Algren (19 page)

Mary Guggenheim came to visit, but he kicked her out, wanting the flat clear in time for Simone to come back. After hemming and hawing and flirting with a jazz musician in New York, Simone called him in April from New York. Did he have any time? He did. As Lewis Brogan says in
The Mandarins
, “I have all my time. My time is all mine.”

So she flew out to Chicago. At first she remembered their encounter as awkward and unhappy. How could they top the first meeting? And if they did top it, what could they do then? In the novel she makes a sad comedy of his not understanding her request for a hotel room, and then not being able to find one, and then finding one, to her immense disappointment, instead of taking her back to his flat. She gets to see a little of the mean Nelson—gruff, chilly, impatient, a man in a stiff collar, like Herbert Hoover's. To her astonishment, he asked her if she wanted to see the zoo—the real zoo, not the one on Madison. “I didn't come here to exhibit
myself to your animals,” she sniffed. Eventually the awkwardness thawed, and he took her to see more of America—a baseball game, a bowling alley, Polish diners serving sour cream cakes, the lake-front, where they sat in the new spring grass watching children run around playing cowboys and Indians, and even more of the lower depths. He took her to the Cook County Jail, which he had visited in early March to see Julius “Dolly” Weisberg, a convicted murderer and former nightclub owner who had died in his cell before making it to the electric chair. Nelson showed her the chair and explained to her all the details he had learned of execution—how the condemned wore a white shirt with two buttons, black tights, and a black hood, how the contacts were attached at the nape of the neck and the ankle, and how the guards thought blacks needed less of a jolt than whites since blacks got more scared. He would use this all later in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. She did not return to her hotel, and they went instead back to Nelson's flat on Wabansia, where they made love on the squeaky bed with the Mexican blanket. She remembered that their lovemaking started initially because he wanted to comfort her after their whirl of strange experiences, then out of passion. At thirty-nine, she had what she described as her first complete orgasm, which speaks either very well of Nelson or very poorly of Jean-Paul Sartre.

The following evenings were spent at more dive bars and burlesques. One bar was too scary even for Nelson—he avoided it because its piano player had been shot. Entering another bar, they drank vodka, and Nelson advised her that the patrons were all sinister characters. She looked around as “a pretty young man laughingly caresses a fat dwarf,” drunks make speeches, and a dignified blonde in pearls works a dice table, reading a book about New Orleans while she waits for customers. When Nelson asked one of these dice girls if anyone had ever tried to cheat her at the game, she answered poetically, “Well, they try, but I have a very naked eye. So
they don't get away with much.” Stuck on the mirrors behind the bar were pictures of naked Japanese girls, stolen by GIs from the pockets of dead enemy soldiers. Having taken this all in, Simone looked at Nelson and told him she thought he was the only truly sinister character around there.

He took her to a mission because after all that sex and liquor it was high time to save her soul. Someone played the harmonium, and they stood with crowds of hungry tramps, pretending to sing together out of a blue hymnal. They snuck out, but the tramps stayed—there would be dinner served afterward.

She needed to return to New York, and Algren went with her, taking his first airplane ride. This time it was Simone's turn to show off what she'd found in the lower depths—the Bowery, the Harlem clubs—but Simone's biographer, Deirdre Bair, said they spent most of their time in bed at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. Nelson clowned and pretended to be in awe of the skyscrapers like the country boys from his old army unit, calling himself “only a boy from the provinces” and “a local youth.” The latter description was taken from the headline of an article he'd saved from a neighborhood newspaper after
Somebody in Boots
was published: Local Youth Writes Book. The woman who would become known as one of the mothers of feminism postponed her trip back to Paris and fussed over her “beloved local youth” for two weeks, “just like all the American women I had ridiculed for the way they catered to men's needs. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.” She described Nelson later as “unstable, moody, even neurotic,” but she liked feeling that she was the only one who understood him. To Simone he possessed the rarest of gifts, “which I should call goodness if the word had not been so abused; let me say that he really cared about people.” Nelson and Simone did not talk about Jean-Paul, not yet. There was only so much reality these famous realists could take at one time.

