Algren (7 page)

The
Anvil
was edited by Conroy, the Moberly, Missouri–based godfather of the new worker-writer literary movement of the Midwest, which sought to express the problems of the times in the voices of the people themselves, rather than those of sophisticated outsiders. Algren began corresponding with Conroy, a big, curly-haired, blue-eyed, hard-drinking son of Irish immigrants. Ten years Algren's senior, Conroy was both a writer and an actual laborer—he took backbreaking jobs in sawmills and factories to support his family, and wrote at night while exhausted. He had lost his half brothers and father to Missouri coal mine accidents and had taught himself about literature. The
Anvil
was one of the most influential of the small, left-wing literary magazines that proliferated in the 1930s, and Conroy always found time to cheer on beginners like Algren, who came to see him as both a friend and a surrogate father. Algren would later accuse Conroy of ruining people's lives by encouraging them to become writers.

Without a wife and children, Algren was not interested in copying Conroy's method of writing after wearing himself out all day in manual labor. After his months of canning peas and picking fruit down south, Nelson did not feel he needed to prove his proletarian bona fides. He also was not interested in a safe, white-collar post at Sears, Roebuck, like his high school classmates. It irritated him to think that he would have to work a meaningless job just to survive. He wanted to write, and he was attracted not as much to the voices of the working class, like his father, as to those beneath, the ones who fell off the lowest rungs of respectable employment into the morass below—the beggars and petty thieves and prostitutes.

When Gitlin told him his letters about the Sinclair station would make a story, Algren agreed but decided not to stick with himself as the aggrieved Yankee narrator. He instead restructured the story to be told in the voice of Homer, a cowering grifter giving his statement to a lawyer in a murder case. In the story a “Jew kid” named David, a college graduate from Cincinnati with a pregnant girlfriend at home, is repeatedly robbed and conned by Homer and an ex-felon named Luther, known as Fort for the last prison he left. The kid catches on that he is being cheated, but he can't seem to free himself from the others; only in his sleep does he seem fully aware of his situation, and he wakes up screaming about the inhumanity of his circumstances—“We're cut apart!” and “Thy blood is not my blood.” After the three commit a robbery together and get away in a boxcar, Fort is so startled by the young man yelling in his sleep that Fort kills him. The title of the story, “So Help Me,” is a repeated plea by the narrator—a vow that he is telling the truth and nothing was his fault. It was a risky and brilliant voice for such a young writer: an unreliable narrator speaking in dialect about robbery and murder and making it all seem inevitable.

“So Help Me” was picked up by
Story
magazine in August 1933, for twenty-five dollars. It was a prestigious magazine at the time and
a big score for a newcomer. The same issue had pieces by William Faulkner and Meridel Le Sueur. The publication of “So Help Me” was followed later that year by “Forgive Them, Lord,” in
A Year
magazine, about a black man named Christopher who witnesses a murder of a black father and daughter. The girl had been impregnated by a white man, whose family wanted to cover it up. The witness decides to keep quiet about it, knowing there would be little chance of justice. Like Homer, he tries to justify his fear to himself—maybe the girl deserved it somehow, maybe it was for her own good—and he resolves to be a good Christian and forgive the white killers. But a woman learns what he knows and betrays him for seemingly no reason at all, and he, too, faces being murdered at the end of the story. His practical, pious, slavish decision not to be a hero turns out to be worthless, and he loses both his soul and his life. These early stories contain what became frequent Algren themes: casual, senseless cruelty and the inability of the oppressed to stick together against a common enemy.

Both of these early stories were published under Nelson's new pen name—he had dropped “Abraham” for a simplified spelling of his middle name, “Algren,” which offered the pleasing phonetic symmetry of two syllables and six letters in both first and last name. It took back the pre-Jewish name of his eccentric paternal grandfather and separated him from his prosy parents. “He didn't want to operate as a Jew,” said his friend Dave Peltz. “Nobody knew that he was Jewish.”

