Algren (41 page)

Royko knew Algren was not much appreciated by the civic leaders in town since he had never paid them any compliments. He wondered why some local university had not offered Algren a professorship that would have allowed him to make a living, and write. Other countries do that for their writers. Royko figured a university in this country would do it only “for dull writers who know how to play university politics and act properly at the dean's wife's teas,” not ones that occasionally pinched a coed. Algren was definitely not made for academia, as he showed in Iowa City. Art Shay figured that Algren was just looking for another shake of the dice, trying Paterson and the Carter case. “He wasn't making a living here,” Shay said.

Before he packed to leave, Algren held an auction of much of what he had stuffed into his Evergreen apartment over sixteen years, trying to sell every piece of junk he had—photographs, autographed magazines and copies of manuscripts, ancient crockery and a rickety table he pretended was his legendary poker table. Before the auction, he covered everything wooden with a chocolate-brown varnish—bookshelves, wainscoting, even the toilet seat. Florence Shay paid $300 for his old oak desk. Andy Austin bought a corroded teakettle that looked too grimy to ever use, along with some Bessie Smith records. She also threw Nelson a party at her Astor Street apartment. He arrived in his usual way, yelling “Cookie Monster!” outside the door, and upon admittance, receiving his martini in a prechilled glass. The dining room table held a large sheet cake with a map on it showing the route from Chicago to Paterson. Andy's young daughter and other writers and artists and musicians stood around the table, admiring and laughing over the cake. Nelson stared at the confectionary map, then reached down, put his arm on one side of it, and swept it across, smearing off all the frosting. Everyone was silent with horror and surprise for a minute, and then someone picked up a sticky hunk of cake and threw it. Then everyone started throwing cake, as Andy's startled daughter hid under the table. Andy played the good hostess and pretended this was all in good fun, but Nelson's gesture mystified her. It was probably meant to be funny, but it came off as angry. With Nelson the two were often mixed.

On his way to the train out of Chicago, Nelson was pursued by television reporters asking why he was leaving. One of them rode with him all the way to Gary, Indiana, and bought him a double martini to try to make him talk. But Nelson would not say what he figured the reporter wanted him to say—something sentimental about Chicago. “He even wanted me to read from one of yesterday's books, but I declined, so he read it,” Nelson wrote Suzanne McNear
as he sat among jumbles of boxes in his new flat in Paterson. “I don't know what he read, I wasn't listening. What's so terrific about leaving a city where you never felt welcome anyhow?” But he also wondered to Suzanne what he was doing in New Jersey. Other than Hogan, and a big, hard-drinking, pugnacious New York homicide detective named Roy Finer, he knew nobody. He was all alone.

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged into his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water.

—H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE,
M
OBY
D
ICK

In 1976, due to work by both the
New York Times
and Fred Hogan, Alfred Bello and Arthur Bradley recanted their testimony in the Rubin Carter case, and his guilty conviction was overturned. Carter was hailed as a civil rights hero, and Bob Dylan, who had written the hit song “Hurricane” about his case in 1975, held fund-raising concerts on his behalf with Joan Baez and Roberta Flack. Heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali had attended a hearing to show his support for Carter. With all the interest about the Carter case, Candida Donadio figured she could sell Algren's book for $50,000, Algren recalled. But G. P. Putnam turned it down—Algren's publisher and others seemed to think the manuscript contained too much case transcript and not enough Algren.

Then the Carter case took another tragic twist. At the retrial in December of 1976, Passaic County prosecutors introduced the motive that Carter and John Artis had committed the murder in
revenge for an earlier killing of a black tavern owner. Bello went back on his recantation, and placed Carter and Artis at the murder scene. After being freed for nine months, they were convicted again and went back to prison. Nelson was so shocked that it took three days to pick himself up off the floor, he told Jan Herman. The celebrities who had rallied around their case mostly deserted it.

