Algren
Authors: Mary Wisniewski
A
TIRELESS CHAMPION OF THE downtrodden, Nelson Algren, one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, lived an outsider's life himself. He spent a month in prison as a young man for the theft of a typewriter; his involvement in Marxist groups earned him a lengthy FBI dossier; and he spent much of his life palling around with the sorts of drug addicts, prostitutes, and poor laborers who inspired and populated his novels and short stories.
Most today know Algren as the radical, womanizing writer of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, which won the first National Book Award, in 1950, but award-winning reporter Mary Wisniewski offers a deeper portrait. Starting with his childhood in the City of Big Shoulders,
Algren
sheds new light on the writer's most momentous periods, from his on-again-off-again work for the WPA to his stint as an uninspired soldier in World War II to his long-distance affair with his most famous lover, Simone de Beauvoir, to the sense of community and acceptance Algren found in the artist colony of Sag Harbor before his death in 1981.
Wisniewski interviewed dozens of Algren's closest friends and inner circle, including photographer Art Shay and author and historian Studs Terkel, and tracked down much of his unpublished writing and correspondence. She unearths new details about the writer's life, work, personality, and habits and reveals a funny, sensitive, and romantic but sometimes exasperating, insecure, and self-destructive artist.
Copyright © 2017 by Mary Wisniewski
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-532-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wisniewski, Mary, author.
Title: Algren : a life / Mary Wisniewski.
Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002793| ISBN 9781613735329 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN
9781613735350 (epub) | ISBN 9781613735343 (kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981. | Novelists, Americanâ20th centuryâBiography. | Authors, Americanâ20th centuryâBiography.
Classification: LCC PS3501.L4625 Z95 2017 | DDC 813/.52âdc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002793
Interior design: Jonathan Hahn
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
To Mitch and Bonny, Lucian and Gabriella, and Frank and Sophie, the kings and queens of old Polonia.
5 Polonia and
Never Come Morning
6 Polonia's Revenge, and Algren in the Army
Index
CHILDHOOD DAYS
Take me out for a joy ride
A girl ride, a boy ride,
I'm as reckless as I can be,
I don't care what becomes of me.
âR
EN
S
HIELDS AND
K
ERRY
M
ILLS,
“T
AKE
M
E
O
UT FOR A
J
OY
R
IDE
”
Who's yer fayvrut player?
âN
ELSON
A
LGREN,
C
HICAGO:
C
ITY ON THE
M
AKE
Nelson Algren's first memory was of getting lost, looking for a hero. He was two and a half. Taking another small boy, he walked up the sidewalks of Detroit in 1911, away from the house where he was born at 867 Mack Avenue, away from his mother's candy store, into the vastness of the booming city, a golden-haired boy in short pants. He was looking for his uncle Theodore, a sailor who had worked on the big boats on the Great Lakes. Nelson's mother, Goldie, who never entertained notions, only convictions, loved to talk about Theodore and her other astonishing brothers. She told how Theodore had gotten into a fistfight with the ship's cook on the deck of the steamer
Chicora
. The captain said one of them had to leave. Theodore was proudâhe knew he'd work again on one
of the thousands of steamers and barges filling the country's upper Midwest, on Superior and Erie and Michigan, the lake Nelson later referred to as the “secondhand sea.” So Uncle Theodore shook hands with everybody except the captain, and got off at Benton Harbor, Michigan. On its next trip, in January of 1895, the
Chicora
left from Milwaukee and sank without a trace beneath Lake Michigan's wintry waters. Even a secondhand sea can be a devourer of men.
But this was not the best part of the story, Goldie would insist, speaking from atop a step stool, where she was sponging a wall, or from her knees, scrubbing a floor, her thick, blonde hair frizzing in the heat. The son of a fireman on the
Chicora
went looking for the wreck in a glass-bottomed boat called the
Chicago
. But in less than a week the glass-bottomed boat and the fireman's son went down too. The glass-bottomed boat story was a bit much, and Algren's father, Gerson, an overburdened working man always waiting to go another shift, had his doubts. He thought the son was a damned fool to follow his father.
“Not all the damned fools are at the bottom of the lake,” Goldie would snap back. Algren's memories of his parents' relationship were mostly of quarrels, the two of them circling round and round the ring, with Goldie forcing Gerson into rhetorical corners, where he would hide, rope-a-dope, behind the evening paper, his lips moving as he read.
But Uncle Theodore was no fool. Nelson urged his companion down one sidewalk after another, past the wooden balloon frame houses of laborers like his father, working for “the screw works,” or for Packard or Ford. What were the screw works compared to the open water? Goldie had taught contempt of ordinary labor early.
A train came by and the tiny boys waved to the engineer. “That was Uncle Theodore,” Nelson told his friend, trying out an early gift for improvisation. He was satisfied, but still lost. Everything was so enormous. A Jewish tailor found them and gave them rye bread
before calling the police, his many children looking on. Perched on a policeman's desk, eating ice cream, Nelson remembered the guns behind the desk, black and mysterious.
