Algren (8 page)

Nelson showed throughout life both long periods of melancholy and times of perverse recklessness, a drive to walk on the edge of things, like a boy baiting a mad dog with a stick just to see what would happen. He liked to gamble with high odds, and despite his intelligence sometimes did not think things through. He also could have a dangerous level of arrogance—as he had complained to his friends at home, he did not think much of the mental powers of
southerners. Some combination of these traits—the recklessness, the snobbery, the typewriter fetish, and perhaps a long-festering sense of deprivation—led him to a curious action. On January 25, 1934, he put the cover on the typewriter, opened the drawer to put it in the desk where it belonged, and then nervously, impulsively, gathered it in his arms like a bulky sweetheart and carried it out of Sul Ross onto Alpine's wide Main Street. He stopped at a hardware store to buy a big wooden box, planning to send the typewriter to his parents' house in Chicago, while he would follow later on a train. He said his good-byes to Mrs. Nettleton, who ran the boardinghouse, and the eternally hungry Widow James, and hopped an eastbound freight.

Alpine was not a big town—about three thousand people at the time—and a tall, interesting Yankee stranger walking down Main Street with a typewriter and a big packing box on a clear, mild weekday evening was bound to attract attention. Nelson said later that something like thirty-seven people had noticed his march, and another dozen had seen him entering the freight depot with the box the next morning. He had billed it to his parents' address. He rode a freight about eighty miles away to Sanderson, and then the train stopped. He was enjoying the midday sun, suavely rolling a cigarette one-handed and waiting for the train to start again, when a sheriff walked up and asked his name. Nelson told him and learned he was in trouble. It was something about a typewriter, which had been plainly labeled “Property of Sul Ross College” and had never left Alpine. It turned out he hadn't committed the perfect crime after all.

Nelson joked often about his arrest later, but it's clear from the statement he made to the sheriff that he was badly frightened and, like Homer in “So Help Me,” he wanted to justify himself. “I wanted a typewriter very bad because I am a writer by profession…. A typewriter is the only means I had to complete a book which
means either a few dollars or utter destitution. There is nothing more vital to my mere existence as a typewriter, it is the only means I have to earn a living.” He added that he did not feel like he was stealing from an individual—just from the school. But he could not tell that story to the judge—not yet. It was a circuit-riding court, and he would have to wait for the judge to come back around again. Nelson was stuck in the Brewster County Jail for a month. Later he remembered he was there for five months—which showed how the days must have dragged. As Nelson put it in
Somebody in Boots
, in prison, “Before a month is out you feel that you've done a year.” It was a critical experience for Nelson's work—a crucible and a wound and a lifelong grudge. It was similar in effect to Charles Dickens's four-month stint as a child in a blacking warehouse while his father was in debtors' prison. The injustice of this was played and replayed in Dickens's fiction on a series of overworked children. A variation of Nelson's county jail imprisons characters in all his novels and in many of his stories—it catches Cass McKay in El Paso and Chicago, Bruno Bicek and Frankie Machine in Chicago, Dove Linkhorn in New Orleans, and Ruby Calhoun in New Jersey. The cell walls never stopped closing in.

Nelson had nothing to read. He tried to write, and in his notebook he made observations and rough cartoons of the people and things in the prison, but he was tortured by a case of hives that broke out whenever he tried to scratch, and they seemed to transfer themselves to new areas at a touch like poison ivy, until he suffered from head to toe. He may have contracted them from a fungus in the prison, or insect bites, or just stress. He refused an offer of a can of insecticide to cure them, figuring that it would just make it worse. His cellmates included a short, one-armed man who bent tobacco tins with the red, bumpy nub of his missing limb and became the model for Nubby O'Neill in
Somebody in Boots
. Nelson remembered how the small-time thief was an egomaniac who
considered himself the boss of the cell. In
Boots
he's also viciously racist, and claims he left South Chicago “on account of niggers an' spiks' movin' into Stony Island.”