In mid-May it was time to say good-bye again, and this time she cried so hard in the taxi on the way to the airport bus terminal that the driver asked if she would be away from her “husband” for a long time. Nelson had given her a copy of
Never Come Morning
to open on the plane. Inside, he had written:

à Simone

I send this book with you

That it may pass

Where you shall pass:

Down the murmurous evening light

Of storied streets

In your own France

Simone, I send this poem there, too,

That part of me may go with you.

She cried again, all the way across the Atlantic. To the astonishment of her friends in Paris, she showed off the silver ring he had given her, a wide, ornate band she wore on her middle finger.

After two visits to Chicago, Nelson had figured out that while Simone may have been a bluestocking, she was not easy to shock. Simone was not some sheltered bourgeois. She had grown up poor, with a family that pretended to be rich because they used to be. One of her childhood jobs was to cut old newspapers into square pieces and thread them onto string to use for toilet paper. From her balcony in what was then the slum district of Montparnasse, she could watch oddballs—one who draped himself in a kitchen curtain, another with blue glasses whose nose was painted red on one side and yellow on the other.

As a teen in the 1920s, she would sneak out to bars and pretend to be a hooker or an artist's model. Like Nelson, she sought out the edges, attempting to see as much of the disorder of real life as
possible. She would smash glasses, snatch the hats from other customers' heads, and throw them into the air, shouting “Chapeau!” While a young teacher in Marseille, she roamed the seedy dock areas alone, and hiked through the countryside, flagging down trucks for a lift. She once jumped from a moving car in the middle of nowhere when the driver threatened her with rape. When Nelson first met her, she was still missing a front tooth from a biking accident during the war—she hadn't been able to repair it. “I want life, the whole of life,” she wrote in her diary. “I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of a flame.”

She had also been a fiercely competitive student and diligent worker—her friends called her
Castor
, the Beaver. She had taken second in philosophy in her final exam at the Sorbonne, a then unheard-of honor for a woman. The student who had come first was Sartre.

Letters between Nelson and Simone flew back and forth all that spring and summer, filled with endearments. “I am in our Chicago home as well as you are in France with me,” she wrote. “We have not parted and we'll never part. I am your wife forever.” She called him “husband.”

“I did not think I could miss anybody so hardly,” Algren wrote. “If I were to hold you just now I should cry with pain and happiness.”

This was the honeymoon time, if honeymooners can be people who don't actually see each other. Nelson worked intensely on the manuscript that became
The Man with the Golden Arm
, letters from Simone piling up in a tin box. She included in one letter mauve bellflowers; in another, a lipstick kiss. He shared with her over a dozen possible titles for his novel—she liked “High-yellow and the Dealer”—along with the names of his characters, and ideas for how they could be developed. She kept his yellow letters by her bed in her
messy, toothpaste-pink hotel room in Paris, to read again and again and memorize. She pressed him to work hard and well while they were apart, and she thought it was good that he gambled to relieve tension; she preferred to drink. She also claimed she wouldn't mind if he took other women to bed, though in another letter she threatened to poison his lips and skin to kill off any rivals. She seemed to have transmitted a little of the “Beaver” energy across the ocean. He sent her books, like Edith Wharton's
Ethan Frome
, and they talked about them through the mail. He asked her about the books he loved himself. Had she read Dreiser, London, Melville, and Twain?

It could have been a good arrangement for writers—a passionate love affair without the distraction of somebody being around the house all day. But Nelson hadn't learned from his last failed experiment with marriage, and a long-distance romance was not enough for him. He wrote that he hoped her next visit would be permanent. He planned to ask her to marry him when she returned.

There was a problem—tough for her to explain, and tougher for him ever to understand. In Paris was Sartre, an ugly little man, just five feet tall, walleyed, with a round, pitted face, yellow teeth, and enormously magnifying spectacles. He had a bad complexion and protruding ears, and was going bald. Algren once said if he had met Sartre as a stranger, he would have mistaken him for a cheerfully unsuccessful salesman of men's pants. But he had one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century—and Simone had started a conversation with him in 1929 that she knew could continue until Judgment Day, and they would still find the time too short. They had become lovers, and decided together they would not marry, but would more than marry. They would have no secrets from each other, and would have everything in common—money, work, and plans. He was exactly the companion she had dreamed about since she was an idealistic teen—he was her double, and she could share everything with him.

