Nonconformity

by Nelson Algren

  10. “Hypocrisy” from Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody, by Finley Patrick Dunne (New York: Dover, 1963), p. 207. Chicago-based journalist and humorist Dunne’s Mr. Dooley was a fictional Irish saloonkeeper and amateur philosopher from Chicago’s West Side who pondered the subtleties of current events in essays published in the Evening Post and American Magazine.

  11. In the fall of 1952, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections compiled a report on McCarthy’s activities during 1948 as a member of the Senate Banking Committee and a joint committee on housing. McCarthy had accepted $10,000 from the Lustron Corporation, a builder of prefabricated houses and a regular petitioner for funds from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and had authored parts of the Housing Act, which included a provision allowing the RFC to make a loan of seven million dollars to Lustron in 1949. McCarthy invested the $10,000 he received from Lustron in Seaboard Airline Railroad, another company indebted to the RFC. Prompted by Senator William Benton, McCarthy’s chief adversary and sponsor of a resolution calling for his expulsion, the Congressional committee labored on for a full year without managing to get McCarthy to respond to the charges. “I have not and do not intend to read, much less answer, Benton’s smear attack,” wrote McCarthy. The 82nd Congress ended, and McCarthy’s friend William Jenner was appointed chair of the 83rd. Jenner then made the report unavailable.

  12. U.S. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, a McCarthy supporter, was author of the International Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act, which heralded a Communist conspiracy. He also co-authored the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which placed constraints on immigration.

  13. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was a prominent American economist, social philosopher and author of a number of books critiquing capitalism. In the early part of the century, American journalist Joseph Lincoln Steffens was the best-known of the muckrakers. Here Algren notes that all the old torchbearers of truth are long dead.

  14. During the McCarthy era the American Legion was a proponent of blacklisting.

  15. The passion and intention of this passage from Twain encapsulates that of The War Prayer, which Twain dictated in 1904-5, although it is not a direct quotation. Twain’s War Prayer bore a similar relationship to his writing career as Nonconformity does to Algren’s. After reading it to his daughter Jean, who thought its publication would be regarded as sacrilege, and to at least one friend who clearly felt he should publish it, Twain finally decided against immediate publication: “I have told the whole truth in that,” he said, “and only dead men can tell the truth in this world.… It can be published after I am dead.” This famous story is told by Paine, in Mark Twain: A Biography.

  16. Whittaker Chambers, a Communist Party member turned informer, was the first individual to testify before Dies’ HUAC and name names, accusing Alger Hiss of sending secret federal documents to the Soviet Union. Hester McCullough was a Westchester (New York) housewife and amateur vigilante blacklister who became something of a right-wing cause célèbre when in 1950 she was sued for libel by the dancer Paul Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler.

  17. From The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand, Collected and with an Introduction and Notes by Irving Dilliard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952; Third Edition, Enlarged, 1960), p. 284. See below.

  18. This passage appears towards the end of one of Learned Hand’s most famous speeches. The jurist delivered the address at the convocation of the University of the State of New York in his native Albany on October 24, 1952. His words were immediately carried across the country on the news wire services, and the Saturday Review made the speech its feature article in the November 22, 1952, issue. Given the political climate at the time, Hand’s words comprised an impassioned, if understated, plea against the status quo. See above. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  19. Frank Yerby began his career as a writer of protest fiction, but turned to popular historical romance novels in the ’40s. Emmet Kelly was a famous American circus clown. For the rest of this section, Algren scornfully refers to Yerby as “Kelly.”

  20. 1887 letter from Anton Chekhov to M. V. Kiseleva. From Letters of Anton Chekhov, Selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 41. Algren attacks Chekhov here under false pretenses, since Chekhov’s view of the writer’s responsibility closely approximated his own, and had little or nothing to do with the kind of dressed-up entertainments Algren is attacking.

  21. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 121.

  22. Fitzgerald, p. 81.

  23. Hearn (1850-1904) wrote stories and essays based in the Far East; Sterling (1869-1926) was a lyric and dramatic poet.

  24. André Gide’s journal entry for October 8, 1891, included this observation: “This terrifies me: To think that the present, which we are living this very day, will become the mirror in which we shall later recognize ourselves; and that by what we have been we shall know what we are.” The Journals of André Gide, Volume I: 1889-1913, Translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 16.

  25. Fleur Cowles was an editor for Look magazine.

  26. “Books” by Joseph Conrad, a 1905 essay reprinted in Joseph Conrad on Fiction, edited by Walter F. Wright (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 81. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  27. Clarence Budington Kelland was an author of juvenile novels and editor of The American Boy.

  28. Algren seems to have taken this passage from an English language edition of The Illuminations available at the time he was writing, and then perhaps condensed it—or he was quoting from memory. The Louise Varèse translation of this passage differs substantially: “The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sick-man, the accursed,—and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul—richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them!” From an 1871 letter from Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, printed as a preface to The Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1946), pp. xxx-xxxi.

