Algren (34 page)

Algren pretended he did not care about what critics thought, and made Podhoretz, Fiedler, and Kazin targets of his satire ever after—with cracks about “Justin Poodlespitz” and “Leslie Fleacure.” He claimed Kazin was “better fitted for measuring meat than literature.” In an airy interview with John Hutchens at the
New York Herald Tribune
in June of 1956, Nelson said that while he would just as soon not have had “ice-water reviews,” he believed that “a good or bad book succeeds or fails regardless of the reviews it gets…. The people who believe in this kind of book won't be thrown off by the review of it.” But friends said that his behavior at the time showed genuine distress at the negative criticism, coming on top of his legal troubles with both Otto Preminger and Amanda, from whom he was seeking a divorce. Nelson grew more defensive about the novel over the years, or perhaps more appreciative, as the hurtful noise of the critics died away. In a 1957 interview, he admitted that
Golden Arm
was a better book, but that in a lot of ways
Wild
Side
had “more vitality.” Two years later he claimed that
Wild Side
was “by sixteen furlongs and eleven lengths the better book…. It is an American fantasy, a poem written to an American beat as true as Huckleberry Finn.” By 1969 he called it “the best I've written or will write.” It especially pleased him to know that hookers and pimps liked it—a prostitute had walked up to him in a bar and told him he “got it just right.”

Despite the early mixed reception, the book has become a cult favorite and was an influence on other absurdist writers, such as Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Ken Kesey, along with musician Lou Reed, who had a hit with the song “Walk on the Wild Side” about the lower depths of New York City. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson also acknowledged his debt to Algren, and said that the ancestors of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang had a literary prototype in Dove Linkhorn. Also inspired by the novel was James Leo Herlihy, whose
Midnight Cowboy
is about a country boy who goes to New York in hopes of making it rich as a gigolo. Herlihy inscribed a copy of his novel to Algren, calling him “Boss of the Wild Side.” Novelist Russell Banks, who became friends with Algren in Algren's later years, said the book was “a homegrown version of the European
bildungsroman
, to be read alongside
Huckle-berry Finn
,
The Red Badge of Courage
, and
Native Son
.”

Besides his new book and his lawsuit against Preminger, Algren was in the public eye for other reasons in the spring of 1956. A theatrical version of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, which Algren said had been held back by Preminger, had finally opened off-Broadway to great reviews but small audiences that only half filled the Cherry Lane Theater. The production by Jack Kirkland, best known for his hit theatrical adaptation of
Tobacco Road
, closed after forty-nine performances.

Nelson's love life, which he had always kept private, also had suddenly become a topic of international speculation. Appearing on
the
New York Times
best-seller list at the same time as Algren's book was the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's
The Mandarins
, which she had dedicated to Algren and contained a barely concealed account of their affair. The novel about French intellectuals had won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. It was just as well for Nelson and Simone's relationship that he never listened to her pleas to improve his French—it kept him from reading it for two years. Asked about the book, Nelson said that a female novelist should have enough to write about “without digging in her own garden. For me it was just a routine relationship, and she's blown it up.” He was just being honest, but it made him look like a cad.

In the same letter in which she criticized
A Walk on the Wild Side
, Beauvoir said she had not been bothered by Algren's comments about her own book. She said she had only tried to convey a little part of their affair, and it was different from the “true truth…. Nobody understood that when the man and woman leave each other for ever, they still are in love and maybe this love will never die.” But he did not write her again for almost six months. Walking along the beach in Indiana with Dave Peltz in the summer of 1956, he talked about “Frenchy's thing” as if it should have been a joint project. He wanted the books to be joined together—slap!—one facing one way and one the other. “So you could turn it upside down to read the other book,” he said. Dave thought Nelson was jealous—Simone was of worldwide importance, while Nelson was broke in Miller. Nelson did not think she was even half as good a writer as he was, and yet her dry, talky book was one of the top ten best sellers of the year. He tried making a transatlantic call to Simone that summer—an expensive ordeal in those days. But Claude Lanzmann answered and Nelson got off the phone. Simone told Nelson in a letter that it was just as well, since it would have been too hard to hear his voice without seeing him.

