Algren (20 page)

Friends of Nelson always talked about how funny he was—a perpetual joker, constantly weaving threads of absurdity into conversation. He was “one of the few writers I knew who was really funny in conversations,” recalled Kurt Vonnegut. When he introduced Nelson to Chilean novelist José Donoso, Nelson had said, “I think it would be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.” When Nelson injured his finger playing softball, he started a running joke with Amanda about it, comparing the finger to different kinds of food—a nice, pink avocado, or a pork chop that looked
good enough to nibble. Friends of Simone, on the other hand, recalled her lack of a sense of humor. She was puzzled by jokes. When Nelson sent her comic books, she used them for insight into gender roles. But whatever her friends saw, she played a different role with Nelson, and they teased each other through the mail. Her letters to him show a lightheartedness and sense of mischief never seen in her other work, which Nelson complained was like eating cardboard. On her direction he gave up wearing suspenders and switched to belts, though he refused to learn French. He sent her a list of “Seven Good Frog Commandments,” sternly insisting that she have no other crocodiles before him. She answered that she was his faithful frog, who loved her crocodile very much.

One late night, when Simone and he came back to the flat from being out drinking wine, they found a large, heavyset woman in a blue-and-white dress waiting to see him. She was an acquaintance of Nelson's from his WPA days who had written him a letter from the state mental hospital on West Irving Park Road—the same place where Nelson later confines Sophie in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. He had written her back and unwisely provided his return address. So when she escaped from the asylum, she turned up at his flat. They let her in, and she drank scotch, and then a little more scotch, and then a little more scotch, while she told Nelson and Simone how well everyone thought of Nelson. The lady downstairs thought well of him. The people in the street thought well of him. Suddenly she yelled, “You son-of-a-bitch! You're responsible for
this
!” and showed him the black-and-blue marks on her arms, where apparently she had been restrained in the asylum. She jumped to her feet and demanded razor blades. Nelson had some on a shelf, and he quickly threw them away to keep them out of her hands. So she ran into the small toilet, and found a blade there. She then began to shave her arms and legs, saying, “You know, this will make all the difference in the world.” She pointed at Simone and
demanded that Nelson send her home. “I've waited a long time for this night,” said the woman, razor blade in hand.

Many people would have found this kind of late-night encounter with the mentally ill unsettling, but not Simone. Nelson recalled that instead of running into the street and calling the police, Simone was “dying”—she was “laughing her head off.” This was not the stern, humorless worker her friends in Paris knew. Nelson knew someone else.

The idea of their impending separation seemed ridiculous to him. If she loved him so much, why couldn't she be a writer in Chicago, as his wife, cooking his pot roast and washing his socks? Before she left later in September, he asked her again to stay with him for good, and she had to say that it was impossible. She again explained her relationship with Sartre. But Algren had always had a keen nose for baloney—and the “contingent love” idea had a powerful reek. Was
he
contingent? Contingent on what? The idea astonished him. He wrote later that being able to love only contingently meant being able to live only contingently. If she did not play a direct role in Sartre's work and she was not sleeping with him, why did she need to be with him all the time? For now Nelson was willing to be a monk for her, and wait. She took a cab to the airport, and it came too early. When she arrived, she sat and closed her eyes. A man came to her with a box and said, “Miss de Beauvoir, you must have some friends here, this is for you.” It was a bouquet of white flowers, from Nelson. She called him, and when she heard his voice, “so near, so far,” she cried and cried.

Through the mail, they began planning a big trip for the following summer—a “honeymoon” trip down the Mississippi, to New Orleans, and then to Mexico. They would be together from May through September. He had proposed that they celebrate May 10—the day he put that silver ring on her finger.

That trip was to be one of the happiest of both their lives. It was also the beginning of things falling apart. Beauvoir was keeping
something big from him—she was planning to cut their New Orleans trip short by two months to return to Paris to help Sartre on a screenplay. The fearless Simone was afraid to tell him in a letter—she planned to explain in person. In coming up with their peculiar arrangement, there was one question Sartre and she had avoided—how would a third person feel about it? The defect in the system was about to manifest itself with “particular acuity,” as Simone wrote later.

