The Devil's Stocking Read online

  About the Author

  One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, Nelson Algren once wrote that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition. He was born March 28, 1909, in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His first short fiction was published in Story magazine in 1933. In 1935 he published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. In early 1942, Algren put the finishing touches on a second novel and joined the war as an enlisted man. By 1945, he still had not made the grade of Private first class, but the novel Never Come Morning was widely praised and eventually sold over a million copies. Jean-Paul Sartre assisted in the translation of the French-language edition. In 1947 came The Neon Wilderness, his short story collection, which would permanently establish his place in American letters. The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award and generally considered his finest novel, appeared in 1949. Then came Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a prose poem, and the novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). Algren also published two travel books: Who Lost an American? (1963) and Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965). The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, based on the life of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was published posthumously in 1983. The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren appeared in 1995, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a lost 1952 essay on the art of writing, in 1996. The Man with the Golden Arm critical edition, the only critical edition of any of Algren’s works, was published in 1999, the 50th anniversary of its publication and the first National Book Award. It includes contributions by Algren biographer Bettina Drew, Algren scholar James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others.

  The

  Devil’s

  Stocking

  Copyright © 1983 by Robert Joffe

  The author wishes to acknowledge the support given this novel by the National Endowment for the Arts.

  First Seven Stories Press Edition, May 2006.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Book design by Phoebe Hwang

  Frontispiece: Algren mocking the state of the world, New Year’s eve 1962 at the Shay house in Deerfield, IL. © Art Shay.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Algren, Nelson, 1909–

  The devil’s stocking I Nelson Algren; with a foreword by Herbert Mitgang.—1st Seven Stories Press ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-58322-699-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60980-205-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3501.L4625D4 2006

  813’. 52—dc22

  2005029044

  With a Little Help From My Friends by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1967 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights in the U.S.A., Mexico and the Philippines controlled by Maclen Music Inc., c/o ATV Music Group. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

  Bye Bye Blackbird. Lyrics by Mort Dixon. Music by Ray Henderson. Copyright © 1926 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

  Night And Day. Words and Music by Cole Porter. Copyright © 1932 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

  Sent For You Yesterday. Words and Music by Count William Basie, Eddie Durham and James Andrew Rushing. Copyright © 1938 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

  It’s Only a Paper Moon. Copyright © 1933 by Anne Rachel Music Corp. Copyright Renewed, Controlled in the U.S.A, by Chappell & Co., Inc. (Intersong Music, Publishers) and Warner Bros. Music. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

  You Always Hurt the One You Love. Music and Lyrics by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts. Copyright © 1944, Renewed 1974 by Doris Fisher Music Corp. Used By Permission.

  Cocktails for Two. Words and Music by Arthur Johnson and Sam Coslow. Copyright © 1934 by Famous Music Corporation. Renewed 1961 by Famous Music Corporation.

  Penthouse Serenade. Words and Music by Will Jason and Val Burton. Copyright © 1931 by Famous Music Corporation. Renewed 1958 and assigned to Famous Music Corporation.

  My Melancholy Baby. Words by George A. Norton. Music by Ernie Burnett. Copyright © 1911 by Ernest M. Burnett. Copyright © 1912 and 1914 by Theron C. Bennett Co. Renewed 1939 by Charles E. Norton and assigned to Jerry Vogel Music Co., Inc. Renewed 1938, 1939 and 1942 by Ernest M. Burnett and assigned to Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., New York, N.Y. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved Including Public Performance for Profit. Used By Permission.

  Blue Moon by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart. Copyright © 1934 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Renewed 1962 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. All Rights Assigned to CBS Songs, A Division of CBS Inc. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used By Permission.

  To Stephen Deutch

  Contents

  Foreword by Herbert Mitgang

  The Last Interview by W. J. Weatherby

  1. First Trial

  2. The Wall

  3. Evidentiary Hearing

  4. Moonigan

  5. Athens

  6. Supreme Court Hearing

  7. The Devil’s Stocking

  8. Chinatown

  9. Second Trial

  Foreword

  Herbert Mitgang

  The world of Nelson Algren (1909—1981) was not yours or mine and, in a strange way, not his either. As novelist, poet and occasional reporter, he was a deep-sea diver in the netherworld of America. Yet he was not a part of its frenzy and violence; above all, he walked on the wild side as an observant writer. Early in his life, poverty and circumstance had positioned him in the dead-center of political depression and literary realism. There, where his true-life characters dwelled, he chose to do his work of lending them a measure of dignity.

