Algren (29 page)

The last day of Simone's visit was filled with awkward silences—he had told her he was thinking of remarrying Amanda and things could not go on as before. Simone was lying in bed in the back room, drowsing in the unusual late-October heat, surrounded by newspapers and magazines when Nelson came in with a strange expression on his face. She sat up suddenly, asking what was wrong. Simone remembered that “his face crumpled, he fell to his knees beside the bed, he told me he loved me.” And they became lovers again for the few hours they had left.

Simone got onto the South Shore train to Chicago crying, trying to unpack this ball of confusion. She had tried to tell Nelson that it was nice to have him as a friend, and he had told her, “It's not friendship. I can never offer you less than love.” After flying to New York, she wrote Nelson a letter from the Lincoln Hotel, asking if everything was really over. She admitted that she had felt guilty about the relationship since the beginning, knowing she loved him
so much yet could give him so little. She begged him to please keep her in his heart until they could meet again. “I am just a poor heap of crumbling pieces.”

This sorrowful letter, sent on October 30, must have arrived just as Chicago got socked by a big temperature drop and back-to-back November snowstorms, and Nelson had plenty of time to pace his lake house and brood, watching the wet November snow coat the trees and melt into the still-unfrozen waters of the lagoon. He wrote back that he could still have feelings for someone and yet not allow her to rule or disturb his life. “To love a woman who does not belong to you, who puts other things and other people before you, without there ever being any question of your taking first place, is something that just isn't acceptable.” He wanted a different kind of life, with a woman and a house of his own. He told her that he was trying to take his life back from Simone—he did not like it belonging to someone he saw only a few weeks every year.

Simone wrote back that he was not being fair. Her visit was brief because he had invited her for only a short time, and it had been two years now since he had come to see her in France. For the past three years, she had accepted the idea that he would love other women—how could she be holding him back? She would try not to love him, and joked that she would instead love her new black car. “Well, that's that,” Simone thought, believing she would never again fall asleep feeling another person's warmth. It was painful, but the experience was not wasted—she was hard at work at the time on both an essay on the Marquis de Sade and the novel that would include a barely disguised account of her relationship with Nelson. The FBI was not the only one taking notes.

Nelson was lonely and pursued relationships with other women in the next few months, including Mari Sabusawa, a petite, politically active Japanese American who would marry the novelist James Michener; a blonde named Barbara Fitzgerald; and his
old drug-addict friend Margo. Algren's friends said women used to throw themselves at him in those days—he still had a rugged attractiveness. He also was a great listener—a draw for any woman, remembered Doris Peltz. “He was gentle, appreciative,” Peltz said. “I never heard him raise his voice,
never
.”

His neighbors in Miller saw all the women coming in and out of Algren's house and explained to their children that Mr. Algren went through a lot of “housekeepers,” said Dave Witter, whose family lived nearby. Simone was supportive of the relationship with Barbara, offering to let her come to France and visit. But she was mystified by his continued attraction to Margo, who was still struggling with addiction. “Why don't you marry a nice
clean
American girl,” Simone wondered. Dave Peltz understood better—he thought troubled Margo was “raggedy, a stray cat” like Nelson himself, and they seemed to understand each other. But like a stray cat, Margo came and went.

Missing a family of his own, Nelson let himself be adopted by other people's families—staying in the city overnight with Jack and Gladys Conroy or Studs and Ida Terkel, or playing and drawing pictures with the Rowland and Shay children. Art remembered how Nelson shocked his gentle wife, Florence, during one visit, while they discussed a newspaper story about a hitchhiker who murdered an entire family. On each of the man's knuckles was tattooed a letter, spelling out
H-A-R-D-L-U-C-K
.

“That poor son-of-a-bitch!” Nelson commented.

“You mean the father?” Florence asked.

“No, the hitchhiker,” Nelson responded, causing Florence to hit him with the newspaper. But Nelson wondered what had happened to the hitchhiker in his life to make him do something so awful. His sympathy was with the guilty.

