Algren (12 page)

Whiskey by the barrel

Sugar by the pound

A great big bowl to put it in

And a spoon to stir it around.

and

Hello boys, ain't it a sin,

Watch that gravy run down Sam's chin.

It is Algren's most joyful book, written by someone who both loved a party with good food and company and knew what it meant to be hungry.

By the late 1930s, Nelson had recovered enough of his creative spirit to write poetry again. The first edition of the
New Anvil
in March of 1939, with a run of 3,500 copies, contained his “Makers of Music,” and the next had “Utility Magnate,” for which he used the pen name Lawrence O'Fallon as a joke. The latter poem mocked Sam Insull, whose fall had caused so much misery—even Studs Terkel's mother lost $2,000 on his stock. Nelson's friend Christine Rowland, who lived with her husband Neal near Rat Alley, helped distribute copies at bookstores. The Communist Party had dropped its endorsement of the East Coast
Partisan Review
, and Jack and Nelson hoped the party would provide patronage for their new magazine, which promised to provide a creative forum for “those who do the useful work of the world.”

Algren's work for the party, outside of its support for the arts and for political causes he favored like the Spanish loyalists, is a bit murky. He was certainly a part of the Communist movement and probably a party member sometime during the 1930s—the poisonous Howard Rushmore confirmed this to the FBI by showing a letter Nelson had written to him in July of 1937. In the letter
Algren recommends an acquaintance named Lew Andrews to Rushmore. “Politically, speaking as a party member, I can say that he is a party member in good standing,” Nelson writes, and the rest of the letter has his style. Another informant, Joseph Klein, claimed Algren had to have been a member in 1935 and 1936 since he had taken part in party meetings at its New York headquarters. But it is unclear how much political work Nelson actually did. He was an original member of the League of American Writers, which had been launched at the 1935 New York congress and included both party members and so-called fellow travelers. The league was later labeled a “front group” during the hysterical days of McCarthyism, but it had always been open about its affiliation with the Communist Party USA. Participants included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Erskine Caldwell, Upton Sinclair—in fact, just about anybody who mattered in the 1930s literary world—Ayn Rand not included.

Nelson could be naive about the party—in May of 1938 he signed, along with Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker, the “Statement by American Progressives” criticizing premature condemnations of the Moscow show trials. These were the trials Stalin used to kill off his political enemies. Quick to see injustice in the American legal system, Nelson was curiously blind to the idea that innocent people also could be unjustly sentenced to death in Russia. Hitler and Franco seemed like the real enemies of freedom at the time, not Stalin. On the other hand, Algren was never a dogmatic Communist—he had a more complex, artistic view of reality than could be encompassed by a political platform.

The party and the league did not approve of Nelson. A sniffy letter sent in 1938 by the league's executive secretary, Franklin Folsom, refers to “very distressing rumors about your conduct and Conroy's … I am sure you know that I am referring to charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct.” Former
Midwest Daily Record
editor
Louis Budenz told the FBI that Nelson had been tried in absentia by the party for Trotskyism, but was “cleared on the ground that he did not know what he was doing.” Wright suffered more for his alleged “Trotskyism”—at a Chicago May Day parade in 1936, he was picked up and thrown to the sidewalk by two white party members, ending up with bleeding hands.

Despite the problems and divisions within the movement, many intellectuals in the 1930s were either Communists or Communist sympathizers because of the deep unrest of the era and because Stalin's crimes had not yet been revealed. “In those days, if you weren't a Socialist or a Communist or a Trotskyite, you did not have a conscience,” remembered Peltz. Communism during the Depression seemed to offer an alternative to Fascism, racism, and the barbarity of an unbridled market system. With Social Security, bank regulation, and his alphabet soup of relief programs, Roosevelt may have saved the country from revolution, even if it was really World War II that rescued the economy. The intellectual Left's affection for the party started to waiver with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Wallie Wharton was an early dissenter, telling Conroy in December of that year that the Communists were “conniving, bigoted, fanatical, smug, ass-kissing, baby-bombing gangsters.” In 1944 Dick Wright became one of the first prominent Western former Communists to denounce the party.

