Algren (30 page)

“It was a strong and moving indictment, honestly written, and I printed it expecting a reader controversy to break over my head,” Bradley recalled. “Instead there came an outpouring of applause that amazed us all.” The head of the department of religion at a Catholic college used it as a sermon text—another reader ordered a hundred copies to use as a Christmas greeting, while the
Nation
reprinted it as “American Christmas 1952.” Jack Conroy suggested that a Chicago publisher could put it out as a small book, but Doubleday came first and gave Nelson a $1,500 advance to make it into a short book, a follow-up to
Chicago: City on the Make.

In writing the essay that he called “A Walk on the Wild Side,” Nelson revisited some of the same ideas he had explored in his 1943
Chicago Sun
article “Do It the Hard Way”—including the belief that a real writer must work from his guts and connect with life as it actually is. But nearly ten years later, he seemed to have become less optimistic about whether this type of work would be welcomed, and harsher about the sacrifices that are required. Nelson and Simone had both been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Crack-Up
, a collection of letters and essays published after the writer's death. Fitzgerald offered a melancholy view of his life as a writer, saying that he had paid for his stories not with blood, but with his emotions, until he was left with nothing. Fitzgerald had used himself up in becoming “identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.” Algren presented Fitzgerald as a model of artistic integrity—someone who poured himself out like a libation in the service of his craft. Algren also warned of the heavy toll an American writer has to pay when he works contrary to the conventions of his time. Citing the models of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Carl Sandburg, Algren wrote that “it would seem there is no way of becoming a serious writer in the States without keeping shabby company.” Thinking of Poe and Fitzgerald, Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay, he also saw how honest writers could become victims. He contrasted these kinds of writers to the more comfortable scribblers like Frank Yerby, Louis Bromfield, and Booth Tarkington, who sought to please and succeeded by never risking failure. “No book was ever worth the writing that was not done with the attitude that ‘this isn't what you rung for, Jack—but it's what you're damned well getting.'” Algren accused current American literature of being flabby and complacent, and demanded that writers go down into the underground of American life to find vitality, as Dostoyevsky had done. Writers needed not only the bravery to tell the truth, but a safecracker's ruthlessness
and sense of alienation. “If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get,” Algren challenged. “And you won't write anything anyone would read a second time either.” He offered a path to real art as rough and narrow as the way into heaven. Dan Simon, the editor of Seven Stories Press, which published
Noncomformity
in 1996, comments in an afterword that the essay was also Nelson's own plea to himself “to persist in the face of increasing opposition from within.” With this credo, he was steeling himself for an increasingly difficult fight, which he ultimately would not win.

The essay condemns not only McCarthyism and its eroding effects on democracy, but middle-class complacency of all kinds as deadening real life. “From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how.” As he wrote in
The Man with the Golden Arm
about the “special American guilt” of owning nothing, failure in the well-upholstered 1950s had come to be seen as a moral defeat, and was frightening people into trying to live without risk, not seeing that this was the real defeat. He sees McCarthyism as a replay of the sickness of seventeenth-century Salem, in that America was trying to exorcise its demons by destroying their nonconformists, their “odd fish.” Throughout the essay, he uses long quotes from favorite authors—Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Rimbaud, and Beauvoir. The language of the essay is more straightforward and philosophical and less lyrical than the language of
Chicago: City on the Make
. It also echoes T. S. Eliot in the repeated line “between the H Bomb and the A.” Eliot writes in “The Hollow Men” that “Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Lies the shadow.” Algren makes the reference despite his opinion
that Eliot was a “deeply reactionary ham.” Algren assumes familiarity with the Eliot poem without directly quoting it—his essay is about the shadow cast by fear over the nation's freedom and creativity.

The essay that came to be called “Nonconformity” is itself an odd fish—not so much an argument as a rant or a cri de coeur—a work of literary criticism that also condemns 1950s American culture. It is reminiscent of Mark Twain's “The War Prayer,” which had attacked both the savagery of war and the false piety that upheld it. And like “War Prayer,” Algren's full essay was not published until after his death, by Seven Stories Press in 1996.