On entering the jail, Nelson heard a list of “rules of court,” presumably from this one-armed fascist, whom he quoted later in
Somebody in Boots
. He kept a copy, written out in pencil, in block letters:

Men found guilty of breaking and entering will be filed $200 or 40 days on the floor at the rate of 5 c a day. Every man entering tank must keep cleaned and properly dressed. Each day of the week is washday except Sunday. Every man must wash his face and hands before handling food. Any man found guilty of marking on the wall will be given 20 licks on rectum west. If the man breaks these rules he will be punished according to the Justice of the court. On entering the tank each and every man must be searched by the sherrif [
sic
]. He will search everywhere…. Each and every man using toilet must flush it with bucket. Throw all paper in the ash tub. Do not spit in coal tub or through windows…. Any man upon entering tank with venereal disease, lice, or crabs must report same to court.

The jail also held a rodeo rider charged with two murders, who invented a perverted game of blindman's buff. One inmate would stand blindfolded while three or four others hit him in the behind with a belt. If he guessed who hit him, another would take his place. This could fill up an entire afternoon. “I didn't particularly enjoy this game, but this was one way we passed the time,” Nelson remembered drily. The rodeo rider himself always managed to avoid being the one with the blindfold, and was later freed without prosecution, having connections in town.

It was dull in the cell—inmates longed for something to do, even sweep. They played checkers and took turns looking out of the window with its four cold, blue steel bars. They argued constantly, about anything that came to mind, or insulted each other—Mexicans or the slow-witted deserter from the newly formed Civilian Conservation Corps offered good targets. A can of tobacco sent through the barred window was a grand occasion. Food was sparse, as the warden was given sixty cents a day per prisoner for food but wanted to make his own cut of that as large as possible. The toilet, or “thundermug,” had to be flushed with a bucket of water, making a tremendous racket. In
Somebody in Boots
and in the short story “Thundermug,” flushing was not allowed at certain times of day so that the warden and his family could rest. This meant that the prisoners, afflicted with queasy stomachs from thin meals of corn bread and beans, would have to wait.

A big event was when the sheriff brought in a federal prisoner overnight. One night, a man was brought in who had been shot in the back. Nelson and his cellmates spent the day watching him die because he was in too much shock to give the required formal permission to operate. Nelson later describes this agony in the short story “El Presidente de Mejico”—the grayness of both the cell and the man's skin, as the rain came down outside.

Nelson wrote to friends, but told no one he was in jail. In his notebook he drafted sheepish letters to James Henle, trying to explain why his novel needed more time: “Dear Mr. Henle—This letter will come to you as something of a shock, I'm afraid. I've gotten myself into an unholy scrape down here.” “Dear Mr. Henle, This may come to you as a mild shock, to say the least.” The letter was never sent. He sat in the cold cell and tried not to tear his skin by scratching, listening to his fellow prisoners sing obscene song parodies: “There was an Indian maid / Who was very much afraid / That some buckaroo / Would slip up her slew.” He wrote in his
notebook: “One terror: being alone … In all the world. I have no home.”

Nelson waited through the coldest part of the short Texas winter, and in February court was held. The penalty for felony theft was two years, to be spent in hard labor in Huntsville. His public defender was an elderly man named Wigfall Van Sickle, a Sul Ross College founder and former state legislator who had lost his only child in 1920. Algren later told H. E. F. Donohue that Van Sickle had put up “a formal and conventional defense … in a very perfunctory way.” Other evidence shows that Van Sickle gave a literary defense, comparing the defendant to Jean Valjean in Hugo's
Les Mis
é
rables
, imprisoned for stealing bread. Whatever the argument was like, Nelson was no doubt aided by his color. Both judge and jury recommended mercy, and Nelson was given a suspended sentence and ordered not to come back to Texas. A month delayed, and without the typewriter, Nelson rode freights back to Chicago, his head full of horrors.

