by Colin Asher
Nelson accepted the cup and replied honestly. “I don’t know if I did. I don’t know if I didn’t. I honest to God can’t tell you, but I know something wanted me to and something didn’t want me to.”
Peltz suspected the plunge was more intentional than that. Nelson said he felt euphoric right before he crashed through the ice, and Peltz thought that detail was significant. “You see,” he reflected later, “he was light-headed because he knew maybe the whole thing would be over soon . . . he felt a sense of being liberated.”
Nelson put on a brave face after he plunged into the lagoon. That night, he attended a New Year’s Eve party, recounted the story, and made it seem like a joke—but in truth, the accident had a profound effect on him, and over the course of the following months, he made significant changes to his life that, in retrospect, seem like a reaction to his near-drowning and the events that precipitated it.
The first thing Nelson did was fire his agent. He had been dissatisfied with Ingersoll & Brennan since his first trip to Hollywood, in 1950, when he found himself negotiating the sale of the film rights to The Man with the Golden Arm without assistance. But he felt loyal to them because they took him on after he returned from the war, and he kept working with them until March 1957, when he traveled to New York City and hired the McIntosh & Otis agency.
Next, Nelson dropped his lawsuit against Otto Preminger and sold the film rights to A Walk on the Wild Side to Marion Lebworth—the same man whose offer he had rejected a few months earlier. He had been adamantly opposed to entrusting Lebworth with his intellectual property at the end of 1956, but by the spring of 1957, he was willing to accept Lebworth’s money. He was more interested, by then, in stabilizing his life and paying down his debts than he was in securing his literary future, so on June 1, he signed the same contract Lebworth had offered the year before, and accepted a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.
Then Nelson abandoned his book. A week after he fell into the lagoon, he told a gossip columnist that his next novel was called Entrapment and that it was half-finished—but a few months later, he set the book aside.* That decision was in keeping with his other choices that year, but it’s likely Paula Bays played a role in it as well. She and Nelson had remained on good terms after she entered rehab in 1953, and he had continued to believe they might be together again—but that dream died abruptly when Bays married a pipe fitter in the summer of 1957. Her new husband didn’t know she had once been an addict and prostitute, and after their wedding, she made a clean break with her past. She called Nelson to invite him to the ceremony, but he declined, and they never spoke again.
The tenor of Nelson’s writing, speeches, and comments to the press also changed dramatically that year. As a public figure, he had been earnest almost to a fault for the first twenty years of his career, but after his plunge into the lagoon, his pronouncements became cynical, detached, and self-pitying. That summer, he told a group of college students that “most writers of the new school are on the side of the winners. Nobody seems to want to defend the accused.” And soon afterward, he began calling himself a journalist, referring to himself as a loser, and claiming that he was planning to pawn his National Book Award.
Despite the fact that he needed money desperately, Nelson couldn’t make himself cash the check Lebworth had given him. He kept it on his person for weeks, and regularly caressed and fiddled with it. Sometimes, he removed it from his wallet while he ate, rested it on the table, and gazed at his name on the PAY TO THE ORDER OF line and the numbers following the dollar sign. Nelson announced he was finally ready to go to the bank sometime that summer while Dave Peltz and Jesse Blue were at the house on Forrest Avenue. The check was dog-eared by then, and covered with coffee stains and butter marks, but the writing on it was still legible, so Nelson, Peltz, and Blue went downtown, and entered the Gary National Bank.
Peltz did the talking when they got inside. He asked the manager to verify that the check was still good, and when the issuing bank confirmed that it was, Nelson became abashed. He still harbored doubts about selling his film rights to Lebworth—not least because the contract didn’t promise him any share of the profit if a film were ever made from the book—but by then, he had gone too far to turn back. He told the teller he wanted the money in cash, and then he handed Dave Peltz a paper bag and left the building. The teller began placing stacks of bills into the bag, and while she did so, Nelson stood on the sidewalk with his nose pressed to the bank’s plate-glass window like a dog.