But Nelson did not yet know of Simone's plan—so they spent that time of waiting between September 1947 and May 1948 writing letters, exchanging gifts of books and liquor and candy, living in love and illusion. “Wait for me,” she wrote, with the red Parker fountain pen he'd given her. Nelson spent his solitary hours revising and revising
Golden Arm
—forty times in some sections. It came in “lumps,” he told his friend Joseph Haas later, with each lump needing to be smoothed and grained down. Then when a passage looked and sounded just as he liked, he often had to toss it aside because it did not fit. But while the work was hard, he was not unhappy. “I had more kicks, aside from writing in that time, than ever before,” he told Haas. It was “a lucky book, and a lucky time now past, and I was lucky to write it.”

Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot

Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?

—N
ELSON
A
LGREN,
“T
HE
M
AN WITH THE
G
OLDEN
A
RM
” (
POEM
)

This is a man writing and you should not read it

if you cannot take a punch.

—E
RNEST
H
EMINGWAY

In the early summer of 1947, Nelson had about two hundred pages of his third novel stacked on his desk beside his black Royal typewriter, along with cascading piles of notes and corrections, mixed up with letters and shopping lists. But he was running into his familiar plot troubles. Ken McCormick at Doubleday thought it was shaping up, and Nelson was beginning to feel better about it himself, but admitted, “I still don't see it clearly all the way.” He told Ken he knew damned well that it wouldn't be in publishable shape by the following spring. Nelson sent the manuscript to his agent, Madeleine Brennan, who thought the story of the professional card dealer and war veteran needed a peg—something to hang it all on. Nelson had considered a drug angle—the use
of morphine to ease pain during World War II was something he would have witnessed as a litter bearer in the army. Though the drug had been used as far back as the Civil War, by World War II, innovations in needle design allowed medics to administer it right on the field. The morphine problem among returning veterans was also in the news. In January of 1947, newspapers around the country had run stories about the Jewish Chicago boxer Barney Ross, who had gotten addicted after suffering malaria and a shrapnel wound in the war. He had kicked morphine in four months after checking himself into a public health facility in Lexington, Kentucky, and called the narcotic “the toughest foe of his career.” But while morphine seemed promising and innovative as a hook for the novel, Nelson was not sure he knew the issue closely enough to write about it. He needed details and close encounters, or he could not write about anything.

One night he got his chance—a Polish friend named Jack asked him to go out for a beer on Madison Street. By the time they emerged from the tavern at two in the morning, it was raining, and Jack invited Nelson to take shelter at his nearby home. Nelson followed him across the wide, glistening street, over the broken sidewalk, into a warren-like building. Going upstairs, Nelson found Jack standing behind a curtain in a filthy flat, swinging his arm up and down. “Jack is having trouble,” somebody said. Misty with beer, Nelson wondered what he was seeing, and was disturbed by Jack's swinging arm. What did it mean? A few more shadowy people showed up, and took turns carrying cigar boxes into the bathroom. Someone explained to Nelson that they were just having breakfast—would he like some?

“No, I guess I had breakfast,” Nelson said.

“You want to see how it's done?” a man asked him.

“Hell, no, I don't want to see how it's done,” Nelson retorted. Despite his taste for the darker realities and his experience as a
medic, he did not like needles. If someone went into a bathroom with a cigar box full of something under his arm, Nelson did not care to see whatever he did in there. After this rainy morning, he paid other visits to the place on Madison to listen to jazz records and learn more about the habits of people who were on narcotics. This included a lack of normal groceries and cravings for chocolate sweet rolls and lollipops. They slept lightly and at odd hours—between seven and eleven in the morning, when working people were away and the streets quiet. Then they'd wake up sneezing in their “evening country,” eyes watering, anxious for another fix. Jack was a naturally strong person, and Nelson believed him when he said he would kick the habit if he felt it was getting the best of him. But one night his wife called Nelson and said that Jack was sick and could not see a regular doctor. He needed his own doctor, meaning his dealer. Two of Jack's junkie friends came by Nelson's flat at Wabansia and Bosworth in a cab, and together the three of them drove north to make a deal for nine dollars, and brought back Jack's medicine to West Madison. Jack was weeping and pouring sweat. “Well, you know, it happens to everybody,” Jack explained, and Nelson felt contempt for his weakness. Nelson had more sympathy for another of Jack's friends, a man with a pushed-in face who unlike Jack did not want to be on dope. “He wasn't Frankie Machine, but when I think of him I think of this guy,” Nelson explained. There was a cabbie who played drums at night and drove around the city during the day looking for fixes. Nelson did not want to visit the Madison Street warren too often because it took time away from his writing. But he would let the junkies come up to his own place and do what they needed to do. He claimed he never tried it himself; to write, he needed both proximity and a safe distance—a sometimes uneasy balance.

