Algren (38 page)

Who Lost an American?
also contains more critiques of modern Chicago, including parts that had already been published as the afterword to a 1961 reprint of
Chicago: City on the Make
. One of the most angry and prescient new sections is a takedown of Hugh Hefner's
Playboy
enterprise, which was considered one of new Chicago's business success stories. Algren saw through Hefner's pretenses that he was doing something daring and sexually liberated with his skin magazine. According to Algren, Hefner had recognized that “the American businessman's most erotic zone is the skin of his wallet.” The idea of being a playboy, with a fifty-dollar tin key, gave insecure American men an identity without the hard work
of knowing themselves, without having to come up with their own personalities. They consume, therefore they are.
Playboy
provided them the assurance that they were straight, without making them deal with actual human women. Instead they were offered fantasies of women, who were commodified like cars and cigarettes. “Hefner has sensed that the middle-class American he is pitching to is a frightened race more at ease with the appearance of passion than with passion itself,” Algren writes. He sees the bunny tail not as a way of making a girl cute but as a way to encourage contempt. It is a powerful feminist argument, which comes packaged in absurdity—Nelson likens his trip to the Playboy Mansion to Alice going to Wonderland, with strange creatures dancing the twist instead of running a Caucus Race. It includes an encounter with the ghost of “Terrible” Tommy O'Connor, the Chicago gangster who tells Nelson he escaped capture by being neither alive nor dead, but instead existing, like the
Playboy
man, forever in the third person. Algren revisits the
Playboy
idea in
Notes from a Sea Diary
in describing the bordellos of India, seeing in the contempt for women the same fear of not being a full man. In one of the pieces of straight journalism in the miscellanies, Nelson offers brief sketches of the lives of prostitutes housed in eighteen cages in India—and how they were brought to this life through rape or poverty or just bad luck. It is similar to the bordello sequences in his novels, offered without opinion and thus even more disturbing.

The parts of
Who Lost an American?
and
Notes from a Sea Diary
that are played mainly for laughs are the least effective. One that has not held up well is “Rapietta Greensponge, Girl Counselor, Comes to My Aid,” which imagines a New York party peopled with Nelson's many enemies. Rapietta appears to be Harriet Pilpel, the lawyer in his Otto Preminger suit; Ginny Ginstruck is Madeleine Brennan, mocked as a drunk who loses manuscripts; and Kenwood McCowardly, an editor with Doubledeal & Wunshot, is
Ken McCormick of Doubleday. James Baldwin is Giovanni, holding Nelson responsible for every white crime, including the race riots that hit Chicago when Nelson was a child. Norman Mailer is spoofed as Normal Manlifellow, insulting Hemingway as not tough enough. Nelson appears as a caricature of himself—the naive midwesterner, a character a little like Mike Royko's Slats Grobnik, but not as funny. The section is ephemeral, childish, and tainted with envy. Algren expert James Giles thought it unfortunate that Algren undercut his satire on the shallow New York publishing world with attacks on Baldwin and Mailer. “Beyond the comic persona of ‘Algren' lies the bitterness of Algren, an unjustly neglected writer clearly jealous of successful rivals,” Giles wrote.

Algren is more effective against the literary establishment in the parts of
Notes from a Sea Diary
where he takes on the critics in defense of Ernest Hemingway, who had killed himself in July of 1961. He saw critics knocking down Hemingway as the revenge of the mediocre on the great, and mocked Leslie Fiedler for comparing the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” to the whiteness of the white whale in Melville or to the white goddess who deals in death. But Hemingway was just talking about snow, Algren wrote. “All the rest of the stuff is simply the Professor earning a living.” In contrast to the comfortable critics with their university seats, Algren saw Hemingway as a man who risked himself, both personally and in his writing. The atheist Algren again calls on Christian ideas to expound his terms—Hemingway knew, as Dostoyevsky knew, that he who gains his life shall lose it, and he who loses it shall save it. Algren critic Brooke Horvath wrote that for Algren, to stand with Hemingway meant “to refuse alienated isolation and to welcome compassionate involvement with the world.” It was the same challenge he had once put to himself as a fiction writer, but like Herman Melville's dejected Wall Street clerk Bartleby, he now preferred not to do it.

