What remain are such telling scenes as the one in which Dove Linkhorn visits a cave-like restaurant, where he watches a pyramid of snapping turtles blindly climbing on top of each other, only to be beheaded by a black man, naked to the waist, who grabs the next topmost turtle for decapitation, a symbol for the USA’s pointless, destructive yearnings.
‘When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough,’ writes Algren, describing his true subject best.
Dove Linkhorn, Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie and a large collection of those Algren calls ‘the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores’ are all in search of the USA, only for the reader to discover in the end that these ‘lonesome monsters’ are the USA.
A Walk on the Wild Side was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in May 1956. The hit of Broadway at the time was a new Cinderella story called My Fair Lady. The times could hardly have been less propitious.
The reviews of A Walk on the Wild Side have become legendary in their savagery; at times they seem as politically charged in their circumlocutions as any Soviet review of the era, of writers deemed unacceptable by the State. There were some who defended the novel, but they were drowned out by the novel’s detractors.
Time magazine declared that Algren’s ‘sympathy for the depraved and degraded’ had ‘carried him to the edge of nonsense … Algren has dressed his sense of compassion in the rags of vulgarity’. In the New Yorker Norman Podhoretz attacked what he called Algren’s ‘boozy sentimentality’ and claimed that Algren was saying ‘we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectable’.
Leslie Fiedler similarly claimed that there was no room in Algren’s world for ‘workers or teachers or clerks’ and went on to describe Algren as ‘isolated from the life of his time. He was made, unfortunately, once and for all in the early 1930s, in the literary cult of “experience” of those times. He has not thought a new thought or felt a new feeling since … our literature has moved on and left him almost a museum piece – the Last of the Proletarian Writers’.
The political crime was unmistakable, as the verdict and punishment were inescapable. Book sales fell away. Though he continued to write and publish, Nelson Algren was finished. His novels went out of print, he was neglected, his reputation diminished to the extent that for a time he was largely forgotten. It is hard to think of a major American writer of similar stature who has had so little impact on subsequent American writing.
Algren sensed the change – how could he not? – and the way in which critics were increasingly not on the side of the artist, but of the status quo. In 1960 he wrote of the new owners of literature arriving ‘directly from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and the short story would have to conform … [forming] a loose federation, between the literary quarterlies, publishers’ offices and book review columns, presenting a view of American letters untouched by American life’. The New Criticism – with its emphasis on the search for imagery, symbols and metaphors, and its contempt for history and politics in shaping art – was for Algren a tragic misunderstanding of the role of literature; for ‘it left unheeded the truth that the proper study of mankind is man’.
In some way the criticisms of 1956 have mutated but remain: the charge that Algren was an overwrought word drunk boozed up on an outdated sentimentality stuck; that he was a relic from the 1930s; that the world had changed and Algren had not.
It is too simple to say that Algren was punished for his politics. His politics, left-leaning though they were, were not his real crime. Algren understood far better than those who blackballed him the nature of his offence.
His aesthetics were not what the new empire wanted: what was emerging, what was wanted, was a new classicism: a pared-back modernist prose. Nor was his subject – the dispossessed – any longer of interest or concern.
‘I think Faulkner is too tragic about life,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren. ‘Life is tragic, and it is not. In your books one can feel very well this strange two-sided truth.’ But in a nation whose culture seemed ever more hostile to irony, tragi-comic art had less and less place.
Not the least of Nelson Algren’s charms to those of us not American is the way he is at once both entirely of the USA in all its extraordinary vibrancy, and yet able to tally and report accurately and honestly the immense human cost of that vibrancy: a USA no longer a new and great dream of exploding possibility, but a nightmare of receding hopes.
‘The pimps,’ he wrote of 1930s New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, ‘didn’t seem to catch on that the country was progressing downward to new rates of normality’, describing mid-twentieth-century perfectly.
And Algren achieved all this in a lush language at once immediate and vernacular, but steeped in the tradition of his culture’s greatest writers: the poetry of his sentences harked back to Whitman; his wry humour and vernacular power to Twain; his novelistic largeness to Melville; his pained humanity to Fitzgerald.
But everything in Algren is transformed into a particularly American agony, comic and tragic, and he created an idea of a spiritually compromised USA so potent that for some decades no one wished to know of it.
Frequently categorised, with the passage of years no category seems sufficient to label the rich, fecund world of Algren’s greatest works. He was a naturalist who wrote unnaturalistic prose; an absurdist whose work reeked of reality; a realist whose best effects are often comic, a determined stylist who in the end believed passion mattered more than style; a passionate writer who fully understood that the measure of great writing was in its capacity to escape the writer’s intentions, politics and passions.
