Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  He doesn’t believe that the Spanish people are going to war against each other in his lifetime.

  So if you were the editor of a magazine the Spanish people were giving their lives to preserve in the mid-thirties but are now shopping around for a chance to dynamite an indispensable bridge across the Ebro twenty-six seconds ahead of the Italian cavalry so that you can crawl into a sleeping bag containing Ingrid Bergman with her head shaved, it looks like you’ll have to shop around for somebody else’s river and somebody else with her head shaved. In somebody else’s sleeping bag. Personally, the one I liked best was the one about the great white shark, Over The River And Into The Ocean. Although I have never dynamited a bridge I’ll call it off if the cavalry will give up their horses.

  The Bartender-Who-Knows-the-Answer-to-Everything says Spain would be a happier nation if it only had a king. Those were good times, simpler times, he says, when Spain was a kingdom. Now what country does he think he is in?

  I didn’t trouble to tell him that what he is living in is a kingdom. But, so long as it is, perhaps they ought to go all the way and pick one and now is a good time because there are three candidates who have a legal claim: Don Jaime, Dona Beatriz, and Don Juan. The first is a deaf mute, Dona Beatriz is blind, and Don Juan is an idiot. Arriba, España!

  The bartender’s wife asked me if I were English and I felt I was losing altitude. “Americano,” I told her. But when she answered that it came to the same thing because both peoples spoke the same language, I felt my seat belt snap. I informed her that what the woman on the juke was singing was Americano and if she wanted to hear Inglés she should catch Reinald Werrenrath doing The Road to Mandalay. So much for The Boxer Rebellion.

  The Bartender-Who-Is-an-Authority-on-Everything taxied in with the news that the greatest American singer of all time was Johnny Ray and the greatest song ever sung was The Little White Cloud That Cried. As I hadn’t seen an American newspaper for a week this came as a complete surprise. “You don’t hear so much about Johnny Ray since Sal Mineo came along,” I told him.

  When a woman get weary,

  No tellin’ what she’ll do—

  Another Americano wandered in. This one was wearing a coat so I couldn’t tell what his name was. He sat beside me but I didn’t ask him where he was from. Finally I got tired of that and told him the time without his having to ask it.

  “They don’t know how to make a hamburger in this country,” he replied immediately; “they don’t know what butter is. I waited an hour and a half this morning to get two poached eggs!”

  “You can get a good hamburger on the Champs-Élysées,” I told him. “Why don’t you try there?” After a minute he left too. That left me the only American in Barcelona who liked The Club Java.

  The reason there are so many crippled dogs along this street is because the new cars are so wide and come on so fast that the brutes don’t have a chance to get out of the way. The biggest cars, the blackest, that make everything moving leap for the wall, are the ones with liveried chauffeurs.

  I have a sightline from here on the ancient street fountain where women of the waterless tenements come, kettle and pitcher, pan and pot, for water for drinking and bathing and washing. Whether you live in village or city in Spain, it’s an uphill grind and a downhill slide for water. In rooms of dreamers, city or town, sleepers go forever uphill then go forever down: winding up a stairwell’s steep abyss or slowly down the spiraling cliff. Hope means hope for soap and water to last the day and saving the suds for tomorrow. Those big black cars that make you leap for the wall are Portuguese. The passenger in the back seat of one was a bishop.

  Two Barcelona men are on trial here before a military court charged with “insults to the chief of state.” If Franco is going to try everyone who insults him here I’d like to have a peseta a head for turning people in. I’d come before El Porko wearing a black tricorn and a monkey suit, give him that nutty-looking salute and say respectfully, “El Caudillo, Spain insults you,” and he’d owe me thirty million pesetas. But I’d say it respectfully so he wouldn’t put me in jail too. They called it a Civil War, but if that one was civil I would as soon not be around when they lose their manners. The big problem to me is the Portuguese. If it’s true that their power has declined, where do they get those cars? Is everyone in Portugal a bishop?

