Algren (31 page)

Sometimes Nelson would disappear without telling Amanda where he was going, heading into the city on the South Shore train
to go to the muddy grounds of the Hawthorne racetrack, or to play poker in the Gold Coast mansion basement of politician Adlai Stevenson's ex-wife, Ellen. Algren's friends were continually dismayed over his blind faith in his own poker playing over the years—something that took both money out of his pockets and time away from his typewriter. Shay said that Algren's poker playing might have cost the world of literature as many as four great novels.

But it is not clear from Nelson's life if gambling was a crippling addiction, or just an expensive way to relax—the degree of the problem varied over time. Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and gambling addiction expert from the University of California, Los Angeles, who is familiar with Algren's life and work, said the writer definitely showed a pattern of gambling addiction. But it is impossible to say in hindsight if Nelson was an addict or just a gambler, which was part of his personality. A person can drink a lot without being an alcoholic, or gamble a lot without having a gambling addiction—it depends on one's relationship to the supposed vice. “If you live in a world of gambling and that's the people you surround yourself with and that's what you do, even if it takes up a lot of money and time and energy, it doesn't make you make an addict,” Fong said. On the other hand, if someone views gambling as a way of escape and a way to avoid responsibility and mask emotional pain, and he keeps gambling even if he does not enjoy it, that can be addiction. Fong said the larger question was whether gambling really damaged Algren's career. He may have been richer if he had stayed away from the track and the poker table, but it is hard to say if his productivity would have increased. Algren's literary hero, Dostoyevsky, definitely showed the signs of a gambling addiction—and lost nearly all his money at the gaming tables in 1863. It made his financial situation precarious, but does not seem to have harmed him creatively. He used his experience to write the novel
The Gambler
, dictating it in just a month to pay off debts. The short novel is now seen as a
pioneering study of the mind of a disordered gambler—and was followed by some of the writer's best work, including
The Brothers Karamazov
and
The Idiot
.

Whether Nelson's gambling hurt him as a writer is a chicken-and-egg question—it certainly hurt his financial comfort, which may have led him in later life to take shortcuts, including his increased recycling of old material. His friends remember that despite the money he got from reviews and advances and lectures, he was constantly broke, constantly avoiding the tab, though he picked it up for everybody when he did have money to spend. Peltz remembered going to a restaurant with him and leaving a fifty-cent tip on the table. Nelson claimed to have forgotten something, but he really went back to pick up the tip. However, Nelson's gambler's nature might have helped him to be the great writer he was in the first place. The way Nelson's brain was constructed, he seemed to relish taking big personal and creative risks, living on the ragged edge, and hanging out with a dramatic group of people—and that's part of the mysterious personal alchemy behind
Never Come Morning
,
The Neon Wilderness
, and
The Man with the Golden Arm
. The same part of Nelson that led him to hop a freight train or steal a typewriter made him play the horses, and that was who he was. “For people who really enjoy gambling, that psychology is combined with seeking new experiences, risking things, not wanting to be tied down to a typical conventional lifestyle, wanting to be your own man and having your own success,” said Fong.

Nelson's urge to take bets with long odds sometimes put him on top—using morphine addiction as a topic for a novel in 1949 was risky, and it worked. Ironically, decisions he made to stabilize his personal life during the 1950s also left him less able to take chances in his creative life, because they left him with such a thin cushion for living. If he had put a little of his
Golden Arm
movie money from Roberts into the bank, and kept living cheaply and alone on
Wabansia with a long-distance but artistically supportive relationship with Beauvoir, he could have kept playing the horses regularly and still had the time and money to write novels he wanted to write, with supplements from grants, lectures, and book reviews. But unlike Simone, content with a bohemian existence, Nelson wanted both art and some semblance of a normal home life. The balance is tricky for all creative artists in a country where the making of art has little government support—and Nelson found it impossible. One of his big gambles was on having a normal life, and he got into a situation with Amanda that he could not maintain, and suffered great losses. Poker was not the only way he risked himself.

