Algren at Sea

  This is why nobody raps a critic’s door unannounced after midnight: there’s a Thinker in there but he’s on a tight schedule. He drives a well-lighted route, strapped in by a safety-belt, and stops only at well-behaved motels. And there’s nothing to drink in the house anyhow.

  But if you’re entertaining friends and the aquarium is closed, rap the novelist’s disorderly lair—“You in there! What are you up to now? What’s next?”

  You-In-There doesn’t know what he’s up to at midnight, 0230 hours, nor upon the gong of noon. He drives a collision course, lights out, along an untraveled way. The risks he assumes are the kind for which he is wished failure by most; and particularly by those who never take any. Their most urgent need is to be able to say “We were right after all.” Meaning that the man’s failure will be all his own doing.

  Yet the man’s risks succeeding, he gains cheers from the same gallery. “We were right after all” now means that they have a claim on his triumph because they’ve been with him all along.

  The practice of fiction involves the writer, personally, directly, and whether he would or no, with multitudes: that’s the basket he’s dammed in. The Practice of Criticism is a means of remaining personally uninvolved: that’s his basket.

  Benign critics there are. I know of at least one who would prefer to get the best from a living writer than to get the best of him. He makes allowances, in writers of the past, for those flaws which scar all human effort that has nobility.

  But we are not concerned here with benignity. Our problem is the middle-aged youth, so convinced the world owes him a refund, he is too timid to damn and too stingy to applaud. Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation:

  “All these reviewers inhabit much the same intellectual milieu, and what they have in common, apart from talent and intelligence, is an attitude toward books and an idea about the proper way to discuss them,” one commentator promises proper subscribers to a new review—“a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. Books are too important to permit of charitable indulgence. A book for them [The Milieu People] is, quite simply, an occasion to do some writing of their own.”

  Such injunction against charitable indulgence of creative work, combined with a concession of dependence upon the work of others for something to write about, is not only to demand damages where no injury has been inflicted, but to demand them arrogantly. Talent can spring up anywhere; but it is never dependent. Unsolicited opinions should not be telephoned collect.

  The injunction also illustrates the ancestral conflict between the artist’s view of the world and that of the Establishment. To the artist, the landscape of commercial enterprise has always been a chamber of mirages by which the true world is perverted; and the Milieu-Man, the critic, has, traditionally, been the artist’s apologist.

  But to Business, Government, Church, Military, TV, Press and Hollywood, the world which feeds, clothes, arms and amuses men is the one real world; the artist is the distorter.

  The Milieu-Man has now, by and large, become the Establishment’s apologist. Whose proof, that the Establishment’s reality is real, is that the Establishment works: that nowhere before has the artist been so widely benefacted. In no other age, no other land nor other season than our own, has the artist been more generously patronized.

  Yet he must remain hostile or be untrue. For the Establishment lives in the third-person; the artist in the first. The devastation we have seen, and the dehumanization threatening, prove that the Establishment not only works but that it works too well.

  In such a world the writer’s single usefulness has come to be the man who lives by no image, let his flaws show naked as they may. For, however disastrous to human values a civilization geared to technology may seem to him, he’s in it all the same. And the best he can do, by strength, luck or sheer stubbornness, is to stand in ironic affiliation to it.

  The Impossible Generalized Man, The Sagacious Impossibility, either at the levers of a commercial publishing house or a chair of English Literature, cannot risk such irony.

  Nor is this to quarrel with the just and necessary function of criticism: how many times Hemingway might have pressed the trigger before releasing it is just what is needed for a fuller understanding of Farewell to Arms. Dedicating oneself to a chronological breakdown of the accidents Hemingway sustained, from the time he skinned a knee in 1904 to the time a chandelier fell on him in 1938, shows us that the proper study of mankind is man. Anybody who can merge criticism with autopsy is the boy for me. And Harper’s will pay for it if you type it neatly.