  The bartender asked me if I’d like to taste a carraquillo and I said I’d bite anything that wouldn’t bite me back. He said No, it was just a little drink that would warm me up. I said I wasn’t cold just to see if he could think of another reason. I kept putting obstacles in his path like that. I didn’t want to make things easy for someone who wanted a king. He insisted on making me warm enough even though I wasn’t cold. By this time it was plain that what he had in mind was to knock me out and steal my camera. Well, I know a trick or two myself, one being to fall backward off a barstool and lie on the floor pretending I am unconscious. When he took down an unlabeled bottle, I demanded that he give me only a small glass, thus reducing his chances of knocking me out by 50 per cent.

  He and his wife then began laughing at something together—a pair of operators if I ever saw a pair—they even contended a little over the bottle for the honor of being the one to pour the dirty drink. It must have been her turn, because she served me and stepped back, waiting. I drank it and looked around. They make coffee cups in Spain too small.

  Actually, all you have to do is pour a spot of cognac into a cup of Spanish coffee to have the drink called carraquillo. Unless you prefer to do it with anise, in which case it is called Death in the Afternoon. In France they say red wine is the communion of the poor and in Ireland they say Guinness is the communion of the poor. But if they call cognac-coffee a hard drink, then in Spain the communion of the poor must be Communion.

  The good wine is the Bueno, the cheap wine is the Ordinario, but there is no bad wine as there is no bad dancing; and the Ordinario is bueno enough for anybody.

  Except, of course, for Portuguese bishops who live on wood alcohol strained through a bandanna.

  Below the great gaiety of the Spanish heart is a stern, ancestral passion for control. To be loosely gay will not do. As one does not drink or dance or face the death on the horns of the bull loosely. Like the Irish, the Spanish are infatuated with death, but with an infatuation as different as midnight from noon. The Irishman goes by degrees, half willingly, into that good night. Goes too gently into that good night. The Spaniard stays death’s stern hand with his own. No man gives so little to death and no man dies so hard. As the Irishman leaves lightly, he drinks hard. As the Spaniard goes hard, he drinks lightly.

  Penalties for public drunkenness here seem inordinately severe. An offense that would get an incorrigible lush thirty days on a state farm in the States will get him years at hard labor here. Dignity is more important to the Spaniard.

  Man’s first triumph, in the Spanish view, is over the great bull of passion within every man. The bull of lust and the bull of fear, that must be faced with no outward show. Personal dignity is the communion of the poor.

  There is also big money to be made here in robbing the blind. My own personal control was remarkable, inasmuch as the bartender kept pouring the great bull of carraquillo. For I concealed my inner excitement that the stuff was being poured on the house, and he kept pouring it. He even poured one for himself. So I knew the man realized he wasn’t dealing with some fool who would turn down a free drink just because it might zonk him onto his skull. He kept pouring.

  My assumption that everything was free was gradually earning me his respect. My strategy was to keep him pouring out of respect until he would realize that it would be cheaper to quit pouring free cognac and offer me keef.

  I stood up and drew on a cigarette until my eyes crossed. Then I uncrossed them and looked at him inquiringly. Keef is a mild hypnotic combining the finest virtues of hashish and marijuana into a single noble blend. Humanitarian seamen bring it into Barcelona from Africa. I don’t know what t
hey call the name of the stuff from Greece. You might call keef the communion of the poor, too, because that is what the poor here really do call it, except that it costs more than the poor can afford.

  The bartender shook his head. Either he didn’t have any or he didn’t trust me. All he did was turn Bessie Smith over.

  Gimme a pigfoot and bottle of

  beer,

  And I don’t care.