Nelson Algren was born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit, as Nelson Ahlgren Abraham to Gerson Abraham and Goldie Kalisher, two Chicago transplants and nonobservant Jews. He was a late baby and only sonâhis sister Irene was nine, and his sister Bernice was seven. Gerson was already forty-one, and Goldie thirty-one. Both his parents had come from big families. Besides the heroic Theodore, there was Goldie's big brother, Abraham, and little brother, Harry, a sailor on the USS
Chicago
who had served in the Spanish-American War. He died at age twenty-nine, the year before Nelson was born, becoming the family saint. There were Goldie's sisters Hannah and Toby, who on a summer evening used to sing, accompanied by the player piano, in memory of Harry:
My brave boy sleeps in his faded coat of blue
In the lonely grave unknown lies the heart that beats so true
His grandfather, who treated Nelson as a special favorite, showed him how he could blow real smoke through a little wooden clown.
The Kalishers were a “prosy family,” Nelson remembered. Goldie's parents, Louis and Gette, were middle-class German Jews who came from Prussia to Chicago in the nineteenth century, and became embarrassed at the Polish Jews who followed them and looked so
Jewish
, with their yarmulkes, beards, and prayer shawls. Families like the Kalishers “knocked themselves out to repudiate their Jewish roots immediately,” Nelson said. As in Germany, “They were anxious to become blonde and blue-eyed, which they succeeded in doing.” Towheaded Nelson must have pleased them.
German, not lower-class Yiddish, was spoken at Grandpa Kalisher's home at 862 North Washtenaw in the West Town neighborhood,
where he made red-banded “Father & Son” cigars and kept a
sommerhaus
, a European-style cottage, in the back. Goldie taught her son the German version of “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which starts: “Ich bin klein / Mein Herz ist kein,” translated as “I am small /
my heart is pure.” Nelson would tell his friend Art Shay that Goldie gave him some of his German toughness.
This was one kind of immigrantâhardworking, home owning, joining the American Legion and assimilating. On Gerson's side was the opposite kind: the renegade, the lunatic, the crook. This was the type that fascinated Nelson, and this type keeps reappearing in his fiction, the one with the hustler's blood, and in his own life of petty thefts, swindles, and sometimes ruinous gambles. This was Nels Ahlgren, his Swedish grandfather, born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a shopkeeper in about 1820. When Nels was a teenager, his fatherâNelson's great-grandfatherâdied, and Nels read his much-marked copy of the Old Testament. “When he did, it drove him bonkers,” Nelson recalled. Nels memorized the book, became an Orthodox Jew, changed his name to Isaac Ben Abraham, and moved to America before the Civil War.
Isaac went first to Minnesota as a fur trader, where he was burned out in an Indian raid. Then he went to Chicago and brought misfortune to a little servant girl from Koblenz, Germany, named Yetta “Jettie” Stire, sixteen years his junior, by marrying her and moving her to the swampy wilds near Black Oak, Indiana, which later became part of Gary, squatting on land he did not own, as Nelson recalled the story. Before trying his hand at farming, Isaac opened a country store and conceived an ingenious con, giving his customers Swedish pennies instead of American ones in change. The Swedish coins were worth about a third less. When he ran out of them, he tried making his own. Though Nelson does not elaborate on Nels's methods, he believed his grandfather also experimented with perpetual motion, the eternal chimera of shiftless intellectuals.
A squatter farm and a crooked store among the mosquitoes and coyotes of Black Oak were not scope enough for a man of Abraham's peculiar genius, so he took his wife to San Francisco, leaving at least one child behind to collect later. On the West Coast, while waiting for a boat to the Holy Land, Abraham became a sort of freelance rabbi, scolding his fellow Jews for their lack of orthodoxy, able to quote the Bible word for word. He made such a nuisance of himself in San Francisco that the chief rabbi would hide from him. When Swedish Isaac came knocking, someone would be sent down to say the rabbi was not home. Abraham would leave abrasive notes, mocking the rabbi's intelligence. “He was an intellectual before his time, which was his trouble, inasmuch as he didn't want to work,” recalled Nelson, who looked like him. Nelson's father, Gerson, named for the son of Moses, was born in San Francisco in 1867. His sister Hanna was born later.
Through some mysterious appeal, Isaac gained enough money for passage to Jerusalem for himself and his family. Nelson doesn't explain in his memoirs, but Abraham may have hooked into one of the early Zionist movements to create Jewish settlements in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, settlements that included Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem. Gerson would later tell his own son he remembered camels as a small boy. How terrible this strange land must have appeared to poor Jettie, this desert country full of hard men, speaking a language that was neither German nor Yiddish nor English. As Nelson told it later, she was stuck doing all the work for Isaac and his hangers-on, sewing and cooking while missing Indiana. She soon had enough of the Promised Land. She went to the American Consulate, begging for release, and miraculously was given passage money, in one version of the story. Gerson walked down a dusty road with his mother, leaving Jerusalem as a young boy in 1871. What visions Jettie must have told him as he trotted in the strong Palestinian sun, of lush trees and fat cows, of actual
rather than prophetic milk and honey. Gerson must have loved his mother, for as an adult he worked always with hands, and despised men who wouldn't work and follow the rules. But as mother and children walked away, the Swedish prophet called after his meal ticket, “Hey! I'm coming with you.” So what could she do but take him back?