by Colin Asher
Who Lost an American? is interesting for several reasons. It cleanly divides Nelson’s career into phases—the first, defined by earnestness and an evangelical zeal for truth telling; and the second, in which he called himself a journalist and insisted the written word was powerless in the American Century. It was born out of a desire to experiment, and the conviction that fiction writing had become too restricted by the biases of professional critics to allow for experimentation. And it anticipates many of the stylistic changes that would soon become commonplace in nonfiction writing: the sarcastic tone, the mesh of fact and fiction, and the exaggerated incompetence of the narrator.
But that’s not the same as saying it’s a good book, and when it was released, not a single reviewer claimed it was. Nelson is a great writer, the Tribune said, “But it doesn’t necessarily follow that everything he writes will be great.” The Times said the same: “It would be fine to discover him working once again on people whom he could feel in his blood and within an action that might carry his special melody.” Most insightfully, a reviewer for The Reporter wrote: “[Caught] between his own past, in which a deep identification with the social outcast and the working class was all but inseparable from his sense of literary vocation, and the present, in which money seems to brutalize equally those who have too much and those who have too little, Algren seems to have lost all sense of what useful literary tasks might remain open to him.”
Nelson visited his mother, Goldie, in July 1961, just before he completed his manuscript.¶ She was living in a nursing home at the time, and had been for the past four months. Her doctors had been expecting her to die since the beginning of the year, and though she had outlasted their best predictions, it was clear she wouldn’t continue doing so for much longer.
Nelson sat down when he arrived, lit a cigarette, and looked at his mother. They had never had a good feeling for each other. She was all rules, modest ambition, and respectability, and he was late nights, big ideas, and irreverence. But no matter their differences, they were still mother and son, and at the end, each was all the other had left. Nelson’s sister Irene had died the year before while he was in Europe.
“Give me one,” Goldie said, meaning a cigarette.
“No, you don’t want to smoke, Ma, do you?” Nelson asked. Goldie had smoked one cigarette in her life, maybe two.
“Well,” she said, “I have to do something.”
They sat there together for a while, smoking, and attendants from the rest home gathered nearby to watch. They had barely seen Goldie move in weeks. Then there was a murmur in the room, maybe something moving through the pipes in the walls, and Goldie looked at Nelson and said, “Voices are coming up from below.”
“But she said it in this rhythm, with a certain rhythm to it that surprised me very much,” Nelson said later. “I was surprised that she should put her last strength into trying to make a poem.”
Goldie died the next day.
* This point can’t be overstated. The peak of Nelson’s career—roughly, 1942–1956—coincided with the peak of the pulp paperback market, which meant that, early on, the sale of his books brought in a fraction of what they would have if they had been released later. He was paid well when his hardcovers sold, but almost nothing on his paperbacks. Nelson may have received only one thousand dollars for the first paperback edition of Never Come Morning, for instance, even though it sold a million copies. He received (by my rough estimate) about fifteen thousand dollars for the paperback edition of A Walk on the Wild Side, even though more than 1.2 million copies were printed. The Neon Wilderness sold at least 500,000 copies, and at least 120,000 copies of The Jungle (the edited version of Somebody in Boots) were printed, but it seems Nelson recieved only a few thousand dollars from the sale of these books.
† This is true both in absolute terms and when adjustments are made for inflation.
‡ Most of these references make sense in the context of Nelson’s life, but Mailer and Baldwin require explanation. Mailer made it into the book because he insulted Nelson in Advertisements for Myself. Baldwin is a more complicated story. Nelson gave Baldwin’s first book one of its first good reviews, and he later visited Baldwin—bearing a signed copy of Chicago: City on the Make—and tried to befriend him. The visit ended badly. Baldwin accused Nelson of trading on Richard Wright’s name, and they ended up shouting at each other. Though by no means a virulent homophobe, Nelson was, unfortunately, not above trading in homophobic stereotypes as a means of insulting Baldwin. To complicate things further, Nelson later said Baldwin was one of the best writers of his generation, and quoted him frequently.
§ Shulman was a humorist who wrote for television, as well as novels and short stories.
¶ Macmillan, the book’s publisher, requested changes to the manuscript, so it wasn’t finalized until June 1962, but Nelson’s correspondence shows he considered it complete in early August 1961.
A Character Named Nelson Algren
(August 1961–June 1964)
Nelson playing poker in 1962. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-019379; Stephen Deutch, photographer
Someone was cheating. Nelson was certain of it. It was a Friday night in the middle of June 1962, and he was seated at a table with his old friends Dave Peltz and Studs Terkel, an acquaintance named Francis Moretti, and someone he knew only by the nom de guerre Big Injun. There was a pile of cash between them, and each man was clutching a fistful of playing cards.
Nelson had been hosting a weekly poker game in the back room of his apartment since he returned to Chicago. A real estate and insurance agent named Ted Kozlowski played regularly, and so did Peltz, Terkel, a local television director named Billy Friedkin, and a handful of other men.* The pots for each hand were often large, and Nelson took a cut of each one because he hosted the game and often dealt. The percentage he collected usually guaranteed him a profit, but lately he had been losing money.
