Algren (37 page)

Nelson arrived in Paris in early March of 1960, but Simone was not there—she wouldn't return from a trip to Cuba with Sartre until March 20. She had ended her affair, though not her friendship, with Lanzmann and was now living in a studio apartment at 11 bis Rue Schoelcher that she had bought with her Prix Goncourt money. She had left her keys with Jacques Bost to give to Algren. In her absence Nelson had a chance to poke around, listening to jazz records on her stereo as he lay back on one of her yellow couches. The walls and shelves were decorated with the souvenirs from their trip to Guatemala and Mexico. She had surrounded her desk with photos of Sartre, her Parisian family, and Algren. It was clear he still mattered to her—he would always matter. A spiral staircase in the high-ceilinged main room led to a sleeping alcove, in which she had a dresser and a collage of news clippings and photos about Sartre, which likely inspired Algren's own collages that he liked to make later in life. As in Algren's Evergreen apartment, there were books and manuscripts piled up everywhere—including the French translations of Algren's work that she and Sartre had made possible. He was recognized here, in a way he did not feel recognized in the hostile United States. Out her window he could watch the sunset over the Montparnasse cemetery, which held the graves of writers who had inspired him as a young man—Charles Baudelaire and Max Nordau. It was a place to reminisce about his successes and brood on his injuries.

When Simone returned, she had to ring her own doorbell, and she found that nearsighted Nelson at first did not recognize her. He had switched from eyeglasses to contact lenses, but was finding them too uncomfortable to wear. He was broke, so she embarrassed him by buying him a new pair of eyeglasses in Paris.

Simone found Nelson angry from morning until night, blaming everyone but himself for his financial difficulties. Delighted to see him, she listened with patience to long stories of his travails with Preminger, his critics, and his former agent Madeleine Brennan, who he felt had mishandled the rights to his work. Simone still loved him dearly, but found she was getting exasperated at his interference with her busy routine, with his complaining, and with his habit of taking pictures of everyone he saw with his little box camera, including prostitutes who did not appreciate it. They enjoyed each other, too—probably making love, to judge from comments he made about the trip when he got back. He got up early to squeeze orange juice for them both, and at the restaurants, she picked up every tab. Setting up his typewriter on Lanzmann's old desk, Algren worked on his travel articles, or wrote comical letters and postcards to friends at home. Sometimes he hung out with American writers who were staying in the same building, including James Jones—Nelson did not like his novels, which included the popular
From Here to Eternity
, but admired his bosomy wife, Gloria, who had once been a movie stand-in for Marilyn Monroe. Nelson played the clown—when Studs Terkel was in the city for a visit, Studs, Nelson, and Simone went out together to an old and fancy restaurant. Nelson had a stickpin in his tie that had a battery-operated light in it. When patrons at the restaurant would gawk and point out the famous Beauvoir, Algren would light up his stickpin with a control in his pocket.

“Isn't he wonderful?” Simone asked Studs.

“Yeah, but he's a little crazy, you know,” Studs said.

Other members of the family tried to keep Nelson amused while Simone was off working on magazine articles, or accompanying Jean-Paul on his foreign missions. Nelson once got so raucously drunk that he had to be dragged home, his tongue still wagging at all the girls on the street. He did not see much of Jean-Paul on this trip—Simone kept them apart because she worried that Jean-Paul was too overwrought from work and uppers to spend time drinking with “tough Algren.” Nelson flirted with the still-golden Michelle Vian, and he kept holding her more tightly as they danced to “Night and Day” at a nightclub. While in a taxi, she recalled that he took her hand and put it between his legs. He was no longer the sweet, diffident lover of Simone from 1949, but a randy American in Paris, doing what he pleased. Meanwhile, he made fun of his fellow Americans for complaining that they were not getting their ham and eggs in under an hour.

While waiting in the station for a train to Marseille, Simone and Nelson spotted a slim woman holding an enormous teddy bear. It was Juliette Gréco—the soulful, unconventionally beautiful singer who had sat on his lap in 1949, when she was in her twenties. She had become an actress, and two years earlier had appeared in the Preminger film
Bonjour Tristesse
. Nelson found to his dismay that she had gotten a facelift—ruining her “biblical” beauty. Even the great Gréco had been bowdlerized by Hollywood.