Algren had gotten to the Carter case early and stuck with it, continuing to meet with Hogan and following the case through the appeals process. In trouble over back rent, and threatened and harassed by other Paterson residents for his political views, he moved to a duplex on Maple Avenue in Hackensack, on a tree-lined street with a view of a blinking Sears sign. Nelson decided to turn the story into something he knew better—a novel, which he at first called “The Fighter” and then “Chinatown.” He later changed this title to
The Devil's Stocking
—he said a Times Square prostitute had used this description for a man so crazy he was like a stocking knitted backward. Carter was transformed into Ruby Calhoun, and Algren added a fictional prostitute named Dovie-Jean and a mulatto sparring partner named Red Haloways. The basics of the plot were almost identical to Carter's real story—the promising boxer with a troubled past, the triple murder, the lying witnesses, and a racist justice system. The novel includes details from the Rahway State Prison riot that Carter had helped to calm in 1971. Bello became Iello, and Hogan is Kerrigan.

According to correspondence from Candida Donadio, Nelson wanted $100,000 for the novel—he wanted a house of his own by the sea, and he hoped that his first novel in twenty years would get it for him. She was finding it a tough sell—the manuscript she got in 1979 was in rough shape, with flat writing that seemed like undigested reporter's notes and a whole section that appeared to be the transcript of an evidentiary hearing, in straight question-and-answer format. It was neither good journalism nor good fiction—the
marriage had resulted in a stillbirth. Candida found some interest from a publisher for $15,000, but that was not enough for Nelson. He was not able to find an American publisher for
The Devil's Stocking
. Eventually Arbor House brought it out in 1983, two years after his death. Carter's conviction was finally overturned in 1985, with the judge saying that the case had been based on racism and concealing evidence.

Dedicated to Stephen Deutch,
The Devil's Stocking
is unlike any of Algren's other books, and the difference is not good. It has almost none of the lyricism of his earlier novels and stories, and little of the humor of his journalism. It is, as he once described Beauvoir's writing, like eating cardboard. The character of Calhoun is fuzzy, a pile of notes for an intelligent, oppressed black man rather than a real human being. Adeline, the bail bondswoman who helps Ruby's case, is a sexist stereotype—a repressed career woman who needs a virile man to make her stop being so uptight. Her sex scene with Calhoun is painful to read, with lines like “Calhoun prolonged her orgasm with the same cool passion he sometimes worked in the ring.” The novel makes Algren's usual strong charges of corruption and hypocrisy against American society, and it is clear that the prosecutors and police committed a terrible crime in the case by withholding and falsifying evidence. But it feels like a lecture, rather than art.

The two strongest characters in the book are Red and Dovie-Jean. Dovie-Jean is a black prostitute victimized by her circumstances, beginning as a child when her mother dies. She wants to give love, and is always punished for it. Dovie-Jean is the focus of some of the novel's sharpest observations—for example, she is moved by the Statue of Liberty, thinking herself as among the “homeless and tempest-tossed yearning to be free.” But as a descendant of slaves, “she hadn't even been invited.” Like Molly Novotny in
Golden Arm
, Dovie-Jean is defined mostly by the love she offers to a man who is lost—she gives Red a chance to feel real.

Red, the half-crazy sparring partner who makes money in bars lip-synching to white singers like Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis, is the character who seems most alive in the novel. Algren scholar James Giles describes Red as an “example of man at his crummiest,” like a character out of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The “devil's stocking” of the title, Red is a black man who can pass for white in a racist society and has no clear idea of who he really is. The novel implies that it is Red who actually committed the murders for which Ruby is in prison, to avenge the murder of his own father. It is also Red who kills a minor character who stands for Algren himself—an old man at a bar who protests the price of the drinks, and who like Algren had written the New York mayor to complain about prostitution laws and offer himself for arrest. Like Nelson's other doomed characters—Bruno Bicek and Dove Linkhorn—Red has a chance for love, and squanders it. His self-deception is so damaging that he thinks he does not want a black woman, and puts Dovie-Jean into a situation that leads to her murder. The novel ends with Red in a madhouse, like Sophie in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. It is here that the old Algren returns, with Red occupying himself by neatly tearing strips out of the newspaper to make it easier to throw away. In the madhouse Red meets with Nick LeForti, who had killed Red's father. The old man tells Red that he committed himself because he wanted to “get away from the niggers.” Red said that he wanted the same. This is the most touching section of the whole book, showing a man completely crazed by the conditions of society. The book ends back at the bar where the murders took place, where “all is changed. And everything remains the same.”