Nelson scrutinized the players. He watched their facial expressions and kept track of how they bet and when they folded, and before morning, he was convinced Big Injun and Moretti were the cheaters. Injun was Moretti’s bodyguard, so they always arrived and left together, and that night, at least, their play seemed synchronized—when one of them lost a hand, he usually lost to the other so that, collectively, they took in the majority of the money being wagered.
The game dragged on past midnight and into Saturday—4 a.m., 5 a.m., and then through dawn. The players rose from their chairs around six or seven in the morning and settled up. Peltz and Studs each gave Moretti a check to cover their losses. Then everyone left.
Dave Peltz reached his house in Gary around 8 a.m., tired and eager to get to sleep, but his phone rang before he could lie down.
It was Nelson. “Dave,” he said, “stop payment on that fuckin’ check.”
“Why?” Peltz asked.
“Because Francis and Big Injun were playing out of each other’s pocket.” I’m going to tell Studs to cancel his check too, Nelson said. “I’m tired of that shit and I think they’ve been playing out of each other’s pocket and that’s why they’ve been taking down all the fucking money.”
Peltz hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, but he went along with Nelson and cancelled the check—a dangerous move. Moretti was a loan shark with a reputation for toughness—not a man to be toyed with. His brother was a former Chicago police officer who had been convicted of murder after drunkenly shooting three unarmed men in a parking lot—killing two of them, and wounding the third. Moretti had been supporting the whole family since, so he couldn’t afford to let Nelson malign him, or allow Peltz and Terkel to walk away from their debts. He paid Big Injun to ensure that such things never happened, and it was understood he would get his money one way or another.
Nelson stayed close to home after he called Peltz, and whenever he heard someone banging on the downstairs door, he stepped into the hall carrying a baseball bat. He spoke to Moretti on the phone and said they should get together and talk about their dispu
te, but not right away.
I’m leaving town, Nelson said. Let’s meet in October.
Moretti threatened Nelson with torture, and when Nelson dared him to try, Moretti threatened Peltz too.
About two weeks after the poker game, Peltz was asleep on his living room couch in the middle of the night when a cement block crashed through the window near his head. Then he heard another crash, and rushed into the bedroom to check on his wife. There, he saw a second cement block resting on the floor, surrounded by a spray of shattered glass. He ran outside and looked into the dark, but all he heard was the sound of Big Injun’s feet slapping the pavement as he ran away.
Maybe half an hour later, the phone rang. Peltz answered and heard Moretti’s voice. “Pay up, you cocksucker, or get killed,” he said. Then he hung up.
Peltz drove into Chicago that Sunday and parked outside the Russian and Turkish Baths on Division Street. He had been in touch with Moretti after receiving that threatening phone call and arranged to meet him. Moretti pulled up in a Lincoln Continental, parked across the street, opened the trunk, and removed two baseball bats. Holding one in each hand, he called to Peltz. “Are you alone?”
“Yeah, I’m alone,” Peltz said.
Moretti threw the bats back in his trunk and crossed the street. He handed Peltz the cancelled check, and then they went inside the baths and gave each other platzas. When they were finished and their clothes were back on, Peltz gave Moretti the money he owed him, and Moretti insisted he never cheated.
The problem with you and Nelson is that you “don’t understand the game,” he said. “You don’t understand mathematics. You don’t understand percentages. You don’t understand averages.” Then he lamented the end of Nelson’s poker night. “I had a good, sweet thing there,” he said. “Maybe I won too much. Maybe I should have given a little bit back, especially to Nelson.” If I had, “he’d have kept the game alive.”
“OK,” Peltz said. “I’m ready to go home.”
“You ain’t going home,” Moretti said.
“Where am I going?” Peltz asked.
“You’re going with me, and we’re going to spend this $250. We’re going to drink this fucking money up, every dime.”
And they did. They spent the remainder of the day drifting from one bar to the next, bonding, and talking about what a horrible poker player Nelson was. Nelson would have been offended if he heard them, but by then, he was on a freighter bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.†
The Malaysia Mail pulled away from its dock in the port of Seattle in late June and made a sound like “its rusty heart would break,” Nelson told a friend. Once it was floating free, it powered north through Elliott Bay, then west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and into the open ocean. It entered a bank of fog near the Aleutian Islands that obliterated the skyline for days, and before it emerged, the sounds emanating from the hull had become less worrisome—more a “low grieving” moan than a death rattle, Nelson said.
The Mail was a tramp steamer that operated on no fixed schedule and made no accommodations for comfort. There was a common mess hall, small cabins, and a laundry room where everyone washed their own clothes. The crew was experienced, gruff, and taciturn. Some had no home on land in any country, no family, and no reason to ever stop sailing. There were only two passengers on board. One was a Chinese woman heading for Hong Kong to visit relatives. Nelson was the other.
The Malaysia Mail was expected to drop anchor in South Korea first, but not before it spent a week on the open ocean. Nelson peered at the endless horizon during those first days, played cards with the crew, read, and tapped the keys of his typewriter.
