Algren (22 page)

Nelson also was speaking at rallies for the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, who had been vice president for Roosevelt before Harry Truman. Wallace's platform was to end discrimination against blacks and women, increase regulation of businesses, and create a minimum wage—a clearly more liberal choice than the beleaguered Harry Truman, who also was battling the reactionary
Strom Thurmond of the “Dixiecrats” for the Democratic vote. While working for this idealistic, ultimately hopeless cause, Nelson fell for a young woman who was going through a divorce. She was in analysis, and was not ready to start another serious relationship yet. But he cared enough for her to consider marriage. He told Simone about this in September, in a letter that would get lost and not reach her until November. He told Simone he wouldn't have an affair with the girl, and their connection eventually ended, but it doesn't change what she represented to him—“a place of my own to live in, with a woman of my own and perhaps a child of my own.” Nelson was looking for home again, and realized that he had sacrificed a normal personal life for his writing. He was lonely, and Chicago felt as far away from everything as Uxmal. “I'm stuck here, as I told you and as you understand, because my job is to write about this city, and I can only do it here.” He told Simone that last year he wouldn't have been unfaithful to her, but now he saw that was “foolish, because no arms are warm when they're on the other side of the ocean.” They would always have Chichicastenango, but the honeymoon was over. Nelson did not worry about taking other girlfriends—but the loving letters continued. Knowing the food shortages in postwar France, he also sent oatmeal, dried eggs, and scotch cleverly concealed in bags of flour to confound the customs agents. Sympathizing with her fear of accidents, he sent her collages of newspaper clippings about disasters, like Sophie's book of “fatal accidence” in
The Man with the Golden Arm.

That October Ken McCormick told Nelson he'd finished reading “McGantic” and that he found it had the poetry of William Faulkner and the doom of Nikolai Gogol, but there were a few things that needed sorting before it could be published. Nelson told McCormick he did not want to cut the police lineup scene, even though Frankie only appears briefly. Nelson argued that the point of the section was to show not the men themselves, but Captain
Bednar's reactions to them, to give the idea of his being slowly overwhelmed by their guilt. The lineup stayed. Another point of discussion, as it was with Aswell, was Algren's use of real names—during editing, he had to change Goldblatt's department store, where Frankie tries to steal electric irons, to “Gold's,” “Wieboldt's” to “Nieboldt's,” and “St. Stanislaus Kostka” to “St. Wenceslaus Kostka,” who exists in no breviary. There was also a lot of back-and-forth in McCormick's and Algren's letters over the use of popular song lyrics—Algren wanted a lot of them, to be played in his imaginary taverns and sung in lonely fancies by his characters, not realizing that this often required giving money to the songwriters. He tried cutting back and begged McCormick to apologize to the poor staffer whose job it was to hunt down permissions.

The final issue was the title. “The Man with the Golden Arm” had been picked up from a poem Nelson had published in 1947 in
Poetry
magazine, and he used it as an epigraph to the novel. But he was always second- and third-guessing his title choices, and wondered whether they shouldn't instead use “Night Without Mercy,” fearing the “Golden Arm” title might not stand up as well as the novelty wore off. Nelson also pushed back against the publisher's wish for more hope for his characters, but conceded that the story needed tightening, and some kind of conclusion. In his original drafts, Frankie's story doesn't really end—it just trails off. Nelson tacked on what he later called an unsatisfactory “cowboy-and-Indian” ending, with Frankie being chased by police and hanging himself. He later told his friend Joseph Haas that he might have kept rewriting the book forever if the publishers hadn't wrestled it out of his hands. At last he knew he had done something good, and was happy to have the novel into which he'd put so much of himself finally ready for edits. He planned to read the proofs in France, where he and Simone would celebrate the third “anniversary” of their relationship.

