The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “I don’t see anything in the least funny in that,” she assured me.

  “I don’t think it’s highly comical myself,” I had to admit, “I just thought it was better than sitting around looking at each other. I often say comical things; sometimes I even tell comical stories. Like one time a friend of mine in Chicago, a little fellow but a very big man in his own narrow circle, got to be a judge. We always called him Ding-Ding before he was on the bench because he had once turned in a false fire-alarm. He had the hook-and-ladders swinging around corners all over the Westside, looking for something on fire. All of us reproached Ding-Ding for doing a thing like that, and he took it so to heart he promised never to pull another fire-box so long as he lived. And he stuck to his word so good that when there was a vacancy on the bench they picked Ding-Ding because he had by then become widely known as a man of his word. Even now when he is a judge and so has license to indulge himself a little now and then, he will turn his eyes the other way when passing a fire-box. And when he has to decide a case of someone accused of fooling with fire, he can be very stem indeed.”

  “I don’t see anything funny in that either.”

  “Wait till I tell the whole story,” I asked her, “you’ll purely howl. Because even though he doesn’t pull fire-boxes any more, Ding-Ding still thinks along hook-and-ladder lines. You just should have been there, the time he was holding a bench trial of a kid accused of setting fire to a church. ‘We have to keep Chicago strong and America mighty!’ Ding-Ding hollered, ‘Hard labor! No parole! Take him away forever! Bury him! Twenty years!’

  “But this boy jumped up and hollered, ‘Your Honor! This case has been fixed!’ and his lawyer knocked the boy down.

  “ ‘What did he say? What did he say?’ was all Ding-Ding could think to ask, he was that taken by surprise.

  “ ‘Your Honor, he said he is only a kid from the sticks,’ the lawyer explained.

  “ ‘Why, then we recommend mercy, remand the case, suspend the sentence and adjourn this court,’ Ding-Ding decided.

  “But when the lawyer took this kid home and told his father what he’d jumped up and hollered, the kid’s own father knocked him down.

  “That same evening the bailiff dropped by and he talked to the boy like a father, too. But the boy felt very bitter about being knocked down publicly, so the bailiff said, ‘Well, we’re in private now,’ and he hit the boy and knocked him down also.

  “Ding-Ding came in later, wanting to know what the bailiff thought he was doing, trying to book a fix himself. The bailiff explained that, because of the nature of the charge, he was afraid Ding-Ding wouldn’t stand for a fix and might even get a bailiff fired who arranged one.

  “ ‘It isn’t the man who sets an occasional fire who burns me,’ Ding-Ding explained, ‘it’s the character who pulls a fire-box in cold passion when nothing is burning that I can’t bear—Oh, these goddamned false-alarm phonies!’—and he turned and belted that boy so clean the kid went out cold and when he came to, just lay there crying quietly. So you see, that little Ding-Ding, when it came around to his turn, he hit the kid harder than anyone.”

  I looked at my cheesified friends. The lady looked ready to eat her young and boredom was trickling out of Alfred’s ears.

  “I’m doing a critique on the Existentialism of Zen that will appear in Capistrano: A Western Review,” he told me, keeping his big surprise back for a moment: “And I’m thinking of including a footnote on you!”

  This was going to happen whether the swallows came back on time or not, it looked like. “I’m real relieved to hear about this,” I told him, although what I was really so relieved about was that I finally had a line on him. He was a one-book novelist who had swung to the footnote field, a subsidiary of the critic’s trade: that is, I’m told, the coming thing in prose.

  Conversation, after that, eddied around whether Theodore Dreiser was a great writer, a great great writer or just a good old sport. I maintained, and still do, that the pen is mightier than the sword. Then they began pitting Edgar Allan Poe against the fellow from Yoknapotawful County the way fight buffs like to match Ketchel against Robinson and all like that. I couldn’t help noticing, with these fearless finks, that the best writer was always the one who’d been dead longest.

  “I saw a play,” I told them just to change the way the talk was tending, “it was by some fellow who served eight years in an English jail.”