There was a stack of books, magazines, and journals in Nelson’s cabin, and Ernest Hemingway was either the author or the subject of nearly every one of them. He had killed himself the year before, and critics had been steadily turning out critical reappraisals of his career ever since. Many of the same men who attacked A Walk on the Wild Side were trying to diminish Hemingway’s influence, and Nelson was greatly offended by their efforts. Their true purpose, he believed, was to reframe American literature as an essentially academic pursuit—more concerned with structure, symbolism, and style than what he sometimes called “the things of the earth.”
Nelson also saw opportunity in Hemingway’s death—but unlike most critics, he wanted to assert the importance of Hemingway’s work. He was planning to spend his time on the Malaysia Mail writing a long essay that claimed Hemingway deserved a place in the canon, and that added nuance to the common perception that he was just an alpha male—a man on the cover of Look magazine, one hand resting on the body of the leopard he had just shot, the other on his rifle. That’s not Hemingway at all, Nelson soon wrote. In truth, he was a “broken” man who had seen more loss of life than anyone should have to, and in his writing, “the whole buried burden of American guilt, the self-destructiveness of a people who felt their lives were being lived by somebody else, found expression.”
Nelson had tried to do something similar for Richard Wright, though on a smaller scale. Wright died a few months before Hemingway, and afterward Nelson wrote a touching remembrance that made a claim for the enduring importance of his work. Wright “came to Chicago because there was no other place for him to go,” Nelson wrote. “He came as a stranger, lived as a stranger, and he left without looking back. . . . Yet his impact on Chicago has been more enduring than that of any merchant prince, Mayor, or newspaper owner. For his impact was upon the city’s conscience; and therefore upon the conscience of humanity.
“His voice,” Nelson wrote, “opened a wedge for the inarticulate of the world, both black and white.”
Nelson continued to reference Wright and Hemingway as examples of what a writer should be for the remainder of his career, and though he never said so directly, his defense of their work was a defense of his own as well. He had begun to worry about his legacy, and he knew that asserting the importance of writing that speaks for the “inarticulate of the world” and gives expression to “the whole buried burden of American guilt” was one way of arguing for the importance of his own books.
Nelson hoped the forced seclusion of life at sea would motivate him to work on his Hemingway essay, but that wasn’t the primary reason he booked passage on the Malaysia Mail. Mostly, he did so just because he could. He had no long-term writing projects tying him to Chicago, and the only woman he was seeing at the time was a twenty-five-year-old named Madeleine Gobeil, who lived in Canada. He no longer had to care for Goldie, either, and so traveling was becoming a regular part of his life. In the nine months since his mother died, he had been to Michigan, Washington, Florida, and New York, and at some point after that last trip, he decided to visit Asia, “simply,” he said, because he “didn’t have any experience in going.”
The Malaysia Mail dropped anchor for the first time in the Choryang-dong port in Busan, South Korea, and Nelson went onshore and wandered the streets near the waterfront. The smell of kimchi permeated the town, he noticed, but America’s influence could be felt everywhere. It was common to see people wearing hand-me-down army fatigues, and all the street vendors pretended they were selling branded products—they put handmade soap in used Palmolive wrappers, every candy was called Baby Ruth, and cigarette stubs came in wrinkled Chesterfield packs.
Nelson followed a member of the ship’s crew through Kowloon when they reached Hong Kong, and watched him buy transistors that he planned to resell at a profit on the black market. In Bombay, Nelson explored the city until he found the Kamathipura district, where young prostitutes solicited johns from behind the bars of street-facing cages. He began interviewing them, and continued to do so until the ship returned to the sea and sailed for Singapore.
The Malaysia Mail docked in Calcutta in September, and by then, Nelson had become preoccupied with the ship and its crew. He had been fascinated by them at first, but after more than two months of forced intimacy, their attitude toward the people they traded with had begun to disgus
t him. Every time the ship docked, he said later, the crew was inundated by peddlers and prostitutes, and over time, they had begun to believe they were virtuous simply because they had money to spend.
Once, Nelson explained, the Malaysia Mail was greeted by a madam piloting a small boat loaded with women when it pulled into a port in the Philippines. “When a ship doesn’t dock here for a month,” she said, “we have to sell our clothes.”
“Their lives depend on the crew,” Nelson said, “so the crew is too used to having it their own way. . . . I think this is why I say the ship represents in a way what is wrong with the United States because in our dealings with a lot of the smaller countries they can’t say no. Underneath that is a lot of resentment toward Americans.”
The Malaysia Mail made a second stop in Singapore after it left the Philippines, and then headed back toward the American coast. Nelson had been at sea for more than three months by then, and he was sick of the crew, but he still faced the last leg of the trip—two weeks of nothing but “unrelieved” tedium.
The ship reached the port of Los Angeles in late September, and soon afterward Nelson returned to Chicago with an unfinished essay and a stack of notes from his travels. There was no one waiting to greet him when he got home, and nothing but a stack of newspapers leaning against his apartment door to show he had been gone. He looked at his wall calendar when he entered his apartment, and noticed it hadn’t been changed since February.