The reviews for the travel books were mixed, from amused to downright hostile. In a review of
Who Lost an American?
headlined Intellectual as Ape Man,
Time
complained that the “wheedling, folksy tone of the huckster … comes from the mouth of a man who once had a real gold watch to sell and not a brass turnip.” The
Chicago Sun-Times
' Robert Lowry characterized the book as “surrealist and grotesque.” Arlo Karlen in the
New York Times
was especially harsh, claiming that what had begun as Algren's “small but unique gift became a habit, and finally a tic, a machine clanking out a self-intoxicating gabble of Algrenisms.” Karlen compared his attacks on his literary critics to the swagger of a “tough-sentimental literary lush” on a bar stool, vowing to take on any critic in the house, “his breath stronger than his brains.” Between Kazin and Karlen, Algren began to think the
Times
was out to get him. The
Chicago Tribune
's Lester Goran said
Sea Diary
reminded him of “Ripley's Believe It or Not.” “Freaks, finks and creeps abound, but there is no higher purpose than a sideshow.”

In between the travel books, Nelson was able to tell stories and give opinions in a different way through a series of in-depth interviews with writer H. E. F. Donohue. These became the book
Conversations with Nelson Algren
, published by Hill & Wang in 1964. With Donohue as an active, often skeptical questioner, Nelson spoke of his childhood, his army days and early novels, as well as his opinions on American foreign policy. He also stepped up his attacks on American literary criticism and on Simone de Beauvoir, arguing that to publicize their affair meant that it must never have meant much in the first place.

This was not, however, the final dagger in his friendship with Simone. That came when Nelson's own publisher, G. P. Putnam's Sons, came out with the English translation of Simone's autobiographical volume
Force of Circumstance
in 1965. An excerpt had been published in
Harper's
in December 1964. Nelson got the
proofs from Putnam editor Bill Targ that January, and wrote Simone a handful of what she called “bitter, cruel and terrible” letters. He then took his bile public with an essay called “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir,” ostensibly a review but really a personal attack. In
Force of Circumstance
, Simone did not hide Nelson under the veil of a fictional character but rather gave details of their affair, admitting how much she dictated its terms based on Sartre's needs, and quoted some of Nelson's letters to her, which Nelson had given her permission to do. In his response Algren criticized the “asphyxiating” dullness of her writing, but his special venom is reserved for her sexual views. “Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped,” he wrote. “Procurers are more honest than philosophers.” He never revealed in the review that Beauvoir was talking about their relationship—he did not have to. He ended the piece by imagining that Saigon might fall and the world might crumble, but Beauvoir would keep droning on about her sex life and Sartre and skiing.
“Will she ever stop talking?”

The letters between them stopped and the friendship was dead. They had both killed it—Nelson with his bitter words, and Simone by violating their privacy. Knowing his anger over the veiled version of their affair in
The Mandarins
, where he had appeared as Lewis Brogan, she had nevertheless chosen to take it even further, and then was surprised by his reaction.
The Mandarins
had at least made him look like a good lover—
Force of Circumstance
made him look like an emotional cuckold and a fool. Whoever was most to blame, the result was clear: that source of support for Nelson—the love, the encouragement, the introductions to new ideas and new parts of the world, the help with foreign translations that exposed him to new audiences—was gone forever.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

—E
UGENE
D
EBS

But I tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.

