Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren

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.”

      The country feels like it has come full circle since 1935, and maybe now, eighty-two years and eight editions into this book’s long life, it will finally receive the honest chance it always deserved.

      Here’s to hoping.

      Colin Asher

       Preface

      I WONDER WHETHER there stands yet, above an abandoned filling station a mile this side of the border, a wooden legend once lettered in red—

       Se Habla Espanol

      —that must now have been long washed to rose.

      It hung between an autumn-colored tangle of mesquite and a grapefruit grove gone to weed on a stretch of highway where nobody drove. I’d lettered it myself.

      And sat in its narrow shade shelling black-eyed peas below a broken sun.

      Once in the dead of day a field of white butterflies came out of that sun, fluttered at rest like a single creature: then fled like a dream of white butterflies.

      I shelled on.

      The Sinclair Company owned the station. A Florida cracker wearing a straw kelly the color of an old dog’s teeth was my partner. He called himself “Luther” and the one thing I knew about him for sure was that his name couldn’t be Luther.

      I’d met him working a small-time door-to-door fraud in New Orleans and he’d let me have a few doors. In no time at all we had had to leave town.

      Luther owned a grapefruit-packing shed in the Rio Grande Valley, he had assured me—if I’d meet him in McAllen he’d make me a partner. In McAllen it had turned out all he’d meant was that he had a buddy who bossed a shed there—and now his buddy had left. Fired, dead, absconded or gone on the arfy-darfy, Buddy wasn’t there any more. The only partnership Luther had left to offer me was in the station. Had he offered me half-ownership of a Southern Pacific roundhouse I wouldn’t have turned it down. I’d always wanted more responsibility.

      For I already knew that though wages were fine, spunk was better—and Sheer Grit was best of all. That was the stuff that enabled a young fellow to get himself a foothold on the Ladder of Success. There were deer in the chaparral and frogs in the ditch, if you didn’t work for nothing you’d never get rich, I shelled on.

      A Sinclair agent drove up with papers assigning responsibility for the hundred gallons of gas the company had let us have on credit. The man didn’t pretend to think we could sell gas on that dreadful stretch. His suspicion was that we planned to set up a still in the brush. But keeping the station open made him look like a go-getter with his front office.

      “It don’t matter which one of you signs,” he told us.

      “Ah caint handwrite proper,” Luther admitted humbly to the agent while handing me the papers, “but this lad here got more knowance ’n I’ll ever have.”

      I signed the papers. Luther looked down at me from his six-and-a-half-foot height with a smile that drained cold glee. “You’ll be the Filling-Station King of the Valley,” he told me, like a reward.

      I could hardly have been more proud.

      Selling produce was THE PLAN. Every morning Luther boggled off in a beat-up Studebaker and returned each evening with a fresh load of black-eyed peas in the back seat, and a five-gallon jug of fresh water.

      A store manager in Harlingen had told him that, if black-eyed peas were shelled and bottled, housewives would compete to buy them. Pointing out a Mason jar of peas, on display in the store window, that I personally had shelled and bottled, Luther rewarded me once more: