Algren (39 page)

Algren also was interested in talking with his students about Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
, which was serialized in the
New Yorker
in the fall of 1965 before coming out as a book in January. With a lot of uncredited help from his friend Harper Lee, Capote had reported on the murder of an Iowa farm family by two drifters. The book had accomplished two goals that Nelson always wanted for himself—it had evoked sympathy for people who had seemed unforgivable, and it had made a lot of money. Algren had always managed the first goal but not the second, and his obsession with the Capote book seemed to be a sign that he wanted to modernize his own style, according to Vonnegut, who taught at Iowa at the same time. “There he was, a master storyteller, blasted beyond all reason with admiration for and envy of a moderately innovative crime story…. For a while in Iowa, he could talk of little else.”

Out there among the young would-be literati and late winter snow, Nelson's obsession with poker grew to alarming proportions. Under the misapprehension that Iowa was full of rubes who did not know how to play, he started attending a weekly poker game in the basement of a local named Gilroy, whose wife provided sandwiches and collected three dollars from each player. Neglecting his own wife, Nelson became a regular fixture at the games, smoking cigars, drinking coffee and brandy out of a thermos, and losing to everybody. He played for high stakes, and terribly, giving up pot after pot, calling and raising on hands he had no business playing while
“cackling gleefully at his own corny jokes.” Ellison recalled how one game lasted until 6:00 pm the following night, with Nelson $1,200 in the hole. But Nelson was so committed to the games that one night he risked his life going out into an Iowa blizzard. His fellow players assumed that he had lost half his salary to gambling that year. Vonnegut believed that Nelson lost not only his salary, but Betty's, too.

Betty told Nelson that he was a “compulsive loser” and ought to see a psychiatrist. It is interesting that she said “loser” and not “gambler”—she saw him as addicted to losing. “She says I got a problem,” he said over cards at Gilroy's one night. “Now is that what you think?” “Deal, Nelson, deal,” one of the sharks responded, and Nelson did not get an answer to his question. By June of that year, the lady he liked to call Betty Boop had asked for a divorce. Like his characters, Nelson had once again had a chance at love, but had not managed to hang on to it. When they left Iowa, Betty lived alone on Evergreen while Nelson went to southern Illinois to visit horseracing friends at Cahokia Downs, near East St. Louis. Nelson was hoping to get a racetrack novel out of his observations of the jockeys, owners, and gamblers. He even invested in a horse called Jealous Widow—also known as Algren's Folly. Either name could have been in homage to Betty. It was not a lucky horse—Algren advised friends not to bet on her, though he could not avoid doing it himself. Nelson and Betty stayed on friendly terms for several years after the divorce—unlike Amanda, she had not asked for anything but Mugsie the cat and her red Nash Rambler. There was not much else. By January of 1967, she was back in New York, writing Nelson friendly letters about trying to get acting jobs. The marriage had lasted, as Vonnegut put it, “about as long as a soap bubble. His enthusiasm for writing, reading, and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man.” He would spend the rest of his life as a bachelor.

After a summer with the racetrack people, Nelson returned to Chicago, and, as usual, found he had an easier time writing when he was alone in the house. In November of 1966, the
Saturday Evening Post
picked up his short story “A Ticket on Skoronski,” his first piece of published new fiction since the
Post
had printed the racetrack story “The Moon of the Arfy Darfy” in 1964, a story that included characters from the abandoned
Entrapment
. “Going on the Arfy Darfy” is a racetrack expression for someone who leaves without paying a debt—Nelson had hoped to write a novel with the title, but for now short stories were what he could manage. “Skoronski” goes back to the neighborhood setting, and depicts an old man dying in a tavern while the rest of the barflies keep playing poker, barely acknowledging the tragedy. In an exchange reminiscent of Gilroy's basement, one character tries to talk about a dream, only to be told to shut up and deal. The story ends in mourning, with Lottie-Behind-Bar putting down her head to cry, and saying that God will punish.

