Algren (10 page)

Algren returned to New York in late April of 1935, this time as a delegate and speaker for the American Writers' Congress along with Conroy. Writers at the standing-room-only gathering at the Mecca Temple on Fifty-Sixth Street included Richard Wright, James Farrell, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, Malcolm Cowley, and chairman Granville Hicks. Maxim Gorky, hailed as the father of proletarian literature, sent his greetings. It was a tumultuous time for midwestern proletarian writers, as the Communist Party USA had begun to lose interest in regional art. Conroy had lost control of the
Anvil
to the genial but obtuse Walter Snow, who turned down a story by twenty-four-year-old Tennessee Williams that Conroy had already accepted. Snow was more concerned with getting subscribers and allying the magazine with party bosses in the East than in helping out young writers, according to Conroy biographer Douglas Wixson. Algren was in such deep despair over his book that the formidable Le Sueur had to grasp his thin arms and help him up to speak before the crowd, and then he pleaded with everyone to buy his book. The session ended with a chorus of the Marxist anthem, “The Internationale.” Nelson perked up enough to march in the city's May Day parade, with authors who raised their fists in the air and shouted, “We write for the working class!” Red flags were flying. Other groups shouted, “Free the Scottsboro boys,” and young women dressed as angels banged tambourines. One of the writers lifting his fist beside Algren was Howard Rushmore, a journalist friend of Conroy's from St. Louis who was active in the Young Communist League. Years later, Rushmore got a job as research director for a Wisconsin Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy.

Nelson's depression continued so deep that his Chicago friends were afraid he would kill himself, and they appealed for help to James Farrell. Farrell, who had lavishly praised Algren's short story “So Help Me” at the conference, suggested that the younger writer
take a rest at Yaddo, a 400-acre writers' retreat on a wooded estate in Saratoga Springs, New York, hoping the tall white pines, broad lawns, rose garden, and marble fountains would give him a new perspective. Farrell had been staying there as a guest, along with other leftist artists. On the day he was supposed to leave New York City, Farrell walked around with Algren and talked with him for hours before the train left the station. But while other artists found the luxurious fifty-five-room mansion with its oil paintings and Persian rugs a nice break from the struggle of their ordinary lives, Nelson found it all intimidating and depressing. He did not want to eat, and he spent only a single night before hitchhiking out. Two years later, Farrell attributed Algren's continued hostility toward him to this attempt to help the younger writer when he was going out of his mind. “For which, he will never forgive me,” said Farrell.

Back in Chicago, a girlfriend discovered Nelson “barely conscious, lying on the floor with the gas pipe in his mouth,” in the words of biographer Bettina Drew. The friend called Nelson's friend Lawrence Lipton. Lawrence was worried enough about Nelson's welfare that he had the younger man stay in his apartment on Rush Street so he could keep an eye on him. He got Gerson and Goldie to agree to have him put in a hospital for a short time, but Nelson never thought much of psychoanalysis, believing most psychiatrists to be nothing more than “fancied-up mediums” and a waste of money. With the Abrahams deep in debt and about to lose their house on Troy, there was no money for treatment anyway. Jack Conroy also was alarmed by Nelson's despair, and urged his large circle of friends to write to cheer him up.

One who wrote at Conroy's urging was an Ohio bookseller, Hoyte D. Kline, who told Algren he admired
Somebody in Boots
and assured him that the Vanguard salesman, Franklin Watt, was a “fine lad” who was greatly interested in proletarian writing and doing his best to sell it. Kline complained that most of the customers at
his biggest Cleveland store were “satisfied Babbitts who buy books from the best-seller lists and Woollcott's radio vaporings”—a reference to book critic Alexander Woollcott. “We can but hope that the book buying public will wake up,” Kline wrote. He also advised Nelson that while some novelists like William Saroyan get early success and notice from the New York “tribe of nitwits,” it was better to build up your public slowly. “Above all, don't get discouraged with your writing,” Kline cautioned. “It takes patience but pays out in the long run.” Despite encouragement from Kline, Conroy, Wright, and others, Algren was not patient. He chose to live, but it is a sign of his deep discouragement that while he wrote a few book reviews and poems, his creative output went dry for years, and he did not publish another novel until 1942.

