Algren (16 page)

Assigned to a field artillery battery in December of 1943 after basic training, he got a reputation as a malingerer, incompetent as a jeep driver or even as a typist. His martial skills had not improved since his Ds in artillery drill and theory at the University of Illinois, and he seemed to be on a mission to be the worst soldier in the battery. His superiors complained that he brought up the rear in every running exercise, and was the first to fall out in every foot march. He would leave marches at his own discretion and return to the barracks, boasting that he could do this whenever he felt like it
and telling other soldiers they were fools not to do the same. One sergeant complained that Private Abraham was “sullen” and would take a bath only when he was ordered to do so. During peacetime Nelson's friends would laugh about how sloppy he could be, wearing a rope for a belt, or being so excited about going to the racetrack that he forgot socks. In the army this bohemian eccentricity did not amuse, and it seemed serious enough to have been caused by depression. In January of 1944, Nelson was troubled by anal itching and got instructions on cleanliness at the camp clinic. On February 17, 1944, Capt. Frank M. Langdon issued a harsh report about Nelson, writing, “This soldier is a source of much trouble and an evil influence on the remainder of the battery…. No amount of endeavor on the part of both officers and non-commissioned officers can make him take any interest or part in any training.” Officers tried talking to him, yelling at him, and punishing him with kitchen duty, but he did not care. “He apparently has no pride. This applies both to his conduct and dress,” Langdon reported.

Nelson's behavior was seen as so problematic that he was considered for a Section 8 discharge, which would have meant that he was mentally unfit for service. This would have been a shameful badge to wear home, even for an artist. In late February of 1944, he was sent to the camp's neuropsychiatric unit for evaluation. Lt. David W. Morgan found Nelson highly intelligent, and, likely responding to this attitude, Nelson opened up. He admitted that he was not trying very hard, but that he found the training programs boring and repetitious. He also complained that was he was clumsy and slow at mechanical jobs, and did not do well at hard labor. He wondered why he hadn't been given work more suited to his abilities. A review of Nelson's personal history found some mild neurotic trends, but not enough for a diagnosis, Morgan wrote. He decided that Nelson's problem was not madness, but placement—he needed another unit and different duties.

Nelson also had complained of inner tension. Sheer, frustrated rage could have been partly to blame—one sergeant angered Nelson so much that Nelson remembered waking up every morning thinking about how to kill him. “I wanted to kill him. I could not. When I saw him it was red,” Nelson recalled. The sergeant would see how angry Nelson was and increase his burdens—and then challenge him to fight if he did not like it, though Nelson knew punching him would have meant court-martial.

After his psychiatric evaluation, Nelson was reassigned to a medical team, designated a litter bearer, and trained to give first aid, take temperatures, splint fractures, and dress wounds. By army standards, it was a tolerable summer and included a friendly visit from Amanda. In June of that year, the FBI, which had been confounded for years by Nelson's use of a pen name, finally figured out that Nelson was in the army and temporarily closed his case. Nelson had expected to be shipped overseas in September of 1944, but found out he'd been transferred to a new unit while he was on the way to the troop train. “I lost a good outfit and found a miserable one,” he grumbled in a letter to Jack Conroy, giving his new address as the 125th Evacuation Hospital at Camp Maxey. “No telling when I'll get out of this camp now.” Two months later, he became frantic that he wouldn't be going overseas with the rest of his unit—a lieutenant told him he would be, then other soldiers told him he wouldn't be. He visited a barracks room where bags were being stenciled to identify them in transit, and found that his big hadn't been stenciled and was piled off to the side with other bags belonging to soldiers who were sick, crazy, facing court-martial, or absent without leave. This meant he was staying in Texas! Nelson told a friendly Greek sergeant about the stencil situation and pleaded that he did not want to be left behind. The sergeant asked if he was sure he wanted to go, since he had been goofing off.

“Of course I'm going to be goofing off here,” Nelson responded. “I mean this is goof-off country.”