  “I don’t see anything to be proud of in being in jail,” the shrike-lady told me.

  I looked down at the last lonesome oyster in my stewless, drained and drying bowl, and the oyster looked back up at me baffled as could be. “Where did everyone go, Dad?” it wanted to know. When the waiter took him away I knew I’d lost my only friend around that table.

  The footnote king was still cropping ravioli but he looked up for a moment, dried his chin and asked what the play I saw was about.

  “Capital punishment,” was the closest I could come. It was such short notice.

  “O, this killing, killing, killing,” the footnote king mourned. “O Castro—enough.” Coming from someone who liked dead writers better than live ones, that struck me as a little odd.

  “I just can’t see how anyone can still believe in capital punishment,” the shrike-lady taxied in. “They used to hang eleven-year-olds for stealing sheep in England—but that didn’t put a stop to sheep-stealing.”

  “A person’s habits are pretty well formed by the time he’s that age,” I remembered. “If they’d strung up a couple of ten-year-olds just as a preventive measure it would have put a short quick stop to the mischief—and there’d be more sheep for the rest of us today. As it is there’s hardly enough now to go around.”

  “I fail to see anything funny in that either,” she assured me.

  “They laugh at Random,” I reminded her.

  “You said that before.”

  “I know I did. But I forgot to tell you about Tinkle Hinkle.”

  “Another Chicago judge?”

  “No, this was a convict fellow from East St. Louis, name of Hinkle, who could digest anything. He didn’t like working in the prison machine-shop so he began eating bolts, nuts, washers, whatever he could pick up, in hope he’d be sent to the dispensary. He got so much junk inside him you could hear him tinkle when he walked, so the other cons named him Tinkle Hinkle. The warden heard him tinkle, too, so he had him put under the X-ray and there was so much ironware inside they had to operate. The operation was a success, because when it was done the warden said, ‘We’re transferring Hinkle to the mental ward—I said mental not metal.’ I thought that was pretty good for a warden,” I apologized.

  Then I withdrew a malevolent little packet of toothpicks, of a breed possessing such tensile strength that I don’t apply them to the teeth at all. I simply hold one parallel to the table and leap upon it, gnashing.

  Shreds of filet began spewing to all sides. “Stop that!” the shrike-lady commanded me. “Put that thing away! Alfred! Make him stop!” But the toothpick and I were now as one and I wouldn’t be stopped long as wood endured. One particularly juicy shred landed in the middle of a plate of spumoni owned and operated by a Zen Hipster five tables away; waiters came running, someone blew a whistle; I fled for the door without my coat and made it at the very moment my hosts tried coming through also: for one mad moment we were all three wedged. Then the wedge gave, they fell into a cab and wheeled away. Leaving me coatless, toothpickless, defrocked and bereft.

  Somewhere down Sixth Avenue a fire siren wailed. Remembering Ding-Ding, I hoped it wasn’t a false alarm.

  I remained bemused after the siren, true or false, had died upon the wintry air. What was it that had lent my host an aura of such fraudulence?

  He hadn’t tried to sell me a hot watch. He hadn’t implied that he had powerful influence with the Carnegie, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He hadn’t divulged intimacies from the lives of the Spendthrift Gentry.

  He’d done nothing more than rev
eal a mind better fitted for measuring meat than literature, that was all. And, as butchers go, he was honest as any. Weighing Saul Bellow, he felt obliged to retract a couple thumbs of praise; lest he’d tipped the scale in favor of a writer he admired. As, when weighing Norman Mailer, a writer of whom he disapproves, he would feel obliged to put in a couple phrases expressing respect; if not esteem. You have to hit it right in the middle when you’re this kind of critic.

  The difficulty here being that he was dealing with passion; not with hamburger. He’d been preoccupied his whole adult life with an art based upon passion; and his own emotional equipment was that of a man who could measure accurately but could feel little.

  And so, like Tinkle Hinkle, he’d swallowed so much erudition that he clanked when he talked. And yet himself had never been capable of writing a single line of English prose worthy of recollection.

  “Too timid to damn, too stingy to applaud,” Joseph Heller summed up this critic in 1962.

