The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  This is not to put down summer extension courses in photo-journalism, science-fiction, writing whodunits, juveniles, or how to train your chihuahua to be an attack dog. Such workshops can prove commercially worthwhile as well as being fun; and campus rates are usually more reasonable than those prevailing at Fire Island or Aspen.

  Therefore pay no heed, Miss Wheaton, to Festivals of the Arts in spring, poetry seminars in summer nor “Creative Workshops” in the fall. Avoid hootenanies in Vermont unless you’re paid to appear or own a piece of the maypole. What “poet” would be peddling rides on a wooden carousel in the hills if he could bring a horse-and-rider alive on paper?

  Nor pay any heed to the professional critic. He is not a man who has succeeded in literature but one who has been defeated by it. He knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

  The relationship of the writer to the critic is comparable to that of the jockey to the chartwriter. After the horse has been ridden, and the risk taken, the chartwriter will analyze, for tomorrow’s bettors, a race that, for the rider, is forever done. What the rider has yet to learn cannot be gained from anyone who has not had the living animal under him.

  If God can’t help him, both jockey and writer know, neither chartwriter nor critic can. For it is the imminence of the actual experience, whether riding a thoroughbred or enduring the shock of reality directly, at first-hand, that make the findings of the critic or chartwriter remote to the rider or the writer.

  Imminence of death or prison also makes sharper the outcast sharpie’s eye. His freedom being dependent upon distinguishing between fox and hare, he becomes both hare and fox. Fear of the pursuer and compassion for the pursued become quickened in him; as they become dulled in those who are neither hunter nor prey.

  “Why shouldn’t a cheat speak well sometimes,” one of Gorki’s thieves wants to know, “when decent people speak like cheats?”

  Between the year that James Haggerty assured us that the moral of the U-2 incident was “Don’t get caught,” and the year the Pentagon Papers were leaked, we became increasingly aware that people in government must sometimes choose between losing their positions or speaking like cheats. It should come as no particular shock, therefore, that those whose hands control levers in the American literary establishment may become most outspoken for respectability when their own operations become disreputable.

  “What this novelist wants to say,” one lever-puller becomes suspicious of a novel wherein respectability does not depend upon private proprietorship, “is that we live in a society whose bums are better men and women than preachers and politicians and otherwise respectables (sic). This startling proposition . . .”

  What’s really so startling about preachers and politicians lying as fast as a dog can trot? Or of “bums” being better men and women than these same “otherwise respectables”? The designation of itself, by the American middle-class, as “decent,” and of the unpropertied as “bums,” is demonstrated by this critic’s aptitude for concealing that class’s corruption while proclaiming its morality.

  Why was it that nobody laughed when Malcolm X spoke; while multitudes chuckled when Hubert Humphrey wept on TV? Could it have been because, in racing his public-relations image from coast to coast, crying “You belong to us!” while clutching Lester Maddox’s sleeve and, a week later, weeping stage-business tears over Martin Luther King’s casket, that all Humphrey achieved was a demonstration of how weak and joyless a politician can appear while preaching strength through joy? Wasn’t his failure to reach people due, at least in part, to the recollection of Malcolm X achieving strength through anguish?

  “The strength of any nation lies in the children of its street-corners, its poolrooms and prisons and its alleys,” Malcolm X had already forewarned us, “not in the power of its technology.”

  The direction Mr. Bullins points to young writers, out of the establishment and onto the street-corners, is therefore sounder than Prof. Stegner’s confidence in campus sanctuaries.

  Prof. Stegner is laboring under the illusion, common to academics, that a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said has a compassionating impact upon the human spirit: a premise of American criticism since the days of the Transcendentalists; who came up with their best ideas under a campus moon.

  That a dedication to the printed word may conceal an indifference toward cruelty; and that understanding of justice and human dignity becomes enfeebled in proportion to one’s sophistication should be obvious by now. Unless we’ve forgotten that it was scholars well-disciplined in Shakespeare, Hegel, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Dante and Darwin, who yet devised the cultural programs at Auschwitz.

