Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [50]
Miss Brooks, who is married to insurance salesman Henry Blakely, writes only at night. A mother of two, she devotes the entire day to being a South Side housewife. The family income has always been modest, but it was even more so in 1950. When a reporter phoned her to ask, “Have you heard that you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize?” Gwendolyn had to admit that she was literally in the dark about it – because the electric bill was overdue and she had no lights in her apartment.
James T. Farrell, a master of the naturalistic school, supplements his modest royalties with earnings from lectures and magazine articles. Though his three Studs Lonigan novels are classics today and still sell widely as paperback reprints, they sold poorly in their original editions. Ironically, this work of Farrell was never taken by a book club.
For years, Nelson Algren (a Detroiter by birth) was in similar financial straits. He wrote his first novel, Somebody in Boots, on a twenty-dollar-a-month advance on royalties from Vanguard Press. When he got married (he’s now divorced), he could not even offer his bride Amanda a wedding ring.
“Nobody told me until three years later that you were supposed to have a ring,” he explains. “It was lucky I had two dollars for the license!”
A $2,000 fellowship arranged by Carl Sandburg and several postwar awards for short stories finally enabled Nelson to work without interruption on The Man With the Golden Arm, the novel that won him the first National Book Award. Though never affluent, he is probably Chicago’s most important resident novelist. He has this to say of the city’s more glib disparagers:
“Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while.”
As his books reveal, he does love the city and its people. But he is also one of Chicago’s severest critics. The lyrical blasts he fired in his prose poem, “Chicago, City on the Make,” incensed readers all the way from the Tribune Tower to the Association of Commerce & Industry. But to Nelson’s lasting credit, he continues to call ‘em as he sees ‘em. An interviewer once said of Algren: “He is a man who betrays no inclination whatsover toward politeness, but he has a natural generosity and compassion.”
Many writers spend their time in the vicinity of universities, bookstores, and symphony concerts. Not Nelson. You will most probably find him in a rumpled suit and a shirt whose color doesn’t harmonize at a Chicago jazz spot, or – in summer – at Comiskey Park. (Like James T. Farrell, he had a boyhood dream of being a big-leaguer.) He also spends a great deal of time among the drug addicts, derelicts, and drifters who inhabit the “neon wilderness” west of State Street between Division Street and Chicago Avenue, north of the Loop. It is there that he still prefers to make his regular home, although he sometimes moves to a secluded Indiana dunes retreat when he is writing.
Nelson is not the only Chicago writer of note who is fascinated by such Skid Row locales. John Bartlow Martin, who lived in suburban Highland Park until President Kennedy appointed him United States Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, also used to haunt those slums, flophouses, police stations, and courtrooms for many of his Harper’s and Saturday Evening Post articles. Before he undertook his ambassadorial post, Martin was considered one of the leading magazine reporters in America. He has tackled almost every type of serious reporting assignment, from mental health to his award-winning story of the Centralia, Illinois, mine disaster. But crime and its sociological implications are the topics which most intrigue him as a reporter.
One assignment he won’t soon forget involved the murder of a pretty Chicagoan named Susan Hanson. Gathering material for the story with his customary thoroughness, Martin attended every session of the coroner’s inquest and the subsequent trial of Susan’s husband, Duncan, who was charged with the killing. At a