Algren (42 page)

“I'll call the fire marshall,” she shrieked.

When he explained that he was a writer, she responded, “Oh, I know who you are. I want you out anyway.”

Desperate for help—Nelson walked to a phone booth on the Montauk Highway and called Matt Panczyk, his friendly landlord in Hackensack, who in turn called his old college roommate, the playwright Joe Pintauro, who lived in nearby Sag Harbor. Nelson had been afraid to call Joe himself—they had spent an awkward weekend together in 1974, with misunderstandings over who would pick up the tab for their meals, and Nelson was afraid Joe still held a grudge. Joe said that of course he would talk to Nelson, and then swooped in like a rescuing angel. He gave Nelson the name of a storage place that could take his stuff, and he let him stay at his own white house while his real estate friends found Nelson a cheap rental in Sag Harbor. Joe even found him some clean shirts at a thrift shop while Nelson waited for his own luggage to arrive. While Joe fussed and hustled for the aging, anxious, ashen-faced novelist, Nelson read Joe's novel and praised it enthusiastically. They had dinner with Joe's friend Greg Therriault, and over drinks by the fireplace, the old man started to relax. “He seemed so grateful,” Greg remembered. The color had returned to his face.

Sag Harbor is now a wealthy tourist's mecca, with restaurants along the bay serving expensive fresh seafood and fine wine. But in the 1960s and 1970s, it was still bohemian, full of artists and little shops and cheap rentals. It had been a whaling port, and is mentioned in Melville's
Moby Dick
. The Oakland Cemetery is full of white stones dedicated to the memory of men lost hunting whales. The town's winding streets contain a mix of modest, wood-sided saltbox houses and Georgian revival mansions, with white-picket fences around yards ornamented with rosebushes and old oaks that had survived hurricanes. The residents included artists and writers and musicians. John Steinbeck had lived there for years, and his
widow, Elaine Steinbeck, was still around. Kurt Vonnegut and his wife Jill Krementz lived in nearby Sagaponack. Gloria Jones, the widow of writer James Jones, lived in the area, as did the Chicago playwright Lanford Wilson, Irwin Shaw, E. L. Doctorow, and Peter Matthiessen and his wife Maria. The feminist writer Betty Friedan lived in town and became Nelson's friend and chauffeur, taking him around in her $100 wreck of a car, her gray, bobbed head just able to peer over her steering wheel. He fell out once—but she was driving so slowly that he was able to climb back in, and she didn't notice.

Joe's friends first found Nelson a studio on Concord Street, and then a brown-shingled saltbox on Glover, painted white on the inside, with a fireplace, a backyard big enough for drinks with guests, and rosebushes along the side. Nelson completely covered the walls with his collages of Simone's letters and book jackets, pictures of himself in his army uniform, old yellow news clippings, and posters and framed pictures of drawings by Herman's little girl, Olivia. He put up his books on the shelves, and hung his Christmas lights all around. Friends remembered it was often messy with coffee cups, cracker crumbs, and newspapers, but it could look grand for a party, like a jewel cave from the Arabian Nights.

The house was just around the corner from the main street, where there was a deli and a new bookstore, operated at first just on weekends by a young Italian American schoolteacher named Canio Pavone. Canio remembered when Nelson first showed up at his little store, which he painted blue and white inside and out to match the sea, but was at that point still sparsely supplied. “You call this a bookstore?” Nelson teased him. Where were the Algren books? He told Canio he had a better supply in his house. The next day, he came in with a load of books, to supplement Canio's stock, and then started coming in every Saturday morning, to talk to other writers, always sitting in one favorite armchair covered with green tweed, happily lecturing to people who appreciated him. “He was like a
big teddy bear,” Canio said. “He'd roar, but he was a softie at heart.” Nelson never bought books—since he never had any money—but Canio would let him borrow something if he wanted it.

After seventy-one years of wandering, Nelson was home. He loved Sag Harbor—he loved his neighbors and his house. He would bicycle around town, a little awkward with his big tummy poking out through his shirt buttons. On warm days he would go swimming in his blue trunks in Noyac Bay, developing a healthy, Long Island retiree's tan. Sometimes he would take the train into New York, to meet friends or go to the Aqueduct racetrack, or visit prostitutes in Times Square. One time his Chicago pal Bruce Elliott was in town, and he embarrassed Nelson by running into him just as Nelson was coming out of a nudie show.