When Peltz exited carrying the bag, Nelson accepted it. Then he and Jesse Blue rode the South Shore Line to Chicago and went to the Pullman Bank on West 115th Street. Nelson was worried his money could be seized if the IRS audited him or one of the lawyers to whom he was indebted sued him, so he rented a safety deposit box and placed the cash inside. Then he gave Blue one of the two keys the bank provided, and said, If something happens to me, make sure my mother gets this money.
Nelson had been cautious with his windfalls in the past, but not that year. For the first time since 1933, he wasn’t writing a book or planning to, so he allowed Lebworth’s money to trickle through his fingers at a steady rate. He used some to pay down his debts, and some to buy an unremarkable racehorse named Jellious Widow.† He purchased an apartment building in Chicago and then resold it at a loss when he realized he didn’t want to be a landlord, and he lost a bit at the track, and a bit playing poker.
Nelson’s depression dragged on for more than a year, and as it did, disturbing stories about his behavior circulated. Someone said they spotted Nelson walking around Chicago, sweating and glancing furtively over his shoulder. A friend reported that they rode the train to Gary for a visit, and found him hiding in the bushes because he was scared to step into the lights on the platform. And Amanda claimed that he dropped by her house when he learned she was returning to California, searched her shelves to make sure she didn’t have any of his books, and left without saying a proper goodbye.
For months at a stretch, Nelson did, and wrote, very little, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, Sports Illustrated asked him to cover the 1958 Kentucky Derby. It was the first prestigious magazine assignment to come his way since 1950, so he accepted. It was an honor just to be asked. William Faulkner had been commissioned for the same assignment three years earlier, and another Pulitzer Prize winner named J. P. Marquand got the job after him.
Nelson arrived a week before the race at the house Sports Illustrated had rented for the occasion, and brought Jesse Blue with him. An editor named Whitney Tower welcomed them and handed them keys and press passes. When Blue received his, he said, “This may be one of the nicest things that has ever happened to me.”
Tower saw little of Nelson or Blue afterward. They spent their mornings trackside, watching the horses and jockeys warm up. Blue napped in the afternoons while Nelson wrote, and at night they explored the local bar scene.
On May 3, a three-year-old colt named Tim Tam won the Derby, and Nelson stayed up late polishing his story. The assignment had enlivened him, and after being out of print for so long, it seemed he was eager to impress. He boarded a plane the next morning with his manuscript, and then personally delivered it to the offices of Sports Illustrated.
The text Nelson submitted that day was distinct from everything he had written before. The story, though putatively nonfiction, features a protagonist named Nelson Algren who is more sarcastic, droll, and bumbling than the real Nelson Algren. Much of what happens in the story is either fictitious or greatly exaggerated, and the subject—the Derby—is less important than the narrator’s character and impressions.
“The first thing I did, of course, was to head for the Mint Julep concession,” Nelson wrote, “where they are billed $1.35 a throw, and I was given a shot of gin to which something snagged from a lawnmower had been added. I could have gotten the same effect from two sticks of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.” Later in the story, Nelson claimed that a railing collapsed beneath his weight. “Whether the gra
ndstand holds up until Derby Day or not is out of human hands,” he says. “It’s strictly up to the ants.”
And the horse Nelson describes most lovingly was not the winner, but the twelfth-place finisher—a colt famous for lagging behind the pack, then breaking late. “Nothing comes easy to Silky Sullivan . . . ,” he wrote. “He has to make you feel the way you feel when you see the Happy New Year wino on the curb with snow in his hair and a bottle of Mogen David in his hand, beaming up at the promise of the New Year’s first big bells—then looks down at the bottle broken on the curb and sees one missing from his hand. He gives you that outcast, nobody-loves-me-moment just long enough—then he starts his run, and who, that has ever run from behind the field, can be against a horse like that?”