Nelson was single again in 1956. His marriage to Amanda had ended differently than it had in the 1940s—with the friendly division of towels and sugar rations and photographs. This time Amanda had given up her life and a good job in Los Angeles, and if they could not stay together, she wanted a settlement. He had sued her for divorce on July 8, 1955—complaining of “cruel and inhuman treatment,” and claiming that she had never considered his “physical and mental welfare.” According to the complaint, the quarrelling was so bad that it was impossible for them to live together. Throughout the summer of 1955, he sent her pleading letters from Montana State University at Missoula, where he had a lecturing gig, wondering why she could not just let it go. “For Christ's sake let's get this misery done and over,” he wrote. He told her his life had stopped since they had gotten back together, and he had been trying to find someplace he could work and live again. “If you have any idea that I'll put in another five minutes of ‘marriage,' you're five minutes off.” He felt like he was fighting for his life.

Dave Peltz said he did not understand why Amanda kept hanging on—Nelson was being nasty and taunting her when she asked for money. She had a lot invested in keeping the marriage alive. “He told her to quit her job and come back. And she did. And it was devastating when it didn't work out,” Peltz said.

By September of 1955, Amanda had quit trying, gotten her own lawyer, and filed her own complaint against Nelson while he was staying in Florida. An agreement allowed her to live in the house in Miller Beach until he had paid her $7,000, and Nelson would give up the furniture in the house—including the phonograph. She also got the car, which he did not care about. The divorce was entered on December 28, 1955, and she eventually got her own place in Miller. There would be no third try, and they ended up hating each other. Their old friendliness of the 1940s, which had been a source of support for Nelson while he was writing his great Chicago books,
was gone. Speaking of Amanda years later, Nelson said that if he saw her, “I'd kick her all the day down the street, unless she did it to me first. She was always a little faster.”

Nelson wanted to make another trip to France, and tried again to have his passport renewed. On April 13, 1956, he sent a letter to the passport office saying that he wished to take an oath that he was not presently a member of the Communist Party, nor had he been one in the past. His agent Madeleine Brennan also sent a letter to the passport office, vouching for his good intentions and saying that Nelson wanted to be abroad for six months to help with a foreign film production of
Never Come Morning
, as well as the translation of
A Walk on the Wild Side
. But on June 26, 1956, the passport office told Nelson that his application was again denied, and the FBI began a painstaking, two-year investigation to see whether Nelson could be prosecuted for perjury, using Howard Rushmore's letter and other informant testimony as evidence that Nelson had been a Communist Party member.

Imprisoned in America, Nelson's depression deepened. “He couldn't get a good night's sleep,” remembered Dave Peltz, who sometimes stayed at Nelson's house. “He would wake up. The minute he'd fall asleep he'd have such bad dreams he would [cry out] ‘Nooo, nooo, nooo.'” Dave thought Nelson's unconscious was smarter than he was—he was in denial all the time about his own problems, but in sleep he would wake up with “these terrible, terrible moments of regret about what he must have been doing with his life.” He was so paralyzed by depression that even getting on the South Shore train to Chicago for a publisher's meeting was an ordeal—Nelson had one foot on the train, but could not move the other one off the platform. The conductor and the other passengers started to yell, and Dave Peltz had to push him on board. Dave thought Nelson could have been helped, but Nelson did not want to submit to psychoanalysis. Dave took Nelson to a psychiatrist
friend of his own, who told him, “Mr. Algren, you have a depression, under the depression, under the depression—you have a series of them. To get to them, it'll take a long time.” But Dave said Nelson was frightened of analysis—he feared that tapping into the treasure of his creativity would cause it to leak away.

One morning, as they sat drinking coffee in Nelson's yellow-painted kitchen, Nelson said he had dreamed that Dave was lying on the floor, dying of a gunshot wound.

“Nelson, you wrote that dream,” Dave told him. “You produced it. You were the main actor in it. It was not Dave on the floor, it was Algren.”