  For the most dangerous societies are not those whose tribesmen sacrifice a bear to appease their gods; nor whose gurus distinguish themselves by caking their skins with ocher-colored mud. More ominous are those foregatherings of begoggled PhD’s, their skins caked by sun-dried erudition, most of them earless, who perform linguistics so magical that that which is unreal is made to seem real; that which is empty to appear full: that which is false to seem true. Sacrifices endured at such ancestral rituals prove bloodier, ultimately, than that of one stupid bear.

  The secret of linguistic magic lies in forcing matter to fit the form; rather than permitting form to be shaped by the matter. Dr. S.I. Hayakawa’s miraculous vision of the Chicago Police riot of 1968, as an unprovoked assault upon the just and well-restrained forces of law and order, is a classic example of a man editing reality to fit a personal ambition.

  Dr. Jacques Barzun, pleading for retention of the death penalty upon the premise that Joan of Arc, given a choice of life imprisonment or of death by fire, would have chosen the fire, is thereby enabled to demonstrate that fire would have been his choice also. Which goes to show you how dependent intellectual integrity is upon who is handling the matches.

  That a sane respect among men, one for another, has been preserved at all in this country is not owing to the Bomb-Em-Back-to-the Stone Age, Send-in-the-Marines Eye-For-An-Eye Otherwise Respectables, but by people speaking behind bars: Gene Debs, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Phil and Dan Berrigan.

  Jailbirds all.

  That it has been Earth’s dispossessed who have given Man his most abiding truths, from a conspiracy trial on the outskirts of Rome to the anguish of Solzhenitsyn, is an ancestral paradox now commonly accepted by writers, readers and critics alike. That outcasts may speak truth, however, still comes as disturbing news to the critic quoted above: one perpetually embattled in defense of mediocrity so long as it stays respectable.

  A yearning for respectability, so tenacious as to be achieved only at the cost of sensibility, is revealed in a handbook for other churchmice working the Establishment while ostensibly preoccupied with the arts.*

  “What then are the reasons for the connection between the study of literature and the contempt for success?” this critic inquires and answers himself: “The noblest of them is undoubtedly that the study of literature encourages a great respect for activity which is its own reward (whereas the ethos of success encourages activity for the sake of extrinsic reward) and a great respect for the thing-in-itself (as opposed to the ethos of success which encourages a nihilistically reproductive preoccupation with the ‘cash value’ of all things). To acquire even a small measure of independent judgment is to understand that ‘successful’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’ and that ‘good’ does not necessarily mean ‘successful’. From there it is but a short step in the world to the ardent conclusion that the two can never go together, particularly in America and particularly in the arts.”

  Well, what would you do, given a choice of a nihilistically reproductive preoccupation of the ethos of success encouraging activity for the sake of extrinsic reward, or the thing-in-itself leading to an ardent conclusion? Wouldn’t you rather watch Kukla, Fran and Ollie?

  Laying out a dollar and a quarter for 262 pages done by a man who earns his living by the written word, then disc
overing that he has no stronger control of the English language than Richard Daley, is dismaying.

  What, in God’s name, is the man trying to tell us by splintering prose into such uneven planks? Simply that writers often pretend that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to themselves as rigidly as to businessmen. That’s all.

  While gentile kids were watching the Three Stooges, he reminds us, he himself was a Jewish boy who owned only one suit. Yet he made up his mind early that he was going to travel with the Fast Mensa Set, Jewish or not! And rode the subway all by himself to Manhattan. And walked right into the goy registrar’s office and told him right out he was Jewish and had only one suit. And that after he made it he was still going to go home over weekends! Then he got right in there and practiced talking to gentiles until he got to meet George Plimpton, too.

  And he still goes home over weekends!

