Algren (36 page)

“He was crazy about women,” recalled writer Suzanne McNear, a longtime friend. “All he asked is that they be smart and beautiful and not cause any trouble and have gin in the refrigerator.” He also still thought in the early 1960s that it was still possible he would marry again, and have a child.

As difficult as it was to keep at the typewriter, Nelson was still writing. He was a prolific book critic, with over two hundred reviews over his lifetime, and the late 1950s included assessments of Jack Kerouac, Robert Graves, and William Carlos Williams. He gave a respectful nod to Simone de Beauvoir's memoir of her childhood, but was impatient with the Beat writers like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, calling them clowns for the establishment who were not doing the hard work of writing and engaging with the human race. “I don't see anybody beating them,” he remarked to Studs in a 1959 interview, sounding as though somebody should. “I have to respect writing as a trade, as you would shoemaking. I don't think you can get a pair of shoes together by going into hypnosis or magic,” he said. “I don't know if you have the right to find God before you find yourself. It's a very big thing, just to be yourself.” In Algren's view the establishment as represented by
Time
and
Life
magazines preferred to see the writer as a kind of “goofnik” and thus nothing to worry about. “It helps them to be smug.”

He used the reviewer's pulpit to take on his own critics. In a biting review of
Man in Modern Fiction
by Edmund Fuller, who objected to writers like Algren who offered the world's horrors without solutions, Algren wondered why literature was required to provide answers, rather than just a true picture of life as it is lived. “Of course Frankie had no alternatives; that was the very reason I wrote about him,” Algren retorted. “His frame of reference was the street he worked on, the army he served in and the needle he died by.” Algren also mocked Fuller's contention that characters in modern fiction needed to be perverts or savages to get
sympathy—this suggested that the unloved and ill-mannered did not deserve compassion.

Nelson did not review Saul Bellow, who had replaced Nelson in critical opinion as the lead writer out of Chicago. They did have an encounter in 1959, which did not go well. Algren and Dave Peltz arranged to meet Bellow at a Polish Northwest Side tavern that was low class even by Algren's standards. Algren arrived wearing his army jacket in what Peltz believed was a signal to Bellow that he had been in the service, while Bellow had not. They quickly got into an argument, and Bellow left. Algren saw Bellow as a good writer who could never be great, because he was too cautious—he did not go “all out” like a Hemingway or a Dylan Thomas. For Bellow's part he regarded Algren as a literary has-been, and thought Algren was “the biggest argument in favor of capital punishment.”

While the hardships of the Depression had settled Nelson's artistic sympathies permanently with the lower class, McCarthyism, bad experiences with the New York publishing world, and the negative reviews of the 1950s had changed his vision of his role as an artist and a critic. He was still focused on the underside of society, but now felt a profound and embittered distrust of both the government and the literary world. He no longer felt welcome as a novelist, and started calling himself instead a “freelance journalist.” He even referred to his past works of fiction, like
The Man with the Golden Arm
and “A Bottle of Milk for Mother,” as journalism.

In his new role as a reporter, he accepted a
Chicago Sun-Times
assignment to give his take on the 1959 World Series pitting the White Sox against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Sox had won the American League pennant that September against the Cleveland Indians, and it fit the absurdity of the times that when the Sox clinched the pennant, the fire chief Robert Quinn turned on the civil defense system sirens, leading many to believe they were about to be vaporized in a mushroom cloud. The World Series, which
the Sox eventually lost to the Dodgers, was a joyful event that for Algren roused rather than put to rest the ghosts of 1919. His poetic, quirky story “Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago” was more about regrets and time passing than the 1959 event itself—with memories of old songs and gambling with player cards dipped in wax while gambler Arnold Rothstein was going for the big bucks. He poked fun at the cardboard horns fans blew during the 1959 games, and at a woman next to him who did not seem to know what was going on. Then he saw in left field the figure of Shoeless Joe Jackson walking away, leaving his glove because it was no longer needed. The ghosts mixed with the present in double focus—it was a unique piece of writing, a mix of reporting and memoir, something impressionistic and fanciful and a little absurd, that would become his new style for the early 1960s. Algren still talked about
Entrapment
, and had promised his new publisher, Bill Targ at World Publishing Company, a short novel and a collection of short stories called “Love in an Iron Rain.” But he kept making excuses, joking to Targ in 1959 that he would set a date, but his typewriter ribbon was worn out and the manuscript was at the bottom of a rain barrel in Miller, Indiana. By 1960 he was starting to feel that he would not write another novel. “I'd as soon attempt that as I would open a pizza joint on Chicago's Westside without getting protection first,” he told John Clellon Holmes. “My only chance of getting out of hock is to quit writing.” He was past fifty, and did not want to spend two years of his shortening life writing something that would be ripped apart by the likes of “Norman Pederast.” Who was he writing for, anyway? He used to think it was for readers—now it seemed like it was just for the places he owed money. Instead, he was thinking of different kinds of writing—social criticism and nonfiction journalism—and planned a trip to Europe that would give him new material to explore.