Prose like that would become familiar to readers a decade later when authors began writing in a style eventually called New Journalism. “[I]n a different age of magazine writing,” Whitney Tower said later, “it might have been a prizewinner.” But the article was out of synch with what readers expected at the time, so Sports Illustrated killed it, it was never published, and Nelson added another indignity to the long list he had begun assembling in his mind a few years earlier.‡
Ten days after Nelson filed his Kentucky Derby story, one of the three lawyers he hired in 1955 sued him for four thousand dollars. Nelson probably had enough cash remaining to settle the debt, but instead he sold his house and moved into a tiny apartment at 920 North Noble Street in Chicago.§
Nelson’s new building faced St. Boniface Church—a touchstone of his writing—but his rooms were dank, cramped, and stunk of gas fumes and roach spray. This place, he told Max Geismar, is a “lightless cave off a loveless hall.”
Nelson moved again in February 1959, and this time he chose a railroad flat on the third floor of 1958 West Evergreen Avenue—less than a block from the apartment he lived in when he wrote Never Come Morning. He was hoping the move would get him back in touch with his roots, but he realized when he arrived that that wasn’t possible—either he had changed too much or the city had; he was never sure which. I don’t feel that I’m “coming back to anything,” he told Geismar. “The Chicago I knew, the neighborhood I knew, is either gone or I’m not with it. I see the same neon signs I used to see but I don’t see them the same. I just look, and that’s it.”
* Though the novel Nelson began writing about Bays was never completed, a portion of it made its way into Nelson’s archive. It sat there unread for years, but eventually Seven Stories Press resurrected it and published an excerpt in Entrapment and Other Writings (2009). It’s picaresque, but gorgeous and sui generis. You should read it.
† The horse is often referred to as Jealous Widow, but in racetrack programs the name was spelled Jellious Widow.
‡ Sadly, only portions of this story survive. A piece of it is in Nelson’s archive at Ohio State University, and a small portion not held by the archive appeared in a remembrance Whitney Tower wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1986.
§ Details here are hazy. It seems Nelson sold the house to a friend who was also a lawyer, and continued to have occasional access to it through the summer of 1961.
Part IV
WANDER YEARS
I was critical of him [Wright] for going, but he had to go. He was happier [in Paris]. . . . I don’t know, really, if you’d call it running—I don’t know. I don’t feel I’d want to judge a guy who goes to France or Mexico. I’m not so confident that by staying here I’m doing the smart thing at all. . . . Help yourself to the bourbon there.
—Nelson Algren in an interview with Michael Edelstein and Robert Lamb on April 4, 1962
“No, No Novel”
(February 1959–July 1961)
Nelson at his work space inside his third-floor apartment at 1958 West Evergreen Avenue. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-068771; Stephen Deutch, photographer
It took three strong men only a bit more than two hours to move Nelson out of 920 North Noble Street and into his new apartment at 1958 West Evergreen. He didn’t own much anymore—books and records, a typewriter, a metal bread box full of letters from Simone de Beauvoir, cardboard boxes stuffed with loose manuscript pages, and a large writing desk the movers managed to wedge so tightly into the hallway, it took them thirty minutes to get it unmoored.
When they were finished, the apartment was a mess, and Nelson began the long process of settling in. He bought a ladder, and used it to install a light fixture in the kitchen and to paint over his bedroom windows. He placed his desk in the front room so he could look toward Wicker Park while he worked, and he set a pair of rubber plants on it so they could catch the midday light. Then he arranged to have someone bypass his gas and electrical meters so he could avoid the cost of utilities, and hung pictures—one of Gerson changing a tire, and others of Beauvoir, Paula Bays, his high school basketball team, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and Joan Baez.
Then Nelson reordered his career. Once, he had been a zealot who placed his faith in literature above concern for money or status, but no more. Now he was a proud apostate who expected to be compensated for his labor. “No, no novel,” he soon told a friend. “I’d as soon attempt that as I would to open a pizza joint on Chicago’s Westside without getting protection first. My only chance of getting out of hock is to quit writing. You think that’s too far-fetched but it’s exactly how it has worked out. And anyhow, who for? I used to think it was for some vague assemblage called ‘readers.’ I used to think it was for some people named [Malcolm] Cowley and [Jean-Paul] Sartre and such too. But all that it turns out it is for is for” the lawyers who end up taking all the money.