Nelson felt appreciated by the other writers in Sag Harbor, and early in the winter of 1981, he felt appreciated again by the world of literature at large. He learned that he had been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and would be inducted on May 20. Kurt Vonnegut had put Nelson up for a medal of merit from the academy in the 1970s, but Nelson had not shown up for the ceremony, saying he had to read at a garden party instead. Nelson had not cared about the gold medal—it was not as good as election. And now election had come at last. “This is the turnaround,” he crowed to Pintauro. “Publishers notice.” He gave Joe a copy of
The Last Carousel
inscribed with the words “For Joe, the man who put an end to my losing streak.” Reporters from major newspapers started asking for interviews. He finally had two of the three things he had always wanted—a home he loved by the
real
sea, not a secondhand sea, and respect from his peers. He did not have the love of a good woman—an attempt to French-kiss Gloria Jones was met by a gentle reproof—but two out of three were not bad. Jones did agree to act as his date to the induction ceremony—they found each other extremely funny.

On Saturday, May 2, 1981, Nelson arranged to do a reading at Canio's. He suggested taking two dollars a person for the reading. It seemed a little strange to Canio to ask for a cover charge, but he agreed, and they were able to get a big crowd. Nelson brought over pillows and cushions from his house to help seat the crowd. There was wine and cheese, and Nelson gave a raucous, unscripted performance of the Nijinsky-and-the-fish-slapping-dance story. It was a great success—the little shop was jammed to the walls with people—and at the end, Canio turned over an envelope with $200 to Nelson. Canio, his wife, and a few others were still left, cleaning up the napkins and wineglasses. “Let's all go to Capuccino's,” Nelson said, referring to a nice Italian restaurant down the street. There he spent the money on his friends. The next morning, Nelson went back to the shop to collect his pillows and couch cushions—Canio had spent the night sleeping in the back. “He saw all the pillows on the floor and started rolling around, almost drunk with excitement,” Canio remembered. “He was very pleased with all that attention, because he had for a while been so, you know.” Canio held out his hands wide, expressing the years of neglect of Nelson's work. “He said don't forget next week—I'll see you next week.” Nelson was planning an elegant lawn party at his house—like the parties he had on Evergreen in Chicago but with his Sag Harbor friends—to celebrate his election to the academy. The invitations had been sent—Jan Herman was coming all the way from Chicago.

That next Friday Nelson woke up with a heavy feeling in his chest and called a doctor, who recommended that Nelson be checked out at the local hospital. But there was no time to see a doctor—he had a party to give the next day, and an interview scheduled with the British journalist W. J. Weatherby for the
Times
of London. Nelson posed for a picture by the bay—tanned, happy, and big bellied. With his thin, unruly white hair, he looked like an old sea captain. He spoke with wild enthusiasm to Weatherby about the changing
prostitution business in Times Square, the hostility of the Sicilians in Paterson, and Simone de Beauvoir. He was still angry about
Force of Circumstance
. “I've been in whorehouses all over the world and the women there always close the door…. But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press … God, it was terrible.” He indicated the tin box of letters—maybe he should sell them. “Let's make it all public!” Algren became so agitated that Weatherby began to worry about his health—Algren had told him about the heaviness in his chest. Weatherby decided it was time to go, and Algren invited him to the party the next day, set for 2:00 pm. “I've already bought the liquor,” he said—it may have been the last thing he said to anyone.

Early the next morning, Nelson went into his bathroom and suffered a massive heart attack. When he fell he smashed the dial of his watch—setting the time of death at 6:05 am. It was Roy Finer, the big, tough, curly-haired homicide detective, who found him first. Not able to get in touch with Algren and knowing about the 1979 heart attack, Finer had cut open the screen door and found him lying on the bathroom floor. Herman came to the house and found Finer slumped and wretched on the couch. Kurt Vonnegut learned the news by phone—he had called to see if he and Jill could bring their weekend guest, Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who had been happy with Algren's intelligent review of
Midnight's Children
. The police were there to turn the other guests away. It was like a final Algren joke, Pintauro thought, to die just before people got dressed up and came to his house for a party.