Nelson started his visit to Paris in early May 1949 by causing a commotion at the high-vaulted Saint-Lazare train station—he had brought along so many presents of chocolate, whiskey, books, and photographs for Simone that it took several trips to get it all off the train. Simone had sentimentally worn the white coat she had worn in Chicago, and Nelson was able to spot her waiting behind the barrier. But by the time he was settled on the platform and ready to move his luggage, Simone had given up waiting for him and gone gloomily home. He turned up later in a cab at her flat at 11 Rue de la Bûcherie, then a poor Arab district in the Latin Quarter, with all his suitcases and brown paper parcels piled up on the curb by the driver. That past fall she had finally moved out of her pink hotel room and acquired the fifth-floor apartment—which had just three little rooms and no bath, but a view of the Seine and Notre Dame cathedral. Simone had put red curtains in the windows, and decorated with green bronze lamps by her friend Alberto Giacometti, some Van Gogh and Picasso prints, her books, and pieces of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art from their trip hung from the ceiling beams. Her flat was on the top floor, and the roof leaked, so buckets had to be set out to catch water when it rained. It smelled of mildew. She had told Nelson in a letter that the flat would be their place—no other man would sleep there. They spent the first hour of Nelson's visit going up and down the five flights of stairs, carrying all of his gifts, with help from people at the Algerian café across the street, the Café des Amis. Exhausted, likely laughing at the infirmities suffered after forty, they finally settled onto Simone's two white armchairs and opened one of the bottles of scotch Nelson had brought. They celebrated their reunion to the sound of mournful Algerian jukebox music from the café, coming through the open windows. It was Paris in the springtime, the start of a joyful four months.

Simone's “family”—her and Sartre's tight-knit group of intellectuals and artists and actors—were all eager to meet the tall American writer who had turned Simone into such a fluttering girl. They
were familiar with his work—members of the group were translating
Never Come Morning
—and gave him a hero's welcome. Tiny, ugly, charming Sartre greeted him with particular warmth, putting his arm around Algren and leading him into the Café de Flore. Algren soon found himself in a red chair at a red corner table, unable to move, surrounded by Giacometti, the singer Marcel Mouloudji, the writers Arthur Koestler, Raymond Queneau, and Boris Vian, as well as philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with everyone beaming at him and chattering in French. The beautiful blonde Michelle Vian kindly came over to sit opposite Nelson and translate—helping make him a member of the group. Michelle remembered that Simone kept fussing over him, asking, “Are you alright? What would you like?” and that they held hands like young sweethearts. All over Paris in those days, young Americans were dressing in berets and black turtlenecks pretending to be existentialists, and here was Nelson, the honored guest of all the real ones. The party went until seven in the morning, winding up with a breakfast of onion soup.

Simone's friends loved Nelson—who after an awkward beginning was able to relax enough to tell them all wild stories about Chicago. When he ran out of real ones, he made some up. On another night they visited a cemetery dedicated entirely to pets. Nelson was so disgusted at the waste this represented that he broke the ear off a statue of a little dog, to the delight of the “golden ZaZu” Michelle. To the family he appeared to be a tough guy—a status he never quite managed in the States. Long after his visit, the family would joke that if someone was mistreated, they should “send Algren to punch his nose.” Algren, Sartre, and the journalist Jacques-Laurent Bost had boxing matches, ostensibly for exercise, but with what Beauvoir described later as a “curious strutting macho virility.” Sartre loved it.

Nelson was amused by Jean-Paul, who was so homely yet somehow managed to seduce so many women he might have looked like
Cary Grant. In a letter to McCormick, Algren said Sartre “seemed an unassuming, earthy, warm and humorous little guy, eager to learn everything about the States.” He later recalled Sartre's helpless generosity—Sartre, in his writing, was always saying no to all forms of oppression, but in life he wanted to avoid unpleasantness and was always saying yes. They were once walking down a street together when Jean-Paul made a sudden U-turn and ducked into a café. He had seen a girl whom he had promised to bring an electric train—and he hadn't brought her one. “This was not a girl toward whom Sartre had any obligation, but only a café idiot who liked toy trains,” Nelson remembered. Now Sartre would have to avoid her until he found her a train.

