by Colin Asher
When Nelson completed his manuscript in June 1955, he gave it the title he had intended to use on the political essay he completed two years earlier: A Walk on the Wild Side. Then he sent a copy to Ken McCormick, packed up the little apartment he had been renting, and traveled to Missoula, Montana, where he had lined up work as an instructor at a writers’ workshop.
The position was not demanding, and he was looking forward to relaxing, but first he had to settle the question of his marriage. Amanda was still refusing to divorce, and Nelson was out of patience. She said she thought they could still be happy together, eventually, and he thought she was delusional. “For Christ’s sake let’s get this misery done and over . . . ,” he wrote just after he arrived in Missoula. “I’m utterly dead sick of running here and there trying to find some place I can work in again, some place I can live in again. . . . I never before heard of a man giving all his time and energy simply trying to be unmarried to a woman he doesn’t want to be married to. But that’s how it is all the same.”
Nelson apologized for writing so harshly the next day, but remained insistent they divorce. “I don’t do myself any good by belting you,” he wrote. “In fact it makes me a little sick. But how the hell else can I save myself if I don’t keep pushing to get us apart?” He offered to give Amanda enough money to buy a house, when he had it, and wished her well. “I think there is still a chance for you to have a life that will, with time, make this one you have seem like a nightmare that’s done.”
Amanda agreed to divorce then, and Nelson hired a lawyer to file the required papers. She countersued, and it looked like they would finally be through with each other by the end of the year.
Nelson was finally able to calm down then. He was only teaching two days a week, and when he wasn’t meeting with students, he swam in the college gym, worked out on a speed bag, and wrote. Amanda sent him a portion of the novel he had begun writing about Paula Bays, and he began making headway on his next novel.
But soon after Nelson’s marital troubles were resolved, distressing news began to arrive. The newspapers were reporting that Otto Preminger had signed Frank Sinatra to play the lead role in his adaptation of The Man with the Golden Arm, and every lawyer Nelson consulted said they could find no legal means of stopping the production. Nelson did have a good legal case against Bob Roberts, he learned, but Roberts was overseas and not expected to return. The film was scheduled to be released around the end of the year, and Jack Kirkland had delayed his stage adaptation so they wouldn’t coincide.
Then an officer with the local police department tracked Nelson down and presented him with a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Francis E. Walter, the committee’s chairman, wanted Nelson to appear before Congress and testify under oath about his political connections.††
Nelson pleaded with the officer, and said he couldn’t afford to go to DC, but the officer was unmoved. “These are the papers,” he said. “You either go to Washington or I’ll take you.”
“Do you know what for?” Nelson asked.
“No, you just go there,” the officer said.
Nelson accepted the subpoena and promised to report to the capital, but then he reached out to Doubleday instead, and asked them to have their lawyers contact the Committee on his behalf. It wasn’t a call he wanted to make. Ken McCormick had just read A Walk on the Wild Side, and Doubleday’s editorial board was in the process of deciding whether to publish the book.
* This figure includes Nelson’s book-length essay, even though it was not published in his lifetime.
† Details are hazy here. Nelson says, in his correspondence, that Doubleday would only fund a new novel after he handed in a revision of Somebody in Boots, but he never made it clear whether he sent them a portion of his unfinished novel. It’s possible they didn’t want to see it. They had already paid him fifteen hundred to revise Somebody in Boots three years earlier—and received nothing for their money. Nelson never delivered because he thought the book was beyond saving. He forgot about the contract for years, but Ken McCormick didn’t.
‡ The mansion was owned by the heiress Ellen Borden Stevenson, the ex-wife of Adlai Stevenson—a former governor of Illinois, and the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1952. She was also a patron of the arts who tried to turn her family mansion into an arts center and private club. Poetry magazine was operating out of the building at the same time Nelson and his friend Jack Potter were running their poker game. Later, Nelson and Borden Stevenson reportedly had an affair.
§ Benjamin Appel was a friend of Nelson’s and the author of several early proletarian novels Nelson respected—Brain Guy and The Power House among them—but he had recently begun writing for pulp publishers.
¶ Nelson was planning to live with the Conroys through the fall, but tragedy ended his stay prematurely. Just after he moved in, Conroy’s son Tom swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and died. The family decided to bury Tom in Moberly, Missouri, so Nelson had to move on.
# Nelson gave an interview, usually cited as fact, in which he claimed a different timeline of events: “I came into town on a Sunday,” he said, but contemporaneous correspondence shows he was off by a few days.
** The sale price of the rights was never firmly established, but Preminger once said he paid $100,000 for it. If that’s accurate, Roberts made $85,000 on the sale—meaning he owed Nelson $42,500. Or, a little less than $400,000 in today’s dollars.
†† The fact that Nelson received this subpoena has never been widely reported, mostly because he tried to hide it. He spoke about it on the record only once, in an interview with two student journalists writing for a college magazine that doesn’t have an archive and hasn’t been digitized. His correspondence from this period contains several mentions of a subpoena, but without the corroborating interview, there was no way of knowing it came from HUAC.
