The Correspondence Artist (20 page)

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote
The Mandarins
, she really knew what she was talking about. Those were very thinly veiled portraits of herself, Sartre, Camus, Koestler, and their lovers and friends. And of Algren. The novel takes place almost entirely in the smoky Parisian cafés she used to hang out in, and a little in Algren's gritty Chicago digs which she also haunted. In a letter to Algren, Simone explained that the title referred to the traditional elite circle of Chinese intellectuals. She said that that was an allegory for her elite little circle of French intellectual friends. The novel didn't have anything to do with China.

Simone de Beauvoir did eventually travel through China, and she wrote a book about it, but she wrote Algren saying that that book “is not too good,” and that she hadn't really put a lot into it.

She wrote that letter in January, 1957. By that time, her correspondence with Algren was very sporadic. In fact, this was the only letter she wrote him that year. The editor of the correspondence notes that he also only wrote once in 1957 – in December, “still despondent and nostalgic for the old Wabansia magic, for their life and travels together.” Wabansia was the cruddy Chicago street he lived on when they were lovers. His building was eventually torn down.

 

 

 

 

 

The first time Djeli kissed me, it was on the terrace of his apartment in Montmartre. After that embarrassing incident with Mariam in Bamako, I went home, of course, and a few months later found myself with reason to be in Paris. He invited me to his house, and this time I had a feeling something like this might happen. I'd brought him a couple of things from New York – that inappropriate scarf I'd knit, the iPod holder, a book. He looked at the little collection of offerings on the coffee table and smiled at me. He didn't seem particularly put off by my disproportionate display of generosity. I think people give him gifts all the time. He said, “Let's go out on the terrace. I'll show you the view.”

We stepped out there, and there it was. Not the view, which was indeed very beautiful, but sort of predictably so – a picture postcard version of “the city of lights.” A little too clichéd to move you. The shocking, gorgeous, and obscene thing was the moon. It was full, white, enormous, and utterly exposed. We'd both seen it. We tried to make small talk but there was nothing to say. Djeli kissed my neck.

About ten minutes later we were fucking on his bed. I told him, “I was commenting to my friend Florence the other day that you were the most beautiful man in the world.” Djeli smiled.

I've been feeling guilty about implying Nelson Algren was a second-rate novelist. Over the last couple of days, I finally read
The Man with the Golden Arm
. I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I considered watching the Otto Preminger film instead. It's the story of a junkie gambler who inhabits the “underbelly” of Chicago. The movie stars Frank Sinatra. The paramour's recollection of this film is primarily focused on Kim Novak's breasts. I've never seen it. Well, I didn't watch the film but I did read the novel, and I can't decide whether I think it's very good or not very good. It's both. It's hard-boiled and lyrical, naïve and incisive, hackneyed and utterly original. But it turns out it did win a prize: the National Book Award. People seem to forget this. In fact, it was the very first National Book Award. Algren also received some sort of medal from the American Academy and Institute. He apparently refused to go to the ceremony in New York at which he would be given the medal, saying, facetiously, that he had to attend a meeting of a Ladies' Garden Club back home in Chicago. He was famously pissed off about the Preminger film because he hardly made a dime off it. He was also, as I mentioned, famously pissed off at Simone de Beauvoir. He said to somebody, “She doesn't baby her privacy, does she?” People who look back at the train wreck of the end of his career seem to concur that a) Algren got a raw deal and b) he ended up in a ditch he'd dug for himself. This is pretty much the story of Frankie Majcinek, the hero of
The Man with the Golden Arm
.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this message, of course, between the Coca-Cola incident and the first trip involving sex. Djeli was just beginning to formulate the way he wanted
Peau
to sound. He was exploring more and more the distorted, painful, expressive capacities of the electric guitar – ironically, as his lyrics were becoming ever more sparely lyrical and delicate. As I've said, I hadn't really thought a lot about electric guitar, since that wasn't my musical formation.