The only book of fiction Algren helped create during the 1960s was the 1962 anthology
Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome
Monsters
. The book featured thirteen short stories by younger writers Algren supported, including the Florida convict James Blake, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, H. E. F. Donohue, Joan Kerckhoff, and even Saul Bellow. But the collection included no new fiction from Nelson—“The House of the Hundred Grassfires” is a bordello story that had been deleted from
A Walk on the Wild Side
. Nelson's other contribution to a book of fiction was an introduction to a 1963 reprint of Ben Hecht's 1921 novel
Eric Dorn
. Nelson got $1,000 for the piece, which was unique in the history of paid introductions in being a slam against the book. Nelson called the novel a “literary hoax.” Hecht was furious at his publisher for letting it stand and refused to appear with Algren at a discussion about the book. When Nelson burned a bridge, he did a thorough job of it—not even the pilings were left behind.

As Algren was trying to push aside his old ways of writing, he also was alienating old friends. Perhaps the most hurtful snub was to gentle Jack Conroy, the man who had helped him through the dark days of the 1930s, when Nelson was in despair over
Somebody in Boots
, the man who helped him on the WPA by gifting him with a story to use as his own, who had offered him friendship and hospitality. In a June 11, 1959, interview in the
Reporter
, Nelson made a reference to “J. C. Kornpoen” that was a clear swipe at Jack. “Not surprised you haven't heard the name,” Nelson told interviewer David Ray. “Came from the small mining community of Groveling, Missouri. Perhaps the greatest creative imagination of our day. I say ‘perhaps'—no one ever really knew. No way of telling for sure. You see, J. C. never wrote anything down … Kornpoen occupied the Chair of Make Believe Literature at Alcoholics Anonymous. Never sold out. ‘No offers,' he used to explain.”

Conroy was stunned. “You know, that Nelson is mean,” Jack told Stuart Brent, recounting the nasty
Reporter
interview. Nelson had also recently trashed another old WPA friend, Willard Motley,
in his 1958 review of
Let No Man Write My Epitaph
. Conroy told Brent he was going to visit Motley, and Brent remembered that Conroy's “grey-blue eyes were suddenly swollen with sadness.” Stuart understood—he had his own problems with Nelson stealing his books, and also claimed that Nelson and Simone had once had a sexual encounter in his bookshop. He had backed Nelson—he had stood up for him and held book signings for him and now he was feeling ill-used. James Blake, whose literate letters from prison Nelson had helped get published in
Les Temps Modernes
, also noticed a bitterness about Nelson at the time. According to James, Nelson thought Jack had never made it big as a writer because instead “he chose to be a good guy.” Nelson imagined a stark choice—between literary failure and loneliness.

Nelson also had a rift with Art Shay around 1960. Art said he had tried to help Nelson get a contract with Pennington Press for a book on urban poverty. “Nelson didn't have a dime, and I was trying to get him $2,500 in advance. I was playing the violin for the publishers,” Art remembered. Art then heard from a mutual friend that Nelson had made fun of Art at a party at Herman Kogan's. Art got mad—he was trying to do a favor for Nelson and this was his thanks. Their relationship cooled, though Shay conceded he might have been oversensitive. In the case of both Shay and Conroy, Algren had put being a wise guy ahead of the considerations of friendship.