“They Don’t Exactly Give Me Any Medals for Caution”
(October 1955–May 20, 1956)
By the time Nelson rented a dimly lit walk-up in Manhattan’s West Village in October, he had been on the move for nearly two years. He had traveled more than fourteen thousand miles and slept in at least fourteen different rooms since he began writing A Walk on the Wild Side—but the book was finally complete. He had delivered a revised version of the manuscript to Doubleday just before he reached the city, and for the first time in a very long time, he had nothing to do but wait for Ken McCormick to call.
A few days after Nelson moved into his apartment, two aspiring writers visited to interview him for the Paris Review. Their names were Alston Anderson and Terry Southern, and they were both in their early thirties, struggling to get their work into print, and in awe of Nelson.* “He strikes one as a man who feels and means just what he says,” they soon wrote. “To talk with Algren is to have a conversation brought very quickly to that rarefied level where values are actually declared.”
Nelson, Anderson, and Southern left the door to Nelson’s apartment open when they began speaking, and the space soon filled with strangers. The Village was a warren of cafés, jazz clubs, and studios occupied by young artists and writers at the time, and Nelson was a hero within its confines—so when people heard he was granting an interview, they found his building, climbed the stairs, let themselves into his apartment, and sat down.
Anderson and Southern began by asking Nelson about getting The Man with the Golden Arm published, but then their questions became more general. They invited Nelson to discuss his writing process, his thoughts on style, his forthcoming book, his next project, and his contemporaries.
“Nothing was easier” than getting Arm published, Nelson said, “because I got paid before I wrote it.”
I write in drafts, he explained. “I’ve always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens,” and I’ve never tried to cultivate any style. “The only thing I’ve consciously tried to do was put my
self in a position to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk.”
The novel I just finished, Nelson said, is a “reader’s book.”
“Mechanically and, I think, technically, it’s done more carefully, and probably reads better than other books,” he said, but I didn’t want to write it. “I’ve got a book about Chicago on the West Side—I did a hundred pages in a year, and I still figure I need three years on it—but I was under contract for [A Walk on the Wild Side], so it took precedence. . . . now I’m going back to the one I want to do.”†
“Do you have a feeling of camaraderie, or solidarity, with any contemporary writers?” Anderson and Southern asked, and Nelson said he didn’t.
“No, I couldn’t say so,” he replied. “I don’t know many writers.”
“How do you avoid it?” They wanted to know.
“Well, I dunno, but I do have the feeling that other writers can’t help you with writing,” Nelson said. “I’ve gone to writers’ conferences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the place where you learn to write. I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes.”
Nelson was unguarded, almost confessional, for the entire interview—with one exception. Eventually, Anderson and Southern asked Nelson about his politics, and when they did, he responded tersely. He was still shaken by the subpoena he received from HUAC, and seemed unwilling to take any risks.
“Do you vote? Locally, there around Gary?” they asked.
“No. No, I don’t,” Nelson said.
“Still you do frequently get involved in these issues, like the Rosenbergs, and so on,” they said.
“Yes, that’s true,” Nelson said.
“What do your publishers think of that?” they asked.
“Well,” Nelson said sarcastically, “they don’t exactly give me any medals for caution.”
Nelson heard from Doubleday near the end of October, arranged to have lunch with Timothy Seldes, and arrived for his meeting on the appointed day feeling confident. He was sure A Walk on the Wild Side was going to be a best seller, and had already begun mentally allocating the money he was going to make on it. He would save some to support himself while he finished his next novel, give a chunk to Amanda as alimony, and use the remainder on lawyers—one to sue Preminger, one to fight the State Department over its passport denial, and one to handle his divorce.
Seldes ordered a martini when he arrived for lunch, and Nelson felt doubt sneaking up on him. Seldes was not normally a drinker, never mind a day drinker, and his request seemed like a dark omen.‡
Seldes emptied his glass and ordered a second, and Nelson became worried, and anxious. He had been telling his friends that he was lucky to be signed with Doubleday because they were so supportive, and he had taken it for granted that they would publish his novel, but now it seemed Seldes was about to announce they would not.
Nelson didn’t reveal his doubts. Instead, he kept calm, and waited. There was too much at stake for him to act rashly. His financial future was in question, but also his liberty. Doubleday’s lawyers had been in touch with HUAC on his behalf, and there was no way to know what they would do if his relationship with the publisher became strained, or ended.
Seldes emptied his second glass, ordered a third martini, and found his courage. We’re not going to publish your book, he announced. There’s too much sex in it, and it’ll be banned if we release it.
At the time, it was illegal to publish explicit descriptions of sex, and Doubleday had just gone through a protracted legal battle over Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County—a less salacious book than A Walk on the Wild Side. They published it in 1946, and four months later, the Society for the Suppression of Vice sued them, and won. The book was pulled from storefronts and the New York Public Library, and afterward Doubleday spent years in court trying to get it back on the shelves. They lost two appeals, then argued their case before the Supreme Court—and lost again.
We don’t want another legal fight on our hands, Seldes explained without any joy. He was just a messenger, and a reluctant one. His superiors had decided to reject Nelson’s book, but none of them had had the nerve to deliver the news.
