Algren (11 page)

I feel I am of them—I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself,

And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

Nelson did get some benefit from the Fallonites—he learned details of brothel life and petty crime that he later used in his fiction. He wrote out notes about East St. Louis prostitutes in pencil on a big tablet of thin paper, with phrases that appear later in
Never Come Morning
. The novel suggests that the underground scene Nelson found in the cindery southern Illinois river town could be even nastier than in Chicago. He gives the hooker Chickadee, one of Mama Tomek's girls, an origin in East St. Louis taverns as an acrobatic dancer. She scoffs at northern Illinois pimps as soft on their girlfriends—“down
my
way he takes all her money 'n slaps the crap out of her.”

It was in East St. Louis, too, that Nelson met a legless man named Freddy who inspired both Railroad Shorty in the short story “The Face on the Barroom Floor” and Achilles Schmidt in
A Walk on the Wild Side.
Freddy, who mixed colored water in a bathtub and sold it as perfume, had lost his legs as a fireman on the Michigan Central. “I believe he was the strongest man I've ever known,”
Nelson said of Freddy. “I don't mean just in physical terms. He had a strength of
person
that dominated every scene he occupied.” He described Freddy as both “clear as light” and capable of “tremendous rage.” Nelson kept spotting legless men, both in Chicago on North Avenue and later in Wales during World War II, symbolizing how someone could muster terrible power even after being cut to pieces.

With leftist literary magazines falling away, radical writers found a new income through an unprecedented source—the federal government. In May of 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt set up the Works Progress Administration, a relief program that gave people jobs rather than charity. The goal was to allow skilled people to work on projects that would benefit the country, including building dams and bridges, and making public art. Indigent visual artists were set to work painting elaborate, full-color murals in school buildings and railroad stations; actors put on plays for people who did not otherwise have access to theater; and writers were sent out to collect folklore and oral histories, and produce guides for all forty-eight states. According to its mandate from Congress, the work of the Federal Writers' Project was to “hold up a mirror to America.” Under the leadership of former journalist Henry G. Alsberg, it supported more than 6,500 writers, editors, and researchers through four years of federal funding. One commentator called it the “ugly duckling” of the WPA arts projects since it was easier to see the immediate benefit of a mural in a post office than an oral history from a stockyard worker.

The project was controversial—some joked that the initials stood for “We Poke Along” or “Whistle, Piss and Argue.” A newspaper editorial complained that the Writers' Project meant that now “pencil leaners” would join the “shovel leaners” among those loafing for a government handout. Writer John Cheever described his own work as an editor at the program's Washington office as fixing
sentences “written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” But Nelson, who joined in the summer of 1936 at a starting salary of eighty-seven dollars a month, saw it as a lifeline. “Had it not been for the Project, the suicide rate would have been much higher,” he said. “It gave new life to people who had thought their lives were over.” Poet W. H. Auden called the project “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state.”

The WPA arts projects attracted odd characters of various skill levels. “We were as ill-assorted as a crowd on a subway express,” said WPA writer Anzia Yezierska, “spinster poetesses, pulp specialists, youngsters … veteran newspapermen, art-for-art's sake literati, clerks and typists … people of all ages, all nationalities, all degrees of education, tossed together in a strange fellowship of necessity.” The Chicago offices were at 433 East Erie, and breathing in the fresh winds off of nearby Lake Michigan in the morning aided the feeling of rebirth for Depression-weary artists. The way to get on a WPA art project was to declare yourself indigent—take the “pauper's oath”—and offer some proof that you could do what was needed. It did not take much—Nelson's friend Dave Peltz, who had started with the WPA's rat-poisoning unit before moving to the artistic side, remembered that people who wanted to could get into the theater program if they had “any kind of articulation.” Peltz had then switched from the theater project to writing because he liked it better. The energetic Dick Wright joined early in the fall of 1935, to work on the “Ethnographical Aspects of Chicago's Black Belt.” Nelson's Rat Alley neighbor Mitch Siporin got a job painting murals in the auditorium at the new Lane Technical High School on the North Side; he would also do the St. Louis Central Post Office. Amanda also got a WPA job, counting the people who lived in tent cities in Lincoln Park. Indigence seemed to count more than ability—Tennessee Williams tried but failed to get a job at the Chicago office. He said it was because his work lacked social
content, he could not prove his family was destitute, and “I still had, in those days, a touch of refinement in my social behavior which made me seem frivolous … to the conscientiously rough-hewn pillars of the Chicago project.” Those who did get in included writers and poets Conroy, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, Sam Ross, and Frank Yerby; choreographer and activist Katherine Dunham; and Louis “Studs” Terkel, a gravelly voiced actor who had dropped out of law school to help with his mother's boarding house, and got to listen to the residents' stories of their hard-luck lives. Studs had read
Somebody in Boots
and already admired Nelson before they met. Along with Dave Peltz, Studs became one of Nelson's longtime friends.

