Somebody in Boots Read online

  Copyright © 1935 by Nelson Algren. Copyright renewed 1962 by Nelson Algren.

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Colin Asher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Ig Publishing

  Box 2547

  New York, NY 10163

  www.igpub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-63246-044-8 (ebook)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Preface

  Part One: The Native Son

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: The Big Trouble

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three: Chicago

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Four: One Spring in this City

  Chapter 16

  Afterword

  Introduction

  NELSON ALGREN WALKED into the Manhattan offices of The Vanguard Press on September 13th, 1933, and asked to speak with the person in charge. He was twenty-four-years old—5-foot eleven, maybe 150 pounds, gaunt and disheveled. For the past several days he had been sleeping in the back of a stranger’s car as it raced east along state roads from Chicago to New York City, by way of Niagara Falls. He had one published story to his name—no appointment, no agent, no manuscript.

  Vanguard’s owner agreed to meet anyway. His name was James Henle and he wasn’t put off by Nelson’s lack of pedigree. Before he became a publisher Henle had been a journalist. He signed muckrakers after taking over Vanguard. And the press had published Karl Marx in the past, and jeremiads like People Vs. Wall Street: A Mock Trial. A scruffy drifter from Chicago was a stretch for them, but not much of one.

  Henle invited Nelson into his office, and let him talk.

  Someone from Vanguard sent me a form letter last month after my first short story was published, Nelson explained. It asked: Are you working on a novel? And I’m here to answer. I don’t have a book, but I want to write one.

  Henle played along.

  What would you write about? He asked.

  I spent last year on the road, Nelson said. I train-hopped from Chicago to New Orleans, and then spent time in Texas. If I were going to write a book it would be about drifting. I would hop freight trains into the Rio Grande Valley, and sleep in hobo jungles and eat at Rescue Missions and write about what I saw.

  Henle liked the idea. The Great Depression was lumbering into its fourth year, but no one had written an account of the economic crisis like the one Nelson described.

  I’ll give you two hundred dollars to write that book, Henle said—half up front, spread across three months.

  Nelson had been out of work since he graduated from a state college with a degree in journalism twenty-six months earlier. His family had lost their life’s savings and their business to the real estate crash and bank closures. Unemployment was near twenty-five percent, so he accepted Henle’s terms.

  What will it cost you to travel south and begin working? Henle asked.

  Nelson considered the question. He calculated the price in his head and began to answer, but then he checked himself. It would be prudent to ask high, he reasoned.

  Ten dollars, he said. It will cost ten dollars to return to Texas and begin writing.

  And then Nelson watched, in awe of his own cunning, as Henle reached for his wallet and removed ten dollars in cash. It looked like a fortune to him. The year before, he had harvested grapefruit for less than a dollar a day. He thought Henle was an idiot for parting with so much money.

  “I really, really felt tickled with myself for taking that guy,” Nelson said later.

  •

  Nelson hopped a freight train the next day and headed toward Louisiana along the South Pacific line. His plan was simple. He would retrace the route he traveled the year before—New Orleans, then west into the Rio Grande Valley—and collect material as he went. Characters would emerge from among the people he met riding box cars; dialog would drift on the air; scenes would flash past as his trains rumbled through dusty southern towns. The book would practically write itself.

  It didn’t work out that way. Nelson caught a westbound train in New Orleans as planned, but he rode it for a thousand miles—much too far. He drifted through southern Texas, then north through unfamiliar terrain until he reached El Paso. He stopped there to reassess, and because the border was so close he crossed it and visited Ciudad Juárez and found an arena and watched a bull fight. A toreador waved his flag; he slashed with his sword. A drunken American yelled—“He’ll toss ’em all. This the bes’ ol’ bull ever was in these parts.” And when the carnage ended, Nelson was as lost as he had been before it began. He hopped a freight rolling east then and headed toward the setting of the novel he was supposed to be writing, but he didn’t make it far. The railroad police stopped his train outside Sanderson, Texas, and began walking the snaking line of its cars searching for hobos.

  When the train pulled away, Nelson was stranded. It was October, and he was in the high desert. It would be cold when the sun set, so Nelson began walking along US 90. He had been on the road for three weeks and he hadn’t written a word.

  That night Nelson reached a little Texas college town called Alpine and decided to stay. There was a boarding house on the outskirts of town. A woman named Nettleton owned it, and she offered Nelson a room the size of a cell, a bed, a dresser, a desk, and one meal a day for ten dollars a month. Nelson accepted. He unpacked his things—two shirts, one pair of pants, pads, pencils. Then he went to work.

  Nelson wrote by hand beneath the harsh light of the single bare bulb hanging from his ceiling, and his method was documentary. He created a protagonist named Cass McKay, and led him along a narrative path that tracks the one Nelson traveled himself the year before—away from home, into New Orleans and then Texas, in and out of Relief Missions, through traumas. McKay’s world is a terror, and as he stumbles through it violence hardens him. A man slashes him with a knife outside a brothel. And he watches a freight burn and immolate the flock of sheep it had been carrying. He finds a child’s body by the side of the tracks. And he becomes hardened to other people’s pain.