  Publish or perish is now the cry of the Ph.D., running head-and-head with another Ph.D. for the widest desk in the Department of Humanities. He’d better get attention in print. So; by adapting the attention-getting devices of television to criticism, he can entrench himself in a hard-bought chairmanship.15 We understand, when Time anoints some persevering wheel as “a dedicated critic,” the meaning is that the man has devised a literary image that keeps the paperback stock moving in The Village bookstores as well as hard-cover stock in the suburbs.

  So much for Man’s inhumanity to Man. Obsequiousness in one critic helps us all; for it puts money in circulation. Theses which establish the respective failures of Mark Twain, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway are relieving unemployment of graduate students from coast to coast. For what would any head-on-a-stick marvel do for a livelihood were it not for having inherited a body of flawed art? Back to managing a Nedick’s and telling the cook to hold back on the butter, no doubt.

  Well, everybody has something he needs to throw up: instant erudition soundly based on servility will turn the trick every time. Articles like these restore criticism to its democratic purpose of nauseating everyone who can afford ninety-five cents per copy.16

  I was encouraged to give a boggling world yet another Hemingway paperback, by the realization that it would be a fresh contribution to write the same old things at sea. I would be the inventor of the very first essay on Hemingway smelling of salt! What the other fellows had been getting into the mixture I couldn’t identify; but it certainly was pervasive.

  In fact, I’d always had the feeling that, one time or another, they’d planned to write as well as Hemingway but to be better paid. As things worked out, however, they had continued to write badly without growing wealthy; while Hemingway had gone on writing well without going broke. This had embittered everybody.

  So I took a book of essays, by one Norman Podhoretz, to sea to remind me, should fire break out above or mutiny flare below, to be steadfastly magnanimous; so long as it didn’t cost me anything.

  Would my own efforts induce nausea? If retching was what it was going to take to get me to the docks of Singapore, was my thinking, everybody get set for a fast dash to the rail.

  The Captain was on my side too.

  His crew wanted to go to Japan, but he had a girl friend shelling copra for Proctor & Gamble and they don’t grow coconuts in Japan; so they tossed for whether it should be Kyoto or Chittagong Charlie’s in lIo-lIo. The Captain won the toss. “Make it two out of three, sir,” the First Mate spoke up boldly in behalf of his men. The Captain proved himself a sport. “Make it three out of five,” he offered—and won the next two tosses. Later I asked him to show me that half dollar and, sure enough, it had heads on both sides. “I didn’t want to go out of my way,” he apologized.

  That’s how it is in the Orient, men. That’s how it really is.

  And that’s how it was that the Malaysia Mail made all of the small-pleasure docks and none of the sporty-O ports. Bound neither for Kyoto nor Saigon, neither would we see Macao nor Luzon. We would tie in only at places where copra bugs live in caves called Bamboo Alley, Lion of Kowloon and 472 Cho-Ryang-Dong.

  Happily, my Definitive Essay began with a ring so definitive that, by putting an ear to the page, I distinctly heard something inside g
ong! I’d hit it off! The thing rang with profundity! And yet it was so burdened by precepts that its chime rang leadenly and its tolling held no merriment. It was more of an elegy in a deserted delicatessen.

  God! Had I but been able to sustain that I-Give-Unto-Thee-the-Keys-of-the-Kingdom-of-Heaven intonation, bookies would have been offering 6-5 and take your pick that it had been written by Podhoretz! “Well, we all have our good days.

  That one bad night can ruin. Such as one when, through an ominous tenement on the quais of Calcutta, a schizoid seaman pursued me under the delusion that I was a salami requiring slicing and he had the knife. Though I remained unsliced, my grasp of the concept that the proper study of mankind is man was shaken.

  Later, while trying to dispose of a watch engraved 77 Jewelries (purchased in a free-trade port), my bowlines were severed and the Definitive Essay began drifting to sea. I bartered my Podhoretz essays for a pair of sandals to a boatman afflicted by elephantiasis—where else could I have picked up a pair so cheap?