  29. Popular 1940s novels by Frank Yerby and Louis Bromfield, respectively.

  30. Conrad, pp. 81-2.

  31. The Saturday Evening Blade was a Chicago tabloid newspaper, hawked by Algren in his boyhood. See Algren’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Mark” in The Last Carousel, pp. 293-4.

  32. “Our April Letter” in “The Note-Books” in Fitzgerald, p. 165.

  33. Fitzgerald, p. 81.

  34. Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and short story writer, author of dozens of books, including The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize.

  35. Fitzgerald, p. 84.

  36. Ibid., p. 80-3.

  37. In his autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975, pp. 13, 15 and 26), Durocher gives substantially the same account and adds that in his early years his mother read his words in a newspaper and gave him hell. Algren probably got his version from the same newspaper story as Durocher’s mother.

  38. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Selections from The House of the Dead translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 129.

  39. Soon after completing Nonconformity, Algren would begin his most ambitious novel ever, with a plot line that turns on characters closely linked to those invoked here. Called Entrapment, it tells the story of Baby, a country woman turned
prostitute (modeled after Algren’s very close friend, a prostitute named Margo), and Daddy, her heroin-using husband. When Daddy gets busted, Baby robs from her tricks to get him out of jail. Algren never finished the book, although there exist several hundred manuscript pages.

  40. The Diary of a Writer, by F. M. Dostoevsky, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol. (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 7. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Algren has chosen a passage early in Diary of a Writer in which Dostoevsky is actually quoting the Russian literary critic Belinsky. The section from which the passage is taken deals not only with the misery of those excluded from mainstream society, but goes on to discuss Dostoevsky’s near execution and four years of hard labor, which he later described as vitally important to his development as a writer, where his enforced contact with other convicts gave him knowledge of the Russian lower classes possessed by no other contemporary Russian author. See below.

  41. The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952, renewed 1980. Vintage Books Edition, 1989), p. 713.

  As noted by Algren’s biographer Bettina Drew, in the summer of 1953—which began with the June executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which horrified Algren, and while he still waited to hear from Doubleday on the publication plans for this essay—Algren claimed he read all 750 pages of de Beauvoir’s magnum opus. De Beauvoir, though still deeply bound to Algren, had by now distanced herself from him sufficiently to be deeply at work on The Mandarins, the novel that would recreate their love affair, and to have taken on a new lover in the future documentary filmmaker Claude (Shoah) Lanzmann. But Algren was still deeply in love with de Beauvoir, even though more than a year had passed since he’d seen her, a period during which he’d reconciled with his first wife Amanda. And just as missing Simone must have been part of the experience of reading The Second Sex, so writing Nonconformity was also in part an attempt to prove to her that he was as worthy of her as Sartre was. The passage in question precedes by a few pages the conclusion to The Second Sex and comes as part of an argument whose polemical thrust is that, as she writes, “to explain her limitations it is woman’s situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence.” Both Algren and de Beauvoir extend the analogy beyond the specific context—from the condition of women to that of blacks, the French proletariat or the American underclass. See Afterword. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  42. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer, p. 16. At the peak of his career, during the period of his last years that produced The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky also produced this huge and unwieldy work of autobiographical journalism pieced together from a variety of sources in the form of a diary. Informal and colloquial in tone, dealing in large part with political questions of the day, the work has been compared to Rousseau’s Confessions or Goethe’s Poetry and Truth. See above.

  43. America Day by Day, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Patrick Dudley (pseud.). (New York: Grove Press, 1953), p. 294.

  44. The phrase sounds distinctly like one of Algren’s, and indeed he is paraphrasing and condensing de Beauvoir here so freely that he has rewritten her, perhaps without fully realizing it. To have restored her wording in this case would have been to change his meaning.

  Here is a passage from the conclusion of America Day by Day, de Beauvoir’s account of her four-month trip across America in 1947 in which she first met Algren, which may have been the source for Algren’s sentence: “There are very few ambitious people here.… Ambitions for greatness are often the source of many deceptions, and indicted by faults Americans do not know; they have virtues born of indifference to themselves. They are not embittered, persecuted or ill-willed, envious or egotistical. But they have no inner fire. In order to lose themselves in the pursuit of an object, they find themselves without an object at all.” p. 294.

  45. Letter from Anton Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, written from Nice on February 6, 1898. In Letters of Anton Chekhov, selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney and Lynn Solotaroff. (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 304. The reference here is to the Dreyfus case. Chekhov’s letter was written from France on the eve of the trial of Zola for his exposé (J’accuse!) of the court-martial that acquitted Major Esterhazy in the Dreyfus case. Chekhov passionately supported Zola’s stand against the hypocrisy of the attack on Dreyfus and argued it repeatedly in letters to his friend and publisher Suvorin. The same letter that Algren quotes, for example, begins, “You write that you are vexed by Zola, but here [Nice] the general feeling is as if a new, better Zola has been born. In this trial of his he has been cleansed of superficial grease spots as by turpentine, and shines forth before the French in his true splendor. It is a purity, a moral loftiness that no one suspected.”