Dave recalled sometimes taking Nelson to the racetrack after their short days doing government work, using Dave's car since Nelson never drove. On the one occasion Dave remembered Nelson daring to get behind the wheel, Nelson “totally lost control.” “He had no sense of speed, no proportion.” They'd also go with Studs and other friends to the Chicago Arena bowling alley half a block from the project's offices. Dave remembered that Nelson was comically uncoordinated—when he bowled, he would throw the ball as hard as he could, his arms would fly in opposite directions, and usually the ball would end up in the gutter. “He never knew where to put himself,” recalled Dave's wife, Doris.

Both Dick Wright and Nelson became supervisors, and Nelson's salary gradually rose to $125 a month, with nine writers under his direction. He gave advice and encouragement to younger writers, a practice he continued throughout his life. “Sometimes if you let them ramble, they might say more than if they feel you've got an idea,” he told project staff members on collecting oral histories. He helped young writers examine their own feelings and motives. Margaret Walker, an African American writer, was stuck on a poem and credited Nelson with helping her make a creative breakthrough
by asking her the simple question, “What do you want for your people?” In answer she ended the poem “For My People” with the lines “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born…. Let a race of men now rise and take control.” Studs, who made a career out of collecting oral histories long after the WPA ended, said Nelson influenced his own approach to writing for the rest of his life. But Bellow, just twenty-two and a recent graduate of Northwestern University, was intimidated by the rough-edged Algren and Conroy. “I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me,” Bellow remembered. It was the start of a lifetime of mutual antipathy.

Nelson himself was not good at taking direction, even from his kindly boss, Northwestern University professor John T. Frederick, who Nelson seems to spoof in a notebook as Flatbottom Finkpuss. Nelson's comic description of his work would give credence to the Republican criticism that the WPA was full of boondogglers. “It gave me leisure, that is I could go up there at 10 in the morning and sign on at noon and say, go to the library and go to the racetrack,” Nelson told an interviewer, in his slow, flat-voweled Chicago drawl. “I don't recall doing any real work. I sat at a desk and would regularly get fired by the head of the project…. After three or four months of sitting there, he'd call me in and say, ‘Nelson, I realize you're not really happy here.' And I'd realize which way the wind was blowing and I'd say ‘Oh, I like this work.' He'd say ‘No, you're not happy' and then he'd fire me.” Nelson would retrieve his hat from his desk, have a drink at some North Clark Street gin mill, and then suffer the tedium of going to a relief station and declaring himself penniless, after which he'd be given a bag of moldy potatoes. “When they gave you the bag of potatoes, they had to put you back on the project, whether the supervisor wanted you or not. You were qualified.”

Nelson was kidding, as usual—he did some good work for the WPA. His eclectic projects included a short history of Haym
Solomon, the Polish Jewish businessman who helped finance the American Revolution; the
Galena Guide
about the western Illinois mining town that was home to President Ulysses S. Grant; and a collection of Midwest recipes and cooking folklore later published as
America Eats
. He and Conroy also helped collect oral histories of workers, conveniently located at sleazy North Clark Street taverns with royal names like Queen's Paradise, Duke's Castle, and King's Palace. At the Palace confessions came easier during the “cuckoo hour,” when an extra shot was a penny. The Pink Poodle tavern on Clark became the Pink Kitten in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. Conroy biographer Wixson said the story “Hank, the Freewheeler,” which was credited to Algren and included in the anthology
A Treasury of American Folklore
and the posthumously published
Entrapment and Other Writings
but was not in his usual style, was actually by Conroy, who was freehanded with his work as well as his advice.

