Algren (18 page)

Brent noticed a mesh of wire fencing above the bar. Behind the fencing were live monkeys. Brent wondered what they were for, and Algren advised him to wait and see. Algren's face seemed fixed “in a slight smile of playful disdain,” Brent recalled, though he did not understand why.

After Stuart and Nelson had downed several beers, and the world was getting blurry, Stuart was amazed to see two men walk in, climb a ladder, and open the monkey cage. As Brent describes the scene in his memoir, one of the men took a monkey by a leather strap, placed it on his back, and climbed down the ladder. The two men then walked to a door at the far end of the tavern and went into a room, closing the door behind them. Brent was mystified. “I felt an impenetrable wall between my innocence and the full possibilities of human depravity,” he wrote. The monkeys in their cage would turn up at the Pink Kitten Club in
The Man with the Golden Arm
.

Brent looked again at all the people in the tavern, and felt his smugness and sense of superiority disappear. He started to see what Nelson was seeing—a world of people without choice or destination. Brent meditated on this Clark Street nightmare for days, asking himself if he ought to feel guilt for people no longer responsible for themselves. “Then it occurred to me that the question was never one of guilt, but only of love,” he wrote. “The agony exists regardless of the setting. The lack of love is not alone on Clark Street.”

The 1940s were the creative heart of Nelson's life, and he seemed to know it—to know it was a lucky time and that he was catching his own lightning. He had found satisfaction in his writing, something he knew many people never find in their vocations, but need. He knew that believing in himself was part of being lucky, too. In the winter of 1946, he told Amanda that he had a beginning for the new book, with more of the neighborhood stuff, with a lighter tone in spots, but he did not know yet where it would lead. It would be about a professional dealer, someone who gets paid to sit at a table dealing cards to people who want to win each other's money but don't trust each other enough to let one another deal. But no, he was not looking for romance, not now. He could not afford it. He would soon receive a surprise in love, from an unexpected quarter.

Something is about to happen. You can count the minutes in your life when something happens.

—S
IMONE DE
B
EAUVOIR,
A
MERICA
D
AY BY
D
AY

Language is the source of misunderstandings

—A
NTOINE DE
S
AINT
E
XUPÉRY,
T
HE
L
ITTLE
P
RINCE

The romance of Nelson Algren and the French writer, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was the most ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible, unreasonable, and amazing thing to come into both their lives. The discipline of waiting for someone on the other side of the world to come back and visit him, and the aesthetic and emotional support she offered through her hundreds of loving letters, helped keep Nelson in his chair and focused enough to write his greatest novel,
The Man with the Golden Arm
. His encouragement and political insight into the race problems in the United States inspired her to turn an essay about the “woman situation” into the feminist bible
The Second Sex
. He gave her fiction its most vivid character—Lewis Brogan, the American writer of
The Mandarins
.

The affair could never work—it could never last, because of her lack of convention and what would turn out to be his surprising excess of it, because they were too firmly wedded to their own lives and cities to commit to each other, because it was too hard to sustain a long-distance relationship, and because he had what seems like an irresistible impulse to wreck both romances and friendships. She was a woman of awesome power, so the end of the affair only strengthened her, gave her more to write about, and widened her world and affections. He later denied that the affair meant much more than any of his other romances, and liked to call Simone a French school-teacher who was just “another deluded broad.” But it is clear that the break with Simone came at the beginning of darker days for Nelson—and while it was not the main cause of his deterioration as an artist, it added to the load. He spent part of his last day on Earth yelling about her, and she went to her grave with his ring on her finger.

One of the great literary romances of the twentieth century started in late February 1947, with a series of hang-up phone calls. A short-term girlfriend of Nelson's, writer and interpreter Mary Guggenheim, had advised Simone to look up Algren when she was in Chicago. She warned Nelson ahead of time that he may get a visit from the French intellectual and the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, and he knew who she was, though later he claimed ignorance. Beauvoir, energetically looking for whatever she could learn in every city on her first American tour, had two numbers to call when she got to Chicago—an old woman and a writer. The writer sounded more fun, but her first attempt at reaching him was a misfire. “You have the wrong number,” his sulky voice answered.