Simone and Nelson traveled together, in Marseille, Spain, Greece, and Istanbul. Despite their difficulties, and the continued tension over her commitment to Jean-Paul, Nelson remained impressed with Simone—in 1949 she had been mocked in the streets because of her revolutionary writing about women. By 1960 she was respected and feared. “She had broken through the defenses of the bourgeoisie, of the church, the businessmen, the right-wing
defenders of Napoleonic glory, and the hired press,” Algren wrote of her. “She was, at once, the most hated and the most loved woman in France. It had become plain: she
meant
it.”

But then Beauvoir had to go away again, this time to Brazil with Sartre. To her dismay Nelson declared that he was having such a good time that he would stay in her apartment, making it his own by making changes to the kitchen and growing pots of flowers on the windowsill. When she returned in September, he had gone back to Chicago. She found no letters from him, but only a big pile of his own mail to forward, some photos from Istanbul, and a moldy candy bar. A year later, Bost revealed that he had also left her money for rent, which hurt Beauvoir's feelings. They would not see each other again.

Nelson did not see Richard Wright this time on his trip to Europe. But he did pay a brief visit to London for a fling with Ellen Wright, Dick's estranged wife. Dick and Nelson never had another chance to meet—Dick died that November, at the age of fifty-two. In a tribute in the
Nation
that January, Algren put aside his quarrel with Wright over his self-imposed exile to honor Wright's status as a prophet and celebrate the revolution he had created in American literature. Algren wrote that in
Native Son
, Wright had asserted that “when a crime is committed by a man who has been excluded from civilization, civilization is accomplice to the crime. In defense of Bigger Thomas he demanded of the prosecution: ‘Let's see your hands.'” Their hands were not clean.

After Nelson returned to Chicago, he found he had another family crisis—Goldie was having trouble taking care of herself and needed to be put in a home. She had stayed active in her seventies and early eighties—including a trip with Studs and Ida Terkel to see a performance of Sholem Aleichem stories. She had even gone to see the movie version of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, and been depressed for a month. But age had finally overcome her German
toughness. Nelson's sister Irene, who had suffered for years from rheumatoid arthritis, had died in El Paso in February of 1960 of pneumonia at the age of fifty-nine. Now Goldie's sole surviving child, Nelson put her in a private nursing home in the spring of 1961, since she did not want to be in the care of the county. At the end Nelson remembered that she was just “a little mess of shaking bones,” in constant suffering.

The morning before her death at the age of eighty-five that July, Nelson came to visit her. He lit a cigarette, and to his surprise she asked him for one. A square in all things, she had only smoked once or twice before. He asked her if she was sure.

“Well, I have to do
something
,” she told him. The nurses came in, to watch the old woman smoke, as her life wound down.

Though it was July, Nelson remembered that they heard steam from the radiator. “Voices are coming up from below,” she told him, in a rhythm like poetry. He felt that she had put her last strength into poetry. They had something in common at last.

Nelson owed the nursing home money when Goldie died, and they wanted $1,200 to release her body for burial. Dave Peltz suggested that Nelson just tell the home to keep her body, and he did. In response, they promptly released it.

That summer Nelson had embarked on another romance, this time with a young, blonde French Canadian journalist named Madeleine Gobeil. Intelligent and ambitious, Madeleine was an acquaintance of Simone's; Simone had suggested Nelson as the subject of an article, and Madeleine wrote in April asking if she could visit. They went swimming at the Indiana Dunes, visited the Art Institute, and saw Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
—which Nelson admired tremendously. Soon Madeleine was writing intimate, sexy, French-accented letters from Montreal reminiscent of Simone's in days gone by. He acted as a mentor for her early career as a journalist, and she gave him credit for helping to calm her youthful skittishness. He also was sending
her money, which would partly explain why he was not able to pay the nursing home.