It was a tough winter by the lake—with heavy snowstorms. The local kids skated and played hockey in the lagoon, which Nelson
used as a shortcut to and from the little grocery store. Feeling flush from new foreign translations and an appearance on a television show, Nelson bought Goldie a fur coat. He continued his practice from Wabansia of giving presents to his neighbors—on Christmas he would stick bottles of liquor into his Miller neighbors' mailboxes. His feelings of nostalgia and longing for family seemed to have deepened with the marriage of his niece, Ruth, that spring in a traditional Jewish ceremony, with solemn music. It underscored the passing of time.

As the deep snow finally melted away around his little house, Nelson acquired a cat that he named Bubu de Montparnasse, after a character in a French novel. It was a furry, homely, randy outdoor cat, built like a badger, with short legs and long hair that was once white with orange markings, but was now too dirty for its colors to be distinguishable.

“Bubu came out of the woods only when the weather was bad, or when love-making had exhausted her,” he wrote in an unpublished sketch. As he typed at his desk under a gooseneck lamp by the front picture window of his little Indiana house at night, he could hear her ecstatic yowls out in the trees, “part pleasure and part pain.”

“You're a terrible little bum,” he'd tell her when she came in for milk. She would then jump into a drawer full of his manuscripts to go to sleep, littering them with sand and orange hairs and the leaves she had picked up on her dirty behind. Then, alone with his typewriter in the too-quiet suburban night and struggling over a passage, Nelson would get aggravated and take it out on the only living creature around. He would get out of his old swivel chair with the stuffing coming out of the cushion, snatch Bubu out of the drawer by the scruff of her neck, and toss her out the door.

“It was himself he was throwing outside,” Dave Peltz said.

On May 21, 1952, actor John Garfield died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. He hadn't been able to work in Hollywood since the blacklist, which some blamed for aggravating his long-term heart problems. “He defended his streetboy's honor, and they killed him for it,” said writer Abraham Polonsky. Bob Roberts got blacklisted, too, and would immigrate to England. Even if Garfield hadn't died, he may not have done the movie based on Algren's novel. Ingo Preminger, the brother of maverick director Otto Preminger, said that Garfield had already abandoned the idea of playing Frankie Machine because of concern about the production code. After John's death the rights to the film were bought by a group of investors led by Ingo. Ingo had argued to Otto that
Golden Arm
would give Otto a chance to break the production code and further establish his artistic independence—the novel itself was of little importance.

I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon.

It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN

Hollywood! It's like an old chair—if it's useful, keep it;

if not, give it to Goodwill.

—S
YLVIA
S
IDNEY

In December of 1951, David Dempsey of the
New York Times
reported that Nelson Algren was rewriting his first novel,
Somebody in Boots
. Ken McCormick, feeling the momentum from
The Man with the Golden Arm s
lipping away, hoped something would happen soon. The publisher had bought the rights to the novel from Vanguard—but Nelson was finding the project trickier than he had imagined. It would take more than just excising the musty quotes from
The Communist Manifesto
that started the sections. The year 1935 was two wars, three books, and a New Deal ago, and Nelson felt his first novel was like a “bag of dead bones.” He regretted taking the $1,500 advance—he had no interest in breathing new life into that “schmuck” Cass McKay.

Instead, Nelson was working on other projects—both literary and political. On July 17, 1950, Julius Rosenberg, a machinist and former government worker, was arrested on charges that he had helped the Soviets acquire information on how to build the atomic bomb. The next month, his wife, Ethel, was also arrested. Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who had already pleaded guilty, testified against them both. There was no documentary evidence and the prosecution focused heavily on the Rosenbergs' liberal politics, including the fact they were active members of trade unions. The Rosenbergs and a third man named Morton Sobell were convicted, and while Sobell got thirty years and Greenglass fifteen years, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. While the mainstream press supported the prosecution, in August 1951 the
National Guardian
published a series of articles comparing the Rosenberg case to the infamous Dreyfus affair from nineteenth-century France. In both cases anti-Semitism was blamed for the harshness of the prosecution. Those protesting the conviction complained both of the weakness of the case, particularly against Ethel, and the severity of the penalty. Nelson was outraged and became intensely involved with both the national and Chicago-area committees demanding a new trial. The case was not just a cause for American leftists—the Rosenbergs' plight attracted support from a wide variety of international celebrities, including Sartre, Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and even Pope Pius XII.

