Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Similarly, Nelson used Red Haloways—one of the purely fictitious characters in the book—to comment on the racial stereotypes that had made it so easy to demonize and convict Rubin Carter.

  Ruby Calhoun is a serious, disciplined man who speaks in a straightforward manner in The Devil’s Stocking. He’s very much the person Nelson perceived when he spoke to Rubin Carter, but Red Haloways, in contrast, is the man that people who read the Paterson newspapers imagined Carter was—angry, irrational, and so damaged by racism that he has been driven mad and become violent.

  Haloways has an almost pathological hatred of white people, and by the end of the novel, he’s been committed to a psychiatric institution, where he structures his days around receipt of the newspaper. “He spread the paper’s section out on his bed,” Nelson wrote, “and sat in his armchair before them. He began stripping the business section first, into long, neat strips. When it was done he gathered the strips and put them into the waste basket. And took another glass of water.

  “It was slow work, because each section had to be stripped neatly and scissors were not allowed.”

  In the novel, Calhoun is convicted of murder twice, but Haloways—a real killer—escapes serious punishment. The irrational fear Calhoun has engendered in the city’s police and white residents blinds them to the real threat—a man who has become a killer after being subjected to that same irrational fear and bigotry for years.

  Maybe most presciently, Nelson used the novel to comment on the fear and anger demographic change had created in Paterson. In the novel’s final scene, the character based on Fred Hogan visits the site of the murders Calhoun was convicted of. He goes into the bar alone and looks around. It had once been an all-white establishment in a black neighborhood, but it had since become black-owned. After that change, it was impossible to imagine what the neighborhood’s white residents had been so fearful of.

  “The tavern that once was the Melody Bar and Grill is now the Aquarius Lounge,” Nelson wrote.

  “The changes have been great. There had been no change at all.

  “The pool table remains in the middle of the room; but the players now are black. Budweiser ads still border the walls but the handsome young marrieds in them are, again, black.”

  Hogan’s character sits at the bar, and asks the bartender, with faux innocence, “Isn’t this the place that got into the papers some years back?”

  “The bartender was a black woman who had read Frantz Fanon,” Nelson wrote.

  “ ‘Maybe it is. Then again maybe it isn’t,’ she replied, concealing her hostility beneath the guise of courtesy. ‘We don’t know anything about this place when it was a white bar. I’m sure I couldn’t tell you.’ ”

  “I heard there was a triple homicide here,” Hogan’s character says.

  “ ‘Mister,’ the woman came close to her white customer, ‘I don’t know what you’re after but you won’t find it here.’ ”

  And Nelson ends the book: “All, all is changed.

  “And everything remains the same.”

  Nelson sent his manuscript to Candida Donadio in April 1979, and eventually the publisher at Arbor House, Donald Fine, showed interest in it. He liked the book, but thought it was still too faithful to its source material—too similar to Carter’s story—so he sent Nelson several pages of suggestions.

  Nelson began revising his manuscript, and submitted a new draft in October. Fine offered Nelson fifteen thousand dollars for the book but asked for more changes, and Nelson agreed to continue revising, but told Fine he would have to come up with more money.

  When Christmas arrived, Nelson was still writing. He was alone for the holidays that year, and before the night ended, he was having trouble breathing and was sweating heavily. He remained in his apartment for a long time, trying to muscle through his anxiety and fear, but eventually, he called his downstairs neighbor for help.

  An ambulance picked Nelson up the next morning and brought him to the hospital, where he was admitted for observation and informed that he had suffered a minor heart attack.

  Roy Finer called Nelson’s house that morning. He let the phone ring for a long time, but Nelson never answered, so he drove to Hackensack and knocked on Nelson’s door. There was no answer there, either, so Finer asked a child he saw playing in the street if they had seen anything out of the ordinary.

  A few minutes later, Finer entered the local hospital and located Nelson’s room: 461-1.

  “How the hell did you find me?” Nelson asked, surprised.

