Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  They were the accused with whom Whitman had taken his stand when he wrote “I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself.” Guilty or not guilty, Whitman pled the defense.

  As Stephen Crane had taken his place beside Maggie; as had Dreiser beside Clyde Griffiths. As had O’Neill beside Anna Christiansen; as had Richard Wright beside Bigger Thomas. As had Tennessee Williams beside Blanche DuBois. And where James Baldwin made his still-unanswered challenge: “If you don’t know my name you don’t know your own.”

  What these writers shared was the perception that the owners of their society had not only lost touch with one another, but with their own true selves. The youth who had early armored himself against love became the man who found greater gratification in property than in love; the girl who began by evading the touch of the propertyless man became the woman demanding that Robin Hood be banned from the local library. For the prophets and preachers of this midland bourgeoisie damned the basic act of love as piggishness; while dignifying acquisitiveness, if succeeding on a scale sufficiently grand, as virtuous. Thus marriage consummated more for increase of property than for physical gratification seemed, to this strata, to be morally higher.

  “When one is peacefully at home,” Chekhov had seen what all these impractical men had also seen, “life seems ordinary. But when one goes into the street and questions women life becomes terrible.”

  It wasn’t Tarkington but another Hoosier who heard, below the roar of ballpark crowds with a doubleheader sun striped across them, cries for help from beneath the stands. Ring Lardner left the park laughing strangely to himself. And later sat drinking alone.

  Lardner’s women come out of that same suburb of hell wherein Eliot’s women waited in parlors for husbands with headpieces made of straw. Indeed those splenetic vixens, whom W. C. Fields feared perpetually to confront, occupy the kitchen of the same house. Lardner’s marvelous mimicry barely concealed his dread.

  Though all his marriages are desperate, and all his Women prepare to cry to have their own way, their tears are never from disappointment of the flesh. Lardner’s woman weeps because another woman’s husband is succeeding faster than her own; because a daughter married beneath her, or because her son failed to make a certain fraternity.

  The desolation of her view is reflected by that of Lardner’s aging husband looking out the window of a Miami-bound Pullman:

  “First we’d see a few pine trees with fuzz on ’em and then a couple acres of yellow mud. Then there’d be more pine trees ’n more fuzz and more yellow mud. And after a while we’d come to some pine trees with fuzz on ’em and then, if we watched close, we’d see some yellow mud.”

  The God of the Middle Border had avenged Himself. He had let the Righteous Survivors sleep untroubled only to waken to a nightmare: the wills by which men and women had been divided from their true selves now divided them from conscience. The men they named to speak for them were men whose morality was no more than a projection of consciencelessness in the name of a whole class. Saith the pandowdy Jehovah: “If you’re well-to-do you don’t need a soul.”

  The heart had been made fat and the ears heavy. They heard but understood not. They saw yet perceived not.

  Nada was a sea of yellow mud seen through a Pullman window.

  Ring Lardner discerned the myths. He heard the cries. But he didn’t know what to do about the lies. In a mock-biography he reported himself as a radio enthusiast who had designed his own set:

  “At first he was unable to get any station at all and this condition held good to the day of his death. But he was always trying to tune in on Glens Falls, New York. It was not until his last illness that he learned there was no broadcasting station in that place.”

  There was no broadcasting station in America. Lardner ended with nothing to tune in on. Hemingway’s own set did not begin to work until he was in Paris.

  II. HEMINGWAY HIMSELF

  The surprising thing, next to their progressive corpulence, is the amount of paper that is scattered about the dead. Their ultimate position, before there is any question of burial, depends on the location of the pockets in the uniform. In the Austrian army these pockets were in the back of the breeches and the dead, after a short time, all consequently lay on their faces, the two hip pockets pulled out and, scattered around them in the grass, all those papers their pockets had contained. The heat, the flies, the indicative positions of the bodies in the grass, and the amount of paper scattered are the impressions one retains.