Versions of it did make it into print—through the
Daily News
story, the
Nation
's reprint, and in a piece that appeared as “Things of the Earth: A Groundhog's View” in the
Pacific Citizen
in December of 1952. The sentiments are repeated in another
Nation
article, “Eggheads Are Rolling: The Rush to Conform,” on October 17, 1953, which goes further in calling out both McCarthy and
Time
publisher Henry Luce.

Doubleday had high hopes for the complete essay and was still planning to publish it in the summer of 1953, when critic Maxwell Geismar, an important Algren enthusiast, was asked to write an introduction. “This will be one of the first books they burn: Congratulations,” Geismar wrote Algren. But Doubleday decided the book needed such heavy editing that it sent Timothy Seldes to Gary to help him polish it. Even loving Simone thought that it lacked unity—“made of pieces that do not exactly clutch together.” By September Doubleday had changed its mind and given up the $1,500 advance. Bradley said that he accused Doubleday of being afraid of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others of his kind, a charge Doubleday denied. Seldes told Bradley that there were problems with the essay, primarily its size—the page count in the Seven Stories edition, with heavy quoting from other authors, is less than
eighty, even thinner than
City on the Make
. Seldes said that a big part of Doubleday's decision not to publish the book was its belief in what would be best for Algren. But Nelson was disappointed, and sent the essay to his agent Madeleine Brennan to seek an alternate publisher. Either the post office or Brennan lost it. Algren later turned over his only carbon copy to Bradley, giving up on the idea of ever publishing it himself.

In August of 1952, Nelson got a letter from Simone about a new man in her life—a twenty-seven-year-old blue-eyed, black-haired journalist named Claude Lanzmann, now best known for his Holocaust movie
Shoah
. She told Nelson that they had spent the night together, and planned a real affair after she returned from a trip to Italy. Yet she had a recurring dream that she would be buried with Nelson's ring on her finger.

Nelson did not write Simone again for two months after she told him about Claude, who moved into Simone's red-curtained, fifth-floor flat at Rue de la Bûcherie. In the meantime Amanda returned to Indiana for a long summer visit. After she got back to California, he teased in a letter that she had a lot of nerve making him ask her to marry him, when all along he had been waiting for her to ask him. “Leap year, silly,” he teased, referring to the old tradition that this was the only time women could propose. “And I'm not getting any younger.” He suggested they do it in Paris, where everything would be luckier, instead of Gary—he had a gambler's trust in luck. He decided to wait a little before springing the news on Goldie, though he suspected the old lady was probably already figuring things out.

This sudden proposal and the wish to marry in France sounds like spite—Conroy thought it was. But Nelson's letters to Amanda during this period show strong affection—he calls her Baby Tiger—though not a passionate love, and after the initial stunned silence he continued to write to Simone. It may have been that the man
writing about nonconformity wanted a little conformity. Simone's declaration of a new romance was a goad for him to stop brooding and claim something of his own. Nelson's friend Denise DeClue said that despite his revolutionary writing, Nelson was an “old-fashioned guy” when it came to relationships, and his heart was where his body was. “I must have loved Amanda,” Nelson told Art Shay. “I married her twice.”

It was a big sacrifice for Amanda—to give up a good job as a secretary with the Screen Writers Guild, leave all her friends and longtime home in Los Angeles, and come to suburban Indiana to be with a man who had mistreated her in the past. It was also a sacrifice for Nelson—he should have remembered from past experience he did not work well with Amanda around. He was a “sap,” Nelson later confessed to novelist John Clellon Holmes. But the letters Nelson sent Amanda through the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 contain no reservations, only practical details about whether to bring her typewriter, and how to safely pack the car. He also gave her news of Bubu, who had had a litter of kittens in Nelson's bedroom. Nelson and Amanda were both cat lovers—Amanda was bringing her own small, tidy Susan, pampered with a high-priced diet of fresh liver. They also talked about having children. Amanda was not yet forty, and it was not too late. Simone told Nelson he would be a nice father, though a moody one.