Nelson was too stunned to say much, so Seldes kept talking. Besides, he said, you were supposed to be revising your first novel, not writing a new one. We didn’t order this book, so we won’t publish it.
When Seldes finished speaking, Nelson said: I’ll stand by my book. Then he left the restaurant.
Nelson gave his agent a copy of his manuscript the next day and told her to sell it—he didn’t care to whom—and then he prepared to leave New York. He was reluctant to go back on the road after traveling for so long, but his desire to escape the world of editors, lawyers, agents, and publishers was more powerful.
Nelson’s first stop was Baltimore. He traveled there by bus, went looking for Jesse Blue and his wife, Trixie, and found them living in a row house in a poor neighborhood. They were the guests of a couple named Blackie and Norma, and when Nelson arrived he was welcomed in as well and allowed to stay.§
The environment in the house was not what Nelson had been expecting. He had found sanctuary with Jesse Blue in East St. Louis the year before, when he spent a day partying with men and women living “off the legit” who seemed happier, more carefree, and more content than he was in the world of deadlines, budgets, and mortgages. He had been looking for more of the same when he traveled to Baltimore, but instead he was exposed to a darker, more squalid, and violent part of Blue’s life.
Blackie, the patriarch of the house, was a wild character. He had earned his living as a pimp and petty criminal for decades, but had recently turned fifty and decided to try his hand at a more respectable profession. He was working as a car salesman when Nelson arrived, and was trying to act the way he imagined “taxpayers” acted, but he wasn’t doing either well. He can “live only in terms of battle, challenge, skirmish and war,” Nelson told his friend Max Geismar.
Blackie beat and threatened his wife regularly, lied fluidly, and made a spectacle of himself as a matter of course. Sometimes, he stood on the sidewalk wearing hot pink pants and waited for someone to mock him so he had an excuse to fight, and he cut in and out of lanes at high speed when he drove a car. People often shot him disapproving looks, and when they did, Norma leaned out the passenger side window and yelled, “Get on your side, motherfucker.”
Dogs growled when Blackie approached, and he kicked one under a moving car and killed it a few days after Nelson arrived in Baltimore. That caught the attention of the police, and they dragged Blackie out of bed and into the street before dawn the next day. There were four of them, but Blackie didn’t back down. He was ready to fight, and would have, if Nelson and Blue hadn’t begged him to submit.
“Blackie,” Jesse Blue said afterward, “it’s just such fluke pinches as that will get you and maybe me into the pen.”
“It’s too late to get scared,” Blackie said.
“It’s not too late for me,” Blue said. “I am scared.”
After the police left, Nelson, Blue, Trixie, Blackie, and Norma loaded into two cars and drove west—through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, then into Illinois and on to East St. Louis.
The city was seething when they arrived. A six-year-old boy named Bobby Greenlease had been kidnapped and murdered by a man with Mafia connections the month before, and three people had been killed since. The police were trolling all the seediest bars in search of the usual suspects, and that included Blue and Blackie.
So, Nelson and Blue went back on the road, alone this time, and raced south and east with no destination in mind. They drove through Kentucky and Tennessee, and then entered Arkansas, wher
e they spent a night in a hotel that boasted a sign warning: “You think you can go back to town and pick up a woman and bring her back here in a cab and stay all night with you but you’re only fooling yourself. It’s been tried. This is a moral hotel.”
Then they continued on, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and finally into Florida, where they saw Seminoles piloting jon boats through the swamp.
When they reached the eastern shore and spotted a development called Playland Estates, they stopped driving. Nelson found an unoccupied house and paid to rent it through Christmas. It had a lawn, and out back, there was a swimming pond with a white sand beach. It was near the ocean, so the air was warm and the blue sky was endless, but most importantly, as far as Nelson was concerned, it had no phone line and no more than a handful of people knew he was there. Ken McCormick had tried to call Nelson twice—first in Baltimore, then in East St. Louis—but Nelson had refused to speak to him both times. He told his agent he was done talking to McCormick, and was done talking about his book.
For the next six weeks, Nelson did nothing—or very close to it. He and Jesse Blue spent their mornings reading the daily papers and drinking coffee in silence. Then, in the afternoons, Nelson swam in the pond out back. He tried to work on his novel after dark, but more often than not, he was too depressed to focus.
Farrar, Straus & Cudahy purchased A Walk on the Wild Side only weeks after Doubleday passed on it, and afterward the firm’s owners sent Nelson letters filled with praise. “I really do think this is the best you have ever done,” Sheila Cudahy said. “It is a hell of a novel,” Roger Straus agreed, adding, “and I am so glad we are going to be publishing it.”
But Nelson was too preoccupied by his troubles to be heartened by their enthusiasm. Doubleday was claiming he owed them eight thousand dollars—everything they had advanced him for the novel, and everything they had paid for the two books they chose not to publish—and then there was Preminger. The Motion Picture Association of America had declined to grant the film version of The Man with the Golden Arm its seal of approval, but Preminger had decided to release it anyway. The film was about to premiere in Chicago, and as a result, Jack Kirkland’s theatrical production was indefinitely postponed.