  Out of the scattered letters of that field, Hemingway wrote his own letter to the world.

  He wrote to the woman whose life, she had been told, had been complete by having her own checking account. To her, the death of Catherine Barkley brought a fear that she who guards her life too well might lose it. A strange unease surrounded her heart. Was it possible that one had to earn one’s death in order to become alive? And should no tragic pour strike for her, would it not mean that her own death would be nothing more than a mere sloughing off into earth of a husk no sun had warmly touched?

  And light was all it needed

  And a little cleanness and order.

  To this woman, watching her husband waving goodnight to friends in his well-lit door, he seemed unaware of that dark precipitous edge whereupon both endured their days and nights together. She had no way of knowing that he, too, was secretly afraid.

  What did he fear? It was not fear or dread

  It was a nothing that he knew too well.

  If an increasing awareness of the precariousness of life is increase of wisdom, the death of Catherine Barkley made this woman wiser. And if the belief she had sustained in an afterlife was thereby shaken, it was because her own life began to feel like a sieve through which living hours kept draining.

  Hemingway liked to say that he wrote on the principle of the iceberg that has seven-eighths under water for the one part showing above. And how aware he himself was of his own depths can only be guessed.

  He knew he had the critics fooled, those who, like Macdonald, swallowed the image put out by one Esquire illustrator, depicting him machine-gunning sharks. That he would take a machine-gun to sea is as preposterous as it would be to take a howitzer on safari. That was the image all the same: The Violent American, the man of no memory all muscle and blood, standing with one foot on the head of a slain lion.

  Among the critics, only Malcolm Cowley and Maxwell Ceismar have perceived that what Hemingway appeared to be—the Byronic reporter of the bullring, the boxing ring and battle—was only the surface of this writer. If he had been no more than this—had he been only the writer who most represented his time—he would never have provoked the attacks of the begrudgers. It was his submerged sources which troubled them so. For he did not represent his time at all: he made his time represent him. Because within him the whole buried burden of America’s guilt, the self-destructiveness of a people who felt their lives were being lived by somebody else, found expression.

  In a sense of longing and a sense of loss, Hemingway identified himself with the victims of America; as though those most unworthy of love were the most worthy of it.

  His sketch, called A Pursuit Race, in which Campbell, an advance-man for a burlesque show, wearies of trying to stay one town ahead of the show, demonstrates Hemingway’s early commitment to those who resigned not only from war, but from the race for Success.

  “I’m hopped to the eyes,” Campbell tells Turner, his boss, when Turner finds him under the sheets in a cheap hotel. Then, rolling up his sleeve, Campbell reveals a line of purple blue punctures from elbow to wrist.

  “They’ve got a cure for that,” Turner assures Campbell.

  “They haven’t got a cure for anything,” Campbell contradicts Turner.

  Then, caressing the sheet with lips and tongue: “Dear sheet, I can kiss this sheet and see through it at the same time . . . Stick to sheets, Billy. Keep away from women and horses and eagles. If you love horses you’ll get horseshit and if you love eagle
s you’ll get eagleshit and if you love women you’ll get a dose.”

  “Are you alright?” Billy asks.

  “I was never so happy in my life.”

  This is not merely a story about drug addiction. It is a report on isolation as an American affliction.

  Hemingway came of a strata so afflicted. His great innovation was not the devising of a literary style, but bringing to this class a realization of what was real and what was unreal. A realization for which he went back to the Old Testament.

  The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to the

  Place where it ariseth . . . and there is no new thing under the sun.

  The reason that the critics failed Hemingway is simple: they didn’t read Hemingway. They read, instead, other critics of Hemingway.

  “I did not try to see behind the façade,” an Italian critic admits with contentment, “nor what view of life was beyond that depersonalized style. This has been done, however, in Mr. Savage’s essay.” He doesn’t tell us what critic Mr. Savage went to to understand Hemingway.

