Nonconformity was the result of a layering process roughly the reverse of the one that produced Man with the Golden Arm. In the beginning was the story of what Algren saw as his humiliation in Hollywood after a movie producer purchased the rights to Golden Arm and brought Algren to the coast to write the screenplay. Included here as an appendix, Algren’s sardonic account is his starting point, almost in the same way Frankie Machine’s habit was Golden Arm’s ending point. He then adds layers, most importantly that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical account of his nervous breakdown, as described in The Crack-Up. Algren keeps adding to the surface of his canvas, layer by layer, alternating the high with the low, giving glimpses of a moral universe in the most unexpected venues, scouring books and magazines for sententiae to shore up his arguments. Just as Golden Arm, through layering, became a text about the unendingness of an internalized state of war, this essay was transformed into a text about the responsibilities writers carry with them, about the unendingness, as it were, of the writer’s art. Through this startling metamorphosis, in which Algren lets his writing carry him from a state of utter self-absorption to one where the subject is in the end no longer himself at all (from a text about “my war with the United States as represented by Kim Novak”66 to an essay that affirms the power writers wield when they resist the status quo), the nexus of the essay remains the bond he feels with Fitzgerald. From this link, the real subject of the essay emerges, which is the debt owed by writers to the lives they write about.
Since Fitzgerald is known for imagining the very rich and Algren for writing about the poor, the two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. But in Nonconformity Algren cites Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald alone as father of the school to which he belongs. This is no longer the Proletarian school to which Algren had been linked by academics. Precisely because their subjects are so different, it is a tempting—and powerful—alternative way of reading that he is proposing. What is important about Fitzgerald, Algren is saying here, is that he put himself at the service of the characters he wrote about. And perhaps without fully realizing it, Algren is describing himself as well, since this is precisely the point that has been made over the years by the few critics writing astutely about him.67 Algren is achieving something approaching self-awareness through his empathy with Fitzgerald, at the same time as he is also attempting to seek a higher appreciation for the kind of writing they both do. The “I” of the first section (now the appendix) is transmuted into the “he,” the nonconforming writer, of the body of the essay. Quoting long passages from many of the most radical defendants of free speech of the last hundred years—Whitman, Twain, Faulkner, Learned Hand, de Beauvoir (and not forgetting Mr. Martin Dooley, barkeep, and Leo Durocher, utility infielder)—Algren seeks to replace the image of the defeated writer with which he began with that of a writer-archetype whose profession as guardian of certain necessary truths is unimpeachable, and who has a role to play in society as basic and essential as that of the policeman, the judge or the teacher, although different from each of these.
Nonconformity was written between 1950 and 1953. In the arc of Algren’s life, this period was the absolute high point: The Man with the Golden Arm, published to near-universal acclaim, had won the first National Book Award; in March 1950 Algren flew to New York to receive the award at a black-tie ceremony from Eleanor Roosevelt herself. His fans included Hemingway and the esteemed critic Malcolm Cowley. Hollywood agent Irving Lazar was wooing him and movie idol John Garfield wanted to star as Frankie Machine, the young man at the heart of Golden Arm struggling under all the trouble in the world.
In his personal life there was also a fullness—or at least the possibility of a fullness—that Algren had come to know only recently. Simone de Beauvoir had called him out of the blue in February 1947, on the recommendation of a mutual friend. They had begun an affair that developed into the most passionate attachment either of them had ever known. While by the early 1950s the distance between them had grown, Algren was unable to give up on this once-in-a-lifetime attachment to a woman who was both an intellectual equal and a writer with aspirations every bit as large as his own; his hope was that she might yet leave Sartre for him. Thus it was that after the success of The Man with the Golden Arm, there was a short-lived period of enormous self-confidence for Algren. He was famous, sought after, in love and, still in his early forties, looking forward to a long career among the first circle of novelists.
It must have struck him as strange that at the very moment when his work was breaking through, the society at large seemed to be changing from an open to a closed one. In her biography of Algren, Bettina Drew writes that the “growing atmosphere of conformity and distress” may have changed Algren’s writing plans. And indeed, the jailing of the Hollywood Ten in 1950 cast a pall over the efforts of those who, like Algren, saw themselves as voices the government would like to see silenced. The same year, the Senate approved legislation permitting executions for peacetime spying and passed the Internal Security Act, which called for concentration camp detention for people with radical ideas. Also that year, MacArthur’s aggressive response in Korea had brought U.S. troops so deeply into North Korea that they seemed to be threatening Chinese soil, and the world faced the possibility of an atomic conflict if Russia came to the support of the Chinese.