Under Col. Ralph Bell, Algren's unit traveled to New York in the frigid early December of 1944, took a short rest to let the country boys look at skyscrapers, and then crossed to England. It was a rough passage, with seasickness and choppy waters, and just two meals a day, with fish for breakfast. The unit also saw its first casualty on board the ship—a soldier's skull was crushed when a large case slipped from its ropes. After landing at Southampton, the unit traveled to Wales to spend a damp, chilly winter outside the medieval walled city of Tenby. Conditions at Camp Penally were primitive, with wooden bunks, straw mattresses, and outside privies, and hot water available only when heated on a stove. But football and softball games were played on the beach, and soldiers on leave could walk the city's quaint, winding streets, getting pints of stout at the pubs. The mists of Wales reminded Nelson of Champaign, Illinois. Nelson bought picture postcards of the stone fortresses to send to Goldie and “Mrs. P.,” Amanda's mother. He also wrote Jack Conroy in February asking if he could ship him a “bottle of grape juice” as “we don't get many vitamins over here.”

Despite rough living, Nelson preferred being overseas—discipline was looser, with less saluting, and the soldiers seemed to actually be doing something. His military record shows no more discipline problems, and despite his perverse bragging to the contrary, he
did
get a good-conduct medal. Maybe it got lost in the mail. In two and a half years, he never rose higher than private, and continued to seethe at the way officers treated enlisted men. In “That's the Way It's Always Been,” one of three stories he wrote about the service, Nelson described a Wales camp commander as a Kansas abortionist and “The Man without Any Brains.”

From Wales the unit went to London, then to Le Havre, then Château Regnault in France, then Krefeld, Germany, around Easter
of 1944, to support the 94th Infantry Division on the west bank of the Rhine. According to a history of the unit, it pitched tents on a bombed-out racetrack. On the first night, not knowing the Germans were near, someone built a bonfire under one of the grandstands to make hot coffee. The Germans began shelling, and soon nobody was getting any sleep. Ultimately, the higher-ups decided the unit was in an unsafe position and it was ordered to move back to the outskirts of München-Gladbach, into the stately St. Francis Hospital, brick and stone walls, and high-pitched red roofs like a castle. There were about seventy Catholic nuns to take care of them, German girls serving fresh eggs in the mess hall, real beds, and softball games played on the landscaped lawns—soft duty for wartime.

Nelson would have loved to have stayed at St. Francis for the rest of his service, but his unit moved around, keeping about ten miles behind fighting units, with Nelson carrying a stretcher to collect the bleeding. Other than that, his main concerns were finding wine, gambling, and roaming the Rhineland countryside. The Germans seemed remote, and Nelson did not worry about getting shot unless he got back to camp too late and did not know the guard on duty. “Our war was with the second lieutenants, the MPs and the cooks,” he wrote in the short story “The Heroes.” “Our cooks could have messed up the Lord's Supper.” Poles who had been German prisoners did work for the US troops, and Nelson apparently had some kind of relationship with a woman named Sophie Siemaczko. What went on isn't clear, but among his papers is a plaintive letter she sent him after he returned to the States, in which she wonders why he hasn't written for so long. She complains of Poland's poverty and asks him for anything at all, especially shoes, size 7½.

Nelson was in Paris when the war ended, though he did not get to see much of the city other than masses of GIs looking for thrills in the raunchy Rue Pigalle, known as “Pig Alley” among the Allied forces. He thought he'd be going home, but instead was sent to
sunny Marseille to sit and wait. It was a wild, lawless place at the time, with a mix of troops from different nations and not enough military police to keep order. It was here that Nelson suffered his only war injury: somebody—probably a fellow soldier—hit him on the back of the head with a shoe. There were gun sellers, Senegalese looking to roll unwary GIs, and a roaring trade in prostitution, with soldiers stampeding into bordellos between raids. In the short story “He Couldn't Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn,” about a black soldier who escapes his unit, Marseille is described as “a workers' city, a dirty dockside mechanic sprawling, in a drunken sleep, his feet trailing the littered sea.” In his last months of service, Nelson had no unit to give him orders, and nothing to do but gamble heavily, drink Chianti, and try to make black-market money by selling cigarettes, razor blades, shoes, and Eisenhower jackets from inside a tiny pizza parlor. One of his crap-shooting buddies was a little Italian bookie. Nelson would say, “Pick it up, Joe, pick it up,” and he would say, “
Don't
worry, gotta golden arm.”