The story is a revision of an older story, “Say a Prayer for the Old Guy,” published in 1958. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Nelson kept revising and recycling, with versions of the same stories and essays reappearing in different publications. His kindly agent, Candida Donadio, would tell him, “Those are bits and pieces, Nelson, bits and pieces,” Suzanne McNear said. A major source of income through the late 1960s was the sale of his manuscripts to Ohio State University's archive for $20,000, paid over three years. Old letters and early drafts of his old books were bringing in more money than his new stories were.

He did not seem to have the energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s to write anything long. “It was running out of steam, more than anything,” said McNear. She also thought he drank “way too much,” though few of Nelson's friends and acquaintances thought he was an alcoholic. Part of his socializing was just loneliness—he
wanted to be out with people, where things were happening. One of these social excursions, with some East St. Louis friends in early 1967, led to an arrest for marijuana possession. The 1957 Cadillac matched the description of one that had been used in a burglary, and police found “a quantity of marijuana” inside, according to the arrest record. In his Chicago Police mug shot, the fifty-seven-year-old writer looks old, weary, and surprised. The charge was dropped.

Nelson continued to be disgusted by US politics, particularly the continued US involvement with the Vietnam War, which he regarded as “the crime of the century.” In August of 1968, the national anguish over the war was centered in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Mayor Daley's orders to firmly control protesters outside the convention were carried to extremes by the Chicago police, who beat up protesters, clergymen, reporters, and even passersby in what was later termed a police riot by an official government report. Daley excused it all with the claim that the officials knew of plans to assassinate political leaders, including him, so he had taken certain necessary precautions. The assassination notion was not substantiated, and the riot showcased Mayor Daley's Chicago just as Nelson had described it in his 1961 after-word to
City on the Make
: this Chicago is a place where the “punitive cats have the upper hand.”

Though he had said just a year earlier in a magazine interview that he did not want to go to Vietnam to cover the war, Nelson changed his mind in 1968, leaving in mid-November from San Francisco to Tokyo, and from there to Saigon, writing up travel stories that were published in the
Critic
, a Chicago Catholic literary magazine
.
Nelson liked Tokyo—he was impressed by the energy, the focus on personal dignity even in a place of twelve million people, and the cleanliness. He saw a great interest in the arts and writing—and correctly envisioned Tokyo one day being like Paris in the 1880s, a center of the artistic world. He also professed to like
the humble subservience of their women. The sexism in some of his writing from this trip is appalling, coming from the man who helped inspire
The Second Sex
and so thoroughly eviscerated Hugh Hefner. Nelson decided that the “Oriental” woman was more graceful and possessed more poise than an American woman because she knows she is a woman. “The reason the American woman over-dresses, flops when she sits, strides when she walks, booms when she speaks and gets stoned on half a martini, is because she doesn't feel sure she is a woman.” He also alleged that American women claim to want virility, and then try to destroy it when they find it. He did acknowledge that as attractive as Asian women could be, Asian men were bored with them. His crude depictions of Asian accents also date these stories—a modern reader's enjoyment of his description of sumo wrestling is marred when a Japanese friend declares that betting is “irregal.”

In Saigon he found corruption, poverty, and sadness. Nelson did not really cover the war, but found another version of Algren Country—gambling on battling crickets instead of horses, and whores who had to turn over what they made to the cops and the “mama-sans.” He told Joel Wells, his editor at the
Critic
, that Saigon seemed like less of a war town than a boomtown, with only the very rich and the very poor. Here, he was rich, and though he criticized aspects of the trade in prostitutes in the Orient, he also was a customer. While staying at the Hotel Victoria, he found a thriving black market along the Tran Hung-Dao, Saigon's equivalent of Chicago's Milwaukee Avenue, which leads into the Chinese ghetto. As he had back in Marseille, he tried to make some cash off selling goods from the American army PX—cigarettes and toothpaste and tape recorders. But this time, instead of gambling with generals for high stakes, his black market efforts led to him getting beaten up in an argument over price. He would not try a similar adventure again. Ironically, it was after this Vietnam trip that the FBI's investigation
of Nelson finally came to an end. He was no longer seen as a threat to the nation—that would have disappointed him, had he known.

