Characterization-Nelson Algren

She was referred to me under the suggestion of Nelly Benson in Chicago, February, 1947. I had never heard about her by then, a French writer, philanthropist, teacher, feminist, philosopher, creature combined with both steady empathy and sharp self-independence. My meager knowledge of existentialism, her exploration mostly, was obtained from a New Yorker article. The day after our mid-afternoon first date in the Polish bars, she was on that train to California, back to France. Before her train leaving, she phoned me. I did not phone her back, since she was coerced to drop her telephone by the French officials. On that train, she read a work from mine and wrote me a letter, in a tone unsure but sincere, in English. She asked, "If it was unpleasant for us to say good bye, yesterday, will not it be worse saying good bye when we shall have spent five or six days together and surely be quite good friends?"

I wrote her back. And I bundled all the recommended books that I had left at her hotel's front desk for her. I should have guessed hardly had she made it to pick them up. I mailed them to France.

"Too bad for us if another separation is going to be difficult." I responded. Then I had a walk in the streets of my Chicago, waiting.

After that our correspondence initiated, officially.

From the beginning, she simply jotted down what she saw and heard along the trip in California, about refreshing landscape, nice people she encountered, enthralling updates about her friend, another stranger to me. Sometimes, she asked me questions about my novels, sent me her wishes. I was working on Never Come Morning, a defiant record of the fallen life of prize-fighter Bruno Lefty Bicek. I showed her every thought during the construction. She sent me letters from her Paris. Vibrant, joyful. I pondered, from time to time, this was her talent for happiness.

In her early letters, my title was "Dear friend". Days zipped by. In Chicago's bleak spring, we spent three days together, renewed up each other's strange faces fading gravely in the mutual memory months ago, other than tentatively exchanging explicit emotions and unrevealed motives under written words and phrases. Our meeting blanks appeared weekly became monthly gap. Eventually, then, years. In May, 1947, I came with her to New York. I gave this French woman a silver ring. After that, I became her "beloved Chicago man", "precious husband", and "Dear Nelson".

But we never married, officially. We were writers, fraternity conflicted in various ways: I free vagabond, she enthralled outsiders. My life expanded in Chicago, her Paris. She introduced me her husband, Satre.

I was her transatlantic affair.