Nelson's problems with the Communists seemed less about ideology than style—he did not like anyone getting into his personal business, whether it was Goldie, Amanda, or the Comintern. He saw the party as rigid and authoritarian and wondered why some bureaucrat in New York should know or care that someone in Chicago had been drunk and disorderly. On one occasion Jack and Nelson were called to meet with Frank Myers, a Chicago party official, who kept them waiting for an hour and then “delivered a stern lecture about the necessity of publishing material that made explicit
a Marxist moral,” Jack recalled. This was true of none of Nelson's work—his characters never rose in collective action, but stumbled into their own lonely fates. “The books were certainly not a call to arms,” said Nelson's friend, poet Stuart McCarrell. In the late 1940s, Nelson told Simone de Beauvoir that the party had failed him.

The American movement was split into acrimonious factions eager to call each other out as enemies of the people. In May the “revolutionary” Communist newspaper
Truth
mocked Conroy and Algren for asking for money for the
New Anvil
. It condemned the league as being full of “Russian stoolpigeons” and the
New Anvil
as “an organ of labor aristocracy in harmony with gutter proletariat, in short, fascist literature.” The article is so grimly humorless it reads like parody. Algren suggested that the critic look him up on his next visit to Chicago, and “I'll kick every tooth in that trough you call your mouth down that sewer you call your neck.”

Jack and Nelson managed to keep the
New Anvil
going for just seven issues, long enough to reject pieces by both Willie Wharton and J. D. Salinger. Algren's attention had been refocused on a story he started writing about brothel life in East St. Louis and a boxer, which formed the beginnings of
Never Come Morning
. He also had personal troubles. In February of 1939, his beloved sister Bernice was diagnosed with rectal cancer. This was years before the development of chemotherapy, and surgery had not stopped the tumor's progress. Gerson and Goldie were then living in the Joffes' big Tudor-style home at 3232 West Victoria on the Far Northwest Side and helping to care for Bernice and their grandchildren, Robert and Ruth. To visit his dying sister, Nelson had to suffer his family's scrutiny. Why hadn't he had any children, and where was Amanda? Nelson's three-year-old marriage was falling apart, and in the spring of 1940, he was living alone in the “Polish Triangle,” around Division, Milwaukee, and Ashland on the city's Near Northwest Side. But he was writing fiction again, and had begun to hope.

In March of 1940, Dick Wright, who had moved to the New York Federal Writers' Project in 1937 and was now in Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship, sent Nelson a copy of
Native Son
. Dick was more practical than Nelson and had allowed some of the more graphic sexual parts of the novel, including a masturbation scene in a movie theater, to be cut to satisfy judges with the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was a crucial decision—maybe the novel was not as frank as Wright had wanted it to be, but it helped make the book a huge commercial success that sold more than 250,000 copies in three weeks. Wright's willingness to swallow a little compromise had brought the story of Bigger Thomas and the hard truths it told about racism into middle-class homes across the country. Dick had inscribed a copy to “My old Friend Nelson Who I believe is still the best writer of good prose in the U.S.A.”

Nelson was touched by the inscription, and then staggered by the book. He wrote back to Wright that the novel's anger had hit him hard, and he took it not just as a challenge, but as a personal threat. Dick had done what Nelson always said a writer must do—he had dragged readers into the dock with the prisoner, and made them understand. “You've done a very, very smart thing: I don't think any white person could read it without being either frightened or angry at the end. My own reaction happened to be more anger than anything … I've never read anything more psychologically convincing than Native Son…. You've hit me with something you've been hiding behind your back all the while.” Wright had to be answered—both the book and the compliment were a goad to a balky muse. But Nelson's friend did more than inspire. Learning that Algren was working on a new book, Wright gave his old friend a “big buildup” to his editor, Edward Aswell at Harper, who was anxious to bag good new writers. “If they take your stuff, they will push it,” said Wright. “You can be assured of that.”