  Eventually Nelson approached the president of the local college and gained permission to use the school’s facilities. He began typing his manuscript on campus by day, and revising by hand at night. The little money he had was spent on tobacco and coffee; he scrounged meals from trash cans. Local aspiring writers sought Nelson out, and sometimes he sat down with them over coffee or Coca Cola to discuss his work. They paid rapt attention when he held forth about literature but he didn’t do so often. Mostly, he just wrote—day and night and day and night as the clock ticked down and his money ran low. “He worked like a dog,” one student said later.

  Nelson maintained a frenzied pace for four months, but then the last installment of his advance arrived and he spent it. The book was only half-written. He had to return to Chicago so he could finish writing but he recoiled from the idea. His parents’ house was crowded with family members displaced by the Depression; everyone was out of work.

  In late January, Nelson prepared to leave Alpine. He couldn’t delay his departure any longer. He sent some letters north, and said goodbye to the students he befriended. He penned a homesick poem—“All night one night I heard your voice, my city.” Then he walked up to the college campus.

  It was late and dark when Nelson arrived, and he began te
sting doors. Eventually he found one that was unlocked. When he did, he opened it and entered an office. There was a desk inside, and on it there was a typewriter. Nelson sat down and plunked out a few lines of text on the machine. Then he picked it up and carried it off the campus and down the hill to his boarding house. When he reached his room he sealed the typewriter inside a crate. And in the morning he mailed it to his parents, charges reversed.

  A freight train passed through Alpine before noon that day and Nelson hopped on board and rode north. It stopped after forty miles, and Nelson stepped off and began warming himself in the sun by the side of the tracks. That’s where the police found him. They asked his name. Then they took him into custody and brought him to Alpine where he confessed.

  “A typewriter is the only means I had to complete a book which means either a few dollars or utter destitution,” Nelson told the sheriff. “There is nothing that is more vital to my mere existence as a typewriter, it is the only means I have to earn a living. If I write I can earn my own living.”

  And then the sheriff locked Nelson inside the Brewster County Jail.

  A week passed while Nelson waited for his trial, two, three—his deadline came and went and he began to stew. He watched the clouds through the barred windows of his cell. Sometimes he played checkers. He pictured his future and saw the state prison at Huntsville, a chain gang—the end of a career than never began. The other inmates beat him with belts, and he caught hives and they covered his body.

  He wrote a letter to a friend. “I’m halfway to hell,” it read.

  Nelson’s trial began in February. The proceedings started in the morning and they were finished by lunch. First the lawyers made their cases; then the jury left the room to deliberate.

  The foreman returned quickly.

  “We, the jury,” he began, “find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment and for his punishment a confinement in the penitentiary for a term of two years.” The foreman paused. Then he continued speaking: “Furthermore, we recommend that the sentence be suspended during the good behavior of the defendant.”

  The judge agreed, and Nelson was released—a felon, but a free man.

  Nelson returned to Chicago after the trauma of his incarceration looking for allies and answers. A friend suggested he could find both at 1475 S. Michigan Ave. An arts organization called the John Reed Club met there—writers gathered in the group’s meeting room, and painters. They had their own magazine, Left Turn. And close ties with the Communist Party. Nelson said he would visit.

  He found the Club on the second floor of a dingy building hard by the freight tracks on Chicago’s Near South Side. Murals covered the walls. Magazines published in the USSR were stacked on tables. And when people met to discuss literature or painting they didn’t worry over technique. Art was measured by only a single criterion at the club: Does it serve the revolution? Meetings ended with a group rendition of the “Internationale.”

  Arise ye prisoners of starvation, members sang, Arise ye wretched of the earth.

  Nelson was a star at the Club—one of the only members with a book in the works. And he became a regular. He attended Tuesday meetings that winter, and rabble rousing speeches. He even began making friends. Abraham Aaron was among the first. He was a young militant who had dropped out of college to help start the revolution. Richard Wright, a shy, moon-faced writer from Mississippi who had just published his first poems followed soon after. Then Nelson met a woman, and moved himself into her apartment.

  For the next three seasons those were the corners of Nelson’s life—the Club and its politics, drinking coffee into the early morning hours with Aaron, debating revolutionary literature with Wright, and plugging away at his novel in his girlfriend’s apartment.

  As Nelson worked, the new ideas he was being exposed to found their way into his book. His method changed. The observational, journalistic tone he employed in his early chapters faded, and anger seeped into text—politics, advocacy. Nelson wasn’t content to describe the predation he had seen on the road the way he imagined he would when he pitched his novel to James Henle. He wanted to diagnose causes now as well, and propose solutions.