  “I’m a detective,” Finer said.

  Roger Groening drove down from Saratoga when he heard about Nelson’s heart attack, and when he arrived, Nelson swore him to secrecy. Roy Finer was in the room as well, and Nelson made them both promise to keep his illness to themselves. If anyone learns that I had a heart attack, he said, Arbor House won’t buy my book. They’ll just wait for me to die so they can get it for nothing.

  Nelson returned home in January and went back to work. He sent the final version of his manuscript to Candida Donadio the following month, and she sent it to Arbor House. When he received it, Donald Fine offered Nelson fifteen thousand dollars—the same amount he’d offered the year before—and Nelson turned him down flat.*

  The novel wasn’t Nelson’s best—some of the transitions between scenes were jarring, and there was too much courtroom drama—but it was the best book he had written in twenty years, and he wanted a hundred thousand dollars for it—anything less, he felt, was an insult. The following year, Nelson saw Donald Fine at a party and called him a “cheap SOB” in front of a room full of people.

  Nelson turned seventy-one a few days after he rejected Donald Fine’s offer, and he began thinking seriously about how he wanted to spend the time he had remaining.

  Mortality had been the subtext of Nelson’s life for a while by then. Friends had been dying at a steady pace for years—first Jesse Blue, and then Bud Fallon and James Blake—and journalists had begun asking him retrospective questions about his life and work. And though he still received letters from young writers, lately, their senders addressed him as a veteran, not a soldier. “You,” Cormac McCarthy had written a few months earlier, “were one of the people who influenced me in becoming a writer.”

  In May, Nelson decided he had had enough—of writing, of caring about his legacy, and of city life. He had always wanted to live by the sea, so he bought a map of Long Island, brought it home, and allowed his eyes to drift down the coastline—Oyster Bay, Cold Spring Harbor, Southampton. He didn’t know a soul in any of them, and didn’t care.

  The year before, a young journalist named Jan Herman had interviewed Nelson for the Chicago Daily News, and afterward, he and Nelson developed a friendship. Herman, Nelson learned, had led a fascinating and idiosyncratic life—he had hung around with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, worked at City Lights Books in San Francisco, started a little magazine called Earthquake, and had been the editor-in-chief for a small publisher called Something Else Press.

  One of Herman’s many literary friends was a translator named Carl Weissner, who lived in Mannheim, and because Nelson’s work had always been popular in Germany, Herman put Nelson and Weissner in touch. Soon, that connection proved lucrative for both men. Weissner helped Nelson place two stories in the German edition of Playboy, found a publisher interested in having him translate The Man with the Golden Arm and The Last Carousel for publication, and then began soliciting offers for a German edition of The Devil’s Stocking.

  Money from those deals began arriving in the spring of 1980, and when it did, Nelson rented a small house in Southampton, sight unseen, and hired a moving company to pack his books into one hundred boxes and drive them to Long Island.

  Nelson moved into his new home and lived there peacefully for several days, but when the movers arrived and began unloading his things, his landlord appeared. She looked at the truck, and Nelson’s many boxes, and announced he was no longer welcome to rent her home. She said his
things would never fit inside the house, and told him to leave—immediately.

  Nelson found a payphone and began placing calls. He had nowhere to live, and his possessions were scattered across a stranger’s lawn.

  Eventually, Nelson reached Joe Pintauro, a playwright and novelist he had met only once. Pintauro lived a few miles away, in Sag Harbor, so he drove to Southampton, picked Nelson up, and brought him home. Then he gave Nelson a change of clothes and put a drink in his hand.

  The next day, Pintauro found Nelson a small apartment, and by August, Nelson had moved into a house on Glover Street—just a block from Upper Sag Harbor Cove.

  * That would be about forty-five thousand today.

