Art Shay

Driving my 1949 white Pontiac n a cold winter's day in 1951, I picked up Nelson Algren's mother, Goldie, at her apartment on Lawrence, had coffee and one of her leaden cookies that Nelson had warned me against and then picked up Nelson in his seedy gray overcoat at 1523 Wabansia (now under the expressway). Then we drove south to the Palmer House to pick up Doubleday's editor-in-chief, Ken McCormick, in from New York. He politely munched one of Goldie's cookies between his patrician teeth. He was a prissy man, just turned 60, and didn't like that Nelson had named his cat Doubleday. Rather didn't like Nelson's explanation of why his gray tiger tomcat, that "likes to fuck anything around" reminded him of his publisher, whom he didn't trust further than the distance from his ten-buck-a-month Wabansia pad west to Ashland Avenue--about 400 yards. We were headed for Nelson's $12,000 cottage in Miller Beach, Indiana. I had moved Nelson in with the Pontiac dragging an eight-buck-a-day trailer full of his books, and papers he had pulled from his wine-dark mahogany desk on which he had written "The Man with the Golden Arm" and the long prose poem Holiday magazine had published months before, leading off their now-famous Chicago issue. (He and Simone de Beauvoir had sometimes sported on this very desk, on Nelson's Indian blanket). The Holiday picture editor, Louis F.V. Mercier, (for whom I had done several midwestern shoots) and the articles editor, Harry Sions, had asked me to recommend a writer capable of "doing" the Chicago piece. Unbelievably, they had never heard of Algren even though he had recently won the first National Book Award. When they asked for other "references," Nelson kiddingly gave them Carl Sandburg's phone number in North Carolina. Sandburg took time off from tending his goats to assure Sions that Nelson was the best writer around these parts. After I coached Nelson to ask for a thousand bucks more than the $2000 Holiday would offer, he got the job for $2500. The success of Nelson's Whitmanesque love and hate poem to Chicago had interested Doubleday in publishing it as a book. "We need a title," said McCormick, as the South Chicago steelworks came into view. "Something like "Big, Brawny Chicago"... "Chicago-America's Future" ... something that suggests Chicago is growing, kind of a city on the make." I curbed the car. "That's the title!" I yelled. Two of the passengers agreed "City on the Make" was fine. Nelson's mother wasn't sure. She said, "It's not bad, but how about 'Nelson Algren's Chicago.'" She was voted down, but some years later I used Goldie's suggestion for the title of my University of Illinois Press picture book on Nelson. My favorite "City on the Make" story: In 1957 Nelson and I drove to New York. In the big Rexall Drug Store fronting Grand Central station we saw a remaindered pile of "City on the Make"s at 19 cents each. We each bought an armload. Nelson called writer Irwin Shaw about a party he was going to that night. "Hey, you want a copy of "City on the Make?" he pitched. "Only 19 cents." Overriding Shaw's pleasant refusal that he already had one, Nelson said, "You don't understand, Irwin. It's a great investment. This thing's gonna double in price by next year." Nearly fifty years later, my rare-book-dealer wife--she owns Titles Inc. in Highland Park--now sells them for a hundred bucks! (2003-01-29)

Also by Art Shay

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