In the late summer of 1956, Nelson told Amanda and the Rowlands he was ready to be treated for his depression, and then kept changing his mind, saying he did not want to go through with it after all. Despite their acrimonious separation, Amanda still cared enough about him to push for treatment, so they all got into Dave's car and drove to a private psychiatric facility in wealthy, north suburban Winnetka. The North Shore Health Resort was a stately brick mansion surrounded by mature trees that looked a little like Yaddo, the New York State writer's colony Nelson had fled after a single night in 1935. They all waited with him in the lobby, while Nelson took an hour to sign his name. As Dave remembered it: “He writes ‘N' then walks away. He comes back and he writes an ‘E.'” When Nelson finally finished writing his name, two big men in white coats walked out and grabbed him. “And I hear him as they're pulling him down the hall, ‘Daaave! Daaave!'”

Nelson was diagnosed at the facility with an “anxiety state and passive aggressive personality.” But he was not there long—in less than two weeks, he escaped through a window down a fire escape onto the manicured green grounds, just as he had gone through a hole in the fence at the crooked carnival in long-ago South Texas. He found his way back around the lake to Gary and his messed-up
life. He owed money on taxes. He owed money to Amanda. His law firm was dropping its case against Preminger, and wanted its fees. He had made a clumsy effort to propose to Margo—who turned him down. And he could not get an advance on the unfinished
Entrapment
, the book he had described to Simone as the book for himself. He had spent the previous Christmas with none other than Hemingway himself, in Havana, with good scotch and conversation about hunting and boxing, Papa in a baseball cap and a long white beard like Santa Claus. Even though Hemingway's other guests spoke in a mix of French and Spanish, everything had seemed understood. This Christmas, nothing seemed understood, and Nelson could not see a way ahead. After his long silence, Nelson sent Simone a letter for Christmas 1956 that worried her—he was exceptionally hard on himself, and felt that the light inside of him had gone out.

On New Year's Eve of 1956, Nelson bought beer and other groceries at Pignotti's, the little store on Lake Street in Miller, and headed back across the ice-covered Marquette Park lagoon, using a common shortcut instead of going around, which would save him about ten minutes. The day was relatively mild for December 31, above freezing for part of the day, and about twenty feet across, the thin ice began to crack. Neighbors heard Nelson screaming, and three brothers working on a nearby house saw him hanging on to the breaking ice in more than fifteen feet of frigid water. Nelson warned them that the ice was too thin for them to come out, and asked for a rope. But his hands were numb, and he lost his grip on the rope several times before the men told him to wrap it around his arm. Nelson was taken to a neighbor's house for dry clothes, then to a local hospital to be treated briefly for exposure. He threw his bundle of wet clothes onto one of the two front stairs leading into the house. By the time Dave Peltz had heard about the accident and gotten to Nelson's front door, the clothes had all frozen together
into a heap. Dave went into the house to find Nelson in bed. “Did you try something, Nelson?” Dave asked.

Nelson grunted something inarticulate.

“Did you try, Algren?” Dave repeated. But Nelson stayed muffled under the blankets, not saying yes or no.

It would have been a strange way for an intelligent man to try to kill himself—going through ice in front of witnesses. It would have been an awful way to die, and he had screamed for help. It was likely not a suicide attempt, but an act of inattention by a clumsy man who was distracted by stress and deep blues. “It is so much like you, honey, to fall in a hole!” Simone said when she learned of the accident. A year of ice-water reviews had ended in real ice water. Wrapped up in blankets in deep midwinter, Nelson wondered whether anything he wrote was even wanted anymore.

The following February, Art Shay drove Nelson out to New York to meet a girl who had written him a sexy fan letter. He also wanted to cast about for a new agent to replace Brennan, whom Shay called a “drunken idiot.” A man named Marion “Joe” Lebworth offered Nelson $25,000 for the movie rights of
A Walk on the Wild Side
. The contract would guarantee the rights in perpetuity. Burned by the Preminger deal, Algren told Lebworth he was not born yesterday, but Lebworth gave him a personal check, saying Algren could cash it if he wanted.