But Sartre was never able to stay monogamous. He was enormously egotistical, he loved the game of seduction, and faithfulness meant something different to him than it meant to normal people. He was not the first man to think he was entitled to multiple affairs—but he may have been the first one to offer a thesis for it, and get his came-in-second-in-the-
agrégation
companion to go along. He told Simone that they had an “essential love,” but that it was best that they also have “contingent love affairs.” It was braver and more revolutionary for a woman to accept this arrangement than it was for a man in those days, but Simone agreed. They both had their affairs—though Jean-Paul's were more numerous. They promised they would tell each other of any and all “contingent” loves. They would always be together, even if they were sleeping with other people. Simone later told Nelson that she and Jean-Paul had stopped being together sexually several years prior.

This sounds tidier than it was, of course, and is exactly the type of philosophical theory that blows to atoms the minute it touches actual flesh. In reality Beauvoir was often pained by Sartre's relationships, and his current affair with a married woman named Dolores Vanetti, whom he had met on his own trip to America in 1945, was more worrisome than others—there seemed a risk he might actually marry her. It would be romantic to think that Nelson was the only man Simone was thinking about in the spring of 1947, but it would not be true. Sartre had written her to postpone her trip back to France because Dolores was staying with him some extra time. Perhaps her attraction to Nelson was intensified by this parallel French-American relationship—even a tough feminist intellectual could want a little revenge. Playwright Joe Pintauro, who became friends with Nelson toward the end of Nelson's life and studied the existentialist writers, speculated that Simone was emotionally vulnerable at the time and recognized in Nelson a rising American literary star, the next Theodore Dreiser. She was coming
from a country where women were even less liberated than they were in the United States—French women hadn't even gotten the vote until the 1940s. Maybe part of what motivated Beauvior was trying to hook onto the next big thing, Pintauro said. That did not mean she did not genuinely love Nelson, but strong emotions have shadowy roots.

When Nelson wrote that he hoped next time she would come to stay, she answered that while she loved him, she had already tried to explain that she could not give her life to him. “Do you understand it? Are you not resentful about it? Will you never be? Will you always believe yet it is really love I am giving you?”

Nelson said he understood, but he did not. He told her he felt more married to her than he had ever been to Amanda, and he could agree to an unconventional relationship—she would see him, if he could, he would visit her in France, then he would go home. He wrote that he understood her concerns and knew that not being able to spend her entire life with him did not mean she did not love him. He saw how they could not uproot themselves from their native soils—Beauvoir belonged to Paris for her work, and he needed Chicago for his. These two dramatic people recklessly agreed there would be no scenes, no melodrama.

She came to him in September, and there she was, wonderful Simone, his frog wife—sometimes laughing, sometimes frowning uncomprehendingly at his slang and his jokes, listening to jazz records, drinking Southern Comfort and eating rum cake on the floor of the Wabansia goat's nest—their nickname for his apartment. He would grin his crocodile smile, twirl her around the kitchen, and lead her to bed, or sometimes, shift the typewriter on his desk for the same purpose. He never called her “Castor” as her other friends did but always “Simone,” or “Simone, honey,” spoken softly, as if he were shy about saying it. When he talked about her to friends, she was “Frenchy.” They were cozy together in the mild
Chicago September, talking about what they liked better—
Tender Is the Night
or
The Great Gatsby
, and why did the big, rich United States not take care of its artists? She worked on the travel book that became
America Day by Day
—which included heavily censored sections about her visits to Chicago—and read a draft of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, typed on yellow paper, and full of cross-outs, as she sat on the red Mexican blanket. She also read the writers he liked—Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Stephen Benét. They talked about the role of women—and compared their status with that of black Americans, how they both distorted themselves with subservience. He introduced her to his black friends in Chicago, so she saw the extreme segregation of the city. She had already befriended Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, on her trip to New York, and dedicated to them her travel memoir
America Day by Day
. She talked with Nelson about her idea for an essay on the “woman situation,” and he encouraged her to expand it into a book. Bair credits Algren for the book's American slant. Simone was inspired by Nelson's observations about race relations, as well as the 1,500-page
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
, by Gunnar Myrdal. “I should like to write a book as important as this big one about Negroes,” she confided. She joked that she would call it
Never Come Woman
. She told him later that she picked “The Second Sex” since “pansies” were the third.