17, 1950–December 1951)

  Nelson and his mother, Goldie Abraham, standing outside Nelson’s house in Gary, Indiana. Goldie is wearing an eight-hundred-dollar fur coat Nelson purchased for her after he began earning royalties from The Man with the Golden Arm. Photo by Amanda Algren, courtesy of Rick Kinsinger

  Nelson returned to his flat on Wabansia Avenue after the book award ceremony, but not to his old life. He had been trying to live a solitary existence since returning from the war, so as to focus on his writing, but that was no longer possible. Work was available to Nelson in any volume he could handle for the first time in his career, and he felt compelled to take advantage of that fact. He taught a writing course at the University of Chicago that spring, while simultaneously writing a screenplay for the film adaptation of The Man with the Golden Arm with a collaborator named Paul Trivers. He began working on a long essay about Chicago’s history for a slick magazine called Holiday, and reviewed books for the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Times Book Review. Doubleday offered him money to revise Somebody in Boots for a paperback edition, and he accepted.

  Nelson also met up regularly with a young, moonfaced photographer named Art Shay who had dropped by the apartment unannounced a few months earlier. Nelson had invited Shay in that day, and offered him a cup of tea. They talked, and soon they were touring the city’s all-night cafés, police stations, and slums to collect images for a book of photos. They sent some to Ken McCormick, and he agreed to publish what they produced, with an introduction by Nelson.

  Lovers, old and new, also required attention. Nelson and Amanda had rekindled their long-fraught romance in Hollywood, and begun discussing marriage and parenthood. If they got back together and had a daughter, they decided, they would name her Madeleine. He and Beauvoir were also corresponding, and he was seeing two other women as well. One was a librarian named Mari Sabusawa; Paula Bays was the other. Her sojourn in Ohio didn’t last long, so she was back in Chicago. Her marriage was disintegrating and her husband, John, had become physically abusive, so she ran to Nelson for protection and companionship when she could.

  But nothing weighed on Nelson’s mind more heavily than the country’s political climate, and the chilling effect it
was having on artistic expression and political dissent. Senator Joseph McCarthy had recently forced his way into the headlines by declaring, “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down.”

  McCarthy was an ugly man and a hard drinker whose words ran together in a manner that suggested folksy humility, if you were inclined to be generous, or an inebriate’s slur, if you weren’t. He was speaking to a group of women in West Virginia, and before the end of his tirade, he announced that he possessed a list of subversives who were both employed by the government and trying to undermine it. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205.”

  McCarthy’s rhetoric was baseless and paranoid, and it struck fear into dissidents and patriots alike. Suddenly, everything was fair game—the ethics that govern political discourse, the presumption of innocence, the Bill of Rights.

  The Hollywood Ten learned that lesson when the Supreme Court upheld two of their convictions that spring, and denied a request to rehear the others. The Ten had no more legal options, so they prepared to surrender themselves to the authorities and made a short film to raise awareness about their case. It was a low-budget affair. The ten men headed for prison pose with their families during the opening scenes while a voiceover provides the highlights of their careers. When the next shot comes into focus, they’re seated together behind a long table, smoking anxiously, looking weary and defeated.

  We refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee to protect your rights as well as ours, they say. The country’s future will only be secure if people like us, and like you, resist. “We are aware of a developing nightmare of fear in our land, in which increasing numbers of citizens are being forced to swear, ‘I am not this.’ ‘I am not that.’ ‘I don’t belong to anything.’ ‘I don’t believe in anything.’ ‘I don’t criticize anything.’ ” The pressure to conform will become general now, they prophesied, and the result will be devastating. “Thought control entering the university campuses . . . labor leaders being framed . . . lawyers sent to prison for defending their clients.”

  Their predictions sounded dystopian and fantastic when they were delivered, but they soon began coming true. Two months later, an anti-Communist group called Counterattack published the names of more than one hundred public figures who were, they claimed, allied with the Communist Party. They included no evidence to support their accusations, but by then none was needed.

  The vehicle for their denunciations was a pamphlet called Red Channels that sold for a dollar a copy. Its cover was dominated by the image of a microphone resting comfortably in the palm of a bright red hand, and the introductory text inside had an apocalyptic flair. The “Red Fascists and their sympathizers” have infiltrated our media, it said, and we have to fight back. “The hour is not too late for those in the patriotic and intelligent majority to immediately undertake a suitable counter-attack. No time is to be lost,” it warned. The names of the accused appeared next—page after page of them, organized alphabetically for easy reference.

  The Hollywood studios had been maintaining an informal “blacklist” for at least three years, but Red Channels expanded it dramatically. It also lowered the evidentiary bar for making accusations, and as a result, dozens more names were added over the course of the next few years.

  Nelson wasn’t named publicly, but friends and associates from every phase of his career were. Richard Wright had been added to the list a year earlier, along with a poet named Edwin Rolfe, whom Nelson had known since his days as a proletarian writer. The writers Millen Brand and Ted Ward—more friends from the thirties—were listed in Red Channels, and so was John Garfield, the star who was supposed to play Frankie Machine on the big screen. And before the end of the year, every other person involved with the film adaptation of Arm made the blacklist alongside Garfield—Paul Trivers, the screenwriter; Bob Roberts, the producer; and George Willner, the agent who represented Nelson in Hollywood.