“So Help Me” attracted the interest of Vanguard Press, which asked in a form letter if the author was working on a novel. Vanguard was known for radical, politically oriented books and novels of social realism—it had published not only
Young Lonigan
but also
Female
by Donald Clarke, declared obscene by a Brooklyn court. Nelson did not wait for anything more formal. Hitchhiking by this time was as natural for him as getting into a car, so he hit the
road east, this time carrying pocket notebooks to record impressions. He took a detour to see Niagara Falls with a couple of young men who were giving him a ride, and made notes about the falls' rainbow-colored spray, the
Maid of the Mist
boat that took tourists near the waters, and the rats among the rocks. He went for the first time to New York City in September of 1933.

Nelson found his way to Vanguard and met publisher James Henle in his well-furnished office on Fifth Avenue. Henle was surprised to see the tall, lean, intense young man—he did not even know a letter had been mailed. “Are you planning a novel?” Henle asked politely.

Nelson did not know anything about writing a novel, but this was his chance, and he had to think fast. He looked around the office, resplendent with books, plotting out something to say. After all he had seen and done, how hard could it be? He told Henle he would set a book in the Southwest, so he needed to go back there to do research.

“How much would you need?” Henle asked.

“A hundred dollars,” Nelson replied—which seemed like a lot of money. After what he'd seen outside—the shining new Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Pennsylvania Station with its columns like the glory days of Rome—he figured New York could spare it. He giddily agreed he would write a novel tentatively titled
The Gods Gather
in six months' time—by March 15, 1934—and got $10 in advance. Henle agreed to advance an additional $90 over the next few months, plus another $100 on completion. Nelson gave Vanguard his sister Irene's address on Creston Avenue in the Bronx and left the office feeling satisfied with the shrewd way he'd conducted himself in the world of business. Later he joked that this must be a record low in the world of literary advances. Back on the street, Nelson broke the ten at Hubert's, a wax museum that had an exhibit of the Cubs great Grover Cleveland Alexander,
whose career in Chicago was ended by alcohol and who, like Swede Risberg, frequently turns up in Nelson's later writing as a symbol of old city glory. Algren also took advantage of his time in New York to meet two “Rebel Poets”—Herman Spector and Sol Funaroff, who had just been published by Conroy in a collection called
We Gather Strength
. He was a writer now, among other writers, talking about the country's problems. A letter confirming his agreement with Vanguard showed Nelson was still playing with his name—the Bronx forwarding address had him as “Nelson Algren Abraham” while the signature line was “Nelson Abraham Algren.”

Nelson knew he needed to go back to Texas for his book—memory was never good enough. He had to be in the place he was writing about. The writers he admired—Charles Dickens and Stephen Crane and Anton Chekhov—paid close attention to detail. Algren read Crane so often—particularly
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
and “The Blue Hotel”—that he felt like he had written his works himself. Of Chekhov, Algren once said, “The son of a bitch really puts you in a room.” Nelson wanted his readers in the room, even if they did not want to be there,
especially
if they did not want to be there. For Algren it was not enough to say a character had landed in a jail cell—it had to be a particular cell, the one with the metal benches on one wall, a heavy metal spoon held in a bracket, and a smelly bucket in the corner. “You had to know the difference between the cells in two different jails,” he said.

Besides his writing friends, Nelson had nothing to keep him at home—his sister Bernice had her hands full with her family. Nelson's romance with a sculptress named Barbara Bein had gone sour, and she was berating him to friends. Nelson also did not feel he could use his little bit of money to help his struggling parents, who had been supporting him. The main attraction in Chicago was lovely Sally Rand and her feathered fan at the World's Fair, which was trying to cheer up unemployed midwesterners with the
notion that this was really a Century of Progress. Nelson was both fascinated and revolted by the spectacle—with its Midget City, Sky Ride, and rainbow-colored, futuristic buildings for twenty-five cents a ticket, just blocks away from ragged children digging in ash cans. But he wanted to be alone, in the place he was writing about. He did not want to take orders from anybody, and he needed a touch of cold-bloodedness to do what he had to do.