Those who ascribed to him a programme, an ideology, failed to understand Algren’s humility in the face of the power of art to tell truths often unknown to the artist and even unpalatable to them. He believed good writing came out of compulsions unknown to the writer.
‘A writer who knows what he is doing,’ he once said, ‘isn’t doing very much.’
Algren’s characters fail even at failure, they manage to mismanage crime, vice, sin; nothing is so worthless that it cannot be lost. Algren’s mean streets are revealed by the passing of time to be both as real and as allegorical as Kafka’s courtrooms and castles. It is a hell, and it is the ultimate test of our humanity.
It would be too simple to see Algren simply as a victim of the Cold War. His literature threw down a question to the fundamental nature of the USA.
‘So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV,’ Algren wrote, ‘establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured.’
The American dream, the American century, the American way, the American empire: Algren didn’t buy any of it. The USA, Algren declared in an interview in 1963 was ‘an imperialist son-of-a-bitch’, and Algren did not conceive the role of the writer to sing of its triumphs.
‘The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock’, Algren wrote, ‘has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.’
Like Chekhov, Algren believed a writer’s role was to side with the guilty.
‘American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anyone on my side?” … More recently, I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair – my mother can watch me burn.”’
And so Algren wrote with courage and love against the grain of the Ameri
can empire he clearly recognised coming into being around him, as doomed as a bard of slaves would have been in first-century Rome.
‘The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is in essence a denial of life,’ Algren wrote in Nonconformity. ‘And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.’
According to his friend Kurt Vonnegut, ‘no matter how famous he became, he remained a poor man living among the poor, and usually alone.’ But there was about this something that went beyond identification, or Algren’s belief in people. For Algren it seems that it also enabled a form of spiritual transcendence that he found necessary in order to write.
‘Innocence is not just the lack of something,’ Algren once said. ‘Innocence is an achieved thing. You can’t be unworldly without first being worldly … to be an innocent in the best sense is to have that kind of unworldliness that comes out of worldliness, to be able to see how people waste their whole lives just to have security.’
The American Dream was one of materialism, its hope was that even if you had lost everything yesterday you might regain your fortune today. Algren’s dream is one of humanity; of how you might live a fully human life when you have lost everything and nothing can be regained: through humour, through small victories, through love of others.
In the wake of the commercial and critical failure of A Walk on the Wild Side Algren’s life took an increasingly tragic turn.
The same month as it appeared, a literary sensation from Europe received its first US publication. The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir’s new novel was dedicated to Algren, and in part described a passionate affair between its heroine and an American writer called Lewis Brogan, clearly modelled on Algren. Yet what to de Beauvoir was an affirmation of their love, was to Algren – who had quarried the lives of his own friends for his own writings – a personal betrayal, and Algren now attacked de Beauvoir in the press. Yet privately he still hoped to escape to Paris and to de Beauvoir.
On 26 June 1956 this dream was cruelly ended when his passport was once more denied. On 1 July 1956 he rang de Beauvoir and apologised, though he was again to attack her publicly. On 12 July 1956 she wrote to Algren how ‘in The Mandarins, the love story is very different from the true truth; I just tried to convey something of it. Nobody understands that when the man and woman love each other for ever, they are still in love and maybe this love will never die.’
Now a deeply depressed man, Algren returned to what had been his own home in Gary and asked Amanda Kontowicz to take him in. There he spent most of his days sitting in his room, unable to work, often weeping. In August he suffered a breakdown that led to his being hospitalised.
‘Amanda called me,’ Dave Peltz recalled in a radio interview many years later, ‘and she said, “he’s ready, he wants, he’s going to allow himself to be put into hospital care”, and I came over to the house … he was half-dressed, he wouldn’t put on a shirt, and then he put on his shirt, then he wouldn’t put on his jacket, then he put on the jacket, he wouldn’t put his shoes on, then he put his shoes on and finally, after an hour, I said “I have to go”. He got dressed and he sat in the car.
‘We drove all the way north to this psychiatric hospital, got out, went into the lobby and he was supposed to sign in, he wouldn’t sign in … He would make an “S”. He took a “N”, he made an “S”, he would make an “A” over here, and then come back and put an “E” in between the “N” and the “L” and after an interminable two hours he filled in his name, and the minute he did that, it was like in a B-movie.