He wrote to Conroy of his troubles, and Conroy wrote back in March recommending that Algren “ankle around” to 1475 South Michigan Avenue, the home of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, the writers' and artists' group affiliated with the Communist Party. This would give him company and advice as he finished his novel. Conroy also gave him the good news that he had accepted for the
Anvil
Algren's short stories “Buffalo Sun” and “Holiday in Texas.” The latter story, originally part of
Somebody in Boots
but left out, tells of a rancher, Boone Terry, who drunkenly brags to his men about what a great boss he is, and doesn't notice the anthems of revolution sung by one of the ranch hands. The other hands are too drunk to notice, either—Algren's work, despite his leftist inclinations, did not show any faith in a revolution to come. The kindly Conroy also gave him suggestions for other places to send poems and excerpts of
Somebody in Boots
.

Taking streetcars to the Loop and south, Nelson found 1475 South Michigan and walked up a dark, dingy stairway to a door lettered with the words The Chicago John Reed Club. He opened it to find a room with papers and cigarette butts littering the floor and benches against the walls. Above the benches were vividly colored murals showing giant workers looming over tiny cities. They were carrying banners and seemed to be shouting something. Through the window he could see the art deco towers of the Century of Progress, preparing to start its second year. Nelson was introduced to one of the editors of the club's magazine,
Left Front
, a slim, formally dressed, strikingly handsome African American writer named Richard Wright. Half a year older than Nelson, Dick Wright had grown up in the South and given himself a broad literary education by pretending the library books he was checking out were intended for a white woman. Nelson and Dick found they shared a ribald sense of humor and loved many of the same favorite writers—including Crane and Dostoyevsky, who Dick felt was the greatest writer who ever lived. He had been working in the Chicago post office, providing for his mother and brother, when he became friends with fellow clerk and aspiring writer Abe Aaron. They linked up with Harry Bernstein and Sam Gaspar for what Conroy called “the Chicago Post Office school.” Aaron had discovered the
Anvil
, and brought Wright to a John Reed Club meeting the year before. Conroy was the first to publish Wright in a national magazine—“Strength” and “Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods.” Personally, Wright was serious, self-contained, and a bit secretive—when he disappeared from the writing group for several weeks to take care of personal matters, the group members wondered what was wrong and realized with consternation that he had always evaded the question of where he lived.

Dick fascinated Nelson—he was obviously the most talented of the other members of the group. And Wright's experience of terrible behavior was not limited to two years of wandering in Texas—he
had spent his entire childhood in the segregated South. His uncle had been murdered by a white man for not being subordinate enough. Wright had committed himself to the Communist Party, and
Left Front
proclaimed that its first aim was to “aid in the building of a revolutionary culture in the middle west, to interpret the class struggles and aspirations of the proletariat in concrete regional terms.” Through the years of their friendship, Dick would confront Nelson with Nelson's ignorance of the black experience. Nelson tried telling the story of his mother's solicitude for poor Mildred Ford and the valentines. Instead of being impressed by Goldie's liberalism, Dick was horrified. “She didn't need your mother's pity,” Dick told him.

“No doubt she didn't,” Nelson said. “But sending her a valentine was still an improvement on clubbing her with a baseball bat, wasn't it?” Wright reluctantly agreed.

Wright biographer Hazel Rowley noted that Algren apparently based the dignified, intellectual character of Dill Doak in
Somebody in Boots
on Wright. The second year of the Century of Progress was within sight of the
Left Front
office windows, and Nelson visited it often during that stifling summer to collect material for his novel. He likely visited at least once with Wright. Near the end of
Somebody in Boots
, Cass and Dill go together to the fair, with its “nude dancers, wind-tunnels, Indians, Byrd's South Pole ship. Dante's Inferno, Miss America, alligator-wrestlers, Lincoln's cabin … a zigzag riot of fakery.” They come to a concession where black men were perched in cages over tubs of water—a well-thrown baseball could dunk them. Dill walks by without stopping, and then wants to leave. He later gives Cass a lecture about how much better things are in Russia, and how the order of things must be changed. Change was a long time coming—a version of the game called the African Dip continued at Chicago's Riverview amusement park into the late 1950s.