  In the last summer of his life, when he was living happily in Sag Harbor, on the eastern end of Long Island, Algren laughed as he told me about his conversation with Otto Preminger, who had produced The Man with the Golden Arm. The novel had received the first National Book Award (though, as Algren often noted, no prize money) and brought him fame in the United States and western Europe. He was angry that the film was advertised as if it was not Algren’s but Preminger’s story.

  “Nelson,” Preminger asked him, “how do you know such people—pimps, prostitutes, vice cops, broken-down fighters?”

  “Otto,” answered Algren, “how do you know your kind of people—actors, directors, bankers and broken-down producers?”

  Because of his characters and subjects, Algren’s detractors often have failed to understand his place and significance in American literature. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and other European writers accorded him greater recognition than many critics in his own country. In the United States such neoconservative defenders of t
he American Way as Norman Podhoretz complained that Algren “romanticized prostitutes and hustlers,” and Leslie Fiedler called him “the bard of the stumblebum,” his obituary in the New York Times noted. But working novelists knew what he was trying to do. Ernest Hemingway placed Algren in the first rank of American originals, and Kay Boyle, one of Americas finest short story writers, regarded Algren as a courageous novelist.

  For Algren was in the American grain, rough-hewn, in the tradition of the muckrakers who startled and angered the high and the mighty early in the twentieth century. In fiction and fact, such writers as Hamlin Garland, Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris and Jack London attacked the new industrialists in the pits and stockyards and oil companies, and the old corrupters in political office who protected them. Closer to his own time were the midwestern writers, of whom H. L. Mencken wrote in the 1920s: “There isn’t an American novelist deserving the attention of the civilized reader’s notice who has not sprung from the Chicago Palatinate.” Alongside James T. Farrell, Richard Wright and other angry young men fighting racism and injustice, Nelson Algren was an important voice in the Second Chicago Renaissance, his words walking in the hard and sentimental boots of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters.

  Of his own adopted town, Algren sounded the alarm in Chicago: City on the Make, which bears a strong resemblance to Sandburg’s own Depression prose-poem, “The People, Yes.” Of the corruption in the city he loved because of its night-colors, its imperfections and opportunities, Algren wrote: “Chicago has progressed, culturally, from being the Second City to being the Second-Hand City. The vital cog in our culture now is not the artist, but the middleman whose commercial status lends art the aura of status when he acquires a collection of originals. The word ‘culture’ now means nothing more than ‘approved.’ It isn’t what is exhibited so much that matters as where: that being where one meets the people who matter.” And so Algren found more reality, less deceit, in his beaten-down characters under the El than in the respectable strivers who bought and owned the town. “All we have today of the past is the poetry of Sandburg,” he wrote, “now as remote from the Chicago of today as Wordsworth’s.”

  The slums take their revenge. Algren was a third-generation Chicagoan descended from Jewish, Swedish and German stock. He was born Nelson Algren Abraham in Detroit; when Nelson was three, his father moved to Chicago to follow his trade as a machinist. Nelson grew up in the blue-collar, ethnic streets of the city, worked his way through the University of Illinois and graduated with a major in journalism. “I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a columnist or a foreign correspondent but I was willing to take what was open,” he recalled. “What was open was a place on a bench in Lafayette Square if you got there early. I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station in New Orleans, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life.’ I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since.”

  Algren became a migratory worker in the south and southwest at the beginning of the Depression, sold coffee as a door-to-door salesman, worked at a gas station in Rio Hondo, Texas, and decided to become a writer. He stole a typewriter and started back to Chicago but was caught and spent four months in jail in Alpine, Texas. He began to write short stories and poetry and turned out his first novel, Somebody in Boots, in 1935. For a while, he worked on venereal-disease control for the Chicago Board of Health and, briefly, for a W. P. A. writers’ project. His stories began to be accepted, including the often reprinted “A Bottle of Milk for Murder,” about a young murderer being grilled until he confesses: “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” His second novel, Never Come Morning, was about a South Side prizefighter-hoodlum. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him a small grant, declaring that the novel had not received the honor it deserved. At seventy-two, in his last year, he was elected a member of the Academy-Institute himself.

  Although he was a “name” writer, Algren struggled financially. But his sense of humor and of irony never left him. He and his close friend, Studs Terkel, sometimes would sit in the back room of Riccardo’s, the Chicago newspaper hangout, matching cognacs against martinis and testing throwaway lines. Putting on a hick from Manhattan, Algren said:

  “Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never go to bed with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.

  “All the wisdom I acquired in nine months in the Orient can be summed up in one line. Never eat in a place with sliding doors unless you’re crazy about raw fish.

