Nonconformity

by Nelson Algren

  The great paradox of Dostoevsky lies in the vitality he drew from degradation. American writing, it is this observer’s notion, will remain without vigor until it draws upon the enormous reservoir of sick, vindictive life that moves like an underground river beneath all our boulevards. When the sewers back up we call it a “crime wave;” when after a while the waters subside a little we are content until the waters begin to lap the curb again. Then the pumps come out, and we’re in for another wave of reforms, from press, pulpit and politician, which serve to increase newspaper circulation, fill up the pews for a few Sundays and pump up the local payrolls.

  The stranger from Mars who spent a day in the public library came away knowing that a few Americans possessed wealth that was virtually incalculable, that a hundred-odd million others had more than just enough. But gained barely an inkling into the lives of those who live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love. They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves. They are the ones who are displaced in time, and again displaced in the heart.…

  “I read the smooth journals but they gave no news of this.”

  Not until he walked the unswept streets in the hundred-storied evening and saw the legend in the first-floor-front—ROOM FOR TRANSIENT—did he begin to understand. Or was advised by a clerk, across an ancestral register, “Give a phony, mister.” He wanted to say who he was, but the clerk didn’t want to know.

  Not until he saw them sleeping in the all-night restaurants and the all-night movies and the night-blue bars of the whiskey wilderness did he understand at last that he was on the ancient unswept street where most of humanity has always lived.

  And had he asked them, they would not have been able to say who they were. Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves.

  Out of the furnished rooms and into a cheap hotel and back to the furnished room before the room is out: the “unemployed bartender,” “unemployed short-order cook,” “unemployed salesman,” “unemployed model,” “unemployed hostess;” “self-styled actor,” “self-styled artist,” “self-styled musician,” “self-styled author,” as the self-styled reporters conveniently file them. Their names are the names of certain dreams from which the light has gone out.

  The clerk at the third-rate hotel is always half-pleased to see the “unemployed hostess” or “self-styled actress” come in to register, wearing nylon hose and carrying all she owns in the handbag slung over her shoulder. “A room with a private bath,” she instructs him. “I don’t want to be disturbed.” You don’t have to tell her to give a phony.

  He isn’t even half-pleased to see her, two decades further along, in black ribbed-wool stockings and a shopping bag. But her manner is more humble. “I’ll pay in advance,” she offers, before anybody throws her out. “You certainly will,” he assures her.

  Give her another decade and she’ll show up, just before daybreak, with neither handbag nor shopping; and no stockings at all. Just a weary old weirdie who would lie down to rest. “You got a checkout room for me, mister?”

  Meaning any room vacated by a full-paying guest before his allotted time was up; leaving an hour, or even two or three, before somebody else able to pay rent around the clock shows up. Weary Old Weirdie gets it for half price—and into the clerk’s pocket that goes, you can be mighty sure. Weirdie takes her own chances—she may be rooted out of last night’s sheets in an hour. But if there’s no particular run on rooms she may be left alone up there till evening.

  Those are the chances you take if you’re an old weirdie with most of your hours, save but a few, left behind in the disheveled sheets of a thousand checkout rooms. If nobody tells you anymore to give a phony. Knowing that even your true name has become a phony.

  Wanderer untroubled by names and numbers: unregistered, unattached, uncounted and unbereaved in the files of the American Century. There are no insurance policies to bereave her, no bankbook to grieve her, no driver’s license nor visa, no hospitalization plan nor social security number to say, the day after the nameless burial, what her true name was. Nothing but the hardwood subway bench and the Twelfth Street Station to remember: W. O. Weirdie once took rest here.

  Self-styled actress; self-styled stunt man; self-styled world traveler, part-time entertainer and full-time veteran; self-styled heiress: their names are no more than the names of certain lonely hours. They sought someone to tell who they were, and never found anyone; for they did not know themselves who they were. They looked whole lifetimes for an answer without knowing what the question was.

  The pool shark hitchhiking to Miami or Seattle, the fruit pickers following the crops in a 1939 Chevy with one headlight gone and the other cracked; carny-men and pitch-men, punchboard operators and unemployed blackjack dealers; pigeon-droppers and penny-matchers, young touts in Hollywood tattersalls and coneroos from the Good Old Days in dirty London collars; freelancing phonies and necktie salesmen with furtive eyes; and the stripper forced to a stint of secret hustling after the Super Breakfast show is done, to get up her Daddy’s fine because Daddy’s doing thirty days for going on the drunk again. (Daddy would blow his top, she boasts, if he knew what she was doing. It’s all right so long as he’s allowed to pretend he doesn’t dig a thing. Daddy is smart enough not to ask questions and Baby is smart enough to act as though there were none to ask. It makes things easier for Daddy. And what’s good for Daddy is good for the country.)39

  These aren’t the great gray wolves that run the winter wilderness, but only the toothless, half-tame jackals that prowl the outskirts of dude-ranch camps when night-fires start to wane. Hard-time nomads or easy-livers, zigzag zanies or phony martyrs, young band-rats or elderly satyrs who buy a little and sell a little, work a day and rest a while. Sleep by day and play by night, they abide in an evening country where ten a.m. always looks more like five in the afternoon of any season at all. Theirs is that ancestral hour when the little deeds are done.