Simone had a thick French accent and was sure she'd gotten the pronunciation wrong. She tried again. “WRONG number!” the voice repeated, annoyed. She called again, but he hung up.

Nelson had been cooking dinner in the big yellow kitchen of his two-room Wabansia flat. He was used to people with strong Polish
accents who had never used the phone before calling and yelling into the receiver. He thought someone was trying to get information. He kept hearing the same “hoarse screech” and hanging up; he needed to get back to the stove.

Finally the operator asked if he would be good enough to hold the line for a moment: “There's a party here would like to speak to you.” The name of Dick Wright was mentioned, so Nelson paid attention. Simone gave her name. He did not catch it. She said she would meet him at the “Leetle Café” in “Palmer House” and would be carrying the
Partisan Review
. He knew the Palmer House, but not any “Leetle Café.” When he got to the opulent hotel, he saw “Le Petit Cafe.” The former schoolteacher had unhelpfully translated it for him, his first experience of Simone's tendency to provide too much information. “She wasn't taking any chances on my understanding French,” Algren recalled.

Nelson waited outside the entrance to the café in a shadowed chair, watching Simone go in and out the door four times before he decided she was OK. It could not have been hard—she was attractive to him right away: a petite brunette, with thick reddish-brown hair braided and piled on top of her head, wearing a little green scarf and a heavy, travel-stained, woolen dress down to her ankles. To identify herself, she carried a copy of the
Partisan Review
as promised. Simone had pale, porcelain skin, and eyes, Nelson later wrote, “lit by a light-blue intelligence; she was possessed by something like total apprehension” with judgments that seemed “a fraction sooner than immediate.”

Nelson bought her a drink. Simone talked a great deal, with great force and emphasis—and he did not understand a word she said. So he talked about the war, without thinking about what
she
was doing while he was drinking Chianti and shooting dice as Private Algren. She had been scraping for food in occupied Paris, wearing wooden clogs and her dead father's old wool trousers against
the cold, and seeing her friends risk their lives for the Resistance. Luckily for him, she did not understand much of what he said, either. But he was nice to look at—a head taller than her, his sandy hair starting to thin at the forehead in a high and untidy widow's peak. He looked then, Art Shay remembered, like “an amalgam of Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, with a healthy dash of Woody Allen.” Nelson and Simone were getting along well enough on the nonverbal level, and Simone was sick of her fancy hotel, with its painted cherubs on the lobby ceiling and the “smell of dollars and disinfectant.” So Nelson ditched the “Leetle Café” and took the exotic bluestocking on a Chicago adventure, up and down the city on that cold February night, following the strings of yellow lights, out of the shining downtown Chicago Loop and into the shadowy places.

They went to West Madison Street—Chicago's Skid Row, lined with narrow, dirty taverns and dozens of flophouses, where men took shelter in little six-foot-by-four-foot cubicles topped with birdcage wire for fifty cents a night. Called the “Land of the Living Dead” by
Time
magazine, it was a more reliable source of poverty and depravity than Division Street. Ragged men stood in doorways to shelter from the wind, or stumbled over the broken glass and wine bottles that littered the icy sidewalks. Inside a bar, a small band played on a wooden platform in a corner. Under a sign that said Absolutely No Dancing, drunks and cripples danced. Simone remembered later how a woman with long pale hair tied with a red ribbon drank one beer after another, talking and shouting to herself, and occasionally getting up to dance, lifting her skirt. A drunk asleep at a table woke up and grabbed a fat woman in rags. “They dance with a joyous abandon that verges on madness and ecstasy,” Simone wrote. She was also curious about the tiny tin elk heads that decorated the booths at one of the bars. Nelson tried to convince her that they were actually animal heads shrunk by
the Okawakums, a primitive tribe on an island in the Pacific. And would she like another drink?