  Yet, how dreary to explain one’s life in terms of the distance between names on mailboxes. Never giving us a glimmer of the faces and forms of the home of his youth: how soundless, odorless and colorless a life it appears: like watching TV on a night when the reception makes ghosts of the players.

  And all merely to achieve the editorship of a magazine with less impact than Women’s Wear Daily! Isn’t the life of any precinct captain who succeeds, after years of struggle, in becoming Ward Committeeman, more meaningful? At least his life has had an impact upon the living.

  The philosopher who thinks only for other philosophers has got to be lying. When he loses concern for those unconcerned with philosophy he is no longer a philosopher: he is an occupant with tenure.

  The poet understood only by other poets is practicing a kind of pharmaceutics without a pestle: merely devising a certain distinction for himself by filling prescriptions and calling them cantos.

  The revolutionary who revolutionizes his life-style but not his life has no closer connection with revolution than Tennessee Ernie Ford, singing I Believe, has with heaven.

  Those who believe true change can be effected by meeting force with force may as well be riding with Hell’s Angels. Changes will come from those most reluctant to straddle a bike: those willing to sacrifice power they already possess. Changing from a Harley to a Honda won’t get it.

  The artist who paints with one eye on the approval of those with the leisure to judge, the hands to applaud and the funds to buy, and no eye at all for those who’d rather go bowling than own a Van Gogh, may well gain approval. Then the light from the street strikes his masterpiece and all his colors wash out. He’d forgotten that Van Gogh didn’t seek approval.

  The literary critic, devising his thought from other thinkers, yet never consulting those who never think, may feel strangely uneasy about some clamor, coming to him faintly from beyond his shutters. He senses that a coherent literature, emerging from that clamor, would diminish him.

  Are you still hanging around the edge of that precipice, Miss Wheaton? Still not convinced that it’s not a threshold? Still bemused about what your next move ought to be?

  One move you might make, I’d suggest, is to avoid sleeping with people whose troubles are worse than your own.

  Another is to avoid drinking when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. If you do you’ll be finding yourself in need of a double-shot every time you consider what the world is doing to a nice person like yourself. And, since the world begins working on you early in the day, you’ll have to get stoned to the bricks just in order to get out of bed.

  Then you’ll realize there’s no longer any point in brooding about what your next move is going to be. Because you will already have made it.

  Given a choice, never do anything anyone tells you you ought to do: unless you yourself want to do it. Given a choice, always do what you yourself want to do: even though everyone else tells you you ought not, you should not, you better not—and God won’t like it if you do.

  Watch out for what people tell you God wants you to do. Given a choice between your God and your life, save your life.

  If your God is a God that tells you He comes first, he isn’t any God.

  If He’s the kind of God who tells you to save your life, you’ll never get another; pay attention.

  If you can, believe in Him. If you wish, pray to Him. But bear in mind that your God is not mine.

  Save your life. God can wait.

  *Making It, by Norman Podhoretz, Bantam Books, 1969.

  COME IN IF YOU LOVE MONEY

  BUTTE, Montana, hasn’t had a horse-wire for twenty-five years. The old horse-players are dying off and the young people won’t take chances.

  But the M & M Bar will book your bet if a race is being televised.

  It was Derby Day, 1964, Northern Dancer was at the top of the M & M board at 4-5. Hill Rise was 2-1. Quadrangle was 4-1. The other entries didn’t matter.

  A redhaired youth, Stetson tilted, was dealing poker to half a dozen players. One was a middle-aged woman with a face ravaged yet virginal; like a debauched Joan of Arc. The others looked like storekeepers long wearied of waiting for customers. I took a seat.

  “The game is draw poker, sir,” Red warned me respectfully, “when you get caught bluffing you lose.” He had a bag of salted peanuts and a Pepsi bottle beside his bank.

  “What’s the house cut?” I asked him.

  “We use the joker for aces, straights and flushes, sir,” he answered.

  Eddie Arcaro materialized on the screen.

