Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Nelson never forgot he was being embraced by people who spent years shunning him, though, and when he was in public, he adopted an arch, comic persona that suggested his disdain for Chicago’s fair-weather regard. He regularly appeared at formal events dressed in a torn and threadbare sport coat, made jokes about the self-importance of his hosts, and pretended to be greatly flattered when people professed to admire his work. He wasn’t above raising his voice in polite company, and he often wore a tie that lit up when he pushed a button concealed in his pocket.

  Sometimes, people were offended by Nelson’s act, and an interviewer once accused him of affecting a pose. “Your stance,” he said, “is that of a clown and you are in absolute control as you do it.”

  “Well,” Nelson replied, “I can’t just stand there. I have to react. . . . And my way of reacting is by mockery. And if I mock myself, I assume that people around don’t take themselves any more seriously than I do.”

  The State Department informed Nelson in the summer of 1959 that his passport application had been approved, after years of denials and at least half a dozen appeals. It provided no explanation for its decision.

  Nelson was elated, and wrote to Beauvoir immediately to ask about the possibility of visiting Paris. They had been corresponding irregularly since The Mandarins was published. He wrote to her once in 1957, once in ’58, and then once at the beginning of ’59. He sounded nostalgic about the early days of their relationship in those letters, but also morose and depressed. His mood improved drastically after his passport application was approved, though, and Beauvoir thought he seemed excited about life—and her—again, and she in turn became excited by the prospect of seeing him.

  Come, visit, she said. I live alone now. “So you could even be my guest, since my place is wide enough and you could have a little room of your own. Well, we’ll see. What is really important is your coming.” We can travel in my car, and I’ll cook our meals, and “in our oldish way we’ll be wonderfully happy together.”

  Beauvoir had been feeling politically isolated in France, and old and lethargic. She had aged out of the Paris literary scene, and had begun working at home, alone, instead of in the cafés, where she wrote her early books. She spent much of her time caring for Sartre, whose health was deteriorating, and she was losing intimates rapidly. Claude Lanzmann, her lover, was seeing another woman, and Boris Vian, her good friend, had just died of a heart attack. But the thought of seeing Nelson again enlivened her, and she arranged her schedule to accommodate a lengthy sojourn in her apartment, and weeks of traveling.

  Nelson and Beauvoir were in touch several times to plan his visit, and in their correspondence they spoke intimately for the first time in years. She confessed that she thought their reunion might be awkward, and that she was worried he would no longer find her attractive. And he responded with tender reassurances and tokens of his affection—a leaf he had pressed between the pages of a book, cartoons snipped from the newspaper, and a box of books at Christmas.

  Beauvoir was relieved by Nelson’s enthusiasm at first, but then doubt crept up on her. The outlines of the trip were settled by the end of the year, but he wasn’t supposed to arrive until March 1960, and while she waited, she became increasingly anxious about seeing him.

  Nelson arrived at Beauvoir’s apartment at 11 bis, rue Victor Schoelcher in mid-March and unpacked. She was in Cuba with Sartre and not due to return for more than a week, so he made himself at home. He placed his typewriter on her desk along with a stack of yellow paper, went out to buy imported American food, and spent days writing and listening to the records he brought—Charlie Parker, Mahalia Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy, and Bessie Smith.

  It was a good time for Nelson, and he felt free and easy while he waited for Beauvoir. A musical version of A Walk on the Wild Side had been staged in St. Louis just before he left America, and he had arrived in London in time for a party celebrating the release of a new edition of The Man with the Golden Arm. He visited Ireland afterward and spent two days with the poet Brendan Behan, and when he reached Paris, he reconnected with friends and other expatriates living in the city and began writing the series of essays that eventually became his next book, Who Lost an American?

  Beauvoir returned home on March 20, still nervous about seeing Nelson. She felt anxious when she rang the doorbell to her apartment, then more anxious when there was no answer. She rang it again, harder, and the door opened.

  “You?” Nelson asked with surprise. He had been told her flight was arriving the following day, and he wasn’t prepared to greet her.