The critic Herbert Mitgang, who wrote what he likely hoped was a flattering foreword, seems wistful for what the novel could have been if Algren had had more time to revise, writing that “there are touches of language here and there that remind you that Algren
could be eloquent.” But Algren did not lack for time—he had had six years to work on the Carter book. What he seemed to lack instead was energy—he could no longer do the kind of writing he had done in the 1940s, when he built
Never Come Morning
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
out of constant writing and rewriting. In contrast
The Devil's Stocking
seems flat and underwritten.

It was not at all like the writing he had done for
The Man with the Golden Arm
, or even the unpublished
Entrapment
, with phrases polished and repolished over and over until they glowed. He was not willing to work that hard anymore, said Jan Herman, who interviewed him while he was working on the novel in late 1978. He told Herman he was “tied to a typewriter, but it's a long chain. I can let that thing go for weeks.”

“He didn't feel driven to write anything,” said Herman. “I think he wrote the last book because he wanted to make some money on it. It wasn't as if he needed to write another masterpiece.”

Joe Pintauro thought it was sad that Algren had wasted his last productive years in New Jersey writing the Carter book. “Just imagine Nelson in Paris during all of that, hanging out and living with some great gal, making Simone jealous or just staying friends with her and elbowing around with some of her ilk—he would have been so much better off,” said Pintauro.

In interviews Algren expressed excitement about the new book—he said it was written “from my guts,” the only kind of story worth telling—a man's struggle against injustice. He claimed he was not worried about money—like Mr. Micawber of Dickens's
David Copperfield
, he was always sure something would turn up. But by the end of 1979, the dogged Candida Donadio had not found a taker for
The Devil's Stocking
, and according to Suzanne McNear, Nelson was in poor health. Around Christmas he had a heart attack and landed in a Hackensack hospital. A doctor put in a pacemaker, but Nelson insisted that it be taken out—he felt he did not need it.

Algren's life seemed like it was coming to a sad end—he was without a family, he was broke, his books were out of print, he could not find an American publisher for his latest novel, and he was little recognized by the literary elite. But he received a bit of grace at the end that turned things around, and made his last year among the happiest in his life.

One boon was that the kindly and enthusiastic Jan Herman had helped put Algren in touch with his friend Carl Weissner, a well-regarded German translator who specialized in nonmainstream American literature and had translated
The Man with the Golden Arm
. Weissner found a West German publisher who wanted to bring out not just
The Devil's Stocking
but also other Algren works in new German translations. “Why did we ever go to war with the Krauts?” Algren joked, buoyant with his new chances overseas. Europe always seemed more enthusiastic about Nelson's harsh depictions about the United States than Americans did. Besides the French translations arranged by Sartre and Beauvoir, editions in Italian were also bringing Algren royalties. Some money, enough to help him live, started to flow in from West Germany for translations of his short stories, with more to come.

The other bit of luck started out as a crisis. Algren's Hackensack house was being sold, so he had moved out to a rental in Southampton, Long Island. But the place was too small for Algren's accumulation of stuff, which was considerable despite the 1975 estate sale. He still had his complete, leather-bound set of Dickens, his Colette, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, and Melville, his desk, his typewriter, multiple manuscripts, his old red tin tobacco box with three hundred letters from Simone, collages, and the Christmas lights he liked to string up in all seasons—and the landlady would not let him move everything in. She thought all that paper presented a fire hazard. His things were scattered all over the lawn. She was also annoyed that his $2,000 deposit check had bounced.