  “An Oriental woman, even a sixteen-year-old, knows she’s a love object. American women don’t.

  “A woman once told me that I was a devil’s stocking—knitted backwards.”

  Which was the origin of the title of this, his final novel, The Devil’s Stocking.

  The book has a history. In the modest apartment he rented on Concord Street in Sag Harbor, Algren explained how he had come to write it.

  “I accepted a magazine assignment to write about Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, the middleweight boxer, and his trial for murder. I felt it was a miscarriage of justice. What I wrote began to build into a book. I moved to Paterson to be near the court, prison and records. I was in Hackensack later and had the only Puerto Rican landlady in New Jersey with a pacemaker. The trial and appeals were complicated and I tried to put the transcripts into English.”

  Then Algren perceived the book not as reportage but as a novel. He felt that fiction would give him more turnaround room. For example, he added a mulatto sparring partner in the story who is wholly fictitious, changed the names of all the true-life people to fictional characters, and brought to bear his knowledge of boxing, fallen men and women, gambling, horse racing and the underworld. In an early stage, the novel was called Chinatown. The book was first translated and published in Germany in 1980 with the title Calhoun, the name of its central character. Early in 1983, Candida Donadio, to whom Algren dedicated one of his books with the phrase, “Not an agent—a possession,” renewed efforts to find an American publisher and the novel finally was acquired by Arbor House.

  The Devil’s Stocking is all Algren, with his imperfections as well as hammerblows in prose. The wisdom of turning fact into fiction becomes apparent immediately, for the novel at its best brings into play the author’s imagination, his stacked and sometimes familiar deck of urban jacks and queens and street guerrillas. Had Algren lived, he might have revised some of the “nonfiction” transcripts and added still more of himself; but that is speculation. Certainly the characters he has created speak for themselves, and always in authentic tones. The subterranean world that he knew as well as any living American writer is here. A pimp tells his new woman: “I hope you’re not mad at me for making you a whore.” And she tells him: “No, don’t forget that at the same time I’m making you a pimp.” And there are touches of language here and there that remind you that Algren could be eloquent: “He began mixing self-pity with Scotch.”

  For those of us who are not familiar with seedy criminal courts and jails, crummy hotels, the people who live inside the black and brown skins of a white world, Algren still has the ability to shock and outrage. You would not want to spend the night in some of the places where his characters live—where they should not have to live if their lives were not so desperate; but you know that this is not just pure invention. Maybe the author is forcing us to look at what he perceives to be injustice in the dark recesses of the American Way; if so, The Devil’s Stocking is muckraking in a strong literary tradition.

  The Last Interview

  W. J. Weatherby

  He certainly took Dylan Thomas’s advice not to go gentle into that good night. In a last talk only hours before his death, Nelson Algren was as downright, excitable and aggressive as ever. When he told me he’d complained to his doctor that morning of a “heaviness” in his chest, n
ot a good sign at seventy-two, I tried to steer him away from any topic that would excite him. It was a wasted effort.

  Whether the talk was of an old lover, racial strife in Paterson, New Jersey, or the prostitution racket as depicted in his new novel, everything seemed to send up his blood pressure that last day as the final hours ticked away. Thank God he didn’t know what was coming because he was free to rage against the dying of the light the way he had been raging all his life. When I suggested that in old age he resembled Hemingway’s old man of the sea, he scoffed: “That guy was one of Ernest’s saintly stoics whereas I’ve always felt more at home with the Devil.”

  The new novel, destined to be his last, was very much on his mind that last day. Obviously based on the case of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the black boxer Algren had written about for Esquire magazine, The Devil’s Stocking had cost him his peaceful retreat (from Chicago) in Paterson, New Jersey. He had gone to live in Paterson, close to Carter, and even tried to rent a room above the scene of the homicide Carter was alleged to have committed.

  “The only way I can work is up close,” Algren told me, recalling how his experiences as a young man in a Texas jail (he had stolen a typewriter to work on his first novel) had helped him to understand Rubin Carter’s feelings in jail. But Algren’s “up-close” approach made him a lot of enemies in Paterson when it was learned he was on Carter’s side. He began to be threatened and harassed. At first his fighting spirit seemed to enjoy it, but then he realized what he was up against. The memory still enraged him that last day. “The hostility in Paterson was just about as sick as it could be,” Algren said. “Eventually it made me leave. The racial conflict of the sixties still persists there between the blacks and the Sicilians, and if you were for Carter, then you had the Sicilians on your neck and that’s like fighting the Mafia—you can’t win, brother.”