Early in the evening of August 9, 1940, Bernice, who had championed Nelson and made sure he went to college, died in her home at the age of thirty-eight, leaving two small children. She had been so busy with her job and family that Nelson never knew how she felt about his work, and now it was too late. Writing about the loss to Dick, Nelson expressed his sorrow in short, stuttering phrases. “Trouble and tribulation. Economics and death.” He rarely spoke of her to friends in later years. But when
Never Come Morning
was published in 1942, it was dedicated “For Bernice.”

During the week, Poles are hard workers…. But on Saturdays, 100,000 of them get dressed in their best to congregate in Little Poland and get roaring drunk.

—J
ACK
L
AIT AND
L
EE
M
ORTIMER
,
C
HICAGO
C
ONFIDENTIAL

When I burn please bury me deep

Somewhere on West Division Street

—N
ELSON
A
LGREN,
N
EVER
C
OME
M
ORNING

Nelson spent the best part of his writing life in the Polish American section of Chicago's Northwest Side, known among mapmakers as Wicker Park and West Town but to the residents at the time as Polonia, or simply the neighborhood. Chicago had the largest Polish urban population outside of Warsaw, and about half lived in the insular enclave centered around the six-corner intersection of Division Street and Milwaukee and Ashland Avenues. The Poles had crowded out the Germans who had previously lived there, and many fine old stone mansions had been hacked into flats. It was more than just an ethnic neighborhood; it was a world—a dense
community of ornate Roman Catholic cathedrals, funeral parlors, barber shops, sausage factories, tailors, restaurants, bakeries, delis, produce packers, banks, music stores, fraternal organizations, choral groups, theatrical companies, and orchestras, with four daily newspapers to cover it all. There was the
apteka
selling Old World herbal concoctions as well as modern medicine for when you got sick, the
adwokat
, for legal advice when your son got into trouble, and
ksiegarnia
for buying books in your own language, often printed in the same neighborhood. The parishes of St. John Cantius, St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Mary of the Angels, and Holy Trinity were miniature cities, offering elementary and high schools, day care, benevolence societies, and performance halls. A shopper could buy pickles out of barrels at the corner deli, choose from dozens of varieties of sausages hung on white strings from a rack over the counter, or get massive sandwiches that were Polish versions of the po'boys Nelson ate in New Orleans. Housewives wearing flowered babushkas could get duck's blood for soup at a storefront butcher, who would slit the top off the bird's head in front of them to assure freshness. The neighborhood developed its own musical styles—the honky and “push” polkas—quick-beat mixes of jazz and folk melodies, with the number of musicians kept tight by the narrow tavern stages. In the days before air conditioning, the sounds of accordions and clarinets, backed by Ludwig drums from the Damen Avenue factory, would spill out from behind every
gospoda
's open door. The air was thick with the smells of rye bread, sausages, and burning coal from the factories along the Chicago River.

The Poles had begun coming to the city in the mid-nineteenth century
za chlebem
—“for bread” earned away from the turmoil of Russian and German conquests. Between 1891 and 1914, 1.6 million ethnic Poles had immigrated to the United States. The numbers slowed after World War I—a 1924 law limited the number of eastern European immigrants, considered inferior to Anglo-Saxons. Still, by
1930 there were four hundred thousand in Chicago alone. In their cheeky
Chicago Confidential
guidebook, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer claimed that the Poles were like the Irish of Chicago, apparently trying to draw a comparison to the dominant immigrant groups in New York or Boston. But this was silly. The Irish were the Irish of Chicago—controlling city politics and dominating the police force. The Poles were not able to get the kind of political power wielded by the Irish because there was a language barrier—Polish and English have little in common. They instead found power in real estate and in taking care of their own. Fraternal organizations like the Polish National Alliance and the Polish Roman Catholic Union offered low-income home mortgages, college aid, and unemployment and death insurance. They also worked to build pride and defend against discrimination in the United States, where Poles were stereotyped as ignorant, criminal, and good only for hard labor, and to promote the Polish cause in Europe. The cause became more urgent after the Nazi invasion of 1939.