  Nelson revised and expanded his book, and as he did the violence and crushing despair his characters experience in its early chapters transformed into a preamble to an argument for revolution. “The kewpie doll lay in a dark pool beside her, and people began running up to see,” Nelson wrote. “Now came months that caught Cass up on a dark human tide. Whole families piled into cattle-cars, women rode in reefers; old men rode the brakebeams, holding steel rods above the wheels with fingers palsied by age.”

  Chicago, Nelson said, is “trying with noise and flags to hide the corruption that private ownership had brought it.” “It’s the big trouble everywhere,” he proclaimed, and then he warned—“Get all you can while yet you may. For the red day will come for your kind, be assured.”

  When Nelson finished writing he submitted his manuscript to The Vanguard Press with the title Native Son, but they changed it to Somebody in Boots. It was a demand, not a request. More followed.

  Vanguard felt the novel was not marketable and they used that argument like a cudgel against Nelson—he needed the book to sell, and they knew he did. Over the next few months, he removed some of the political content at their request, and transformed an interracial marriage into a union between a white man and a white woman. He cut some violent material as well. And then he resubmitted his book and waited.

  It took Vanguard four months to print Nelson’s novel—not much time, but enough for his dreams to develop outsized proportions. He began telling people he had written a sensation—a singular account of poverty, a piece of gospel truth bound to become a best seller. He was right, in part.

  Somebody in Boots was released in March, 1935, to good reviews but tepid public reaction. It had no natural constituency. Some readers thought it was too violent, others too sexual. The revolutionary politics scared away the mainstream, but revolutionaries thought Nelson hadn’t gone far enough. He introduced Cass McKay to the Communist Party in the text, but never allowed him to commit to the cause. For true believers, that felt like betrayal.

  Three hundred people bought Boots, four, five, six, seven—then, nothing. It didn’t even earn back its meager advance.

  A few weeks after the book’s release, Nelson’s girlfriend returned to her apartment late at night and found him unconscious on the floor with a gas line shoved down his throat. She thought he was dead.

  Nelson survived his suicide attempt, of course, but he was a phantom for several years afterward. He licked his wounds and fell in love and found a job; he killed one year working with the Communist Party, and another carousing. He carried a notepad everywhere he went but he never seemed to do anything with his material. Five years passed, six. Friends began teasing him. They said he would never publish again. An acquaintance mocked him. You’re a “flash in the pan,” the man wrote, a “mediocrity,” “the almost-but-not-quite Algren.”

  Nelson shut them all up in 1942. Never Come Morning, his second novel, was released that year and struck his doubters like a well-executed hook—they didn’t see it coming and after it found purchase they never felt quite so sure of themselves again. Critics adored Morning, and eventually it sold a million copies.

  Thus began the second phase of Nelson’s career—a period when he wrote books distinct from the text you’re holding in almost every way. They saunter where this one stomps, and their characters dream and laugh. The worlds contained between their covers are alive with music, and thick with ideas. Even their titles set them apart. Somebody in Boots is a blunt declaration, but Never Come Morning and The Neon Wilderness and The Man with the Golden Arm and Chicago: City on the Make and A Walk on the Wild Side move with the tempo of a good bar of blues when you say them fast.

  After Morning was published, Nelson’s books began selling by the hundreds of thousands instead of the hundreds. Fame replaced poverty. Somebody in
Boots was forgotten, and Nelson was grateful that it was—of the eleven books he wrote this one “betrayed” him the most. So long as it survives so does an account of the worst years of his life.

  Somebody in Boots slipped out of print for twenty-two years after its release, and returned then only because Nelson needed the money a paperback publisher promised him for a reissue. His agreement came reluctantly though, and he never got behind the second edition. Before the book went to press he cut the text to hell, and allowed the publisher to give it a new title. This book was called The Jungle in its second life, and it was available at newsstands for thirty five cents. The tagline on the cover read: “A Great Novel of Lawless Youth.”

  A complete version of Boots was released a few years later, but Nelson sabotaged that as well. He wrote an introduction that lacked even a word’s worth of praise, and called it “an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.”

  Other editions appeared after Nelson’s death in 1981, but they didn’t fare well either. The eighties were the wrong decade for this book; so were the nineties. And fans and critics interested in tidying Nelson’s literary reputation—I count myself among their number—never took it seriously. They accepted Nelson’s comments on their face, and interpreted them as permission to read this book quickly and criticize it freely. And more nails went in its coffin.

  But now the edition you’re holding has resurrected Boots just as the world contained in its pages has begun to sound familiar again—a time when the man who feels “he had been cheated with every breath he had ever drawn,” can be found walking the sidewalks, ranting. The voice of the bigot who proclaims, “Yep, niggers got all the jobs, every-where, an’ that’s why you’n me is on the road,” echoes through the political system. And most of us—whether through hardship, disappointment or shrewd calculation—have developed an intimate relationship to the sentiment Nelson revealed when he wrote: “He could not trouble himself, one way or the other, about any better or happier world.”