Dick Wright wanted to help his friend, so he held a party at the John Reed Club's headquarters to celebrate the publication of
Somebody in Boots
in the late spring. It was there that Nelson met Amanda Kontowicz, a petite Polish American beauty with bright, dark eyes, a full, wide, red mouth, and black curly hair framing a heart-shaped face. Four years his junior, she was quiet and catlike in her ability to watch and wait. Nelson came to know her as a sharp observer of character, able to place the phonies in the crowd and tear them down. She also was somewhat hypochondriac, often complaining of small ailments, a bit conventional, and full of self-doubt. She painted, and Nelson found her work original, but she had little confidence in her efforts. She had lost her father while a little girl and grown up in Milwaukee with her widowed mother, Laura, a deli worker; her Polish-born grandmother, Mary; and her older brother, Ted. When Amanda was a young teen, her mother had married a Polish immigrant named Stanley Piatek. They had later moved to Chicago. Though intelligent and bookish, Amanda hadn't gone to college, and had come from what was still regarded as an exotic, backward peasant culture among the WASP and Jewish
intellectual elite, more foreign and misunderstood than western European cultures like German or French. Arriving on the arm of a poet, she must have felt like an unaccomplished outsider at the rowdy writers' gathering at the warehouse on South Michigan Avenue. She recognized in handsome Nelson another outsider, even if this was supposed to be his party.

Amanda was a good listener, and she came into Nelson's life just when he needed one. In the months after the party, they began meeting each other. They sat by the lake on warm summer nights and had long talks about books and family, while Chicagoans who had either been evicted or were just trying to escape the heat camped out on quilts around them. He was a good listener, too, with a focused, gentle manner. She told him of her lonely childhood and her discomfort when her mother had remarried. He called her “Mashya,” the whispery Polish diminutive of her name, so like the Russian nicknames for beloved women Nelson found in his favorite novels. Soon, Amanda and Nelson moved in together, sharing a series of rattletrap apartments, paying the rent with whatever they scraped together on odd jobs. They got married at City Hall on March 1, 1937—a week before Nelson's twenty-eighth birthday. Nelson said the marriage was necessary because Amanda's mother would not visit if they kept living in sin.

It was a long, strange relationship that began in pity and ended in hatred. Nelson claimed later that there was never much of a physical connection between them, and he told her that he did not want children. Yet she held on tightly to him over the years, despite separations, despite Nelson's cheating on her, slamming doors in her face, and trying to remove her from his life “finger by finger.” Nelson speculated later that she was seeking in him something that had been missing in her own childhood, a man to depend on and take care of her, and he was not that man. But Nelson was seeking something, too—he saw himself as homeless, and Amanda
represented home, someone with whom he could talk and listen to music, someone to help him get through tough social visits with his less-loved family members, someone he kept circling back to, despite numerous breaks. “She was just there for him,” said Art Shay. “She didn't have much of a life.” When she was around, he felt crowded, irritable, and unable to work. But when she was away, he felt hollow and afraid, as if the “world had gotten too big and too dark.”

Nelson was terrible at being married, and later reviled the institution as “simply distracting” and claimed he had divorced Amanda after three years, when they were really married for a total of twelve. He complained that marriage was incompatible with the life of a
real
writer, as opposed to just a hack journalist, and pointed to Dickens's awful marriage to excuse his own failures. Nelson was an insomniac and had as little awareness of the divisions of day and night as a cat—napping for a couple of hours here and there, and then getting up to drink glasses of hot tea or coffee with sugar and to read or write, pounding away on a typewriter in the middle of the night. He would pace around constantly from room to room. He also was messy, leaving books and papers in tottering stacks, mixed with dirty cups. He could be warm and funny and generous—putting careful thought into the right presents not just for Mashya, but for her mother.

