Algren (40 page)

“Nelson never did that,” Ginny said. “He was not nice to me after we had sex. After he would
FUCK
me, he didn't say a word!” She said the expletive so loudly that the maître d' had to ask them to leave. They left for Riccardo's, where Ginny told Rick sadly that Nelson was a “beast” to women and she thought he only slept with her because he could not have Marilew.

A significant woman friend of Nelson's from the 1970s was McNear, a blonde, blue-eyed, delicate-featured Wisconsin native with three young daughters. Suzanne was an editor for
Playboy
's fiction section, and she and a fellow editor had invited Nelson and Studs to a dinner party in 1970. Nelson fell asleep and Suzanne was surprised to find him still in her home when she got up in the morning, reading a book. “I don't think you have all the right books in your collection,” Nelson said. She responded, in defense, that she had been moving a lot. “There are a lot of things you need, including mine,” he said.

Soon thereafter he brought her a pile of his books to read, and they became friends, though not lovers, meeting regularly for drinks and dinner. He loved her daughters, and liked to take them out to the circus and matinees at the Goodman Theater. He also introduced them to his friend, the French mime Marcel Marceau. Suzanne's youngest, Mary, was so pleased with their excursions that she got jealous when he once brought along another little girl, and would not speak to Nelson for a week.

His mischievous quality did not fade with age—every time he and Suzanne visited a bookshop together, he would steal a book. He would also steal from individuals—a fan sent him a first edition of one of his books to ask if he would sign it. Instead, he sold it. “I don't have any money and nobody's giving me any,” was how he explained it.

“He was a troublemaker—just for the sport of it,” McNear said.

The writing Nelson submitted during this period was often in rough shape, according to his editors. John Blades, then the book editor of the
Chicago Tribune
, was a longtime fan of Algren's who was excited to have him start writing reviews and occasional feature articles for a paper that had given him some hard criticism in the past. But the feature articles Algren submitted were often recycled from previously published work, and some of the reviews needed a lot of editing, Blades said. “I had to ask him to revise,” Blades said. Sometimes the copy would come loaded with land mines. Blades remembered how Algren's review of a biography of his old friend Ring Lardner of the Hollywood Ten was a tirade against the author of the book, Jonathan Yardley, who never forgave Blades for it. Algren's critique of the Iowa Writers' Workshop contained what Blades believed was an attack against former director Paul Engle, who was married to a Chinese woman. Algren's article mocked Engle for his “odes to fried rice.” Blades said the reference had nothing to do with the rest of the article, and would not have been
recognized by anyone but Engle and people who knew him, but was purely malicious and made the poet so furious that his assistant told Blades he would have strangled Algren if he could get near him. “It was just this perversity he had,” Blades said of Algren. “It was like a smiling cobra.”

Blades said that while he knew the
Tribune
was not getting Algren's best work, it was still distinctly Algren—a unique and valuable voice. Nelson also took the work of criticism seriously—he declined, for example, to review a book by his friend Kay Boyle because he did not want to hurt their friendship if he didn't like it. McNear said that when Algren reviewed a book, he liked to go back and read the author's previous work. “He spent a lot of time on it,” she said.

Clarus Backes, another
Tribune
book editor, had harsher memories. Backes wrote after Algren died that assigned articles would arrive “all but unprintable—disorganized, hastily done, filled with extraneous opinion and meaningless asides. We used it anyway, of course, after heavy rewriting, but I always felt a bit guilty doing so. We were cynically trading on his name under false pretenses because in fact much of what finally appeared—mediocre at best, even after all the changes—was not his work at all.”

One
Tribune
feature that was a real success was Algren's commentary on Edward Hopper's paintings. Algren had dismissed his piece to Blades as just “a bunch of captions,” but it was a unique analysis of both Hopper's work and his own—two artists who depicted American outsiders. Algren got $500 for the article, and he immediately spent all of it taking Blades, McNear, and other friends out for a fancy dinner at a Gold Coast restaurant.