  Nelson could have avoided the controversy surrounding his friends and tried to safeguard his career, but instead he made common cause with them. He created a support committee for the Hollywood Ten, and sponsored a fundraiser to help pay for their legal appeal. He appeared on stage with Jack Conroy and a blacklisted actress named Gale Sondergaard at the event, and managed to bring in about five hundred dollars.* Then he signed his name to an open letter condemning censorship, and helped pay for it to be published in the New York Times. “American artists are being judged, convicted and fired solely on the charges of professional informers,” the letter warned. “American writers have been forced to choose jail rather than betrayal of their beliefs.”

  Nelson took those actions as a matter of principle, but he had no illusions about their effectiveness. He met with some lawyers to discuss the Hollywood Ten case after the fundraiser, and then relayed the lawyer’s opinion to Edwin Rolfe. “It looks like a year in the pokey apiece, from out this way, hope I’m wrong,” he wrote. He didn’t think there was a chance of defeating McCarthy or the forces aligned with him, but he hoped it would be possible to outlast them. “How long does this sort of thing go on?” he asked Rolfe sarcastically.

  Beauvoir was afraid to leave Paris when it was time for her to visit Nelson that year. The Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel and entered South Korea two days after she received her travel visa, starting a war. American armed forces entered the conflict almost immediately, and it seemed as though World War III was about to begin. She thought the Soviet Army was likely to invade France while she was in America and bar her from returning, but Sartre convinced her to go. The Russians don’t have enough atomic bombs to start another war, he said, and the Americans don’t have enough soldiers. They won’t fight each other for a few more years. “Go.”

  So Beauvoir did, but not without trepidation. “I hope the war will stay local in Korea, I hope my plane will not crash, I hope your heart is nearly as stupid and faithful as mine,” she wrote to Nelson. “I hope I’ll find my way to your arms again.” Then she boarded her plane and, after a short stop in New York City, arrived in Chicago.

  The trip wasn’t worth the anxiety that preceded it. Nelson and Beauvoir had been drifting apart since their trip to Latin America, and when they met in Chicago, Nelson greeted her with the news that he was no longer in love with her. “But,” he said, “we’ll have a nice summer together all the same.”

  It didn’t begin that way. Nelson brought Beauvoir to the racetrack that day, and spent the afternoon talking to friends and ignoring her. She drank heavily to kill time, and wondered why she was in America. That question became even more pressing when they returned to Chicago. She felt trapped inside Nelson’s apartment, so she went out alone, but the world outside his walls was even less hospitable. Every time someone recognized her accent, they became antagonistic. “Why are you all Communists in France?” a hairdresser demanded. Nothing like that had ever happened to her in America before.

  Nelson and Beauvoir began to enjoy each other after they left the city, though. Before she left Paris, he had told her that he was going to rent a cottage for them to spend the summer in, but, flush with cash, he spent seventy-five hundred dollars to buy one in Gary, Indiana, instead.

  It was a two-bedroom house at 6228 Forrest Avenue† in the Miller Beach neighborhood, but it felt like an outpost at the edge of civilization. It was the last structure on a road that dead-ended at a park, and it had been built on a long, thin plot of land that was surrounded by tall bushes. There was a yard in front, and a lawn and a bit of wooded land out back that sloped toward a lagoon. Gray squirrels ran along the ground. Birds perched in the trees, and muskrats lived in burrows along the edge of the water.

  Nelson and Beauvoir
moved into separate bedrooms when they arrived—a nice metaphor for the distance that had grown between them, but a misleading one. Their relationship had transitioned into something less than the grand romance they once believed it was destined to become, but there was still more than friendship between them.

  They spent their mornings working in their separate rooms, or reading. Sometimes, Beauvoir sprayed herself with insect repellent, lay on the lawn, and read Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln or Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up while mosquitoes buzzed around her. They pushed a white rowboat into the lagoon behind the house around noon each day, crossed the water, climbed the sand dunes on the other side, and then descended toward Lake Michigan. The sand burned their feet, and they cooled them by walking into the lake until their heads rested just above the waterline. Neither of them could swim well, so they rooted themselves in place at the far edge of caution and allowed the waves rolling past them to rock their bodies gently. They walked back toward shore when they caught a chill, and lay down and baked in the sun.

  They returned to the house for dinner, but sometimes they went back to the beach after dark, walked along the shore, and talked “idly,” Beauvoir wrote later, “about the beginning of the world or about its end.” Stars lit their path, as did the moon, and fire. The largest steel mill in the country loomed on the horizon, two miles west, and flames leapt from its smokestacks while they pondered the apocalypse.

  But tension was present even in the summer’s most carefree moments. The radio was reporting that the war was bound to spread, and Nelson was on guard against intimacy with Beauvoir. He retreated behind a facade of indifference whenever he felt them getting too comfortable, and once he went into Chicago alone and didn’t return for days.