  “It looks to me like every horse in this race has a chance,” Eddie encouraged me to get a bet down. I gave the houseman five and five to put on Quadrangle.

  “His name is Chiqueno,” Joan of Arc promptly informed me. Had I asked her the man’s name she would have told me what the house cut was. Montanans give direct replies only to questions you haven’t asked.

  “Isn’t that the girl who was so drunk in here the other night before last?” Red asked nobody in particular. The players craned about to see and Red took a quarter from the pot for his pocket. Then he spilled peanuts into his palm, popped them into the Pepsi bottle and took a long drink.

  “I never saw that done before,” I observed, meaning the snatching of the quarter rather than the drink.

  “It’s a solution I worked out by myself,” Red assured me, “the peanuts are too salty otherwise.”

  “I don’t think that’s the same girl,” Joan decided, ‘‘she’s part Mex.”

  Why a girl couldn’t have been drunk the night before last because she was part Mexican, I didn’t try figuring out. I was holding four diamonds.

  The fifth was a heart. I played the hand as a pat flush and won. It seemed too easy. Red slipped peanuts into the bottle and drank.

  “Red was so drunk in here the other night it took three policemen to throw him out,” Joan filled me in. “I think there’s something else in that solution.”

  “How was I to know they were policemen?” Red defended himself, “they didn’t have uniforms. When they grabbed me I thought they were just being friendly.”

  “You were too drunk to tell whether they had uniforms,” Joan assured him.

  “Well, what are you going to do if you can’t dance?” Red asked me. “Stay sober?”

  I could see how anyone, drunk or sober, might have trouble distinguishing between officer and citizen in Butte. I’d already been solicited, by schoolgirls, for a contribution toward uniforms for the local police force.

  “Luck is going to play a part today,” Arcaro prophesied, “it’s all kind of historic, too.”

  Inside stuff.

  Somebody wearing a green woolen jockey cap, with VFW threaded in white on its peak, took the chair beside me. I paid him no mind. Until the cards went around. Then the cap began revolving.

  Beneath its peak I saw his eyebrows lifted in disbelief and his mouth rounded in astonishment—then both expressions jerked, in an instant, to bottomless despair. The fellow not only had some sort of palsy of his facial muscles, but he was also an extremely homely sapiens. I decid
ed not to be distracted by the storms of emotion that passed perpetually over his ugly mug: all I would have to do was to keep looking at the TV screen.

  “What’s your story, Deadpan Jack?” Red asked him. Deadpan Jack made no reply.

  The horses were coming out on the track, stepping lightly through a light drizzle.

  “Distance will be decisive today,” Eddie announced boldly. “But breeding is going to count too,” he took it all back.

  The left side of Deadpan Jack’s face began quaking. His cap began revolving; first slowly then faster. I sensed he was holding a pat full house and threw in my pair.

  “I pass,” Deadpan Jack decided; and threw in his hand.

  I can read a poker-faced player just by the intensity of his expressionlessness. But how do you read a man whose face expresses everything? I’d never before come up against such a situation. It was my first time.

  The horses were in the gate. Before I could tell Red to deal me out, he dealt me the five of spades.

  Y caza broke Quadrangle out in the middle of the bunch and began saving ground. My second card was an eight of spades.

  Orientalist was leading the pack, but I wasn’t afraid of Orientalist. Quadrangle began moving up on him. All I had to fear was fear itself and Northern Dancer. My third card was the four of spades. I looked at Red to see what he had in mind.

  Quadrangle got Orientalist behind him; but Hartack, on Northern Dancer, began making his move. He caught Quadrangle yet couldn’t pass him. I looked at my last two cards. Ace of clubs and six of spades.

  “How many?” Red asked me.

  I threw away the ace.

  “One.”

  Y caza began pulling away from Hartack. Roman Brother passed Northern Dancer but couldn’t catch Quadrangle. All Y caza had to do was hold the horse straight and nobody could catch Y caza now. He went under two full lengths in front of Roman Brother.