  46. Fulton Sheen, a Roman Catholic Bishop of New York, was a noted radio and TV preacher who won the 1952 Emmy as most outstanding male personality on television. Fulton Oursler was a writer and editor on religious themes, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told. Fulton Lewis was a radio commentator.

  47. America Day by Day, by de Beauvoir, pp. 80-1. This account of de Beauvoir’s first evening with Algren was not, as is self-evident, part of Algren’s original essay. I include it here to maintain the consistency of the structure of Algren’s essay, in which he alternated his own words with long quotes from other writers, and as a rare window into Algren’s sensibility since, as in this essay itself, it shows Algren, uncharacteristically, revealing the sources of his inspiration. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  48. Popular singer of the period, whose number one hit was called “Cry.”

  49. Mafia bosses.

  50. Hawkins and Young were jazz tenor saxophonists; the Mills Brothers are credited with founding the “black-harmony” singing style and paving the way for 50s rock and roll; the Billy Williams Quartet performed weekly on Ceasar & Coca’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s; singers in the “hep harmony” tradition, Monroe and Laine were singers of, respectively, the 1930s and 40s; Gene Krupa was a “Chicago style” jazz drummer, while Jackie Cooper, an actor, possibly made it to this list for the poetic similarity of his name to Krupa’s; or perhaps Algren mistakenly thought Cooper had played Krupa in the biopic The Gene Krupa Story.

  51. The Bridewell Cure was a cold turkey “cure” named after the Illinois prison where the practice was notorious.

  52. Conversations with Nelson Algren, by H. E. F. Donohue (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 279-80.

  53. Letter from Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, February 6, 1898. In Chekhov, p. 305.

  54. Westbrook Pegler was a newspaper columnist known for attacks on corruption in politics and on labor unions.

  55. Kafka, p. 228. This passage is from the second-to-last paragraph of the novel, which concludes with K. declining to do himself in, and then losing his life anyway, at the hands of his two executioners, “like a dog.” Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  56. New Testament, Romans 7:19. The King James version reads, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The New English Bible version reads, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will.”

  57. Alice in Justice-Land: From Pippins and Cheese, by Jake Falstaff, published as a column in The New York World in the summer of 1929 and subsequently reprinted by the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: ACLU Publications, 1935).

  58. Kafka, pp. 45-6.

  59. Ibid., pp 228-9.

  60. As U.S. Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959, John Foster Dulles emphasized “collective security” in foreign policy and the concept of a strong national defense capable of immediate retaliation as a deterrent to war.

  61. Democratic Vistas, by Walt Whitman. Washington, D.C., 1871, pp. 11-12. As reprinted in The Portable Walt Whitman, edited by Mark van Doren, revised by Malcolm Cowley. (New York: Penguin, 1945, 1973), pp.
325-26. Algren’s Nonconformity is about the same length—pamphlet length—as Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and both embody the same broadsheet-like populist passion, both exhibit the same spirit of restlessness and impatience and both seem to allow themselves only reluctantly, almost petulantly, to be formed as essays, rather than, say, shouts from a Union Square or Madison Square soapbox. So Democratic Vistas is a most important antecedent for Algren in writing Nonconformity. In both, we are seeing writers unburden themselves of the harsh beliefs and perceptions that would usually go unsaid, and by so doing close, or move beyond, an earlier period of extraordinary fecundity—that had produced Leaves of Grass for Whitman, and in Algren’s case the period, just ended, that had produced Neon Wilderness, Never Come Morning, Chicago: City on the Make and The Man with the Golden Arm.

  62. “Murther” for murder, of course.

  63. Whitman, loc. cit.

  NOTES TO AFTERWORD:

  64. Letter from Algren to Joseph Haas, March 1, 1952. Quoted in Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, by Bettina Drew, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), p. 198.

  65. “Nelson Algren,” Paris Review 11 (Winter 1955) by Alston Anderson and Terry Southern, pp. 39-40. Reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 234.

  “I’d spent almost two years on the book before I ever ran into a drug addict,” Algren adds a little later in the interview; “I had the book written about a card-dealer, but there wasn’t any dope angle at all.… It was an afterthought.” And further on, speaking of his writing method generally: “I’ve always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens—you know, until it finds its own plot.… I suppose it’s a slow way of working.” (Ibid., pp. 236, 238, 240.)

  66. Donohue, p. 101.

  67. Besides the aforementioned Geismar, these include Algren’s contemporary George Bluestone and our contemporaries Tom Carson and James R. Giles.