In March of 1952, Nelson told the
Daily Worker
newspaper that “the whole business is straight out of Cotton Mather—the execution of a decent man and woman for non-conformity. It is medieval.” That April he signed on to a letter asking for financial support for the Rosenbergs' cause, saying that their execution would endanger the Bill of Rights. Fellow signatories included civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois and novelist Waldo Frank. On the Chicago committee, Nelson kept busy with speaking and fund-raising events
throughout 1952. At one August meeting Nelson attended at a downtown hotel, the couples' letters were acted out as skits. Algren's involvement was recorded by the FBI, along with any other action he took for political causes during the 1950s, no matter how seemingly benign. This included the unsuccessful 1951 campaign to elect attorney Pearl M. Hart, an advocate for immigrants later known as a pioneer in the gay rights movement, as alderman of Chicago's Forty-Fourth Ward. Someone at these meetings was always eager to tell the FBI who was there, including an acquaintance of Studs Terkel, who reported that Studs said Nelson was “a very good guy politically” but not active, which the informant took to mean not necessarily a Communist Party member. Studs and Ida Terkel and Jack Conroy were also being watched. NBC had dropped Studs's critically acclaimed NBC television show
Studs' Place
off its schedule after he refused to take a loyalty oath. The walls were closing in on Nelson and his friends—and he was pushing back. Judging from his file, Nelson's involvement in political and cultural causes increased, rather than decreased, in the age of McCarthyism. The threat of the blacklist only seemed to encourage him. His cause was not Communism, but freedom of speech and opposition to state-sponsored murder. He told Simone that the Soviet Union was not a workers' democracy, and that the Rosenbergs had died for a lie. Years after the execution, Algren told writer H. E. F. Donohue that he was not saying the Rosenbergs weren't spies—“All I'm saying is that we shouldn't have burned them.”

In the late summer of 1952, Chicago literary editor Van Allen Bradley came out to Nelson's Gary house for drinks and a hot-weather lunch of chicken, ham, cheeses, vegetables, and watermelon, served by Amanda, who was again visiting from California. They both explained to Bradley that they were divorced, but it was amicable. In fact they were discussing getting back together. Algren talked with Bradley about his reading habits—he still loved Dickens
and Hemingway, and every two years he reread Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
. He also was writing—sometimes for as long as six to seven hours at a stretch, sometimes for as little as two. Asked by Bradley if he cared about negative reactions to his work, Algren responded that this was not his concern. “Every serious writer is interested only in expressing himself,” Nelson said. “He doesn't care what the reaction was.” This was nonsense—Nelson kept his reviews pasted into scrapbooks, almost killed himself over the failure of
Somebody in Boots
, and complained for decades about the Polish Roman Catholic Union. But this was the line he gave Bradley for the article, a southern gentleman who copied it dutifully, though he probably knew better. Bradley asked Algren if he would consider writing something for the Christmas book section of the
Daily News
. Earlier that summer, Algren had made a speech at the University of Missouri about the challenges of being a writer in a conformist age, so he chose this topic for the Christmas issue—following Dickens's tradition of using the holiday season as a call to conscience. The two-thousand-word article “Great Writing Bogged Down in Fear, Says Novelist Algren” appeared on December 3, 1952. It criticized McCarthyism and America's inability to see its own problems, and asserted that “the condition of liberty is the capacity to doubt one's own faith and to doubt it out loud as well.”