Algren was, both publicly and privately, to borrow Sartre’s expression, an engaged writer, having participated in left-leaning organizations since the late 1930s, and doing so with increasing visibility by 1950. On January 15, 1951, along with Arthur Miller and 15 others, he signed a letter placed as an ad in The New York Times admonishing people to “Speak up for freedom!” In 1952 Algren became the honorary chairman of the Chicago Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, which catapulted him high on the FBI’s list of suspected Communists and infuriated J. Edgar Hoover. In part inspired by the example of European intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir, Algren’s sense of his civic duties became more acute. In particular, the anti-Semitism and pressure to conform he saw behind the demonizing of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg concerned him. In March 1952 he referred to them as “a man and woman being put to death for nonconformity.”68
It is in this context that we can appreciate the large ambition which informs Nonconformity. Algren wrote this essay at a moment when he knew his words carried weight. He had never before, and would never again, attempt to address the public directly in this way, eschewing the cloak of the novelist. To do so required that he overcome a host of self-protective habits. Nonconformity was written to open people’s eyes to the dangers, especially to writers, that Algren saw all around in the era of Joe McCarthy. Just like each of his novels—and this is one of Algren’s great strengths—Nonconformity describes a particular historical moment. Differently from any other book he wrote, the moment in question here—“between the H Bomb and the A” he calls it repeatedly in the essay, between one act of inhumanity and the prospect of a much greater one—was being exploited by certain groups in the government to silence people, and especially creative artists. So the temptation for Algren to speak to and of this historical moment directly and in his own voice, rather than through a novel, became irresistible. In an age when the pressure to hide—and conformity is precisely concealment and then the effects of that concealment—had become so great, Algren felt compelled to come out of hiding, to express his convictions bluntly, to connect his private credo with his public persona and to do so not just in a speech, interview or letter, but in a full-fledged book-length work of literature.
In the past Algren had usually set himself apart from the risk-takers. A few years earlier, when urged to join the Lincoln Brigade on the way to fight for freedom and the Spanish Republic, he had unhesitatingly refused. As he told H. E. F. Donohue: “I didn’t go to the war in Spain, although I was asked. It was assumed that I would go. My defense when asked why aren’t you there was that I don’t want to get killed.”69
But now he felt a new confidence in
his own voice. And while it is entirely conjecture to say so, perhaps he felt he had to best Sartre in some kind of imagined battle for Simone’s heart. Whatever the reason, this essay represented a new kind of writing for Algren.
Writing about Algren for the Village Voice in 1985, Tom Carson described him as “one of the few American writers, increasingly uncommon since Dreiser, in whom compassion for the dispossessed does not involve a sort of mental portage to reach them.” Carson continues, “The great revelation for him had been that deprivation was not an abnormal social category but a human absolute, and the pressure … comes from a writer trying to measure up to the people he’s writing about.”70 There was something in the way Algren treated the characters who inhabited his novels and stories, something that lent them, as Studs Terkel says, their “respectability.” Algren refused to draw a line between him and them, between us and them. Carson has it right: Algren faces the reader with the paradox of a writer trying to measure up to the miserable lives of his characters. Here was the essential human dilemma with which both Fitzgerald and Algren struggled. It perplexed Fitzgerald and left him distraught; he saw the struggle as a fatal weakness, one that threatened his ability to survive as both a writer and a human being. To Algren it was an essential strength, and more than anything else, the quality that defined his work. He saw himself in a profound sense in the service of his material. And he considered his material not as a narrow stripe but as a broad swath, a representative sampling, of humanity. He felt his characters resonated with universal truths. “There is no such thing as a normal life,” Algren would say to H. E. F. Donohue. “It’s never lived that way.”71 And no one else but Algren could write, as he did in November 1962 in a new preface to his 1942 novel Never Come Morning, “The source of the criminal act, I believed twenty years ago and believe yet, is not in the criminal but in the righteous man.”72
There is a line in the poem with which Algren closed his 1973 fiction and nonfiction collection, The Last Carousel, that codifies the enigma of his writing credo: “All those whose lives were lived by someone else.” The catalyst for his novel Never Come Morning had been newspaper accounts of a nineteen-year-old murderer named Bernard Sawicki who was quoted on the day of his arrest saying he “never expected to be twenty-one anyway,” virtually the same words Algren has spoken by Bruno “Lefty” Bicek in the novel. And on the day of his sentencing to death, Sawicki told the judge, “The hell with you, I can take it.”73 These are Algren’s people, the objects of what James Giles74calls his “harsh compassion,” those who don’t get to live their lives. Algren’s friend, the photographer Art Shay, remembers Algren reading in the newspaper about the murder of an entire family by someone they had picked up hitchhiking. Algren scrutinized the pictures accompanying the newspaper story, including one of the murderer, who had “HARD LUCK” tattooed across his knuckles. “That poor sonofabitch,” Algren commented. He was referring to the murderer. “My wife wanted to throw [Algren] out,” Shay remembered, adding: “Nelson’s humanity. He could see what could drive a man to something like that. Only Jesus Christ … could have that kind of attitude.”75
And yet, the emotional life of Bruno “Lefty” Bicek in the novel is finally completely his own and not Bernard Sawicki’s at all. Algren’s characters were always different from the people whose words and actions inspired them. He borrowed figures of speech and other details as they suited him, but the tragicomic moral universe of Algren’s novels is finally all his own. And this puts another spin on the line in the poem. Not unlike the people who inhabit his novels, Algren was so consumed by the lives he wrote about that he too, like Fitzgerald, saw his life being lived by others.