Through 1953 and on and off for another decade, Nelson kept trying to write a novel called
Entrapment
, a love story that involves both drug addiction and horse racing. He typed hundreds of pages, filled with cross-outs and scribbled margin notes. At least part of the novel would be told from a first-person female perspective—which would have been a tremendous development, given that the central women characters in
Never Come Morning
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
were more interesting than the men. It was a point of view he had used successfully in short stories such as “Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone.”
Entrapment
's lead characters are Beth-Mary, also known as “Baby,” and her pimp, Christian, or “Daddy.” The names echo those in the short story “Design for Departure”—with Nelson again tying his hard-luck characters to Catholic icons. Beth-Mary's background is based partly on Margo's—a naive teenage girl who has come from the country with an older man who gets her addicted to drugs. Beth-Mary's nicknames—“baby” and “tiger”—are the same as those Nelson used for Amanda.

What's left of the never-finished novel is promising; Beth-Mary is sharper, more observant, and more sarcastic than Nelson's male narrators. In a section published in 1957 in
Playboy
as the short
story “All Through the Night,” she seems completely aware of the nature of her addiction, and while she knows that Daddy has turned her into a prostitute and separated her from their baby daughter, she does not see herself as his victim. She knows how they are dependent on each other, and indulges his weaknesses, such as his passing fancies to play tennis or clarinet. Daddy, for his part, likes to imagine he can take care of Beth-Mary—no woman of his is going to flip hamburgers for a living, but he will let her do work that is much more degrading. Beth-Mary sees things more clearly than Christian does. Nelson frequently commented that addicts were the most honest people he knew, and of all his major characters, Beth-Mary is the most frank and the least deluded. Unlike Frankie or Bruno, she does not have a mistaken faith in her own talents—and unlike Homer in “So Help Me” or Banty in “Stickman's Laughter,” she is not trying to talk anyone into anything. She has a witty, outsider's take on the world—when she sees an old religious calendar on a hotel wall, she figures it must be “BC,” a crack about the crumminess of the room. The story itself is a picaresque muddle of traveling between rooms in different parts of the country, fixes, memories, petty complaints about not being able to wear a mink stole bought on credit, and bits of heroin dreaming. “I woke up with a lawnmower that had one blade missing ricketing around the room, cutting corners and coming back,” Beth-Mary says to herself. “It took me a full minute to realize that the racket was all inside my head.”

Later republished as “Watch Out for Daddy,” the story is a sharp illustration of the addict's world—a place without normal divisions of time, but with a strong sense of belonging, created by addict friends and the fix itself. Nelson saw the drug addict as both the ultimate rebel against square 1950s society, as well as its sacrificial, Christlike victim, dying for society's many sins. He felt like he hadn't gotten it quite right in
The Man with the Golden Arm
—in which the drug angle had been an afterthought. After
it was published, an addict friend criticized the section in which Frankie talks for four pages after he takes a hit—nobody “on the nod” would have done that. “You know it ain't so, it ain't like that,” the friend had told him, and Nelson wanted to get it closer this time, as close as he could get without taking heroin himself.

Another section of
Entrapment
is told from Daddy's point of view, after Beth-Mary has left him to marry a safer man. The manuscript for this piece shows tortured writing and rewriting. What emerges is a mood poem, like the fever dream Steffi Rostenkowski has at Mama Tomek's in
Never Come Morning
, with Christian remembering the feel of Beth-Mary, her arms and her breasts and the fresh-washed smell of her body, while he watches the clock tolling away the empty hours. He thinks about drinking, and thinks about when Baby might see him again, though she's sent him a note saying she's getting married to a straight named Virgil. He relives in his mind the places of their relationship with tender particularity—“Love in October. Love in the night-blue hours. Love in the hub of the electrified forest. Love by the yellow moon, love wan by the ashes.” He imagines the different ways he could communicate with her again—a telegram, a phone call, or maybe he would have to come and pick up her things, or maybe Virgil will give her up in a couple of years. But Christian, who like Nelson is a veteran and in his midforties, doesn't move from the hotel room—he keeps looking at the clock and the Christ figure hung above it. His depression and defeat are total—and he seems imprisoned by the “iron rain” and the “iron traffic” outside his room. He imagines himself as Christ sacrificed and looks for nail holes in his palms, “but all he could see in the one was a little handful of light, and all he could see in the other was a small handful of dark.”