Not writing a novel sounds like a ridiculous way for a renowned novelist to earn a living, but it worked out well for Nelson. The publishing industry had changed dramatically since Nelson last worked regularly, and with his agent’s help, he took advantage of those changes.
Nelson’s agent’s name was Candida Donadio, and thanks to her, he was soon earning more from being a writer than he ever had by writing seriously. Over the course of the next few years, she found foreign publishers for Nelson’s books, arranged for him to be paid handsomely to edit a collection of stories entitled Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters, and had Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, and Chicago: City on the Make reissued in new editions that generated more excitement than their initial releases. Pulp paperbacks—books that sold for as little as a quarter and paid authors pennies per copy—were being replaced by high-quality trade paperbacks by then, so Nelson’s reissues sometimes went for several times their original price.*
Glossy magazines had also begun multiplying, and competing for writers by inflating their rates. They were called The Dude, Gent, Coq, Rogue, Nugget, Cavalier, and Playboy, and they were willing to pay Nelson more for an essay or a review than he had been advanced to write each of his first three books.† He wrote for all of them over the course of the next few years, and enjoyed both the money they paid him and the chance to boast that he never read the publications his work appeared in.
University writing programs were proliferating as well, and offering generous sums to authors willing to teach seminars and deliver speeches. Nelson could earn almost a year’s rent by spending an afternoon on stage, and from that point forward, he accepted almost every offer he received and tried to put on a good show. When I appeared at the University of Washington, he told a friend, I “sucked and smiled and wheedled and lapped and meached and dandled and fondled and whinnied and altogether played it so winning and coy that I may get invited back next year.”
“A man who won’t demean himself for a dollar,” he added sarcastically, “is a phoney is my thinking, and I couldn’t live with myself if I tried to keep my self-respect when opportunities to get rich . . . are so abundant.”
Nelson also made a critical assessment of his social life and rearranged it. He stopped writing or speaking to Maxwell Geismar because every time he sent Geismar a lengthy missive, he received a postcard in return. He st
opped speaking to the photographer Art Shay because he thought Shay had been using their friendship to advance his own career, and when he heard that Jack Conroy had made a disparaging remark about him during a speech, he stopped speaking to Conroy as well. Then he made new friends, and established a new routine for his days. He began visiting the Luxor Steam Baths on North Avenue every morning, and eating lunch at Louis Szathmary’s Bakery restaurant on the Near North Side. He visited the YMCA to swim in the afternoons, and spent several nights a week at Jazz Ltd., where he became close to the manager, Ruth Reinhardt. And on Sundays, he visited his mother, Goldie, who was still living in the basement apartment on Lawrence Avenue that she had begun renting during the war. Their relationship had settled into an uneasy truce by then, and though they were never close, Nelson was a dutiful son. He had been paying her rent for years, and she cooked soup for him when he stopped by to express her gratitude.
Once the details of Nelson’s personal life were settled, he began cultivating a public persona. His politics and his writing had once made him a social liability, but that was no longer true. Since Nelson last lived in Chicago, Joseph McCarthy had been sidelined by the Senate and then drank himself to death. Howard Rushmore had murdered his wife in the back seat of a taxi, and then shot himself in the head with the same .32 Colt he used on her. Louis Budenz had parted with his publisher and begun receding from public life, and blacklisted writers and actors were working again in Hollywood.
The Red Scare was over, or close to it, so Chicago’s tastemakers welcomed Nelson home, and soon he was a mainstay on the cultural scene. His name began appearing in the Tribune’s gossip column, and he was on television and the radio more than ever before. Celebrities and well-known writers passing through town began feeling obliged to pay their respects to him, and before long, his hospitality was legend. Typically, he offered visitors guided tours of the remnants of skid row, and brought them to a North Clark Street bar frequented by hard-drinking members of the Menominee tribe. He challenged his guests to arm-wrestling matches, drank them under the table, and brought them to the Cook County Jail so they could touch the electric chair.