  They looked at each other then, for the first time in nine years. He had replaced his glasses with contacts, so his eyes were bare, but aside from that, she thought he hadn’t aged since their last summer together in Gary. And she looked, to him, the same as she had when he first spotted her in the lobby of the Palmer House, pacing in her white coat with a copy of the Partisan Review in her hand.

  After their reunion, Nelson and Beauvoir became lovers again and fell into their old habits. He called her Frenchy and she called him Crocodile. He told bawdy jokes to provoke her, and she grinned and wagged her finger in response—the one still encircled by the silver ring he gave her. Then she began leading him through the city on long walks—past her old apartment at rue de la Bûcherie, a flea market they visited in ’49, and the Musée de l’Homme.

  They traded stories for days. She told him about the trip she had just taken to Cuba, her time with Che Guevara, and the crowds that began following her after Fidel Castro announced that she and Sartre were friends of the Cuban revolution. And he told her about how much Chicago and America had changed. He said that their old apartment on Wabansia Avenue had been demolished, and a highway overpass and some apartment buildings had been built on the lot where they fell in love. The witch hunts directed by Congress have ended, he explained, but the cultural consensus that has followed them is no less stifling. “The arrogance of the respectable he found more intolerable than ever,” she wrote later.

  In the evenings, they went out to theaters where they listened to flamenco and sipped sangria, a bar where they drank akvavit from bottles sheathed in ice, a Senegalese restaurant where they tasted pineapple flambé, an arena where they watched a boxing exhibition, and a pleasure boat that carried them down the Seine.

  At first, each of them pretended the other was the same person they had fallen in love with twelve years earlier—but slowly, each began to understand how much the other had changed.

  Nelson saw Beauvoir more clearly with time. She was still trim and elegant, her hair was still dark, and her face had the same serious-but-not-severe expression when it was at rest. But there was something sad and lonesome about her that he had never noticed before. She had become a much more famous figure, but also a more private one. Her circle of friends was smaller, and she spent most of her time traveling, at home alone, or caring for Sartre. She was preoccupied with death because her friend Albert Camus had just been killed in a car crash, and instead of a grand feminist treatise, her major writing project was the third volume of her autobiography—Force of Circumstance, I.

  Beauvoir also began to see Nelson more clearly with time, and the changes she noticed distressed her. The years that had passed since they were last together had not been as kind to him as they had been to her. His hair, which he ran his fingers through compulsively, was thinning. He was still wearing clothes she recognized from a decade earlier, but he had put on weight, so now his shirts strained across his belly. His eyes had lost their glint, and his mind had taken a bitter, obsessive turn.

  Nelson had been a collector of other people’s stories when he and Beauvoir were first close. He spoke in metaphor and parable, and his conversation overflowed with literary references, overheard dialogue, and apocryphal tales. He was a gifted storyteller who kept his own counsel on all serious matters, rarely spoke about himself, and never betrayed his weaknesses. But by the spring of 1960, he had become obsessed with the story of his o
wn descent. After the elation of his reunion with Beauvoir passed, he began waking up angry and remaining angry for hours afterward. He played records to soothe himself, and incanted the names of the people and institutions that had taken advantage of him, and expounded on their misdeeds. The list was the same each day—Bob Roberts, Otto Preminger, the State Department, his lawyers, Ken McCormick, and Roger Straus.

  “Once I used to live in America,” he said, “now I live on American occupied territory.” My country has become the status-obsessed, conformist place I feared it would become after the war, and “I’ve been eaten alive, made a sucker of, betrayed.”

  Beauvoir also felt like a stranger in her own country, so she could relate to Nelson’s distress. “He had been promised one world and then found himself in quite a different one,” she wrote later, “a world directly opposed to all his convictions and all his hopes.” But being sympathetic to Nelson’s troubles was not the same as being interested in hearing a fresh accounting of them each day. She listened to his complaints patiently for weeks, out of respect for their shared history, but eventually, she began making excuses to get away from the apartment so she could return to the work she had been neglecting since he arrived.