The next day Joe found out that Nelson's body had mistakenly been shipped fifty miles west. Joe realized that no one was taking charge—so he would do it. With Studs Terkel helping out by phone, they were able to arrange for Nelson's niece, Ruth Sherman, to release the body and send it back to Sag Harbor. Joe arranged for a funeral and burial at the old Oakland whaling cemetery—Gloria
Jones recommended a spot under the trees. Walking around with the undertaker on a rainy Mother's Day, Joe found a spot among the oak trees where a red azalea was in bloom. It seemed to Joe like a good omen because red and yellow were Nelson's favorite colors, like blood and the sun. The gravesite is, in the words of poet Andrew Marvell, “a fine and private place.” Carol Phillips, the Clinique founder, who lived in town, offered to pay for everything. But Candida Donadio knew Nelson better—he would want to pick up this tab himself, and he needed a plain pine box. Most of the expenses were covered by the US Army.

Everything was in bloom. Steve Deutch and his daughter came from Chicago, and joined friends from town at the cemetery, all carrying flowering branches to place in and around the grave. “People picked branches from their trees—apple blossoms, pear blossoms, cherry blossoms—it looked like the most fabulous funeral ever,” Joe remembered. Candida read aloud from his poem “Tricks out of Times Long Gone,” which begins:

Again that hour when taxis start deadheading home

Before the trolley buses start to run

A golden-haired woman stood with the other mourners as beautiful as a visiting angel, dressed completely in black except for metallic, golden sandals. When Joe asked who she was, she said simply, “My name is Regina. I'm just a fan.”

In Paris Simone's sister, Hélène, called her with the news, but Simone said she felt nothing. “Why should I?” she asked. “What did he feel for me, that he could have written those horrible things?” Pintauro said she had occasion to be in Long Island a few years later, and did not want to visit his grave.

Yet she was buried wearing his ring.

-

Nelson's gravestone is carved with a line by Willa Cather, suggested by Candida, The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All. The ground in front of it is mossy, soft as a bed, and somebody has stuck pencils into it. Along the top, visitors have laid stones.

When Algren died his work was out of print. Back in Chicago an attempt to name a stretch of Evergreen Street “Algren Street” was put down by neighbors, who were afraid it would confuse the postman. But since 1981 attitudes about Algren have started to shift. In 1984 Dan Simon, who later founded New York's Seven Stories Press, shocked that Algren was so long out of print despite his high reputation, started pursuing the rights to Algren's works and reprinting them in paperback. Simon does not think Algren has been understood in his own country. “American society is a winner's society and Algren loved the losers,” Simon said. “We'd rather not know the things he had to tell us.”

The rediscovery of Algren has continued. In 1981
Chicago
magazine started the Nelson Algren Awards for short stories, an annual prize administered by the
Tribune
since 1986 that helped recognize early work by Louise Erdrich and Julia Glass. Giles's
Confronting the Horror
, analyzing Algren's fiction in the traditions of naturalism and existentialism, was published in 1989. Bettina Drew wrote her well-received biography
Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side
the same year, a book that helped create a resurgence of interest in Algren's work, according to Algren expert Bill Savage.

In 1998 Chicago erected a Victorian-style, wrought-iron fountain in Algren's memory in the “Polish Triangle” park formed by Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee. The dedication on its base reads: “For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.” Representatives of the Polish Roman Catholic Union attended
the dedication ceremony. At the center of an increasingly wealthy neighborhood, attractive to young people and professionals, the fountain is sometimes the focus of protesters—in 2015 a group of young people upset at police killings of unarmed black men gathered there to chant, “Black lives matter.”

Kent State University professor Brooke Horvath published a reader-friendly analysis of Algren's fiction called
Understanding Nelson Algren
in 2005. A collection of critical essays about Algren was edited by Robert Ward in 2007. And in 2014 not one but two documentaries about Algren premiered in Chicago—
Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All
and
Algren: The Movie
, the latter featuring many photos by Art Shay. Since 1989 Chicago's Nelson Algren Committee has held an annual birthday party, with readings and speeches, and a Miller, Indiana, society started in 2015 to host events dedicated to keeping his memory alive.