  Nevertheless—we have his word on it—that “Mr. Savage shows how the entire extrusion of personality into the outward sensational world makes Hemingway’s characters the inwardly passive victims of a meaningless determinism; how the profound spiritual inertia, the inner vacuity and impotence, which is a mark of all Hemingway’s projected characters, ends in a deadening sense of boredom and negation which can only be relieved by violent, though still essentially meaningless, activity; how the final upshot of it all is the total absence of a sense of life, so that life is brought into a sensational vividness only by contrast with the nullity of death.”

  I never cease to be astonished when I see someone like this dealing with half a deck and nobody calling him on it. “The most essential gift for a good writer,” Hemingway told an interviewer, “is a built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector.” Almost any kind of detector would serve to detect what the above critic is spreading around.

  Another charge the critics made against Hemingway consistently was that he was a man who wrote as though he had no memory. And yet it was Hemingway, and none other, whose memory was adequate enough to give new life to John Donne’s sermon that no man is an island. For his memory worked in terms of a race-memory; whereas theirs was limited to the dates of their own reviews.

  Nor was his style a clever trick, an acquired device that a clever young man, panting to get along in the world, picked up from Gertrude Stein, as Macdonald claims. It wasn’t Hemingway who needed to follow Miss Stein around Paris with notebook and pencil poised, but Miss Stein who needed the pencil. His style was the means by which he fulfilled a need uniquely his own; thus filling a need of the company of men.

  This need was for light and simplicity. In achieving it for himself he achieved it for others enduring a murky complexity. By strength of his own love he forced a door. That opened into a country in which, for those willing to risk themselves, love and death became realities.

  For Hemingway, in his life as well as in his writing, always left a door wide for others to enter.

  Robert Frost, at his 75th birthday party, found himself being introduced to Gene Tunney.

  “How did it happen that Hemingway bloodied your nose?” Frost asked just that fast.

  Tunney took a step back as though he’d just walked into a stiff jab.

  “I was trying to teach him something,” Tunney remembered, “but you had to watch him every second.”

  What Macdonald means, in saying that he had Hemingway’s goat, is merely that Hemingway never considered him a worthy opponent.

  Why should he? There’s one in every crowd.

  III. THE REAL THING IN KITSCH

  I once observed another bearded man trying to force another door: one of those little glass jobs of Horn & Hardart’s. In the days when you had either to smash the glass or put in some nickels.

  As a man of force, this one might have smashed a lemon chiffon pie without leaving an imprint unless he were using both hands and chocolate would have stopped him cold. He was a critic whose passion for nickels was barely surpassed by his concern for his corpuscles. Precisely, his passion was so corpuscular that, once had he announced himself as “The Diagnostician of our diseased culture,” the self-congratulatory tone was justified; as he himself was a charter member of the affliction.

  At the moment, this curious fellow had a salad in hand and was trying to get the attention of someone behind one of the little windows. Something had gone wrong at Horn & Hardart’s.

  The girl who was witnessing this scene beside me was from out of town. She was from so far out of town that she called the place “L’ Automatique.”

  “Does your friend have a difficulty?” she wanted to know. For the Diagnostician of a Diseased Culture had now put his salad down as if it were contagious. He was dissenting from somebody who was behind the window; judging by his expression, his dissent was sharp.

  “He says that American culture is a pudding of mediocrity,” I reported, “if you call that ‘a difficulty.’”

  Now he picked up the salad he’d put down and tried to insert it into the open window—it shut so fast he had just time to withdraw his fingers. But the fringe of his beard caught and there he was, trapped with a salad in one hand. He was a tall man and he’d been caught bending. He rapped the glass and waved the salad until the window was opened, releasing him. Then it shut. He inserted a nickel. It reopened, he drew out a second salad and returned to our table, carrying both.

  Yet he appeared perfectly composed.

  “Is it not permitted to make exchange of salads in L’Automatique?” the girl asked about the rules.