Simone was entranced—with the city, with the music, the rebellious dancers, and the dim tavern lights shining into her amber bourbon, a new drink for her. She liked stirring the ice around with the little glass stick. “It is beautiful,” she said. This much Nelson understood, and he was pleased. Here was someone who felt the way he did, who could see how things could be tragic and wonderful at the same time, that here, where the bankers and the chamber-of-commerce types did not go, was where real things happened. “With us, beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, and also good and evil—each has its place,” he said. “Americans don't like to think that these extremes can mingle.”

They went out into the freezing early morning into another, even sorrier tavern, where drunks crowded the counter for nickel beers, or tried to sell pencils. Men sheltered from the cold in the hallway, sleeping crouched in corners. Many were veterans, returned from the war suffering from battlefield traumas, and not able or willing to return to their families, if they ever had them. Algren remembered that he introduced her to thieves, whores and heroin addicts—fallen and falling people. But he knew they were all more than that, more than a number for a sociological report. He told Simone that the bleached blonde at the cash register, a drug addict who had escaped from prison, was an expert on French literature. Simone thought he was kidding. Then the blonde came to their table to join them for a drink and asked Simone, “How is Malraux doing on his latest novel? Is there a second volume? And Sartre? Has he finished
Les Chemins de la liberté
?”

Simone returned to the Palmer House, her head full of Skid Row and Nelson. The following afternoon, after a meeting with officials from the Alliance Française, she asked the French consul to drop her off in Nelson's neighborhood. Nelson joked that the
arrival of this “Crazy Frog” in a fancy car had given him just the sort of status he did not need among his neighbors—now they would want to borrow money. In re-creating the scene in
The Mandarins
, she remembered the corner of Wabansia and Bosworth as smelling of “burned paper, damp earth, poverty.” There was a wooden porch projecting from a brick wall, to the left a saloon with a red Schlitz sign, to the right, on a large billboard, a shiny American family sniffing a bowl of hot cereal. His smile at seeing her was so big and toothy that she called him “crocodile”—and their nicknames for each other were born.

In Nelson's kitchen there was a little table under a window and three rickety chairs on an uneven linoleum floor littered with newspapers. There was a desk with a typewriter and a reading lamp, piles of typed paper, and a record player. Photos and news clippings were pasted to the walls. The cat slithered around the sparse furniture, looking for bugs. The bed was a sagging double mattress in an iron frame, covered by a red Mexican blanket. Nelson took Simone around the neighborhood, showing her his favorite bakery and little Polish taverns, walking around in the snow and a wind that cut down Milwaukee Avenue from the northwest like knives. She wanted to stay, but had to go to dinner with some hateful French dignitaries and could not get out of it. Nelson kissed her good-bye.

“By the time she left I was ready to vote existentialist,” Nelson wrote to Amanda. But he claimed he did not know that's what Simone was—until after he picked up a recent copy of the
New Yorker
and read an article that gushed that she was “the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw.” He repeated this story often—that he did not know who she was, which is odd because he had already been warned by Mary Guggenheim that Simone might pay a call. Either Nelson was pretending more ignorance of celebrities than he actually possessed, or he regularly expected visits from mysterious French schoolteachers, or her accent was just that impenetrable. He
later told a friend that he “never understood a word she said.” Nelson told Goldie about the visit, too; she believed that existentialism must be the same as Communism—they were both “exter-remists.” Nelson left books for Simone at the front desk of the Palmer House and was sorry she did not pick them up before she left. A letter she sent him from her train to California is flirty, with an accent even on paper. She had started reading his new book,
The Neon Wilderness
, in her berth on the train. She liked the book and she liked him, too. “I think you felt it, though we spoke so little,” she wrote. She said she'd be glad to come back in April. “If you do not I will come to Paris one day after you,” he responded. But she had doubts—if it was so hard to say good-bye after a short time, wouldn't it be harder to say it after they'd spent a longer time together? “Too bad for us if another separation is going to be difficult,” Nelson told her. The pattern was already setting itself, for many painful good-byes, and no one was saying no.