“He couldn't sustain giving—he needed to take,” said Dave Peltz, whose friendship also faded over the years because of Nelson's constant demands for rides and loans and other favors. Being friends with Nelson could be risky—Dave once got a concrete brick through his picture window because Nelson had refused to pay a $250 poker debt. Nelson was out of town, so Dave paid it himself. Nelson could be a wonderful, generous friend, but once he found the friendship no longer beneficial, it would fade away. John
Clellon Holmes had a similar tale—he and Nelson became friends for a brief, warm time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then it was over without warning. As Holmes wrote touchingly in his essay “Arm: A Memoir,” “It was as if there were many rooms in his days, each mutually separate from all the others, and when one of them had been furnished and lived-in and used up, he simply closed the door, and changed his address.”

Nelson was not afraid to be rude if it meant he could learn something about human nature. One writer friend of Nelson's was invited to dinner at his house in Miller, and Nelson was not there. She knocked on the door, and waited and waited. As she was about to leave, Nelson appeared from behind a tree. “I wanted to see how you reacted,” he told her. “She was so angry at him, but that was typically Algren,” said Conroy biographer Douglas Wixson, who was told the story. “He was always observing people.”

“He would break away from people,” said Studs Terkel, who noted that Nelson also broke off with the Rowlands and Jess Blue. “He was like the cat, on his own.” Studs managed to maintain his friendship with Nelson through the years, though Nelson sometimes was exasperated with how Studs seemed to be constantly onstage. It may have helped that Studs did not pry too hard into personal matters, and regularly loaned him money, which Nelson was good about paying back.

Even those who managed to stay friends with Nelson for many years said that it was sometimes tough to know who he was—so much of his “grumpy old rebel” persona was an act. Stephen Deutch, a photographer and sculptor who became Nelson's closest friend in the last two decades of Nelson's life, said he got to know Nelson better by reading his fiction, and the fiction better by knowing him. “One never knew exactly where Nelson left off and when the other characters came on,” Deutch said. “I thought he was a complicated person indeed. And it made it more difficult
to know him because I thought he always wore a mask. He liked to project images of himself to all of us and not necessarily the same. I thought he was a fantastic actor…. And I think Nelson was a living fiction himself…. I never found him really predictable either except that he was unpredictable. His reactions to things were not necessarily the ones that most of us would have. He had a particular personality that absorbed everything one way and projected it in a different way. When he told stories, and I don't mean stories he has written but stories about himself, things that happened to him, he got always very agitated, he'd pace up and down the room and enact everything that was going on, but it was not sufficient to listen to his words only. You had to see Nelson's eyes. Those malicious, mischievous eyes. They said more sometimes than the words of his stories, and sometimes you got a glimpse of the real Nelson Algren somewhere in the back.”

One friendship he kept open in the early 1960s was with Simone de Beauvoir. Though he had been angered by
The Mandarins
and barely wrote her at all in 1957, Nelson was still friendly with the most famous woman in his life and wanted to visit her again. After two years of gathering information and comparing his signatures on documents, the federal government had given up on its pursuit of a perjury charge against him, for insufficient evidence. Informant Howard Rushmore killed his wife and then himself in January 1958. Five years after he had become a prisoner in his own country, Algren was again issued a passport on July 14, 1958—the 169th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. In May of 1959, his apartment was burglarized and many of his personal papers disappeared, so he had to get another passport that November. That fall he gave Simone the good news that he would visit again the next spring, and sent a big box of Christmas presents for the whole Paris family, including a book of photography for Simone and a biography of Mark Twain for Michelle Vian. He arrived in Europe
in early 1960, first visiting writer Brendan Behan in Dublin, which Nelson described as a “rain-sodden black pudding town.” He told Studs later that he had been impressed with the authenticity of the people he met in Dublin—their civilized approach to human feelings—which contrasted with the phoniness he found in the United States. “Our split-level people seem to lack the feeling that they have a unique personality,” Nelson said. “Why else would people pay $50 for a key with a bunny on it?”