  “When God is dead, all is permitted,” the critic quoted Dostoevsky contentedly; in a kindly tone.

  “Providing one puts in an extra nickel,” I pointed out.

  He was a critic with a beard that appeared to be more of an appendage fastened with Elmer’s Glue-All than anything growing from skin. He was a de-corpuscled diagnostician who preferred riding the subway to taking taxis unless he was pursuing a celebrity. His pleasures were few and riding in a taxi with a celebrity was an experience as rich to him as riding a passenger train.

  Bartenders regarded him without enthusiasm because The Dram Shop Act discouraged them from throwing him out. They didn’t mind his mixing Coca-Cola and Scotch so much as they did his using half a case of Cokes to one shot of Scotch. Celebrities seldom minded him because they were never sure which one he was.

  “What kind of writer is he?” my friend inquired, after the critic had left his two salads for us to guard, pending his return from another visit to the little windows.

  “A kind difficult to define,” I decided, “his field seems to be that of deriding Philistines for exploiting the avant-garde.”

  “And do Philistines exploit the avant-garde?” she inquired.

  “No. The avant-garde exploits the Philistines.”

  The Diagnostician was now in a dispute with the handle of a faucet that pours a nickel’s worth of milk into a nickel’s worth of coffee, this combination then being purchasable for a dime. Assuming that a man who could measure an entire culture could tell at a glance that he’d gotten only nine cents’ worth, the faucet was obviously in the wrong.

  “Is it not against the rules, exploitation?” the girl asked, eyeing the begoggled wretch suspiciously.

  “It is,” I tried to bring her up to date—“but they keep changing the rules. It used to be against the rules for an artist to become rich. He was supposed to live in extreme poverty and remain unknown until he died of exposure. Upon which event his fame would become widespread and great sums would be made out of the beauty found in his paintings or his books or his songs. Now he doesn’t have to die to become famous. He doesn’t, in fact, have to create a work of beauty. In fact he doesn’t even have to be good. All he has to be today is become avant-garde.

  “You see, so many people have become rich, and so few people are re
cognized avant-gardists, that it is like a country run by electricity where there is a shortage of electricians. There are simply not enough avant-gardists to go around.

  “So many people have become rich so easily that they can’t get enough of books that tell them how rotten they are. This provides a neat way for the avant-gardist not only to denounce culture, but to get rich by doing it. And the Philistines are so afraid that someone will catch them not applauding, that a writer, like our friend, not only makes money by being against kitsch but earns a reputation for being avant-gardist too.”

  “I do not understand this kitsch,” the girl admitted, “is it the pudding of no plums?”

  “Not exactly,” I told her. “It is a pudding that pretends to have plums. It is any song, or play, or book, or painting, or film that pretends to be profound although it is shallow, and true although it is false.”

  “Then it is good that your friend is against kitsch—is it not?”

  “It would be if he were. But where kitsch comes in, he is the country’s widest distributor of it.”

  “Again I do not understand.”

  “I will try to be more precise,” I promised her, “par example: our friend expresses extreme distress at the thing that Hollywood writers do to a good novel, when adapting it to film, which they term ‘licking a book into shape.’ He claims that what this means is to drain the novel of all reality and offer its corpse on the screen.”

  “This is a dreadful deed indeed,” the girl exclaimed.

  “Be patient,” I reproached her, “I am still par-exampling. Because at this dreadful-deed-indeed called ‘licking a book into shape,’ no writer in America is more skillful than is our friend.”

  “I cannot bear to hear more,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Try all the same,” I asked her, “you will be fascinated by its unimportance.”

  I was keeping an eye on our Diagnostician—whom we shall henceforward refer to, Dear Reader, simply as ‘Macdonald,’ as that is shorter than ‘Diagnostician’—and saw he was now tied up in an argument with the woman who changes quarters into nickels. I assumed he was trying to get six.