The
Galena Guide
was a collaboration, with Nelson claiming credit for many of the chapters. Galena remains a peculiar place—a city that time forgot. It had been a boomtown in the 1830s and 1840s because of nearby galena lead mines, and it struggled with Chicago for the position of Illinois's chief city. But the Galena River connecting to the Mississippi became too shallow to navigate, and the market for lead went away, so the town stopped, and its main street still looks much as it did in Grant's time. It was an “October city” before Nelson gave that title to Chicago, and he was able to see in Galena how a town can stop breathing, a theme explored in both
The Man with the Golden Arm
and
Chicago: City on the Make
. Much of the writing in the
Galena Guide
is clear, flat, and journalistic, though Nelson's voice occasionally flashes through. For example, he describes the French explorer Julien Dubuque as a “well educated young fellow, with a good deal of drive, and in time he wheedled extensive mining concessions from the Indians.”
A description of the view from a stagecoach has a lyricism fore-shadowing
City on the Make
, with “acres of prairie grass endless as a sea dotted with trees like islands and bearing wave after wave of wildflowers constantly before the wind.” A section on an emigrant's aversion to the name “Fevre River,” later changed to the “Galena River,” is comic Algren:

“Fever river? Oh no! I don't want to go there. I should be afraid to go there. I should be afraid to stop there a single day with my family,” and immediately his imagination peoples Galena with long, lean, lantern-jawed, bilious-looking, fever-and-ague-shaken beings, whilst he has visions of miasma, bad air, fevers, anti-bilious pills, long doctor's bills, and a whole army of doctors, who being the majority of living citizens, have named the town after their great predecessor, Galen, adding an “a” for propriety's sake.

The chapter called “A Middle-Aged Clerk in a Faded Army Coat” is a spare, thoughtful portrait of Grant before the war. In other sections Nelson doesn't seem to be trying as hard. The day he wrote “Galena knew the meaning of brother against brother as secessionist talk spread” must have been a day spent mostly at the track.

America Eats
was written for the WPA but shelved at the start of World War II and not published until 1992, through the efforts of Chicago chef Louis Szathmáry. The book is more clearly Algren than the
Galena Guide
, with humor and lyricism—a touching, almost reverent history of the Midwest and the varieties of peoples who settled there. It opens with a portrait of how the great inland plains had once been covered by spiraling bluestem grass, which the natives would set on fire in the spring to provide new
pasturage for buffalo. The Indians would gather wild oats and rice from the riversides and eat fish heads flavored with maple syrup as a special delicacy. Then it moves into accounts of pioneer cooking on the “buckskin border,” with the various ways of making sourdough, hoecakes, and corn dodgers, baked so hard that “you could knock down a Texas steer with a chunk of the stuff or split an end-board at forty yards off-hand.” He describes pancake festivals in the French colony of Cahokia, Illinois, for the Feast of the Epiphany; Iowa church suppers with creamed corn and homemade piccalilli; apple-peeling parties along the Wabash River; and Indiana family reunions with scalloped potatoes and deviled eggs. Nelson tells how the drinking at these female-dominated reunions was quiet, with the bottle “a closely guarded secret, betrayed only by Grandpa's insistence on telling the same story three times.”

The writing is economical but richly detailed. For example, at a Nebraska Old Settlers' Picnic, there were not only plates of hot rolls, corn bread, white bread, and Swedish and Russian rye, but lemonade colored red, pink, or green to please the children. Nelson also recalls regional superstitions—that a girl who takes the last piece of bread will be an old maid, and that an apple peeling thrown over a girl's left shoulder will give the first initial of her future husband's name. He included recipes collected from around the region, from Greek lemon soup to Swedish lutefisk to Polish stuffed suckling pig. Some have a Paul Bunyan quality: the recipe for Flemish booyah, for example, requires thirty pounds of oxtails, six heads of cabbage, four fat hens, and a peck each of onions, carrots, potatoes, kohlrabi, and barley. Nelson got the recipes from housewives, farmers, sailors, tavern owners, and greasy-spoon cooks, and wrote them down as best as he could. Szathmáry tested and rewrote them to make them manageable for a modern kitchen instead of a giant iron cauldron over a fire outside the barn. As in his novels, Nelson sprinkles in scraps of song and poetry: