![]() ![]() Beauvoir is overwhelmed by the experience and feels faint. ![]() From here, Algren leads the way through a divine and dark comedy of shady streets and bars, prostitutes, a police-station line-up that cannot fail to make one think of the opening of The Man with the Golden Arm. ![]() They meet amid the bright lights and grandeur of the Palmer House, one of Chicago’s finest hotels, where Beauvoir is staying. The two writers speak, briefly. Beauvoir is visiting from France, has come to Chicago from New York, and a mutual friend has suggested that, should she wish to see the ‘real’ Chicago, Algren be her tour-guide. The caller does not speak his language he hangs up three times before the operator intercedes on Simone de Beauvoir’s behalf. On a cold Chicago evening – February 1947 – Nelson Algren receives a phone call that he thinks must either have been misdirected or misdialled. As Cowie has pointed out, while many would automatically call what existed between Beauvoir and Algren an affair, that word’s suggestion of something secret, untoward, perhaps a little seedy makes it a poor fit to the writers’ pained but loving connection: eighteen years, the author has noted, is surely too long a commitment, and suggests too strong a bond, to be labelled, dismissively, an affair. ![]() Douglas Cowie’s most recent book, Noon in Paris, Eight in Chicago, is a fictionalised account of the near-two-decades-long relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren. ![]()
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