  Nelson left France in May without Beauvoir and flew to Mallorca, Spain, to attend a writers’ conference that had been convened to establish a literary prize called the Prix Formentor. Then he went to Barcelona and explored the rooftops of the Barrio Chino, which were covered with shacks occupied by people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

  Madrid was Nelson’s next stop, and when he arrived, he visited the US embassy. The State Department had only granted him a temporary passport, and it had already expired. The embassy didn’t have the authority to give Nelson an extension, so it cabled Washington, DC, for guidance, but Nelson didn’t wait in Madrid long enough for their response to arrive.

  Beauvoir joined Nelson in Madrid after a few days. They spent their first evening together drinking with a group of young intellectuals who opposed the rule of Francisco Franco—the general who had been ruling Spain since their civil war—and then they began to wander. They went to Seville, where employees from the US Consulate stopped Nelson in the lobby of their hotel and questioned him about his passport renewal. Then they continued on to Triana, where they visited a dance hall hung with paper wreaths and listened to a flamenco singer’s lament.

  They got a car in Malaga and drove to Torremolinos where whitewashed buildings with tile roofs climbed the hills at the edge of town. Then they drifted farther—to Almeria, where Nelson took pictures of a troglodytic village that had been built into the cliffs outside the city, then Granada, and finally the Alhambra.

  Nelson and Beauvoir returned to Paris at the end of May so that Nelson could prepare for his trip home, but when they arrived, he learned that his passport extension had been granted. He had been trying to escape America for almost a decade and couldn’t face the idea of returning earlier than necessary, so he decided to remain in Europe through the summer. Beauvoir said he could stay with her, but made no promises about how often they would see each other.

  The next few months, the last Beauvoir and Nelson spent together, were a sad coda to their long romance. She was more influential than ever, and her greatest challenge was dividing her time between her personal, political, and literary obligations—articles, books, protesting France’s occupation of Algeria, and Sartre. Nelson was marginalized and directionless—a fifty-one-year-old man living in self-imposed exile. He spent his days alone for the most part, contriving excuses to see Beauvoir and writing magazine articles about his time in Europe that he used as opportunities to mock himself. “I can assure you that, at one time, I was well read,” he wrote. “But that was before I consciously set forth on a course of knowing less and less, especially about literature.”

  In July, Nelson and Beauvoir left Paris and set off on a second vacation—to Marseille, where they discussed the Cuban revolution; to Istanbul, where they drank coffee in an outdoor café; and then on to Athens, a fishing port called Heraklion, and Crete.

  They returned to Paris in August, and then it was finally time for them to say goodbye. Beauvoir was scheduled to fly to Brazil and then Cuba, and Nelson was planning to return to America while she was gone.

  Beauvoir felt content when they parted. “Not a single shadow of disagreement had troubled our five months together,” she wrote later. She didn’t feel “nostalgia.” She felt his visit had “completed” their relationship.

  But Nelson’s emotions were more complicated—tinged by regret, longing, and lonesomeness. Once, he told Beauvoir that he had taken a long walk by himself and ended up near her old apartment without intending to—“As if my body hadn’t given up the past,” he said.

  “Was it so much better, the past?” She asked.

  “When I was forty,” he said, “I didn’t realize I was forty; everything was beginning!”

  After she left, he lingered at her apartment alone for several weeks, writing, and once drinking so heavily, her friends had to carry him home and put him in bed. When it was time for him to return to America, he cleaned her apartment and placed a small pile of cash where she would see it to compensate her for some of the time he lived there.

  When Beauvoir returned from her trip, she found a stack of mail with Nelson’s name on it, a few magazines, and a candy bar he forgot to throw away, but nothing else—no note, no books, no love poem. A friend of hers had visited the apartment while it was empty and pocketed the cash Nelson left, so not even that small token remained to remind her of their summer together. They never saw each other again.