Back in Chicago in the spring, Nelson kept writing reviews and going to parties. He told Stephen Deutch he wanted nothing more than to have his own place by the lake, like Deutch had, but ideally in San Francisco, so he could look at the ocean. But he could not afford it, and still had not landed on a new, big project. Longing for society, Nelson would go to O'Rourke's north of the Loop, where he had an unrequited crush on the Japanese American bar owner, Jeanette Sullivan. It was a crummy kind of place, a favorite of journalists and eccentrics, with tables made of shellacked plywood, and no air-conditioning, but with portraits of the great Irish writers Yeats and Joyce hanging on the wall. Bagpipers would come in for free drinks, and sometimes a patron would feel inspired enough by an old song on the jukebox to climb up on a table and sing. Mike Royko would often be there, in a bedraggled trench coat, ready to drink after turning out his daily column, and Studs Terkel, and Roger Ebert, then a young, feisty, round-bodied film critic in horn-rimmed glasses. While Algren complained later that he was not appreciated in Chicago, everyone at places like O'Rourke's and the Old Town Ale House and the Billy Goat Tavern knew who he was and “gave him his props,” according to Bruce Elliott, who later became part owner of the Ale House and painted a picture of Algren that still hangs on the tavern wall. Even Royko, who deferred to nobody, would defer to Algren. When Royko, Terkel, and Algren would sit together at the bar, like a trio of old vaudevillians, it was obvious that Algren was the leader, the one they listened to the most, Elliott said. A story he liked to tell was of “Lost Ball” Stahouska, a crook more guilt ridden about trying to hide the ball at a softball game than about robbing a store, because
everybody
did that. It was the Chicago idea of corruption—it was OK if everyone did it.

Occasionally, Algren would get into some kind of argument with someone at the bar—once it devolved into people throwing cocktail limes and lemons at one another. On another occasion Algren got into a quarrel with hard-drinking columnist Tom Fitzpatrick that ended with Algren pinging a shot glass off Fitzpatrick's head. Ebert would arrive at O'Rourke's on Thursday nights with a group of young women from a film class. Algren would sit in Ebert's booth, and the girls would hang on his every word. In his early sixties, Nelson could still appeal to women, despite his gray hair and paunch.

One of the women he dated in the early 1970s was young Denise DeClue, an aspiring writer from the University of Missouri who had first met Nelson at a writers' conference in Boulder, Colorado. DeClue remembered being taken out to dinner by a group of older writers, including Algren, who had “adopted” her for the weekend. She decided to try cherries jubilee for dessert; this resulted in a round of teasing about her virginity by the old hacks at the table. She responded with spirit, by smacking Nelson in the face with whipped cream. “I was being a jerk, wasn't I?” Nelson admitted, and told her if she was ever in Chicago, she should look him up.

So when Denise finished college and came to Chicago in the summer of 1970, she called Nelson and told him she was in suburban Berwyn, with a boyfriend, and could they come visit? He told her she should come visit, but without the boyfriend. Denise and Nelson dated for about six months. She remembered how kind and fun he was, and how curious to hear everything she thought about the world. In the apartment on Evergreen, he played her Lenny Bruce and Billie Holiday records, and gave her books about the 1950s blacklist, which continued to trouble him. But he was never didactic, never professorial. “What do you think about this?” he would ask, genuinely interested in her opinion. She did not remember him working on much of his own writing at the time,
other than book reviews. He helped her sell a story about the illegal abortion issue to Christopher Chandler, who had started the new publication
Chicago Free Press
. Algren had been digging up material from the bottom of a dresser drawer to give to Chandler to publish. DeClue started dating Chandler, but that did not stop Algren from being friendly with them both. “I knew one day you'd be there, and the next day you wouldn't,” he told her simply when she told him it was over.

Another woman saw a different side to Nelson—a harsher, meaner one. Nelson's friend Marilew Kogan had a sister named Ginny, lovely but emotionally fragile, a “Blanche DuBois” type who liked to do paintings at the lakefront. Rick Kogan remembered going out to lunch with his aunt at the Wrigley Building, and Ginny asking, at an attention-getting volume, if Rick was nice to his girlfriend after they had sex. Embarrassed that his aunt was asking about his sex life, Kogan said yes, he thought so.