  Any reader assuming that memoirs of some moveable feast are offered here, should be advised that, by the time I got to Paris, nothing remained but empty napkin-rings on the grass.

  I met Hemingway only once, and briefly. My only claim to his friendship is that nocturnal message: “it is now 0230 hours.”

  Yet, as he had once observed that all his life he had been peddling vitality, he surely would have understood my defection from critics peddling sterility.

  NELSON ALGREN

  JUNE 21, 1962

  TWO HOURS OUT OF THE PORT OF SEATTLE

  Sooner or later, on her first trip out or her hundredth, every ship carries a doomed man.

  For the Malaysia Mail this was the sixty-first time out of the barn and she labored like a mare too tightly reined; too old to whip, too mean to whinny. I watched her harbor-home going blind in a mist behind her.

  There blue fogs kept bending red roses to rest; and girls, coming home from school, kept tossing their ponytails. No wonder the old scow kept grieving.

  For doomful seas from the black edge of the world would come rolling through nights without a moon: no ocean had ever darkened so lonesomely. “Don’t take things so hard, Pacific,” I consoled the poor brute—“girls come home from school in Malaysia too.” It wasn’t my first time out of the barn either.

  Lights of the rigging came on high and flickering. Then the big low lamps of the staterooms began burning too steadily. Was there somebody else aboard? I took a turn around the deck to a door marked PURSER, knocked, and got a direct command from the other side:

  “Turn the handle!”

  So that was how these things worked.

  He was all officer. Under a cap so bound with braid I saw it had made the decision to go to sea and was only accompanied by the man below for his use as an interpreter. Why would a man be wearing such a self-important hat alone in his cabin unless he’d been practicing the hand salute in preparation for World War III?

  There won’t be time for that this time, sir, I wanted to assure him, as he introduced himself.

  “Mister Manning,” he let me know—and just by the way he told it I knew I need not fear mutiny on this trip.

  “Algren,” I identified myself, for he needed cheering up. The paperback he’d put down was Japanese Simplified.

  Two Japanese lovelies stood framed on his desk. Neither looked simplified.

  “How much time ashore will we have in Kyoto?” I inquired casually.

  “We aren’t going to Kyoto,” he let me know, “but you’ll get a good view of the coastline at Hokkadate.”

  The coastline at Hokkadate wasn’t what I had in mind. “Will I be able to go ashore there?”

  “We only stop at Hokkadate to refuel,” Mister Manning told me, “but believe me when I tell you-you’re better off staying aboard. The less you see of Asia the better off you’ll be.”

  “Did you take these from the upper deck?” I inquired about the lovelies—one signed With All My Love—Noriko and the other To Bill With All My Heart—Suzi.

  “They run a hotel for me in Kyoto,” he assured me stiffly.

  And throw the profits to you from the dock tied in a silk kimono, I assumed—but which one did the throwing? I concluded it must be Noriko because she had a chin like Whitey Ford’s.

  “These people aren’t like us,” Manning informed me, “they steal everything they can get their hands on.”

  I was pleased to learn Americans had given up stealing manually.

  “All I had in mind was to take a few shots to prove to friends I’ve been out of town,” I explained, “if the Captain is afraid I’ll delay the ship I’ll use a Polaroid.”

  He picked up the paperback that simplified Japanese lovelies.

  “I hope you won’t be disappointed in not getting ashore in Japan,” Manning hoped; looking tickled pink.

  If you went ashore you’d be trapped by enemies, seemed to be Manning’s thinking; and if you stayed aboard friends might trap you. He hadn’t gotten far enough in his plans to arrange entrapment by himself, yet seemed to be working toward some such arrangement.

  “It’s alright,” I assured him. “Don’t let me interfere with the ship’s schedule: Just go ahead and refuel at any port you feel like.”