—L
UKE
4:24

In early 1965 Nelson decided to roll the dice on two big changes in his life. The first was another marriage. He had told H. E. F. Donohue he would consider marrying again if he met an attractive woman in her thirties—still young enough for kids and able to cook. In December of 1964, he started dating somebody who almost fit the bill—a forty-year-old widow named Betty Ann Jones, a petite, dark-haired off-Broadway actress. They went out a few times—their dates included a repeat of the visit he had made with Simone to the electric chair—before Nelson proposed. They married on February 27, 1965, less than three months after they had started seeing each other. Nelson claimed later that he had fallen for Betty's self-image as an actress, while she had fallen for his self-image as a writer. John Clellon Holmes described her as a “handsome,
savvy woman, with a sharp eye out.” But Stephen Deutch's eye was sharper, and he saw trouble ahead—he thought Nelson's and Betty's personalities were too different for them to stay together.

Nelson had eccentric ideas about marriage, said Suzanne McNear, who knew better than to accept a proposal. “His idea of marriage was that it would be convenient,” McNear said. “Maybe somebody would cook or clean the house or be available for a drink.”

Betty's first surprise was that he insisted on separate bedrooms. “He had no schedule,” Betty later told Nelson's friend Jan Herman, a journalist and critic. “He'd wake up in the middle of the night and go to the typewriter for three minutes, then go back to bed.” It is clear she did not know what she was getting into—she told Studs Terkel that living with Nelson was like being with a “wheel on fire.”

Nelson's second big gamble that year was to finally accept some of that “campus gold,” and go to the Iowa Writers' Workshop to teach. “How little bullshit can I get away with?” Algren asked Holmes. Holmes told him that for anyone who liked to talk about books and writing, it was a license to steal. “A simplification I came to regret,” Holmes wrote.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had gained an international reputation under former director Paul Engle, was about as far in character as one could be from Chicago—out among the cornfields in Iowa City. Betty, who had taught theater classes in New York City, also got a job in Iowa, teaching in the communications department. They arrived in the fall of 1965, and he settled into a job for which he was not at all suited. He did not believe writing could be taught and had a disdain for anyone who thought it could be—that is, his students and his employers. One of his students at the workshop was John Irving, who would write
The World According to Garp
. Irving was attracted by Algren's “rough charm” but realized that Algren did not care for the small town,
the prep school boy, or his writing. “The best tutor for a young writer, in Mr. Algren's clearly expressed view, was real life, by which I think he meant an urban life,” Irving remembered. Algren learned that some of his students were there to avoid going to Vietnam, while some hoped for teaching jobs. He saw no future Hemingways or Faulkners out there—the only two students he thought wrote good English were not native speakers. After he left Iowa, he would frequently attack the workshop as a con for the gullible—like the Famous Writers School that told all prospects they could be writers as long as they could pay for lessons. Nelson believed that in order to write, students had to live and form their own personalities. Serious creative writing was a solitary journey, not a group holiday. Nelson joked that he was in favor of writing workshops since they paid him more than he got paid for actual writing. “But the young people to whom I talk are not the ones who are going to do any serious writing themselves. If they were they wouldn't be listening to how someone else does it: they'd be doing it their own way, by themselves; without literary field trips through the dead past.” After one of Algren's many attacks on the writers' workshop was published in the
Chicago Tribune
, Engle wrote back to angrily defend the school he had helped establish, citing the awards won by its students. Pointedly, he referred to Nelson as a “former novelist.”

Writer Burns Ellison loved Algren so much he returned to the workshop when he heard Algren was teaching there. In a memoir about the workshop, Ellison remembered how Algren used to mimeograph piles of stories by Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, and James Leo Herlihy for class study, instead of the students' own. He would also bring stacks of magazines, newspapers, and book review sections, pile them on his desk, and allow students to help themselves. The classes often started late and ended early—Burns remembered that Nelson was uncomfortable presiding over a class discussing literature and the art of fiction. “The only times he seemed to feel
at ease were when he dispensed with talking about the Art of Fiction and told his stories, his anecdotes about hookers and pimps, junkies and barflies.” Once he read aloud from “How the Devil Came Down Division Street.” But classroom attendance soon fell off—with students either quitting the workshop or switching to another teacher. “They had enjoyed hearing his stories about Life's Losers, but only up to a point; after all they were Life's Winners,” Ellison wrote.