‘Two guys in white coats came out and they just literally picked him up and hauled him right through a big solid core door, and, as they’re doing that, he’s hollering “Dave! Dave!” and they took him through the hallway and I could hear him hollering “Dave!” and I’ll tell you it’s still in my ears, that scream, that “Dave!”.’
At the end of 1956 Simone de Beauvoir received a letter from her beloved Chicago man saying a light had gone out in him.
He had abandoned Entrapment – the novel which he had stolen time from to finish A Walk on the Wild Side. Of its unfinished manuscript a later editor of Algren’s, William Targ, said, ‘In it he seemed to reach the deep-down essence of the blackest lower depths: drugs, pimping, prostitution, at their most grim level … It would have been an extraordinary achievement … it could have been his major opus.’
According to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Simone’s daughter, who has possession of these Algren letters, Algren confessed he had ‘hit rock bottom, having lost himself in draining battles against his marriage, his publishers, his agents, his lawyers and his poverty. He felt he had lost his driving force, the spark fuelling his writing and his entire being. He realised he was losing Simone de Beauvoir forever, and in this dire mood was not afraid to admit that he missed her terribly. The best days of his life were spent with her. Why had he let her drift so far away?’
On 31 December 1956 he took a short-cut across a frozen lagoon, the ice broke, and Algren would have died in its freezing waters had he not been rescued by workmen. Close friends speculated that Algren had tried to kill himself.
Of the remaining twenty-five years of Algren’s life there is little to tell. Though he wrote more books, including one posthumously published novel, the great creative period of his life was over. Like the police captain, Record Head Bednar, in The Man with the Golden Arm, obsessed with the sense that he should write his own name on the list of the guilty, Nelson Algren had ended up inscribing his own name on the guilty list, the black list, then the reviled and finally the lost and forgotten list.
‘The past is a bucket of ashes,’ he told friends. He took to calling himself a journalist, rather than a novelist.
Algren laughed in the face of the gods and made merry, but his fate is no less tragic for his own particular enduring courage.
In later years Nelson Algren gave the impression that there was nothing he wanted more out of life than to see a fight, or go to the track, or play poker.
‘This was pose, of course,’ Kurt Vonnegut has written, ‘and perceived as such by one and all.’
But it was pose with a price, and pose with a point. The poverty, the gambling, the losing continued, the novel-writing did not; he posed until, one suspects, the pose became too fixed to escape.
‘For years he was exhausted,’ Dave Peltz has said, ‘trying to get over what he had done with his life, what he had done with this great opportunity that he had, and many people described him as America’s foremost writer … He felt he blew it, something happened in his life [and] that he blew it … towards the end when he was not writing and not writing, all he thought about was fame and fortune, like someone who went to the crap table and lost it all. I think gambling was the metaphor for his life, for pissing away his life … he stayed disciplined in the early days before he achieved success and somehow after success was when he lost hold, and I can’t account for it. Unless … he needed to be consistent with being a loser, needed to be consistent with having a pocket full of money and going to a crap table and losing it.’
Nelson Algren died in 1981, Simone de Beauvoir in 1986. She was buried with the ring Algren had given her.
Algren’s epitaph for Fitzgerald could apply equally to himself:
‘Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them.
‘And so he died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin.’
The USA was at the time of Algren’s childhood a symbol of an ideal that could still seem revolutionary and democratic. For Whitman, a seminal influence on Algren, American democracy was a new event; for Algren it is one more lost cause in a life devoted to lost causes, the greatest of which was writing, the act of which demanded you spend of your soul until there is nothing left but the prospect of death.
The fiftieth anniversary o
f the publication of A Walk on the Wild Side takes on an odd resonance given the recent tragic events in what was the Big Easy, not only because the town is the setting for the novel, but because Algren’s principal concern – the USA’s contempt for so many of its own people – is, perhaps for the first time since the 1930s, threatening to become a major political issue. In rebuilding the levies of New Orleans, Americans could do worse than reread A Walk on the Wild Side.
And not only they.
‘Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America’s traditions,’ Borges wrote. ‘Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.’ And so too Nelson Algren.
Richard Flanagan, October 2005
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Praise
About the Author
By Nelson Algren
Copyright
ONE
‘HE’S JUST A pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin’ his old lady is what crazied him.’
‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he’d float upstream.’
For what had embittered him Fitz had no name. Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated – of having been cheated – that was it. Nobody knew why nor by whom.
A Walk On The Wild Side Page 2