  Manning bestowed his Be-Kind-To-Our-Only-Passenger-He-May-Be-Related-To-The-Front-Office smile upon me. He had a mug as round as a rhubarb pie and the smile seemed to drip through the juice.

  I had no way of knowing that anyone with a face so self-satisfied could be doomed.

  JUNE 22ND

  This is one hell of a big ship. Wandering among freight cars in the fantail, I figured out that the reason they weren’t rolling around the deck must be because somebody had had the foresight to button down their wheels. This would require very strong buttons in a monsoon, I realized, and went up to the point of the ship to see what other cargo I was being held responsible for.

  The point of a ship is its front part. The reason for making a ship pointed is twofold: it makes the distance between ports shorter and prevents bumping when you run over a whale. Whales often sleep on top of the water because everybody goes to bed earlier in the Pacific than in the Atlantic. Unfortunately it wasn’t yet my bedtime. I went to find the Captain to see where he needed me most.

  I saw a fellow standing at a steering wheel and went into the cabin to see why he didn’t sit down. The reason he wasn’t sitting down was because he had to stand up to see over the wheel. He said he was a second mate and I told him I’d been married once myself. He asked me whether I’d like to try steering the ship but he didn’t mention pay. Nevertheless I took over as he looked like he needed some rest.

  I realized my responsibility: forty seamen and twelve officers, most of them with sweethearts or wives, were now depending on me not to hit anything. There was a clock that had lost one hand above the wheel and, whenever the wheel swung a bit, the clock’s hand swung a little too. I put all my strength into holding our course steady as she goes.

  “You don’t have to bear down,” the Second Mate let me know, “it’s automatic”—and a fearsome blast just overhead nearly took off my ears, the wheel swung, the clock’s hand boggled, the deck tilted.

  “We’re sinking, sir,” I reported calmly.

  “That was just the foghorn,” the Second Mate informed me with the wannest of wan smiles, “it’s automatic too.”

  I let him take the wheel back. I didn’t yet know that Danielsen’s smile, so thin, so faint, happened only in moments of his highest exuberance. The rest of the time he lived in some sunless world bereft of everything but memories out of years long gone. Though not yet forty, loneliness had aged him by twenty years more.

  “How long have you been at sea?” I asked him.

  “Since I’ve been born,” he told me-and again that smile, so wan and wandering. If Danielsen wasn’t the loneliest Second Mate on the Pacific they must be flying them in from Antarctica.

  “Is there anything to drink aboard??
?? I asked him.

  He whispered something (as he whispered almost everything) that sounded like “Communications Officer.”

  Communications Officer Concannon sat, earphones clamped to the perpetual beep-bop-jot-jot—then rose to six-foot-three to give me a big hand and grin, toss off the phones and begin pouring gin.

  “I saw you come aboard,” he told me. “‘There’s one in every crowd,’ I thought, ‘and two on every ship.’”

  “One of what? ”

  “Why, one mark of course,” he smiled, picked up a stained deck, shuffled and gave them to me to cut; then dealt seven hands of draw poker.

  “Tell me what you need and I’ll match it,” he promised.

  “Match my Jack.”

  He dealt around the board and a Jack fell on my hand. Not bad.

  He placed my forefinger across the top of my cards—“You’re signaling me for an Ace,” and moved the finger down, between the top and the middle of the face-down card—“King.” The finger dead-center was for a Queen. Beneath that indicated a Jack, and the finger at the card’s bottom asked for a Ten. Moving back up, but using two fingers, defined every card down to a Deuce: for which the signal was a small sweeping motion of the card.

  When I’d mastered the signals, Sparks gave me one admonishing word: “It all depends on the crimp I put in the deck. If the man beside me don’t cut them at the crimp, it don’t work. You sit opposite me so it don’t look like cahoots. Now how about a couple hands of blackjack?”

  I must have looked apprehensive because he grinned like a wolf.

  “Don’t you trust me, old buddy?”

  “I trust everybody,” I assured Concannon, “but I’ll cut them twice just for luck.”