Read Online Algren by Mary Wisniewski - Free Book Online Page B

international bridge to Ciudad Juárez and saw his first bullfight, staying free in Matamoros with a woman who called herself the “Angel of the Americas.” Then he lost his taste for tramping. As he rolled through the West Texas hills on the roof of a boxcar, he saw a “lovely, homesick sight”—the campus of Sul Ross State Teachers College, its red-brick classical buildings trimmed inwhite. It was early October, and it must have felt like time to go back to school. Here in the picturesque valley town of Alpine was a place to settle and live cheaply while writing his book, so Nelson got off the train and hitchhiked back. He found a room and meals for twenty dollars a month in a rundown ranch house for transients and railroad men on the edge of town. His fellow boarders included a wispy old lady who claimed to be the widow of the outlaw Frank James and had the appetite of three men. The way she ate, Nelson could see why Frank turned to crime while she was young. The other ten dollars went to stamps and cowboy luxuries like boots, a red bandanna, and Bull Durham tobacco, which Nelson learned to roll one-handed into cigarettes, Texas style. The main attraction was the college, and with permission from its president, Horace Morelock, Nelson began going in through a south entrance every day to use a typewriter in a classroom.
    Nelson fixed on one particular machine in a room full of typewriters, “a big bosomy housewifely Underwood sitting to one side as if chaperoning the younger, more dashing models. I loved her upon sight. She looked fondly upon me, too.” It was on this stately machine that Nelson began to form his first novel, about an ignorant, sensitive Texas boy who wanders, as Nelson wandered, from Texas to New Orleans to Chicago by rail.
    â€œI began telling her stories about the redlight district of Old Storyville and she was incredulous. She had never been out of town. I told her about wild boys of the road and wild girls, too … about sleeping in Salvation Homes, about sleeping in jails, about sleeping in open fields…. She listened attentively.”
    Writing to a friend named Milton in Chicago, Nelson complained about the dullness of the people he encountered. Milton wrote back, chiding Nelson for his snobbery. “Yes, Nelson, slums, ignorance, poverty, Baptists, class struggle…. Ridicule is comparatively easy and most often does not commit one to anything. To bea revolutionary artist means commitment, means alliance with the proletariat and the impoverished farmer…. Buck up, Pal!”
    Nelson worked hard in the quiet classroom, only interrupted occasionally by students curious about an author in their midst. He made friends with some of them, and gave a lecture on writing that was covered in the school newspaper. “I believe I told them I was Theodore Dreiser’s nephew or something,” he recalled. But his process throughout his writing life was slow, building up and taking down, with drafts that kept expanding. He figured the way to finish a book and get a plot was to “keep making it longer and longer until something happens.” At this rate, there was no way he would have a manuscript ready on or before March 15, 1934, as promised to Vanguard, and by January he had gotten the last of the advance money. He saw flaws in the unfinished manuscript, which he thought lacked humor and had too little dialogue. He hoped to visit Jack Conroy in Moberly, Missouri, to let the more experienced writer see his work before he went back to Chicago, where he could live cheaply at his parents’ house while finishing the book. The problem was he had no typewriter in Chicago. He complained that his stuffy brother-in-law, Morris Joffe, wouldn’t let him use his. Nelson developed attachments and aversions to typewriters—he had his favorites, and later would blame missed deadlines on balky machines. This “bosomy Underwood”—he also