To have a successful book store means also to be a slave to detail. This I found killing. Often I would struggle for hours to track down a title someone had requested, go to the trouble of ordering it (more often than not on a money in advance basis), only to find that the customer no longer wanted the book. Or I would special order a book, run like a demented fool over to the customer’s office to deliver it personally, and discover that the wrong book had been ordered in the first place. You could pretend to yourself that this kind of service would endear you to the customer and cement a faithful relationship, but it didn’t always work that way.
I worked hard, but my customer relations were not always perfect. I demanded that customers buy books for the same reasons that I sold them—out of a serious regard for greatness. I could not stand having myself or my books and records treated as a toy by the jaded and self-satisfied. And I was a jealous god. Today I know better, yet I instinctively back away from a customer who comes into the store carrying a package from another bookseller.
But well or poorly done, it took all kinds of doing: typing post cards, making phone calls, washing and sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows and shelves, running to the post office, delivering books, and talking in the meanwhile on the mind of Spinoza, the beauty of the Mozart D Minor Quartet, the narrative power of Hemingway, or the value of The Caine Mutiny, which on first appearance was slow to catch on.
Still, the business was developing. Each day I met someone new. Each day presented new challenges to one’s strength and intuition and pure capacity for survival. Around this struggle there developed a convivial circle which was ample reward for anything. On any Saturday afternoon it might include Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, Studs Terkel, Ira Blitzsten, Dr. Harvey Lewis, Marvin Spira, Evelyn Mayer, David Brooks and Dr. Robert Kohrman, holding forth on an inexhaustible range of subjects, filling the air with tobacco smoke, drinking fiercely strong coffee from sometimes dirty cups, and munching salami and apples. The world of the Seven Stairs was beginning to form.
For months I practically made a career of selling Nelson Algren’s neglected volume of short stories, The Neon Wilderness. Nelson had already received considerable acclaim for the book, as well as his already published novels, Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning, but short stories don’t sell (it is said). In any event, these stories represent some of Algren’s finest work (which at its best is very fine indeed), and I placed the book in the hands of everyone who came into the shop. I sold hundreds of copies. Then to keep the book alive, we held periodic parties. One month we would call it Nelson’s birthday, another month the birthday of the publication of the book, still another the birthday of the book itself. We invariably invited many of the same people, along with new prospects. At one point, Ira Blitzsten was moved to remark that he didn’t want Nelson to autograph his copy as he wanted the distinction of being the only person in Chicago with an unsigned copy.
Algren is a tall, lanky individual with mussed blond hair and a sensitive face, sometimes tight and drawn, sometimes[sometimes] relaxed. In those days he wore steel rimmed spectacles and Clark Street clothes—a pin stripe suit, a garish shirt, a ridiculous tie, in spite of which he still had a fairly conservative bearing. Once he even wore a bow tie that lit up.
He is a quiet man. You sense he has a temper, but he seldom uses it. He is an authority on the argot of the “wild side of the street,” and I never heard him utter a vulgar word. He has the faculty of putting others at ease. When he talks with you, he gives you a remarkable singleness of attention. Even if the room is overflowing with people, you know that he is listening only to you.
He is a loner who reveals nothing of his private life. In fact, he never gave me his address. When he is introduced to someone, he shakes hands and nods his head at the same time. He gives you the simultaneous impression of understanding and remoteness. You are not surprised to find that his humor is sardonic.
Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy could perform a remarkable duet on the subject of James T. Farrell, Conroy in a broad Irish accent, Algren in a clipped, half muttering manner. I never learned the personal source of their animosity, but the name of Farrell had the magic to channel all their hostilities and frustrations into a fountain of pure malice. It was wonderful.
Sometimes Nelson brought his mother. Sometimes he would bring with him one of the girls related to the novel he was then writing, The Man with the Golden Arm. One night Nelson took me to “the wild side.” We entered a Clark Street tavern, a long, bare hall perhaps 150 feet long and thirty feet wide. Along one wall stretched a huge bar. It was a busy evening—every stool was occupied. We crossed the wooden floor to the other side of the room where there were rows of small tables with folding chairs set around them. Before we were seated, one of the men at the bar slugged his woman in the mouth, and the two fell off their stools, blood gushing, and landed, one on top of the other on the floor. The bartenders came around and dragged them out, pitching them into the street.