In 1973 Algren tried another miscellany book—this time a mix of fiction, criticism, and reporting that he called
The Last Carousel
, after the last story in the collection. Almost every piece was what he called “old lumber”—it had been published previously, and often
revised. It included a rewrite of his childhood memories from
Who Lost an American?
, a few racetrack and whorehouse stories, pieces of the never-finished
Entrapment,
his letters from Vietnam, and a sentimental essay about the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, with the theory that they had been shot because their crimes were so much smaller than the kind practiced by big business. The collection provides a sampler of Algren's writing style in the last part of his career, from the colorful reporting of the Saigon chapters to nostalgia about Chicago at the start of the twentieth century to the poisonous criticism of academia in “Tinkle Hinkle and the Footnote King” and “Hand in Hand Through the Greenery.” There are also some absurdist pieces—“Could World War I Have Been a Mistake?” imagines a traveling show that featured Vaslav Nijinsky hitting Sergei Diaghilev with a nine-pound mackerel. First published in
Audience
in January of 1971, Nelson's story appeared a year before the Monty Python comedy troupe broadcast its fish-slapping dance routine. Popular culture was finally catching up with Nelson's brand of humor.

The Last Carousel
was by no means Algren's best book, but the quality of the pieces overall was superior to the travel books, and the reviews were strong. The
Chicago Daily News
gave the book a full-page feature review, calling it Algren's best in twenty years. “Algren is one of those who writes by ear, saving a well-turned phrase, in love with the music that words make,” the paper wrote. The San Francisco, Washington, and New York papers all came in with praise, too, with James Frakes at the
New York Times Book Review
raving that this was Algren “at the top of his form.” While he quibbled with some of the selections, and some of the hokier turns of phrase like “fly-a-kite-spring,” Frakes said that it was about time there was a new Algren book. “When we've a living American writer as sure-footed and fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it's almost criminal not to have something of his in hardcovers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in.”

But
The Last Carousel
was not a big seller. Bill Targ at Putnam had been unhappy with the shape the “unspeakable manuscript” had been in. He complained to Algren that he sweated weekends at home and in the office over it. “Many or most editors would not have allowed some of the trivia to appear between covers,” Targ wrote, but he was trying to keep Algren happy. Algren, for his part, blamed Putnam for the weak sales. He was furious because he said the books were distributed erratically, and some of those positive reviews came in weeks before the books arrived at stores, leaving book buyers who might have been interested after seeing the review with no way to get it. He told Candida Donadio that the book did not come out in some stores until two weeks before Christmas, and that it had sold only nine thousand copies. In an interview with Henry Kisor of the
Chicago Daily News
, Algren called Targ “an inept blob.” Targ responded in a letter to Algren that he was an “inhuman turd … a liar, an ingrate and shithead.” Nelson found this response so amusing he kept it folded up in his wallet to show friends. He eventually severed his relationship with Putnam, which had carried him through two books.

Nelson was still talking about how much he had admired
In Cold Blood
, and in 1973 found a subject for a factual crime story of his own in the murder conviction of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, from Paterson, New Jersey. Algren had been following Carter's career as a middleweight contender since it began in 1961—he kept news clippings of Carter's fights. In June of 1966, two black men entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and shot the bartender, a male customer, and a female customer, all white. The men died immediately, while the woman died a month later. Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley, white convicted felons who had been near the bar that night to burglarize a factory, identified a white car leaving the scene as resembling Carter's. They later identified Carter as one of two black men they saw carrying weapons
outside the bar the night of the murder. But an actual witness from inside the bar, who had been shot in the eye, did not pick Carter as one of the shooters. Carter had weapons and bullets in his car, but they did not match the kind of bullets used in the shooting. Alibi witnesses placed Carter at a different bar at the time of the shooting, and Carter passed a lie-detector test when he was first arrested. Despite the problems with the evidence, in 1967 Carter and his friend John Artis were convicted of the triple murder and sentenced to life in prison. The story was a good fit for Algren, as a fight fan and a skeptic of American justice, especially for African Americans, and
Esquire
assigned him to write an article about the Carter case in early 1974.