Madeleine had read something by the African American writer James Baldwin, and wanted to meet him. Nelson had also admired James—he liked to echo his statement about African Americans, which Nelson felt also applied to the underclass in general: “In order to learn your name, you are going to have to learn mine.” So he and Madeleine arranged to meet James at a South Side motel. Baldwin was with about ten young acolytes, and the scene became hostile when one young man falsely suggested that Algren had hooked on to Wright only after Wright became famous. They all aggravated each other so much that Algren thought he was being baited, rose to it, and told Baldwin, “Listen,
boy
.”

Baldwin jumped up and said, “You
said
it! You
said ‘boy!'
”

“Yeah, I'm a white supremacist, but it took you six hours to get it out of me,” Nelson replied. The meeting ended on friendly terms, though Algren said later he thought that Baldwin was vindictive not only about being black, when he would rather be white, but about being homosexual when he would rather be straight. He got back at him in writing later, satirizing him as Giovanni Johnson, a character who skips around like a sandpiper and says “ta-ta and huggy-vous.” Nelson's views on gays were not ahead of his time—he thought a homosexual was “an inferior woman.”

Madeleine did not feel comfortable in Canada and went to Paris to interview the existentialists for
Playboy
and other magazines, and decided to stay. She got involved with a young diplomat, and her relationship with Nelson ended. Nelson was upset about it, according to Dave Peltz, though he had always felt free to carry on with other women when Madeleine was not around.

Nelson published several pieces about his travels in Europe and later East Asia in magazines such as
Harlequin
, the
Atlantic Monthly
,
Rogue
, the
Kenyon Review
, and
Contact
. Nostalgic for his childhood
after Goldie's death, he also wrote about his days in Park Manor, the lost
Chicora
, Gerson the fixer, and John the Greek. The pieces were gathered for a miscellaneous collection and published in 1963 as
Who Lost an American?
dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir
.
This was the first of three such collections—the second was
Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way
in 1965, followed by
The Last Carousel
in 1973.

The pieces that form these miscellanies represent a new kind of writing for Algren, going further into absurdism, with a mix of journalism, critical commentary, history, and impressionistic memoir. But his goals in this new, journalistic writing remained the same as they had been in his fiction: to confront readers with stories of the underclass, to call out hypocrisy and corruption, and to show how people will lie to themselves and cut themselves off from love. It was a different means to the same end—he viewed literature as being made “when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.” By this definition, he explains, the refusal of a city clerk in Terre Haute, Indiana, to issue arrest warrants for penniless prostitutes was an act of literature. So were the protests against the Rosenbergs.

Nelson's essays on foreign travel speak to the protests offered by writers of conscience, and about the hypocrisies woven through American foreign policy. In an essay called “Barcelona,” Nelson tells of meeting the novelist Camilo Cela, author of
The Hive
, and asking him what he would do if his worst political enemy was being pursued by the police. “I would hide him,” Cela responded. It was the wrong answer for “Rear-Echelon Liberals Against Fascism,” Nelson notes, but the right one for people who care about people. For Nelson the individual was always more important than the cause.

In the foreign essays, Nelson sometimes portrays himself as the caricature Nelson, an innocent abroad or an ugly American carrying out US foreign policy. In Istanbul, for example, he writes
of liberating a street cat caught under half a grapefruit, but it was a Commie cat and was not thankful for its freedom, or for the milk that Americans had invented and offered other countries in exchange for air bases. It did not understand the deal Nelson was offering. “If you don't love
us
more than
them
, you can't have
our
nice milk.”

Just as the foreign sections are for the most part not straight journalism, the memoirs are not offered as straight autobiography—Nelson instead portrays his young self as a character, an outsider in the world, belonging to no group and no god. He wrote that between the valentine fiasco with Mildred Ford and the tragedy of the hanged candy store owner, “I had realized that where God's colors raged behind a lifted cross was no business of mine.” His tale of a circus tightrope walker who lived next door, used in both
Notes from a Sea Diary
and
The Last Carousel
, seems at least partly fictional, since he places the walker on Moorman Street, a Wicker Park address and not one of the places where Nelson lived as a child. Whatever the facts, the story becomes a symbol of the struggle of the artist in America—after an accident, the walker is confined to a psychiatric ward, and then goes to work in a factory, eventually becoming the kind of pathetic barfly who does tricks for drinks.