The writing is as beautiful and evocative as the best sections of
Never Come Morning
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
—it is another Edward Hopper painting, an impressionistic reflection of
alienation and the loss of love. Nelson's mind by the late 1950s was flooded with images of loss—he had lost Bernice and Simone and was losing Amanda in the home he had wanted for so long. Nelson rewrote Christian's scene over and over, and it is exquisite, but it goes nowhere. This time Nelson could not resolve his old problem with plot. He put his early sketches away in a drawer, to work instead on the long-delayed rewrite of
Somebody in Boots
. He had taken an advance on it from Doubleday, and it was time to deliver. “Under this arrangement you get diverted from a book you really would like to write,” he said ruefully about
Entrapment
in a July 1963 interview. “One gets diverted, hung up, estranged from something that is really important or significant to you.”

In redeveloping
Somebody in Boots
, Nelson at least would be able to skip the work of cutting all new timber, which is how he described his work on
Golden Arm
. He decided to turn the episodic story of the horrors of the Depression and its effects on one sensitive but ignorant boy into a naughty Horatio Alger story, in which the hero uses his sexual prowess to rise in the world. Comedy is tragedy plus time, and the twenty years that had come between Nelson's month in the Brewster County Jail and his new, larger prison of Cold War America opened up the story for comic possibilities. “I renamed him Dove Linkhorn and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Nelson wrote. “He stirred for a moment, then sat up grinning.” But the rewrite was a burden to him, adding to the stress of his failing marriage, and he ended up writing a lot of it away from the little house in Gary, instead writing in Missouri, New York, and Florida, and crashing for six weeks at the Conroys' on the South Side, in an upstairs room. He even revisited New Orleans and the Rio Grande Valley, to again spark memories of his tramping days and, as he joked to McCormick, to see if he could get back that 51 percent interest in the Sinclair gas station. He wished he could escape with his typewriter to France.

One of Nelson's escapes from Gary took him back to Hollywood, with the offer to write another screenplay for
The Man with the Golden Arm
for $1,000 a week. An off-Broadway theatrical version of the novel was being planned, which Nelson wanted, but he knew a movie could bring in more money and attention. Roberts had escaped the blacklist for England and Garfield was dead, but Algren had hopes that Otto Preminger would treat the novel he had purchased with respect. Preminger already had a reputation as a maverick—the 1954 film
Carmen Jones
with Dorothy Dandridge re-created Bizet's
Carmen
with African Americans. It was considered both racially and sexually groundbreaking, and got tremendous reviews. In 1953 Preminger had challenged decency standards with
The Moon Is Blue
, believing the movie production code out of date. He did not get the Motion Picture Association's seal of approval, but he got it into theaters anyway and made $3.5 million. He wanted
Golden Arm
to take on the production code in an even bigger battle, and he wanted a good writer on the project. He had fired the first screenwriter on the project, Lewis Meltzer, so called on Algren.

Otto and Nelson could not have been more different in personality—Otto was a proud, headstrong Viennese Jewish aristocrat who had gotten out of Austria before the Anschluss. Bald and powerfully built with blue-gray, heavy-lidded eyes and a commanding presence, Preminger had grown up indulged by his parents and was used to getting everything he wanted. He was known on the set both for his Old World courtliness and his violent tantrums, which made the veins on his neck stick out. But he did have an eye for good material, and liked pushing societal taboos. He found tragedy in the idea of someone being hooked on something, whether heroin or love. But judging from the final product, Preminger did not care much about the novel's other themes of guilt and society's oppression of the poor. “I have no obligation, nor do I try, to be ‘faithful' to the book,” Preminger wrote in his autobiography.