Simone, happy in her relationship with Claude and always generous, suggested in November that Nelson and Amanda come to Paris for a honeymoon trip—without even knowing their plans. “She knows how things are before you tell her, every time,” Nelson wrote. “What can you do with somebody like that?” Nelson paid a deposit of $170 for a cabin on the SS
Liberté
, a French line, sailing March 24. He joked that is was just as well they were getting out of the country for a while—the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower had just made everything worse.

It was already worse than he thought. After many anxious weeks of waiting to get his passport, he learned in a March 3, 1953, letter that it had been denied due to allegations of Communist Party activities. Shocked, Nelson wrote the passport office that he was not a Communist, nor had he recently terminated party membership, but his appeal was in vain. He had always felt so free to travel—and now it was as if the blue steel bars of Brewster County Jail had come down around all forty-eight states. The SS
Liberté
returned sixty dollars of his cabin deposit. Amanda and Nelson were committed to going ahead with the marriage anyway, without the good luck of Paris. After Amanda had come back to Chicago, Van Allen Bradley remembered meeting them for drinks at Riccardo's, one of Nelson's favorite restaurants north of the Loop, and Nelson “proudly and rather schoolboyishly” showing off Amanda's engagement ring.

Amanda and Nelson remarried on March 16, 1953—just over sixteen years to the day of their first attempt. For a few months, they seemed to enjoy their conventional roles, with Amanda doing the shopping and cooking dinners for Nelson while he worked on the “Nonconformity” essay and sketches for a new novel. But the relationship deteriorated quickly. The house was all Nelson—his books, his piles of papers, his insomniac habits, his pictures of Simone. Amanda, an intellectual, sophisticated woman who had been an independent professional in California for the last ten years, was suddenly confining herself to a back bedroom in the tiny Miller house to give Nelson space to write, just as she had stayed late downtown while they lived together on Evergreen. This time it was worse, since she did not have the distraction of an outside job. It was a small house for realizing disappointments—a white-sided prison with a lilac bush in the yard.

Nelson became moody and depressed, especially after the execution of the Rosenbergs in June. Eisenhower had denied their appeal on June 19, declaring that “by immeasurably increasing the chances
of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.” The couple was executed in the Sing Sing electric chair that evening—it took several tries to kill Ethel, and at the end smoke was rising from her curly black hair. Nelson thought capital punishment was the worst kind of murder, since in an ordinary murder a person might fight back and have hope, and not be sure of death until it came. But in a state-sponsored murder, the victim knew the day and hour, and had the agony of waiting. “Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands,” he told Studs. “There is no torture in the world more terrible.” He wondered what worse things the McCarthy era could bring.

In letters to Simone, Nelson spoke of his depression, calling himself the “American Prisoner.” He paced the house, unable to stack sentences like the good bricklayer he had been while writing
The Man with the Golden Arm
. He asked Amanda how she thought this was a marriage. She protested that they should keep trying—they could grow old together. She continued to have hope for the relationship despite all the evidence against it. “Any man who doesn't want to be married to me must be some sort of nut,” Amanda told him.

“I never have been very strong in the head,” Nelson retorted.

In an unpublished memoir, Nelson compares their two cats, in a manner that suggests he was comparing the personalities of their owners. Bubu is described as a big, raggedy, randy outdoor cat, while petite Susan is clean, sharply observant, well behaved, and disinterested in sex. That's Nelson's side—Amanda told biographer Bettina Drew that the stress of trying to live with Nelson during those years gave her a permanent nerve disorder, Raynaud's disease. “He was cruel to Amanda,” said Dave Peltz.