  Past times, simpler times, when we went to a bar to drink whiskey instead of staying home to smoke pot. Past days, gone days, when every saloon had a print of Custer’s Last Stand donated by the Budweiser Brewery. Old times, Budweiser times, when we called for a boilermaker when we wanted a shot and a beer. Gone times, Schlitz times, when a man would say “I’m taking a count” when he wanted to know how much money he had instead of “I’m reviewing my holdings.” Lost times when nothing was easier than to forget an army serial number. Times that had transpired upon some first-person person’s planet before third-person times came along. Times when there had been nothing to get grim about except crapping out three rolls running or having to go to a war. How was it then that the campus fellows, arrived with their blueprints to which the arts must henceforward conform at peril of getting bad grades, felt grim about everything?

  Had the big crapout to them been simply in being born? Or had it begun later, and all Daddy’s fault too, when he’d forbidden his boy to ride a bicycle for fear of a skinned knee? Had the fathers, out of love, built a picture-window world wherein well-behaved sons could watch others ride no-hands with no risk to themselves? Was Junior so grim about everything because his true self had been left looking out of a picture window?

  While campus fellows, authentic paperfish authorities, began seeking ways and means of bringing the arts into a picture-window world where the artist would be both safer and richer, certain prebeatnik cats went searching Chicago’s South Side for ways and means of passing for black.

  Through Richard Wright we had become aware that those who ran the white world had lost the will to act honestly. We had learned from Wright that it is those who have nothing to lose by speaking out who become the ones to speak the truth. And to these, all the horrors of poverty—schizophrenia, homosexuality, drug addiction, prostitution, disease, and sudden death on the gamblers’ stairs—were no more remarkable than the sight of a man with a fresh haircut. In the midst of life, where there are nothing but horrors, there is no horror.

  Crafty madams and ancient midwives, tenor-sax players and policy-runners, con men, quacks, pimps and tarts, poolroom sharks and intellectuals, all were citizens of a country whose capital was Forty-seventh and Indiana. But only the latter had divorced themselves, intellectually, from Negro life. Talking in phrases picked up in evening courses at the University of Chicago or at Northwestern, we knew that the phrases, so high-sounding to their own ears, were as artificial as hairstraighteners and skin-lighteners. We had been made suspicious of the values of the white world by Wright. Our suspicions had been confirmed in war.

  Wright had made us aware that the Christianity of the white American middle class had lost it nerve: now we saw it to be a coast-to-coast fraud. And the fraud lay in this: that property was more valuable than people. The Negro had come up in America, putting the value of people above that of property simply because he had no property to evaluate.

  This fraud, as essential to successful merchandising as making a profit, had by 1948 so pervaded the American white middle class that its ancient image of Jesus Christ had become that of The Young Man On His Way Up whose total purpose was accumulation of securities; and whose morality was confined by the warning: “Don’t Get Caught.”

  By 1948 everything went, in the race through the supermart of publishing, advertising, television, and bond-selling; and Christianity had lent its blessing to the Supermart. The image of America reflected in editorials in Life, on TV, in movies and on the stage, was a painted image that had nothing to do with the real life of these States.

  “The horror, gentlemen, lies precisely in this: that there is no horror.”

  But in Negro music we heard voices of men and women whose connection with life was still real.

  Still heard—and yet were already being overwhelmed by Negro voices in praise of hair that was no longer nappy. They became so cool that they surpassed themselves; causing whites to imitate their coolness.

  Under the impetus of a new American affluence, a new Negro elite, as eager as the white middle class ever had been to put aside feeling for ownership, began to emerge.Taking its cue from the enormous circulations of Time, Life, Look, and Reader’s Digest, the Negro press now began presenting an image of the Negro bourgeoisie, as flattering to that class as the white journals to theirs. In it we saw the same disconnection between the life of the States and its representation that marked the white bourgeoisie.

  This saddening change was never demonstrated more inadvertently than in a soap opera so corny that it would scarcely have been tolerated on afternoon TV. Raisin in the Sun gained instant acclaim by white critics because it presented the identical aspirations, among Negroes, as had led the white American middle class to founder in a world of gadgets. Raisin in the Sun, enacted by Negro players, was not a play about Negro life at all. It came straight out of the turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater by way of Clifford Odets.