That field trip to the Mötley Crüe concert was fairly hilarious. I don't know who felt more out of place – me, or Sandro. It was in Madison Square Garden. Somebody had snagged a skybox for our party. I tried to chitchat with the ponytailed dads. A guy brought in giant cups of soda for us, and potato chips, on the house. You know how rock concerts are. We were very far from the stage, but they have those huge video projections on the
side. There were some women dancers with enormous, buoyant boobs making snarling faces at the audience. Tommy Lee rode onto the stage on a motorcycle and the crowd went wild. The biggest hit, which got the most enthusiastic reception, was their classic, “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

Perhaps you know the lyrics to that one. They start out extolling the virtues of leggy, red-lipped beauties from the West Coast and the Northeast; then they reminisce tenderly about a certain sexual escapade in Paris, France. They manage to rhyme “
ménage à trois
” with “breaking those Frenchies' laws.”

Their rendition of this little chestnut was accompanied by much snarling and gyration from the dancers. The dads drank their sodas and ate chips. So did the kids. So did I. I was wondering what we were doing there but thinking it was an educational experience for Sandro and me.

If you do any research on Nelson Algren, one of the first factoids that inevitably pops up is that Lou Reed was inspired to write “Walk on the Wild Side” after reading Nelson Algren's neglected novel of the same name. Mötley Crüe also recorded a song called “Wild Side,” but it's unclear to me whether it was influenced by Algren, or even by Lou Reed. It does have one interesting line, though, which seems to have something to do with the art of correspondence: “Forward my mail to me in hell.”

Anyway, as regards our own correspondence, you can see even in this early message that I was already feeling very lucky to be on the receiving end of Djeli's reflections on his creative process, and I wanted to share with him some of the thoughts I'd been having about life, art, and politics. I'm really not sure how much of an impression they made.

 

 

 

Of course,
Peau
has nothing to do with Mötley Crüe. It's an almost excruciatingly beautiful album. Djeli's voice is fragile,
exquisite, Ultra-Sensitive, erotic. Djeli, if you're reading this, please don't be angry.

If the nightingales could sing like you, they'd sing much sweeter than they do.

 

 

 

In August of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir went on a trip through Scandinavia with Sartre. He was very popular in Denmark because of his philosophical debt to Kierkegaard, and the Dutch and the Swedes also seemed to have hard-ons for his grim, realistic view of things. Simone wrote Algren about this trip, and she affected a kind of bemusement about the way everyone was fawning over Sartre. Mostly, she described the terrain – particularly when they got to Sweden. She wrote, “My beloved Nelson, I write to you from your ancestral land.” She described the grey sea, the rocky soil, and the uncanny, strange quality of the light. She said it looked like a lunar landscape.

She wrote Algren, “Would you like to be on the moon with me, darling, or would you be afraid?”

Algren took a while to write back. She complained, “I do not like not to have letters from you.” She ended that one: “Feel how much I love you, please feel it just now, because just now I love you so much.”

 

 

 

A little over a month ago, Djeli wrote me saying that he was writing a song with an explicit critique of the catastrophic US foreign policy of the last eight years, but that he didn't think it played into the facile anti-American rhetoric so prevalent in France. As you know, I'm more comfortable with that kind of rhetoric than Djeli is. Djeli said jokingly that even if I perceived this song as an attack on my nation, I could take it as sexually
motivated, since I had on any number of occasions observed that he liked to launch into political tirades when he seemed to be sexually aroused. That was friendly of him. But the message wasn't one of those where he directly provoked me for my simple-headed political correctness. I agreed with everything he said. In his e-mail, Djeli made the astute observation that in point of fact, he wasn't anti-American: it was the Bush administration which was undermining the very American ideals that Djeli still found compelling. I wrote him:

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, the critic George Bluestone made this surprisingly sentimental assertion: “If, as Algren makes abundantly clear, morality is not to be found in the law, the church, in criminal ethics, in social struggle, in any normative standards for success, then where is the moral authority? Only in love.”