  All those who, between sleep and selling, between rest by day and play by night, do the little deals.

  “But do you know,” somewhere one of Dostoevsky’s odd fish cries out suddenly, “do you know it is impossible to charge man with sins, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate villainies; when, economically, he has been brought to villainy, and that it is silly and cruel to demand from man that which, by the very laws of nature, he is impotent to perform even if he wished to …?”40

  Their names are those of certain nighttime notions, held too tightly, that would not ever have been conceived had there been someone in the night to hold instead.

  And do their time cheerfully enough when trapped—thirty days or sixty or ninety without a hangover of guilt. The little man in the business suit who wouldn’t steal a dime if you put it in his pocket carries around a heavier load of guilt these days than do the people of the twilight. When the latter take a fall they come out ready to say, “I paid for that one,” for they feel they have. But the business suit, when he is finished paying in full for everything, is plagued by the feeling that there’s something unpaid for yet. So he goes to a twenty-dollar-an-hour analyst who feels guiltier than he does. Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt.

  It is the hapless, useless, helpless goof-ups who’d rather play a juke all day than get into the rat race for fame and fortune, who go guiltless. The tricked, the maimed and the tortured who do the little deeds. And never lie down to rest. For they sense that the guilt is elsewhere.

  The caves of their country are the acres and acres of furnished rooms as well as the railroad hotels of
the small-town slums; on the dim-lit streets behind the bright-lit boulevards as on the rutted roads behind Main Street; in the chicken-wire flops as in the all-steel cells with the solid doors; backroom brothels as in back-street bars; in the courts and the wards and the charity hospitals; in all the dens and all the dives wherein we see and touch the bone and flesh out of which our time is forged at last.

  Down in the alley battleways behind the billboards with the painted smiles.

  There, accustomed to taking daily strolls along the unterraced edge of utter disaster, long used to being booted gratuitously by the hindquarters of destruction, here at last are all those, in Dostoevsky’s phrase, for whom nobody prays: the ones whose defeats cost everything of real value, and yet whose laughter cuts closest to the bone.

  Leaving scar-tissue enough to satisfy Ilsa Koch.

  In the horse-and-wagon alleyways of the littered hinterland behind the editorials. The street that stenography so often reports yet never can touch without flinching. The unswept streets where most of humanity has always lived.

  Yet, in suggesting that the true climate of the human condition on the home grounds may best be gauged underground, I’m referring not only to a sociological strata but to a psychological condition as well: all those so submerged emotionally that they are unable to belong to the world in which they live.

  “To regard the universe as one’s own,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “one must belong to the caste of the privileged; it is for those alone who are in command to justify the universe by changing it, by thinking about it, by revealing it …”41 To know oneself one must belong to the world.

  It is therefore possible to live underground even while skiing at Aspen or Sun Valley. You don’t have to live in an alley to be submerged.

  Although, come to think of it, that does seem as good a way as any of going about it.

  I was in penal servitude, and I saw “desperate” criminals. I repeat, this was a hard school. Not one of them ceased to consider himself a criminal. To look at, they were a dreadful and cruel lot. However, only the simpletons and newcomers were “braggarts,” and these used to be ridiculed. Mostly, they were gloomy, pensive people. No one spoke about his crimes. I never heard any grumbling. It was even impossible to speak aloud about one’s crimes. Now and then someone would utter a word with a challenge and a twist—and all the inmates, as one man, would “put a check on” the pert fellow. It was a rule not to speak about this. Nevertheless, I believe, probably not one among them evaded long psychic suffering within himself—that suffering that is the most purifying and invigorating. I saw them solitarily pensive; I beheld them in the church, praying before confession; I listened to their single, spontaneous words and exclamations; I remember their faces—and, believe me, not one of them, in his innermost, considered himself right!

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky,

  from The Diary of a Writer

  187342

  VI.

  FROM THE PENTHOUSE SUSPENDED silently so high above the winding traffic’s iron lamentation, forty straight-down stories into those long, low, night-blue bars aglow below street-level, a lonely guilt pervades us all.

  A loneliness not known to any ancestral land. To some other less cautious race conquering or lost. No other age, more distant and less troubled. No other time, less lonely and much longer. No other night-blue bars.

  No other forest of the night, no other wilderness than ours.