Nelson also was astounded anew by Simone, now that he saw her at home. She was as big an oddball as he was—the least “Parisienne” woman in Paris, hopeless about fashion and housework. Her idea of a culinary challenge was to not break another can opener. But she was also hardworking and brave. She had put off his visit until she had finished
The Second Sex
, and excerpts were being printed that summer in
Les Temps Modernes
, the influential magazine edited by Sartre and Beauvoir. She was getting vicious letters calling her “frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted,” or else an unwed mother. People laughed and pointed at her in cafés. Nelson saw not his “frog wife” of Wabansia but a fearsome, fearless woman creating a revolution. Once, a self-satisfied male reporter waylaid her at a café table and asked her to tell him about existentialism.

“You do not care about Existentialism, you do not care about anything,” she said, her crystal blue eyes blazing. She then got back to her work without a second glance.

Nelson managed only one visit to see his old friend Dick Wright, who had moved to Paris in 1947 and lived just ten minutes away from Simone, with his wife, Ellen, and two young daughters at 14 Rue Monsieur le Prince. It did not go well—Algren already
believed that becoming an expatriate meant Wright had made an artistic mistake, and everything he saw would confirm his preconceptions. Wright had grown plumper and now lived opulently in an eight-room apartment that took up the entire fourth floor of a building by the Sorbonne medical school. Dick led Nelson into his library just off the entrance hall—a writer's dream with several typewriters, a desk, a tape recorder, full bookshelves, overstuffed leather chairs, and large modernist paintings on the walls. All of this might have helped to put Nelson's back up—for all of his protests that he liked his little Wabansia flat, he also craved nicer things.

Dick and Ellen were good friends with Simone, and knew about her and Nelson's relationship. He was sure Nelson had come to Paris to stay. But Nelson told him he was just visiting. He told Dick he liked France fine, but he could not imagine writing there. He had to write about Chicago, in Chicago. But Dick thought Chicago was a nightmare, and was happier in France.

“I'd be afraid to do that for fear of losing contact with my roots,” Nelson told him.

Dick got angry. He asked Nelson to remember the other great exiled writers. “Look at Dostoyevsky.”

But he was exiled, Nelson protested. He argued that there was a difference between being exiled by your government and being self-exiled. Nelson seemed oblivious to all the reasons why the Wrights, as an interracial couple in 1949, might have preferred France to the United States.

It was the last time they saw each other. Nelson could show a stubborn rigidity—he could not accept the idea of Simone's living in Chicago but not with him, yet he also had been unable to live a normal married life. And now he claimed that living outside of Chicago and the States was impossible for his work, even as he found living there difficult and lonely, and anyone who chose otherwise was wrong. Two years later, Nelson would publicly excoriate Dick
Wright for his choice, saying that he had abandoned his “potentialities, along with his people” to try to live as a Café de Flore intellectual. He wrote that there should be a warning posted on Wright's old South Side tenement: “Tough it out, Jack, tough it out.” After the visit, Nelson wrote a letter to Amanda saying simply that their old friend Dick “lives in sedate comfort and occupies himself with his family and his cab, little more,” and asking if he could bring her back some paints. Another hero had fallen in Nelson's mind, and a friendship came to an end.

After traveling like a happy tourist through Paris, Nelson and Simone traveled to Italy, Algiers, Marrakesh, Marseille, Cabris, and Tunis, where an Arab boy asked if he wanted to ride a camel.

“Tell him I have a fear of heights,” Nelson told Simone.

“He speaks no French,” she replied, “and I don't know how to say cowardice in Hebrew.” So Nelson agreed to climb on, imagining himself as Lawrence of Arabia.

Nelson sent naughty letters to Jack Conroy—vowing to bring back an Italian princess's maidenhead on a silver shield—and cheerful, newsy postcards to Goldie. One of these dealt with a mysterious phone call she received from someone whose name he did not recognize. Nelson wrote back that she should “tell him to keep the change, he's got the wrong number.” The answer to this mystery may be in Nelson's FBI files—two weeks earlier, Goldie had gotten a pretext phone call from an agent inquiring after Nelson's whereabouts. Goldie naively told all about Nelson's trip to France—even diving into his problems with the translation of
Never Come Morning
. The US government was watching his every move.