  “The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All”

  (September 1980–May 1981)

  In his prime, Nelson was a solitary creature—a man most at ease in his goat’s nest, a flat that looked down onto an empty lot and a trash-strewn alley. He forswore luxury, scoffed at chasing status, trained like a boxer to keep his mind sharp, and avoided the company of writers—because writers who spend time with writers write books about writers who spend time with writers, so that their work will be read by other writers. He was never interested in that, so instead, he wandered the neon wilderness by night, and stalked people who lived behind billboards or slept in cage hotels. They were the story no one saw, and he believed it was possible to forecast the future by reading their scars.

  But by the time he reached Sag Harbor, Nelson was a jolly old man with a big, round belly, and he had had enough of abstention. He lived a block from the ocean in a wood-framed house with a peaked roof and a fireplace, and in the mornings, he slipped into the frigid Atlantic and swam a little, but not a lot. He liked to laugh and to make people laugh, and when he found himself in uptight company, he let them know he had no patience for pretension. In expensive restaurants, he removed his dentures at the table and rinsed them in his water glass.

  Solitude had also lost its appeal, so Nelson surrounded himself with friends and admirers. He invited Roger Groening and Roy Finer to visit, and he hosted Jan Herman, his wife, Janet, and their daughter, Olivia, for an entire week. Sag Harbor, Nelson soon learned, was thick with writers, and when his new neighbors Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Matthiessen, John Irving, and E. L. Doctorow sought him out, he welcomed their company. Betty Friedan had a house just across the street from Nelson’s, and she often drove him around town because his only means of transportation was a used bicycle.

  Nelson was no longer writing regularly by the time he reached Sag Harbor, but his mind was still sharp, and because there was nothing else to preoccupy him, he dwelled on the past and wondered how he would be remembered when he was gone. There was a debate about the merits of his life and work raging constantly in his mind, and no side ever claimed victory for long.

  In the summer of 1980, a German film crew visited Nelson for an interview, and he swaggered for them. “I am a survivor,” he said, “. . . the greatest taker of the mandatory eight-count who gets up and starts all over.”

  But by Christmas, Nelson was gripped by doubt. He spent the holiday at a party hosted by Gloria Jones—James Jones’s widow, and mother to a young woman named Kaylie. Everyone drank heavily that night—martinis, and Stolichnaya—and when the festivities ended, Kaylie Jones, the best drunk driver in the house, volunteered to drive Nelson home.

  Jones loaded Nelson into the car, got behind the wheel, and began driving toward Sag Harbor—her eyes locked on the twisting road. For a long time, she and Nelson were silent. Then he spoke. At dinner, Jones announced she had applied to Columbia’s MFA program, and he wanted to know why.

  “Why do you want to be a writer?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if I want to be a writer,” she said.

  “Good. Don’t become a writer,” he said.

  “I’m just going to study writing,” she hedged.

  “Good,” he said. “Study all you want, just don’t become a writer. It’s a lousy, stupid thing to do. You start out thinking people are going to admire you and love you and respect you but really nobody gives a shit. It’s a terrible life.”

  Then, in February 1981, Nelson changed his mind again. That month, he learned that the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters had decided to make him a full member. Donald Barthelme had nominated him, and Malcolm Cowley and Jacques Barzun seconded.

  Nelson had been wary of awards for years, and was dubious about the intentions and integrity of the people who conferred them. When an arts organization presented him with a grant a few years earlier, he had refused to thank them because he didn’t see why he should, and he had had Kurt Vonnegut accept the Award of Merit for the Novel in his stead. But this was different. Membership in the academy wasn’t a bauble conferred by the literary establishment—it was an invitation to join.

  On April 9, Nelson made his way into Manhattan wearing a pinstriped suit, a gravy-stained tie, and a rosette that indicated he was a member of the academy. He met a woman named Carolyn Gaiser that afternoon, and together they flagged down a cab and headed uptown.

  Nelson and Gaiser met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1968, and they had dated briefly. She knew him to be a cynical man, but that night was different. He seemed almost giddy. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. He had just bet a horse and won, and he displayed his winning ticket proudly. “Tonight’s on OTB,” he said.