  Its characters, like those of The Motor Boys in Mexico, were immediately identifiable. The only dimension was that which faced the audience. The story moved flatfootedly about an investment in real estate; and, indeed, it was nothing more than a play about investing in real estate. For its reality was the make-believe reality in which the white merchandising class had invested. And had never been able to understand how life, lived for acquisition, rather than for living, leaves the liver dead long before he dies.

  The new Negro elite, in adapting the hypocrisy of the white ruling class, had now made their adaption theatrical.

  This elite found its apologist in the expatriate novelist James Baldwin.

  “All I can do,” Baldwin wrote, “is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people can be better than they are.”

  This admirable sentiment would have rung less hollowly had it not been composed in Corsica.

  And had the writer not been sporting a papier-mâché fez.

  The hypocrisy, having become theatrical, had now become hilarious.

  The Bartender-Who-Didn’t-Get-a-Prize began a long rigmarole about how he used to run a café but didn’t get a prize for that either. He didn’t want to serve coffee with milk because once you started something like that it led to serving ham and eggs, and there was no end to that but bankruptcy. Why he thought bankruptcy was worse than the condition he was in he didn’t explain.

  He appeared to have suffered some more recent loss, because he kept peeking inside my camera to see if he could find it in there. Then he would hand it to his wife and she would peek in, but she couldn’t see anything either. Finally I took a peek myself and what do you know: I’d forgotten to load it.

  This was a shock, because I have been trying to get a start in life since 1929 and if it isn’t one damned thing, then it’s another. One decade it’s a nationwide depression, so that if you make a living you’re a fink; the next decade it’s a war, if you don’t go you’re 4-F; and the next decade if you don’t get your picture on the cover of Time, your relatives are ashamed of you, especially your mother.

  It’s mighty strange beyond a

  doubt,

  Nobody knows you when

  you’re down and out.

  What I ought to do right now to start getting a start, is to load this camera with color film and do a photograph book called Poor People of Barcelona and follow it up with Poor People of Andalusia. When I finish with the poor people of Spain I’ll do the poor people of Italy. I’ll do Poor People of Naples, Poor People of Sicily, Poor People of Rome—any place where they have a good hotel. Great journals like Playboy will hire me to make their subsc
ribers even more self-satisfied. I will cater slavishly to the utterly complacent; I will be the poor man’s Cecil Beaton. In my work, children bitten by dock rats in Istanbul will come to serve a social purpose by helping subscribers to Heritage who read in bed to feel that much the more contented. What was it that brush salesman wrote in Saturday Review— “There is no true compassion in these modern works. The degraded and the criminal are identified with. One has to be a pervert or a savage to elicit sympathy.” Alright, I’ll work along these lines—compassion is for the healthy and the well-to-do and by the time I hit Budapest we’ll all feel more secure.

  Perhaps the Innerspring Mattress people will send me to India. Benares, or Indore. I’ll get to photograph the Maharajah of Indore outdoors and the Maharanee indoors. In no time at all my picture will be on the cover of Time and Clare Luce Tooth will be on the phone telling me there is a little party at Fleur Scheisskopf ’s place and I am invited!

  What shall I say then? Why, that I’m not able to leave my typewriter, thank you all the same, until my masterwork, Inside the Inside of Europe is completed.

  “I can’t wait to read it,” Clare will tell me, “I’m terribly interested in Europe.”

  “The book has nothing to do with Europe,” I’ll have to forewarn Clare; “it deals only with what it is like on the inside of the inside. What it’s really like.”

  This touristic fantasy left me faint, and I came around only because someone kept tugging at the loose piece of my jacket. It’s that clown of a porter again, I realized. But it wasn’t. It was the bartender returning my camera. What was I doing leaning against somebody’s wall? I hadn’t noticed at the time but it sure looked like I’d left the bar.

  “That was pretty good carraquillo,” I congratulated him.

  No, I didn’t tip him either. “Honesty is its own reward,” I let him know and, pushing him gently yet firmly to one side, went on my way contentedly.