The South delivered on its promise of research almost immediately—he was pulled out of a boxcar by police in Greenville, North Carolina. The white prisoners were sent to the Salvation Army and warned that if they were caught on the train again, they'd get arrested. The black prisoners were sent off to hard labor. Heading west again, he passed through Alabama and Louisiana, then back to El Paso, copying observations about the types of train cars into his notebook and trying out phrases: “the Mississippi was an oily brown” or “the moonlight lay slantwise over the baggage carts.” He took down snatches of dialogue and slang—a Mexican was a “pepper,” “beef” was meat. Nelson had rejected “The Gods Gather” as the name of the novel and settled on “Native Son,” from the old song:

The miners came in '49,

The whores in '51,

They jungled up in Texas

And begot the Native Son.

He walked across the international bridge to Ciudad Juárez and saw his first bullfight, staying free in Matamoros with a woman who called herself the “Angel of the Americas.” Then he lost his taste for tramping. As he rolled through the West Texas hills on the roof of a boxcar, he saw a “lovely, homesick sight”—the campus of Sul Ross State Teachers College, its red-brick classical buildings trimmed in
white. It was early October, and it must have felt like time to go back to school. Here in the picturesque valley town of Alpine was a place to settle and live cheaply while writing his book, so Nelson got off the train and hitchhiked back. He found a room and meals for twenty dollars a month in a rundown ranch house for transients and railroad men on the edge of town. His fellow boarders included a wispy old lady who claimed to be the widow of the outlaw Frank James and had the appetite of three men. The way she ate, Nelson could see why Frank turned to crime while she was young. The other ten dollars went to stamps and cowboy luxuries like boots, a red bandanna, and Bull Durham tobacco, which Nelson learned to roll one-handed into cigarettes, Texas style. The main attraction was the college, and with permission from its president, Horace Morelock, Nelson began going in through a south entrance every day to use a typewriter in a classroom.

Nelson fixed on one particular machine in a room full of typewriters, “a big bosomy housewifely Underwood sitting to one side as if chaperoning the younger, more dashing models. I loved her upon sight. She looked fondly upon me, too.” It was on this stately machine that Nelson began to form his first novel, about an ignorant, sensitive Texas boy who wanders, as Nelson wandered, from Texas to New Orleans to Chicago by rail.

“I began telling her stories about the redlight district of Old Storyville and she was incredulous. She had never been out of town. I told her about wild boys of the road and wild girls, too … about sleeping in Salvation Homes, about sleeping in jails, about sleeping in open fields…. She listened attentively.”

Writing to a friend named Milton in Chicago, Nelson complained about the dullness of the people he encountered. Milton wrote back, chiding Nelson for his snobbery. “Yes, Nelson, slums, ignorance, poverty, Baptists, class struggle…. Ridicule is comparatively easy and most often does not commit one to anything. To be
a revolutionary artist means commitment, means alliance with the proletariat and the impoverished farmer…. Buck up, Pal!”

Nelson worked hard in the quiet classroom, only interrupted occasionally by students curious about an author in their midst. He made friends with some of them, and gave a lecture on writing that was covered in the school newspaper. “I believe I told them I was Theodore Dreiser's nephew or something,” he recalled. But his process throughout his writing life was slow, building up and taking down, with drafts that kept expanding. He figured the way to finish a book and get a plot was to “keep making it longer and longer until something happens.” At this rate, there was no way he would have a manuscript ready on or before March 15, 1934, as promised to Vanguard, and by January he had gotten the last of the advance money. He saw flaws in the unfinished manuscript, which he thought lacked humor and had too little dialogue. He hoped to visit Jack Conroy in Moberly, Missouri, to let the more experienced writer see his work before he went back to Chicago, where he could live cheaply at his parents' house while finishing the book. The problem was he had no typewriter in Chicago. He complained that his stuffy brother-in-law, Morris Joffe, wouldn't let him use his. Nelson developed attachments and aversions to typewriters—he had his favorites, and later would blame missed deadlines on balky machines. This “bosomy Underwood”—he also remembered it as a Royal—was the first in a string of typewriter loves. He was having a hard time saying good-bye.