  The cab pulled over on West 155th Street, and Nelson and Gaiser stepped out, climbed the academy building’s wide, regal steps, and passed beneath an ornate wrought-iron gate. They went inside and found the bar and ordered drinks, but then a member of the staff interrupted them.

  “Mr. Algren,” she said, “You’re late. You’ve missed the members’ meeting.” She took Nelson and Gaiser in hand and led them into a library, where the academy’s members were seated. “Just a moment,” she said. “I’d like to introduce another new member—who was late. Nelson Algren.”

  The room erupted in applause, and when it died away, people read tributes to Nelson and praised his body of work.

  When they finished, Nelson turned to Gaiser and said, “Here we are. Meeting the elite.”

  “You’re one of the elite yourself, how does it feel?” she asked.

  “Joining this outfit can be very important for a writer,” Nelson reflected. “For your work,” he continued. “They start taking your work much more seriously.” His novel about Rubin Carter was about to be released in Germany as Calhoun, and his other major works were also scheduled for publication there. He had been paid well for them, and if the book took off, it would mean better sales in Italy and France, and possibly an American edition of The Devil’s Stocking. It seemed just possible that his writing could have a renaissance.

  Nelson looked into his martini glass then, and told Gaiser, “Drink up, kid. These drinks are on the house.”

  Nelson’s formal induction into the academy was scheduled for May 20, and he decided to throw himself a party to celebrate it on May 9. He invited all his friends to attend, and most said they would try. Jan Herman made plans to fly out from Chicago with his family so he could write about the party for the Sun-Times, and Roy Finer said he would take the train from the Bronx.

  The afternoon before the party, a journalist named W.J. Weatherby dropped by Nelson’s house for an interview and found him in good spirits. They sat in the living room, and Nelson joked about his nomination and reflected on his career.

  “I didn’t know I was running for office until they informed me I was elected,” he said. “It puts you in the league of people who are ‘distinguished,’ so I’m told by my literary friends.”

  “If I had only written one book,” he said, “I’d want it to be A Walk on the Wild Side. Or maybe this new one, The Devil’s Stocking.”

  Weatherby shifted the conversation to Beauvoir, and Nelson became agitated. Almost two decades had passed, but he was still upset that she had written about their affair. “I’ve bee
n in whorehouses all over the world,” he said, “and the women there always close the door. . . . But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press.”

  Tension gathered in Nelson’s chest as he spoke, and he became short of breath. Earlier that day, he had visited a doctor and been advised to check himself into a hospital, but he had refused. He was about to host a party, and people were flying in from out of state to attend.

  Weatherby changed the subject, but Nelson was like a dog with a bone. She violated my privacy, he said, so I’ll violate hers. He threatened to auction off her love letters. They were sitting nearby in a tin container, and he said, “If one half of a correspondence is made public, then the other half should be.”

  Weatherby, mindful of Nelson’s health, said he should go—it was getting late. Nelson encouraged him to stay and talk some more, but Weatherby insisted.

  Come to the party tomorrow, then, Nelson said. “I’ve already bought the liquor.”

  When Weatherby left, Nelson was alone in his little house by the sea. Everything he needed to do to prepare for the party had been done, so he went out. He got on his bike and pedaled around Sag Harbor, beneath the dark spring sky, until he tired of it, and then he returned home.

  He entered his cottage after midnight, and sometime later he went to the bathroom on the second floor. His chest was feeling tight again, and while he stood there alone, his heart quivered, and then stopped.

  He fell, and as he did, his left wrist smacked against something. The glass face of his wristwatch broke, and the hands froze in place. They read: 6:05.

  Roy Finer arrived at Nelson’s house a few hours later and tried the front door. It was locked, so he went around to the back door and let himself in. He climbed the stairs, and found Nelson supine on the bathroom floor. The phone was ringing, but Finer ignored it, kneeled down, and placed a hand on Nelson’s belly. The flesh was cold, so he went downstairs and sat on the couch.