  There has been no occasion since for revising Heller’s estimate.

  HAND IN HAND THROUGH THE GREENERY

  with the grabstand clowns of arts and letters

  “DEAR Mr. Algren,” a young woman writes from Wheaton (Ill.) College, “I am a freshman and am standing on the threshold of a literary career. What is my next move?”

  “Your next move, honey,” I had to caution her, “is to take two careful steps backward, turn and run like hell. That isn’t a threshold. It’s a precipice.”

  The girl appears to feel that she is about to be welcomed through the gates of that enchanted land named “The Smiling Side of American Life” by William Dean Howells; later to be packaged by Richard Nixon as “Our Free Civilization”; then telecast as Marlboro Country.

  A smiling image yet sustained, in air-conditioned stillnesses, when summer is the season. Then Creative Writers’ Workshops, poetry seminars and Festivals of the Arts will materialize midst campus greenery. The Failure of Hemingway The Failure of Faulkner The Failure of Whitman The Failure of Melville The Failure of Crane The Failure of Twain The Failure of London and The Failure of Wolfe will be revealed by one-book novelists embittered by the failure of David Susskind to invite them to a party where they might have met George Plimpton or even Allen Funt. Just anybody.

  Perpetual panelists will clobber perpetually rejected novelists with symbolisms concealed in the work of other perpetual panelists. Manuscripts will be returned bearing the instruction: Insert more symbols. This can happen anywhere but chances are better in Vermont.

  There a kind of Sing-Along-With-Mitch picnic-king who can sing For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, impersonate Dylan Thomas and denounce Jacqueline Susann for commercialism while counting his own house, will welcome cash-customers to his lonely-hearts literary supermart in the hills of Vermont, DEPOSIT REQUIRED ON ALL CARTS.

  The mock-up poet will himself assure Miss Wheaton that nothing stands between her unreadable novel and its publication except consultation with a publisher’s representative; whose identity will remain undisclosed until she’s coughed up tuition for a season of creative picnicking (including a pass to the company store). At so much per diem.

  The company-store pass won’t get her into Faculty Cottage because the Sing-Along Supervisor draws a sharp caste line between published and unpublished writers. Miss Wheaton won’t make this elitist group because not only is she unpublished but she’s not well-groomed enough to make up for it.

  Well-groomed women, seeking sanctuary while a divorce-mill is grinding, will wheel up in Caddies. A Junior Editor, grown middle-aged in search of a self he’d loved and lost, will arrive by Mohawk Air bearing an initialed attaché case containing only a pinch-bottle of Haig & Haig and a signed copy of Atlas Shrugged. Poor girls from the Village will arrive in sandals, seeking a piece of the Establishment and higher heels. Pursued by studs, barefoot or finely shod; on the prowl for a piece of anything.

  The authoress of one nonbook will explain how she made it in a man’s world. The editor of Seminal, a quarterly financed by his mother-in-law, will not reveal how he made it in a woman’s world. Then virgins budding between hard-covers, and paperback editors mildewing between soft, poor girls afoot and old girls a-wheeling, Discover-Me-And-I’H-Discover-You Faculty Wonders, a subscriber to The Famous Writers School who claims he wants Max Shulman’s autograph (that must be a put-on), one-bookers, non-bookers, publishers’ representatives, pinch-bottle vets, Miss Wheaton Supermart Dante and all, will spring hand-in-hand through the greenery and up and down the hall.

  For one week or two or ten.

  But after the grabstand clown has checked his holdings and counted all the carts in Vermont, Miss Wheaton will be left standing within the very door where she’d come in—to marvel at the emptiness of her own cart.

  At so much per diem per diem.

  Where had that “Publisher’s Representative” gone? Could that quickie in the greenery have been with nothing more than one more unpublished poet? If Breadloaf hadn’t been exactly a precipice it sure as hell hadn’t been a threshold.

  “Good writing thrives like corn in Iowa City,” Miss Wheaton, still perplexed, reads in the N.Y. Times, “where 125 of the nation’s most promising writing students just signed up for another semester of agony and ecstasy at what is generally considered the best author’s course in the United States—the Iowa University Writing Workshop.”