As a society we hope to be judged by the achievements of our best and brightest; individually we may wish to express our finest qualities in what we do. Algren reminds us that self-knowledge will not come by either of those routes. He believed that we can’t know ourselves except by looking deeply into the eyes and hearts of our most forlorn, most broken-down, who are shorn of all but their essential human qualities, and sometimes even of those. Only by looking there will we be able to see into ourselves. (The last line of the poem quoted above is “Within a rain that lightly rains regret.”) He wrote about them with unparalleled beauty, writing gorgeously of hard luck cases of all kinds—as if that were the only thing worth writing about. He was not the first of his kind. Yet no other writer of his generation had Algren’s blend of radicalism with a vision that was so personal and lyrical.
There has been surprisingly little serious critical attention paid to Nelson Algren’s writing since his death in 1981. One valiant and thorough popular biography by Bettina Drew. One excellent scholarly monograph by James Giles. And that’s about it. Amazingly little, considering that Algren’s novels themselves continue to be widely read and studied, that Algren himself is considered by many to be among the handful of great American novelists of the 20th century, and that no one has yet made him known to us in the way that other writers of his stature have been made known—weighed and measured, analyzed and interpreted, and in this way inducted into the pantheon of American literature.
It is almost as if Algren were someone we don’t want to know. Someone to be respected, but not included. A writer who somehow slipped past those who stand as our nation’s self-appointed literary gatekeepers, rather than being accepted by them. He is still the quintessential outsider. Unlike the writings of, say, Faulkner or Hemingway, Algren’s works comprise a literary backwater, known to many but visited with understanding by few. For most readers, his world is a landscape we lack either the words or the desire to find familiar.
Like Fitzgerald, he published his first novel in his early twenties, but unlike Fitzgerald, Algren did not succumb to weaknesses of spirit and misfortunes of circumstance. At the time he wrote Nonconformity he had been a practicing writer of fiction for twenty years. After Nonconformity he would go on writing books for another thirty years—until the end of his life at the not-unripe age of 72. There is a completeness to his artistic output—four major novels, a half-dozen other books of lasting importance written over a span of fifty years—that saves him from the sense of doom that has engulfed so many other American writers in this century. Algren is not a tragic figure in the way that Fitzgerald is.
He began as a Proletarian novelist, a member of the John Reed Club, a contributor to Jack Conroy’s Anvil and the Canadian Masses, who wrote with the belief that the disenfranchisement of the Depression was going to turn our society on its head. Twenty years later his vision had taken on greater complexity and depth. Along with the things he’d always known to be true, his personal journey had taught him much that gave his mature output broader definition. Nonconformity and The Man with the Golden Arm are the work of a different writer from the one who penned Somebody in Boots. He had learned a different faith, and a willingness to continue wrestling with the world whether or not he was able to change it. Alongside his apparent tragic vision, there is in Algren by this point, as in Beckett, a corresponding non-tragic one.
Into this literary situation, Nonconformity lands with a very specific and relevant history and much to say about Algren, in his own words, that was not generally known. It shows him as isolated, and as self-isolating. Indeed, his subject in Nonconformity emphatically is not the importance of solidarity among living writers. He cruelly attacks James T. Farrell, and jabs at other lesser lights of his epoch. And the name of the one writer with whom Algren had had the closest and most mutually supportive relationship, Richard Wright, comes up only once in passing. The enthusiastic reception Wright’s Native Son (1940) received on publication had fueled Algren’s faith that his own work would be appreciated, and Wright had written the introduction to Never Come Morning. But by 1952, the emotion Algren attached to his connection with Wright belonged to a different decade.
Nonconformity nonetheless shows Algren to be much more thoughtful, literate and “literary” than the image he cultivated over the years of someone who, w
hen he wasn’t writing novels, was playing cards, betting on horses, or socializing with killers and drug addicts. He did all that. At the same time, as he shows here, he took the responsibility of the writer in deadly earnest, and could examine the history of free expression not just in terms of the immediate crisis of McCarthyism he was facing in 1952, but as a centuries-long struggle.
In Nonconformity, Algren turned to subject matter that was, for him, quite banal—himself, other writers, the writing art, the responsibility of the intellectual, the dangers of conformity for those who create. This once in his life he chose to write at length about the state of literature because he felt that suddenly something was happening to our nation to cause artistic creation generally, and his own artistic output in particular, to be under an extraordinary threat.
Sadly, after completing The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren did not publish another novel for seven years, and then abandoned the novel altogether for two decades, although he wrote many more books.76 His decade of unabated achievement had been as amazingly fertile as anything in the history of American literature. It had generated, in chronological order, Never Come Morning; Neon Wilderness, his now-classic story collection; The Man with the Golden Arm; Chicago: City on the Make, his prose-poem paean to Chicago; and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing; five very different major works of the imagination, each an enduring work. None were written easily, and by the end he had spent himself. The self-assurance he felt by 1949-50, and still had in 1952, progressively dissolved thereafter into an anguished battle between his compassion and a newfound bitterness and cynicism. Nonconformity, which he wrote in defiance of an era, was also a plea to himself to persist in the face of increasing opposition from within, opposition based in his own mounting loss of faith that his writing was truly valued. And in the end Algren’s own life would share something of the aimlessness and pathos of his characters.
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