  Nelson arrived in Chicago in mid-September to attend a book signing at the Marshall Field & Company department store. The event had been organized to promote the release of a new edition of The Neon Wilderness, and when it ended, Nelson secluded himself inside his apartment so he could focus on the collection of travel essays he had begun writing in Paris. For the next ten months, he did little else.

  The travelogue Nelson produced in that time was released in May 1963 as Who Lost an American?, and it is distinct from everything he had published in the past. Like the essay he wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1958, it’s comic, and satirical, and blends fact and fiction—but unlike that earlier work, it is also bitter, vengeful, self-pitying, and wildly uneven.

  The book begins with a fictional account of Nelson being evicted from his home after failing to pay his legal bills, and fleeing from the sheriff who served him papers. “Excusing myself,” he wrote, “I rolled my stamp collection into my G.I. blanket, mounted my British lightweight bicycle made in Dusseldorf and, with the cry of ‘Sink the Bismarck!’ broke through the cordon and sped swiftly down the Indiana Turnpike till I came to a tollway.”

  The story shifts to New York City, where Nelson attends a literary party filled with fictionalized stand-ins for all the people who, he felt, had wronged him. Roger Straus makes an appearance as “Trustworthy Ex-Naval-Eye Roger Blueblade,” and Farrar, Straus & Cudahy becomes “Blueblade, Suckingwise, Scalpel & Tourniquet, Trustworthy Publishers.” Ken McCormick appears as “Kenwood McCowardly” of “Doubledeal & Wunshot.” The literary critic Alfred Kazin transforms into “Alfred Paperfish, Leading Footnote King.” Elizabeth Ingersoll, Nelson’s former agent, becomes a lush named “Ginny Ginstruck.” Norman Mailer is “Norman Manlifellow,” author of Look, Ma, My Fly Is Open, and James Baldwin makes an appearance as “Giovanni Johnson,” an offensive caricature of a gay man who prances instead of walking, and speaks with a lisp.‡ The chapter ends with Mailer pinching Baldwin’s ass and then running from the party into Central Park. Nelson then boards a ship and sails for Europe alone.

  Who Lost an American? follows Nelson across the ocean, and when it does, the writing improves dramatically. The book was dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir when it was published, and the portions of the text Nelson spends discussing her career and their common friends are among the best.

  Juliet
te Gréco, a singer I met in 1949, Nelson wrote, was “a woman who had been made by times in which there had been no hours to spare to pretension.” Marcel Mouloudji “emerged from the kind of winter that war makes upon children, one when the only heat in Paris was that of the café.” Jean-Paul Sartre was “dangerous because of his total commitment to the nature of man and his opposition to formal assaults, from left or right, upon the nature of man.” Beauvoir was ridiculed for her political positions in 1949, Nelson wrote, but by 1960, “[s]he had broken through the defenses of the bourgeoisie, of the church, the businessmen, the right-wing defenders of Napoleonic glory, and the hired press. She was, at once, the most hated and the most loved woman in France. It had become plain: she meant it.”

  The book’s narrative progresses in the same order as Nelson’s travels, and as it does, it continues to toggle between passages of earnest commentary, and mawkish and self-pitying sections that muddle their effect. After having suffered so much for honest writing, it seems Nelson had developed a compositional tic—after penning a line of insightful prose, he felt compelled to undercut himself immediately. “Any challenge to laws made by people on top, in the interest of people below, is literature,” he wrote on one page. Then, four paragraphs later, he announced, “I am no better informed on Spanish literature than on American, my entire library consisting of the works of Max Shulman.”§

  The last four chapters of the book are set in Chicago and contain a brief history of the city that begins with Nelson’s childhood and advances to the present day—a time when Hugh Hefner dominates headlines and the city has become “a middleman in business-blues who has one daiquiri before dinner and the filet better be just as he ordered it or somebody is going to catch hell.” There are bright spots in these chapters as well—moments of insight and thoughtful critique—but the book’s cynical tone overshadows them. And as a result, it’s difficult, when you compare the book to Nelson’s earlier work, to feel anything other than the sentiment that so obviously dominated his thoughts while he wrote it: disappointment.