But he could also be cold, and his bizarre sense of humor could turn nasty—the not-always-reliable Howard Rushmore claimed that once when he was staying at their apartment in January of 1936, Nelson told him to go ahead and climb into bed with Amanda and make love to her, as Nelson wouldn't mind. He freely invited his own friends over, and starting in March of 1938 had Conroy crash for months in their apartment in the mostly African American Bronzeville neighborhood at 3569 South Cottage Grove Avenue. Originally built as an arcade for the 1893 Columbian Exposition,
the building with its big front windows attracted artists, who called it Rat Alley. Residents included Gilbert Rocke and Mitchell Siporin, a black-haired, bespectacled social realist who painted colorful, surreal images of workers from the nearby Back of the Yards neighborhood. On Saturdays Amanda made Jack, Nelson, and herself stew that they would eat all week—she had gotten used to chaos. Jack, “beaming, gleaming, flopping and pitying his lot,” would get so drunk that friends would put pennies on his eyes as he lay on the floor. But Nelson complained if Amanda invited
her
friends over, saying it was
his
apartment, even though she was paying half or more of their expenses. He often drank and gambled too much, and would disappear to odd places—sordid taverns on Madison Street, brothels, and poker parties.

In the late 1930s, Nelson and Jack were drawn into a circle of wild satirists, toughs, mill workers, and underground figures in East St. Louis known as the Fallonites, named for their leader, a handsome, witty, brawling, hard-drinking, womanizing ironworker named Lawrence “Bud” Fallon. The pack included Wallie Wharton, an
Anvil
editor who wrote barroom satires about the pompousness of the Communist Party, and Jess Blue, a pistol-toting petty mobster who knew a lot about prostitutes and years later acted as a pimp to a teenage girl. The group kept girlfriends, whom they called “jeeps,” and the fact that Nelson was living with Amanda did not stop him from picking up other women while he was with this crowd. Separated from his family and drinking heavily, Conroy was flattered by the group's regard for his literary status, and he wasted his creative energy helping Wharton write satirical plays that were performed in St. Louis and Chicago taverns, according to his biographer, Douglas Wixson. In Chicago the play
The Drunkard's Warning
became a satire on James T. Farrell, mocked as James T. Barrelhouse. Performances were supposed to raise money to start the
New Anvil
magazine, which Conroy and Algren planned to
edit together. The otherwise generous and gentle Conroy had never forgiven Farrell for his negative review of
The Disinherited
. Still smarting over Farrell's corrections on
Somebody in Boots
and his pity after the writers' conference, Algren helped contribute lines and performed in the show, even after Farrell's family pleaded with them all to stop.

Nelson also suffered under the group's mischief. Bud Fallon mocked his note taking with this bit of doggerel:

Ain't got no Pulitzare, but I'm not the type to care,

'Cause I got a pocketful of notes …

Never had no Guggenheim, I just don't have time,

But I got a pocketful of notes …

O lucky, lucky me! I'll await posterity

For I got a pocketful of notes!

Nelson, easily teased and always better at dishing out ridicule than taking it, was the target of pranks by the group. Bud wrote him obscene and anti-Semitic letters under Wallie Wharton's name. Nelson got so mad he threatened to tell the postal authorities on Wallie, before figuring out that Bud was the actual author. Fallon later sent anti-Semitic letters to Meyer Levin, the editor of
Esquire
, with Algren's signature. In New York at the Second American Writers' Congress, Jack and Bud's buffoonery got in the way of Nelson's attempt to pick up a blonde at a bar. It was also at this congress that Nelson had a chance to see Ernest Hemingway, his hero among living American writers. Hemingway spoke on the writer's responsibility to fight against Fascism and to tell the truth as he sees it so that it becomes a part of the reader's experience. Hemingway's future wife, Martha Gellhorn, also spoke at the conference. They later began corresponding with Nelson, and both became powerful advocates of his books.

Nelson's desire to be with the Fallonites in “lusty, smoky and virile” East St. Louis showed a touch of masochism—more of the desire to live on the thin edge of things that had gotten him into trouble in Texas. He was never really a tough guy, but he wanted to act the part of a tough guy, as he had wanted to be like the semipro ball players he saw as a kid in Albany Park, and Bud Fallon and his gang offered models. If he could not be them, he wanted to understand them. As Walt Whitman said in
Leaves of Grass
, which Nelson quotes at the beginning of
Never Come Morning
: