Nonconformity

by Nelson Algren

  In two cases, the new format required long quotations where Algren had none, and I chose passages that would not have been appropriate had the essay been published in 1953, as Algren had intended. One is de Beauvoir’s description of her first meeting Algren in 1947, the second is Algren’s answer to the question “What is American literature?” taken from H. E. F. Donohue’s Conversations with Nelson Algren. Since the essay is seeing its first publication only now, nearly half a century later, I believe both these additions are fitting.

  The archive held two slightly variant typescripts of almost the same length, which were largely identical. They must have been roughly contemporaneous, and the discrepancy was probably the result of final retyping in June 1953. There was no way of telling which of the two came later, and even had I been able to tell, this alone would not have been decisive; the later version might well have reflected Algren’s deflated mood at the time, his increasing doubts about Doubleday’s commitment, and displayed more second-guessing than improvement. In the end I followed one of the two almost in its entirety, introducing versions of less than identical passages from the other in only a few places where there seemed to be something worth saving that did not appear in both.

  Since Algren eventually borrowed his own original title, A Walk on the Wild Side, for his 1956 novel, the essay needed to be renamed. I didn’t much like Doubleday’s choice, “The State of Literature,” and neither had Algren. Other titles he came up with over the years tended to be self-mocking, reflecting, I think, his frustration and bitterness over the fact that the book was never published. I chose Nonconformity because it was the word by which Algren most often referred to the book, in conversation and in writing, because I like it, and because it hasn’t become any less provocative over the years.

  With thanks to Robert A. Tibbetts, former Curator of Special Collections at Ohio State University, Columbus, which, along with the Newberry Library in Chicago, holds Algren’s papers. Mr. Tibbetts received me warmly when I visited, and with humor and great warmth left me to my devices. Thanks to Stephen Deutch, for his marvelous pictures and who introduced me to Algren’s old neighborhood, the first time he had returned there since his friend’s death; to Bettina Drew, for keeping the facts of Algren’s life and work alive; to James Giles for keeping us thinking about Algren in new ways; to Art Shay, Algren’s other photographer-friend, from whose book, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, came our cover images; and to Studs Terkel, who has also remained Algren’s friend all these years. Special thanks to Kurt Vonnegut, who initially challenged the viability of publishing Nonconformity at all and then never stopped asking me how work on it was progressing; and to Victor Navasky for helping sort out several points of fact regarding the period we now call the McCarthy era.

  Two writers literally volunteered to work with me, at times when we could not afford to pay them, because of my association with Algren. They are Tom Downs and C. S. O’Brien. O’Brien became my sounding board. It was O’Brien who fought for keeping Algren’s opening section (now the appendix) on the basis of its being the nearest parallel to Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. And it was O’Brien as well who tracked down Algren’s references to the inimitable Mr. Dooley, a character I had never heard of.

  When I first contacted Algren’s friend, and still his agent, Candida Donadio, in 1984, I had not yet published a book. And yet her agency, then as now, treated me with the respect they accorded anyone passionate about Algren. Over the years Candida, Ruth Sherman who as Algren’s surviving relative is executor of his estate, Eric Ashworth and Neil Olson have been gracious and helpful and always convey to me the palpable sense that Nelson is nearby.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Elinor Nauen for her inspired copyediting of Nonconformity; to Cynthia Cameros and Moyra Davey for sharing the journey of the past year at Seven Stories Press, to Brendamichelle Morris for her help securing permissions for Nonconformity, and to my wife, Adriana Scopino, without whose help this work could not have been completed.

  To H. E. F. Donohue, whose Conversations with Nelson Algren preceded this book and led the way, I am particularly thankful. Every serious reader of Algren knows Conversations. In its pages Algren’s personality lives like an eternal flame. Several passages from Conversations appear in Nonconformity because they are illuminations of Algren’s work and his spirit. My hope for Nonconformity is that it may help readers of Algren continue on that road, in that spirit.

  —D. S.

  APPENDIX

  [In October 1949, the actor John Garfield decided he’d like to star as Frankie Machine in a movie version of Algren’s harsh and brilliant new novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. Garfield sent his producer, Bob Roberts, to Chicago, where he struck a deal with the writer. In early 1950 Algren and a friend, an addict named Acker, who Algren thought could serve as a technical adviser on the film, traveled on the stylish Super Chief train to Hollywood. Once there, things got off to a bad start. Garfield only swept in and out between games of tennis; Algren kept talking about renegotiating the deal. Within days communication had broken down to the point where Roberts had Algren served with summonses. Algren felt Hollywood was mistreating him, and it only made sense to him to treat Hollywood with equal scorn and loathing in return. In the end a better deal was struck, and Algren returned to Chicago, somewhat mollified, to work on the screenplay, which he completed in three months. For the next two years, as the pervasive persecution of leftists and liberals intensified and as the number of blacklisted actors, writers and directors increased, the film project foundered. Then, in May 1952, under threat of perjury prosecution for refusing to name Communists by claiming he didn’t know any, Garfield, aged 39, died of a sudden heart attack.

  Several years later, and after Algren spent another disastrous episode in Hollywood, the film of The Man with the Golden Arm was finally made by Otto Preminger, to Algren’s intense and everlasting dissatisfaction. He would come to refer to his Hollywood experience as “my war with the United States as represented by Kim Novak” (who co-starred, alongside Frank Sinatra). The hurt of it stayed with him, partly because he made very little money from it, and partly, perhaps, because he understood it to be emblematic of his larger conflict with the whole country.

  Originally, Algren had placed his satiric account of his Hollywood experience as the opening scene of this essay. Since both its tone and its substance set it apart from the rest of Nonconformity, it is included here as an appendix, of interest to the reader of Nonconformity as vintage Algren and as what triggered him to write the book.—D.S.]

  Life, Peer Gynt decided, is a matter of passing safe and dry-shod down the rushing stream of time. When, not long past, I discovered myself to be passing not only safe and snugly shod, but downright lavishly set up, I felt, though there was no Anitra near, that I agreed with Peer at last. The downright lavish setup was called, exotically enough, the Garden of Allah.89 But the only exotic thing about it was that the rent was free. Free because I was being accorded the Ten-Day-Hollywood-Hospitality Treatment, an operation predicated upon the assumption that half a grand allotted from a producer’s budget toward the comfort and entertainment of any writer from the hinterland is certain, with the help of that Yogi sun, to arouse such slavering gratitude in said hinterlander that he’ll sign for any price the producer deigns to name. And if he doesn’t so deign, said hinterlander will ultimately feel so guilty about the advantage he is taking of the helpless that he’ll plead for permission to sign anything. That he’ll sign blind just to feel clean once more. The producer can fill in the figures later.

  “Don’t worry about price,” I had been comforted by long distance. “Trust me to take care of you. I like writers. I want to take care of you.”

  It sounded fine. I had not yet felt that sun. Driving from the station, the producer’s flunky assured me that the apartment I was to occupy had been vacated by a name-star only a matter of hours past. “You’ll be sleeping in his bed tonight,” he promised. Lucky me, I thought, that the train was late. B
ut took the hint nonetheless that living in such a place, rent or no rent, was in itself enough to make a trip from Chicago worth any said hinterlander’s while.

  But didn’t really feel it to be worth that much until the flunky appointed the name-star’s pantry with a case of good scotch, a case of fair rye and a case of cheap bourbon; then lowered his lids to indicate we weren’t to talk about money. “Don’t mention it,” he reassured me. I chose to mention it all the same. What I mentioned specifically was “Where’s the gin, for God’s sake? He must have thought I said “Djinn,” for in only a matter of moments there appeared—precisely as in a story by John Collier90 and all of it stuffed inside a castoff tattersall of the late Laird Cregar’s91—a real Hollywood djinn. An honest-to-God Guru. He was fresh up from Malibu Beach and his toes stuck out of his sandals like amputated thumbs. He looked like he’d slept in a bottle with the cork in it.

  It was, of course, the producer himself. And we were off to Romanoff’s. I dined with him unaccompanied that first evening, a bit self-conscious of my closed-in toes. The next, I took the liberty of inviting a newfound friend. The next I took two liberties and by the time we made the Brown Derby we were blocking traffic. With my senses by now so awhirl with the wonder and hurry of it all that I had no time for gratitude.

  In the faint hope of fanning some sort of spark in that direction, the djinn inquired softly, during the course of some feverish carryings-on at the Beverly-Wilshire, and the wind whisking every which way, whether I’d care to meet Miss Sylvia Sidney. The entire course of my life having been determined by the 1931 version of An American Tragedy, that damned near did it. That an introduction so long sought should come at a moment when my eyes weren’t focusing was of no importance. Indeed, I bowed so low from the waist, in the direction I judged the lady to be, that I had just a bit of trouble straightening up. It wasn’t till the following forenoon that I learned, accidentally, that Miss Sidney was in Brussels. I felt like a sprout.

  I confronted Guru with his betrayal and he didn’t even redden. He was just hurt. The party to whom he’d introduced me, it turned out, was a highly effective writers’ agent—so why did I have to get so salty when somebody tried to do something for me? “We’ll get along better when you learn to trust others,” he counseled me—and topped the bit off with the hollowest laugh I’d yet heard in The Land of Hollow Laughter.

  Then he put a contract before me and confessed all: “I’m not a businessman at heart”—placing one hand over the heart to indicate precisely where he wasn’t a businessman-at—“I’m just a frustrated writer.”

  “At heart I’m not a writer myself,” I confessed in turn, placing Bernard Shaw’s hand over the place where my own valentine-shaped ticker throbbed—“I’m just a frustrated businessman and I don’t even trust myself.”

  Again in a matter of moments, but this time more as in something by Howard Fast,92 I was evicted from the Garden of Allah where there was no Anitra near. And presented with a bill, per diem, which Guru just happened to have in his pocket. Itemizing, among other small comforts: one case of good scotch, one case of fair rye, one case of cheap bourbon. Nothing was free after all.

  “Is there any relationship between my refusal to sign and my eviction?” I had just time to inquire.