To learn more about it, Algren went to New Jersey to meet with Fred Hogan, an investigator for the New Jersey Public Defender's Office who was convinced that Bello and Bradley were lying. They hit it off at once, and Hogan arranged for Algren to meet other investigators, and to talk to Rubin Carter himself in prison; Algren found Carter both intelligent and sane. According to Hogan, Algren was a thorough reporter, going to the Lafayette Bar to study how the murders happened and talking to people around the hardscrabble city about what they saw. Hogan said he had to warn Algren to be careful—it was a rough town and people were still upset about the case—but Algren showed no fear, even trying to rent rooms above the Lafayette so he could be closer to the scene. He never talked about himself as a famous writer, Hogan remembered. “I didn't really know how well-known he was,” said Hogan, who had Algren over for Christmas dinner with his family. “He was a real down-to-earth-guy, a knock-about guy, always a little disheveled.” Hogan also remembered that Algren drank a lot, and ate a lot of junk. When
Esquire
,
Playboy
, and then the
New Yorker
turned down the story, Nelson became even more interested in the case. He wanted to turn it into a book—a true-crime story that could be as big a hit
as
In Cold Blood.
Fred suggested that Nelson move to New Jersey to better understand the case, and Nelson took him up on it. It was for the same reason he went back to South Texas to work on
Somebody in Boots
—he needed to be near his subject to write about it. As he explained later, “The only way I could work is up close.”

Nelson's announcement in 1975 that he was leaving Chicago, the city most identified with his writing, hit the local newspaper and literary community like a tornado. Why would he leave Chicago, the backdrop to his own legend, for
Paterson
, of all the woebegone places in the world? Nelson gave various explanations, often joking, sometimes bitter. In a joke interview with Studs Terkel, he explained portentously that Paterson was an up-and-coming community, a new leader in welfare cases. He claimed to Steve Deutch that this all had to do with his long-standing desire to move to San Francisco. “I am only two hours from New York harbor now where I can get a ship to Barcelona or Marseille, and from there to a Greek or Cretian port, hence the Persian Gulf and down to the Indian Ocean around Yokohama and Tokyo. I won't stop in Korea because that would be going out of my way. And from Japan to Manila is a comparatively short distance. Any freight ship can make San Diego from Manila. In two weeks. Then I am only 45 minutes by air from San Francisco. So it all fits exactly as I planned.” He told Mike Royko over dinner that he was moving because he felt like moving.

In other venues he was more theatrically gloomy. In a
Chicago
magazine article, he recalled the past glories of Carl Sandburg and Richard Wright, Barney Ross and Tony Zale, and the now-vanished Riverview and White City amusement parks. Kids these days who wanted to be writers went to creative writing school, instead of living life, he groused. He saw a city of consumption for its own sake, with men honoring the phony glories of
Playboy
. He did not mention, in this article, his own hurt at not being invited to
Playboy
's twentieth anniversary party, which had been filled with
other writers. McNear said the snub had been a serious blow. But in public Algren preferred to look like he did not care what
Playboy
or anyone else thought of him. He pretended not to care, and did not mention that all his books except a paperback edition of
The Last Carousel
were out of print in 1975. Even the new independent publisher Chicago Review Press had to regretfully turn down Nelson and Studs's request to bring them out again. “So say
sayonara
and then goodbye, old broken-nose-whore of a city in whose arms I've slept ten thousand nights,” Nelson wrote. “I won't sleep in them again.”

In another interview he compared Chicago to a woman who looked good when you married her but after twenty-five years looked like hell. The city had changed. His old neighborhood had changed—the Poles were moving out, up farther northwest along Milwaukee Avenue or to the suburbs, being replaced by Puerto Ricans. “I'm out of touch with the people now. The Puerto Ricans don't talk,” he told a young reporter. He knew less Polish than Spanish, so the trouble was that he had stopped trying. He had also lost Mary Corley, his housekeeper—his friend Stuart McCarrell said her death had been terribly upsetting.