Algren by Mary Wisniewski Page B

Congress, Jack and Bud’s buffoonery got in the way of Nelson’s attempt to pick up a blonde at a bar. It was also at this congress that Nelson had a chance to see Ernest Hemingway, his hero among living American writers. Hemingway spoke on the writer’s responsibility to fight against Fascism and to tell the truth as he sees it so that it becomes a part of the reader’s experience. Hemingway’s future wife, Martha Gellhorn, also spoke at the conference. They later began corresponding with Nelson, and both became powerful advocates of his books.
    Nelson’s desire to be with the Fallonites in “lusty, smoky and virile” East St. Louis showed a touch of masochism—more of the desire to live on the thin edge of things that had gotten him into trouble in Texas. He was never really a tough guy, but he wanted to act the part of a tough guy, as he had wanted to be like the semipro ball players he saw as a kid in Albany Park, and Bud Fallon and his gang offered models. If he could not be them, he wanted to understand them. As Walt Whitman said in
Leaves of Grass
, which Nelson quotes at the beginning of
Never Come Morning
:
    I feel I am of them—I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself,
    And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
    Nelson did get some benefit from the Fallonites—he learned details of brothel life and petty crime that he later used in his fiction. He wrote out notes about East St. Louis prostitutes in pencil on a big tablet of thin paper, with phrases that appear later in
Never Come Morning
. The novel suggests that the underground scene Nelson found in the cindery southern Illinois river town could be even nastier than in Chicago. He gives the hooker Chickadee, one of Mama Tomek’s girls, an origin in East St. Louis taverns as an acrobatic dancer. She scoffs at northern Illinois pimps as soft on their girlfriends—“down
my
way he takes all her money ’n slaps the crap out of her.”
    It was in East St. Louis, too, that Nelson met a legless man named Freddy who inspired both Railroad Shorty in the short story “The Face on the Barroom Floor” and Achilles Schmidt in
A Walk on the Wild Side.
Freddy, who mixed colored water in a bathtub and sold it as perfume, had lost his legs as a fireman on the Michigan Central. “I believe he was the strongest man I’ve ever known,”Nelson said of Freddy. “I don’t mean just in physical terms. He had a strength of
person
that dominated every scene he occupied.” He described Freddy as both “clear as light” and capable of “tremendous rage.” Nelson kept spotting legless men, both in Chicago on North Avenue and later in Wales during World War II, symbolizing how someone could muster terrible power even after being cut to pieces.
    With leftist literary magazines falling away, radical writers found a new income through an unprecedented source—the federal government. In May of 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt set up the Works Progress Administration, a relief program that gave people jobs rather than charity. The goal was to allow skilled people to work on projects that would benefit the country, including building dams and bridges, and making public art. Indigent visual artists were set to work painting elaborate, full-color murals in school buildings and railroad stations; actors put on plays for people who did not otherwise have access to theater; and writers were sent out to collect folklore and oral histories, and produce guides for all forty-eight states. According to its mandate from Congress, the work of the Federal Writers’ Project was to “hold up a mirror to America.” Under the leadership of former journalist Henry G. Alsberg, it supported more than 6,500 writers, editors, and researchers through four years of federal funding. One commentator called it the “ugly duckling” of the WPA arts projects