  He never so much as cracked. “What kind of a businessman do you think I am anyhow?” he demanded to know.

  “What kind of a writer do you think I am anyhow?” was all I could think to reply.

  Whereupon we locked, the terrible djinn in the open-toed shoes and I in my watertight ones, in a life-and-death struggle to determine, once and for all, who was the greater jerk.

  I very nearly won. I was scarcely a ranking contender and I was up against the champ. Smart money would have said he wouldn’t even have to extend himself. Yet, on the morning he phoned to say, “After all, I do like you,” I felt I had him.

  “I like you too,” I assured him. (To illustrate further the operation of affection in the Land of Hollow Laughter: while waiting in the office of a medium-size bigshot, to be introduced to a king-size bigshot, the latter entered and went directly into conference with the medium-size one without indicating awareness of a third party in the room except by a palm over his mouth and an occasional jerk of a thumb in the general direction of that party. Whispers, chuckles, thumb-jerks, a final backslap—and he had left quite as unceremoniously as he had entered. Whereupon the medium-size one assured me: “He likes you.” And he really meant it too.)

  We had reached the tacit understanding that neither of us could afford anything less than affection for one another. He needed to make a million dollars and I needed to buy a house in Indiana. So though the very sight of me caused his features to be suffused by a disgust matched by nothing earthly save the revulsion in my own breast, we clung passionately each to each: a friendship based on the solid rock of utter loathing.

  He showed up with a flute of Johnny Walker on one arm and a male friend on the other. By the stardust in the friend’s eyes I immediately recognized an autograph-hunter. A hunter who inquired my name so shyly that I confessed, “You got me.” Whereupon he put a packet of blue papers bound with a red rubber band into my hand, and the only process-server in the world with stardust-eyes excused himself.

  I was alone with the Great Guru. The Great Guru from Malibu. Riffling hurriedly through the packet it became clear that he was charging me with everything from piracy on the high seas to defrauding an innkeeper. I was secretly relieved to note that he didn’t have anything on me for the theft of the Stone of Scone.

  “You see,” he explained with that smile that succeeded so wondrously in being at once shamefaced and self-satisfied, “every time I talked long distance to you I had a lawyer on the extension.”

  The bird really liked me. Then, as if struck abruptly by the injustice of everything, he strode to the middle of the room, literally beating his breast with one hand and still clutching the bottle fiercely with the other, to turn the awful accusation upon me—“I’m a nice guy! Why do you make me act like a jerk?”

  It wasn’t the real me that made the djinn give such an effective interpretation of a jerk. Indeed it wasn’t myself at all. This impulse to do a creative job of work was genuine and pulled him hard. But the demands of the bank financing that impulse pulled him the other way, and harder. Still he stood at last with his fat toes showing, his legal threats in one hand and gifts in the other—the very personification of an industry at once predatory and propitiating. One that finds nothing untenable in going down on all fours one day crying mea culpa, promising to be a good boy and licking hands or whatever is in reach, and the next to be up and beating its breast with the terrible roar, “Movies are better than ever! Your money or your life!” A sort of kowtowing cannibalism, both abject and arrogant, sufficiently comical in either an individual clown or in a whole industry largely dominated by clowns.

  Overwhelmed by what I had done to the man, I followed him about the room as hysterical as he was—“I don’t know why I make you act like this.” I broke down completely. “Everything is mixed up in my head—I don’t understand myself anymore. Back home people like me!”

  He put the bottle in my left hand and a pen that writes under water in my right.

  That Yogi sun had done me in at last.

  NOTES

  1. The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. 81-4. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  2. Mark Twain to George Washington Cable, recalled by Cable at a Twain memorial reading on November 30, 1910. Mark Twain: A Biography, by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), pp. 785-6.

  3. William Faulkner’s address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm, December 10, 1950. In The Portable Faulkner, Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1946, renewed 1974), pp. 723-4. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  4. Writer-director Kazan, actor Fer
rer and playwright Anderson. All were blacklisted and were among the first to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in an attempt to clear their own names by testifying against others as former Communist Party members.

  5. The Feinberg Law, enacted in New York in 1949, required teachers to report on the loyalty of their colleagues in and outside the classroom. In Illinois, the Seditions Activities Investigating Commission was created in 1947, chaired by Paul Broyles. In 1951 Broyles persuaded both houses of the Illinois legislature to pass a bill requiring state agencies to ferret out subversives. Governor Adlai Stevenson vetoed the bill. Two years later yet another Broyles bill was vetoed by the next Illinois governor, William Stratton.

  6. ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), established in 1947 by establishment liberals, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Neibuhr and Hubert Humphrey. Identifying themselves as part of an intellectual elite, members of the ADA tended to be strong critics of Joe McCarthy on the one hand and fierce opponents of Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party on the other.

  7. In Act Four of Peer Gynt, Peer is mistaken for a prophet, and in that guise he asks his disciple and love interest Anitra, “Do you know what life consists of? … It’s to be transported dry-shod down the stream of time, still unchangeably one’s Self.” Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen (New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 139. See opening of Appendix.

  8. Faulkner, loc. cit.

  9. “Varchous” for virtuous, of course.