  Ours no longer being the lonesome prairie’s desolation, but the spiritual desolation of men and women made incapable of using themselves for anything more satisfying than the promotion of chewing gum, a goo with a special ingredient or some detergent ever-urgent. Working one trap or another for others, the aging salesman of bonds or used cars having made his little pile, senses dimly that he’s backed up into a trap of his own devising.

  The tiger-pit of loneliness out of which there is no climbing. Alone at last with his little pile, the weary years in and the weary years out haven’t brought him a thing he wanted in his heart. It was only that which he was taught he was supposed to desire that he now owns so uselessly.

  “It is because of the abstract climate in which they live that the importance of money is so disproportionate,” Simone de Beauvoir observes. “The people are neither mean nor avaricious.… If money is the sole object for so many, it is because the other values have been reduced to this one denominator.”43

  The criticism is valid but neglects those rebels, from penthouse to bar, who resist, every hour on the hour, success according to that cult. All those who feel their hours to be too brief to devote to the working of traps. In them the desire to be of real use in the world deadlocks with the carking dread of being used by it. Habit has made it impossible for them to exist beyond the boundaries of the cult. Contemptuous of a philosophy that preaches that every man is an island and each man’s duty is to appoint his private island comfortably, they are, even while being most contemptuous, unable to live except on an island and simply cannot endure the discomfort of living anywhere else.

  The most bitter protest against the middle-class faith in money as an end in itself always comes, in the States, from the children of that class, who have to take the spiritual consequences of having too much of everything though earning nothing, while those who work hard all their lives never have enough of anything. Trapped between the double tyrannies of conscience and personal comfort, comfort wins going away. The bitter protest is drowned at last in that self-pity that abides at the bottom of the nearest pinch bottle of Haig & Haig.

  “It isn’t that young Americans don’t wish to do great things,” Mme. de Beauvoir adds, “but that they don’t know there are great things to be done.”44 Not what they desire most deeply, but what, for lack of a better goal, they are forced to settle for.

  From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how. That’s the trap.

  A trap in which some turn to that same twenty-dollar-an-hour analyst—“Doctor, what’s my problem?” And the doctor cannot speak the truth without losing his double saw. To stiff-arm a customer with the alarm that his trouble is something as simple as cowardice, or as hopeless as a spiritual void, would be only to lose that twenty an hour to a competitor with a more flattering tale to tell. After all, a doctor has problems too. Particularly when he’s in the same secret trap as the patient—his sole advantage being, as in dealing blackjack, that he’s on the side of the house.

  The more daring man decides to throw over his job and get howling drunk: success is for squares, have a ball while you can, tomorrow be damned and all of that.

  Yet Monday morning finds him back at his desk pushing that real good goo, the crazy kind with the special flavor, the hair oil that leads to early promotion, the cologne that makes the girls want to take you to stag parties or the booze that affords every Clark Street lush with his fly unbuttoned a certain distinguished air.

  “When something does not go well with us, we seek for causes outside of ourselves,” Chekhov observed. “Capital, masons, the Syndicate, the Jesuits, bugaboos, are ghosts.… If the French start talking about the Yids, the Syndicate, it is a sign that they feel all is not well with them, that a worm is gnawing at them, that they need these ghosts to appease their disturbed consciences.”45

  Something is gnawing, so somebody has to be punished. For those who need to rebel, but cannot afford it, the scapegoats who live at the bottom of a whiskey bottle will do. For those to whom drink or drugs or dice are unthinkable, Joe McCarthy is the boy with the proper answers.

  Some rebels.

  The addict’s revolt has a special grace. When he shoves a needle into his vein it is, in a sense, to spare others. Somebody had to be punished all right—and he’s the first who’s got it coming. Things are going wrong in
the world, so, in a sort of suicidal truculence, he impales himself.

  That the truculence of the witch-hunter is something else is evidenced by the ferreting into all our hearts.

  When Faulkner fitted out his workshop, being a good American didn’t mean just being a good non-com. Now the notion seems to be that what matters most is how to pilot a jet or strip a bazooka, and that that is all that really matters.

  “I went into the army,” I heard the teenage volunteer explaining himself, “because that’s where they can’t fire me.”

  “All I want,” another decides, “is a job with a pension to it.” But why the undertone of disappointment, the dull unacknowledged pang, as though everything he had ever done was only what he had been told to do and out of it all he had yet had nothing all for himself? As if, each time he took an order, he felt that same dull pang.

  “I know right from wrong,” a girl in trouble tells me, “but I don’t seem able to get a foot on the ground either way.”

  They’d rather take their chance in the full light of the taverns or the half-light of the lounges, these days, then among men. The teenager feels, as often as not, that there is no longer much point in knocking himself out to be a good surgeon, architect or engineer when there seems so little chance that he’ll ever be able to put real skill to work. Our idealists aren’t calling for those crafts as they did in Faulkner’s America—they’re calling for good officers and reliable non-coms, in civvies as well as in uniform.

  Indeed, by packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit it out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.