Nelson was finally discharged and returned to Chicago in December of 1945. He may have lived at Goldie's place on Lawrence for a little while—his name was on the door—before he found an apartment at 1523 West Wabansia for ten dollars a month. He had returned without wounds, or medals for bravery, but with a different last name—having changed it legally from Abraham to Algren in January of 1944. His identity as a writer was complete, and he would do no other type of work for the rest of his life.

The Wabansia “nest” was a good place for writing—just two clean rooms at the back of a building, a bed, a table, a narrow back porch to get some sun, a sink with a faucet, a toilet but no shower, refrigerator, or heat; Nelson fixed the last problem by hauling a fuel oil stove up the stairs. The whole place rattled when a train went by. He showered at the YMCA, where he also liked to swim, jump rope, and work at the punching bag. It was wonderful to
have privacy after more than two years of communal living in the army. He told Amanda in a letter that about a third of his time was spent listening to the radio—
Duffy's Tavern
, Fred Allen, lectures on literature from the University of Illinois, and Henry Morgan, a controversial satirist whose subversive humor matched Nelson's own, announcing “Good evening, anybody” as Nelson made himself a dinner of stew or pork chops in his cluttered yellow kitchen. Morgan poked fun at his sponsors, the government, the city, the country, the education system,
The Mikado
—anything that came along. He liked to play records by Spike Jones, who parodied popular music. In one January 1947 show, Morgan pretended to take a reporting trip to the southern state of “Kornpone,” where “I recognized many old friends as I peeked under each hood.” Asked about the governor, a local responded that everything was “O-K-K-K.”

Nelson also loved to listen to music—both recorded and live at clubs like the Jazz, Ltd., at State and Grand, a Dixieland club run by clarinetist Bill Reinhardt. Documentary films about Nelson always give him a jazz background, with saxophones wailing in midnight landscapes—as if he were constantly living in his own film noir, followed by a bebop combo. It is true that Nelson loved jazz and blues, and especially admired female singers like Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Marlene Dietrich—singers with smoky, weary voices who always sounded like they were singing the truth. But he also liked classical music—he went to the orchestra, listened to the symphonies on the radio, and would quote the light opera masters Gilbert and Sullivan. He also was a fan of the folk singers Pete Seeger and Burl Ives, and his collection included a multialbum set of Irish harp music. The music he most frequently heard at the bars around Division Street would not have been jazz, but Polish polkas and obereks.

Afternoons were spent playing softball or poker with guys from the nearby Tabaka tavern. Despite the name, Chicago softball is not
a gentle pastime—the game is played with a sixteen-inch boulder, thrown hard, and caught without gloves. Algren's friend, newspaper columnist Mike Royko, used to complain that many of the Ivy Leaguers at the
Chicago Sun-Times
did not want to play because they were afraid they'd hurt their hands, so he had to find ringers for the paper's team. But Nelson was not burdened with this sense of caution—and he mangled his left-hand pinky badly enough in service of the Tabaka Boosters that he could not type with it for weeks. It is just as well he was not a better athlete—catching the ball too often could have ended his career.

As for poker, it supplied plenty of material to write about, but at a high cost, since he was terrible at it, though he liked to brag otherwise. His friend Dave Peltz remembered that when a straight fell into his hands, Nelson's eyes shone “like bright lights. He couldn't hide it.”

He also had mixed luck at getting grant money. He had applied repeatedly and unsuccessfully over the years for a Guggenheim, recruiting Martha and Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg as sponsors. Back from the army, he tried again for the prize, this time with the idea of writing a war novel, but found that after two months the war had already started slipping away. He wrote the story of the black soldier in Marseille, but was not satisfied with it, and could not spin it into anything bigger. From his window looking out on the alley, he could watch life spilling in and out of the neon-lit taverns all night long, and he started putting together the stories that became his second great Chicago book,
The Neon Wilderness
, and thinking about the characters who would people
The Man with the Golden Arm.