Nelson also knew about the effects of withdrawal through his friend Margo, a smart, bookish, vulnerable young woman from the
country who had become a Madison Street prostitute. A fan of the Stoics in his college days, Nelson thought anything could be broken by simple willpower, and he wanted to help Margo break her habit. He convinced her to go off drugs, and he put her to bed in his Wabansia apartment, heroically planning to see her through the worst of withdrawal. “I don't want you to see what I look like when I'm kicking,” she protested. By midnight she was so sick she was blind, and Nelson, fearing she would go mad or die, put on his army jacket and went out into the rain to look for her connection, asking random hookers for help for Margo, only to see them flee into the night. He went to a White Tower hamburger stand at Madison and Aberdeen, where the staff dressed like nurses to emphasize how clean everything was—an eerie, bright oasis in the gray, early-morning gloom. There, drinking coffee, he found “a little lame man, wearing double-lensed glasses and a cap shadowing his eyes…. He looked so wrong he had to be
somebody
,” Nelson remembered.

“I'm a friend of Margo's and she needs help,” Nelson whispered.

“She ought to know better than to send a square down here,” Max retorted, but returned with Nelson to Wabansia, where Margo was lying facedown on the floor in a pool of sweat. Nelson remembered how she started to smile as soon as Max touched her, before the needle even went in. Nelson saw Max as a blessed friend instead of a villain—a contrast to the role he assigned to Nifty Louie in the novel. Nelson saw in the addict's revolt against society “a special grace. When he shoves a needle into his vein it is, in a sense, to spare others…. Things are going wrong in the world, so, in a sort of suicidal truculence, he impales himself.”

With this collection of material, Nelson thought that maybe he could try the dope angle, but he worried that it might be too sensational. Brennan told him to go ahead and use it, so the card dealer picked up a habit, and the novel began to find its shape.
Nelson decided to have just the dealer, Frankie, on dope, and not his wife—two in the family would be too much. Sophie became another kind of psychological cripple.

Another influence on the novel was the changes coming to the city in the late 1940s; after more than a century of expansion, Chicago was showing the first whispering hints of a coming decline. Except for during the Depression, manufacturing jobs had expanded in the city from 1900 through the late 1940s. But then they started to shift from the city to the suburbs, and the Chicago economy began a move toward the service sector. Returning GIs had begun moving to the suburbs to raise their new, growing families, attracted by big yards and privacy and aided by low-interest veterans' loans. During the war, federal officials had urged Chicago to start plans for a modern highway system, which in the next decade would push through Chicago neighborhoods like pythons, eventually swallowing up Nelson's Wabansia nest. Suburban areas had begun to receive investment at the expense of poorer, innercity areas, while the slow melting of restrictive housing covenants helped allow African Americans move to areas that had previously been out of their reach. The need for housing among African Americans was great—the lure of wartime manufacturing jobs had helped expand the black population in the city from 8 to 14 percent during the 1940s. But the movement of blacks into formerly white communities often resulted in white hostility and rioting. Down in Nelson's old neighborhood by St. Columbanus in the summer of 1946, about two thousand people gathered around the house of a black doctor and his wife, some throwing rocks and firecrackers. The couple moved three days later. In
The Man with the Golden Arm
, both Frank and Sophie complain about blacks moving into the neighborhood, though in 1950 the city was still the most segregated in the nation. All these factors helped drive people out of the city, a trend that would accelerate in the years to come. In 1950
the Chicago Plan Commission declared Nelson's neighborhood and the whole inner ring of residential areas along the north and south branches of the Chicago River blighted or near blighted.