  A six-month deferment from the armed services or the chance to have a steady boyfriend free from parental supervision provides the ecstasy; the agony belongs to the parents footing the bills. For what is offered at Iowa is cover, concealment and sanctuary. Their parents’ whole purpose having been to protect their young, out of their playpens and into their teens, from winds of economic weather, the kids who come to the Iowa Workshop have never even been rained on, poor things. Their strongest passion is watching Batman and their greatest hope that they will never get wet.

  “The mere fact that the younger American literary generation has come to the schools instead of running away from them,” Prof. Wallace Stegner of Stanford assures us, “is an indication of a soberer and less coltish spirit.”

  Prof. Stegner says that exactly right. The younger literary generation has come on the run because it’s cold out there. The sobriety, and lack of coltishness, constitute their qualifications for reporting fashions or sports; or teaching “Creative Writing” on another campus. They bespeak a readiness to be cowed in return for a stall in the Establishment barn; at whatever cost in originality. They will not buck. They will not roar. At times they may whimper a bit, softly and just to themselves; but even that they will do quietly. For what it lacks in creativity, the Iowa Creative Workshop makes up in quietivity.

  “Are you one of the quiet ones who should be a writer?” The Famous Writers School asks the same question that the founder of the Iowa Workshop—himself a “Famous Writer”—is asking: “If you are reserved in a crowd you may be bottling up a talent that could change your life. If you’ve been keeping quiet about your talent, here’s a wonderful chance to do something about it. The first step is to mail the coupon below for the free Writing Aptitude Test.”

  The second step is to unbottle your money and send us some.

  The University of Iowa is a good place to go if you want to become a journalist, a linguist, a zoologist, a jurist or a purist. Its Creative Writers Workshop is a good place to go to become a tourist. For it provides sanctuary from those very pressures in which creativity is forged. If you want to create something of your own, stay away.

  For if the proper study of mankind is man, it follows that to report man one must himself first become one. How is one to create something who has not, himself, been created? How is one to make something without first having been made into something himself?

  The style is the man: the personality that is unformed cannot create form; the young man or woman who is unintegrated himself cannot integrate wood, stone or language. Nobody can become anybody until life has pressured him
into becoming somebody.

  And as becoming somebody is a solitary process, not a group-venture, so art is a solitary process—not a field-trip in pleasant company.

  Why has the Iowa Writers Workshop, in its thirty-five years of existence, not produced a single novel, poem or short story worth rereading? Because its offer of painless creativity is based on a self-deception. The student provides the deception and the school provides the group.

  “Writers in groups are with few exceptions the most impotent and pernicious of tribes to infest the planet,” the playwright Ed Bullins assures a N.Y. Times interviewer, “it would be healthier for a writer to socialize with drug addicts than with a claque of hacks.”

  Had the Times man gone to the kids, instead of playing patsy to the brass, he would have learned what they taught me:

  “It’s a respectable way of dropping out.” “The longer I hang on here the longer I stay out of Vietnam.” “I had to find a school where I wouldn’t get kicked out for bad grades—either that or go to work for my old man.” “It may lead to teaching creative writing somewhere else.” “Too many squares around my home turf. I was getting conspicuous.” “There isn’t anything I really want to do—but hanging on here makes it look to my folks like I do.” “My parents keep pushing me to get married but I want to have fun and games first.” “I heard they were going to reevaluate the impact of literary naturalism on American writing and I want to get in on the ground floor.”

  “Iowa City,” the Times man reveals the workshop’s advantages to poets who teach there, “is the place where a poet can relax in the knowledge that a regular paycheck will come in no matter how badly the book goes.” That it can go badly enough to embarrass readers, without stopping a paycheck, is demonstrated by the founder-poet’s own odes to fried rice.

  Of the eighty-odd students whose work I read at Iowa at least thirty were too disturbed, emotionally, to write coherently in any language. Only two used English lucidly; and neither of these was native-born.