At first they distrusted his style. Then they distrusted his lack of politics. Then they distrusted his politics. Then they distrusted his drinking in public while they drank in secrecy. Or—worse yet—didn’t drink at all. They distrusted his adventures. They distrusted his beard. Finally they distrusted his smile.
Yet they never came out with what they really distrusted. Because the big thing with them was the money; and he never went for the money. He made the money, he liked the money, he spent the money. But he never went for the money.
They had his goat, they said. Because, sooner or later, they felt sure, he’d go for the money. He bought leisure and travel and adventure and houses and boats and sporting days and easy good times. Yet he never went for the money. Had he gone for the money they would have had his goat. As long as he didn’t he had theirs: because it left them with nothing to get hold of except his beard and his smile.
The big thing with him was neither the money nor yet that mystic stream of time, eternal and serene; nor yet those long beautiful islands. Nor yet the changeless and changeful seas.
He was the historian who noted how many letters littered the field where the Austrian dead lay face-down in the sun with their hip pockets emptied: and he was the Austrian facedown in the sun. He was the English girl dreaming herself dead in an Italian rain. He was the advance man with purple wounds from elbow to wrist hiding beneath the sheets in a cheap hotel. He was the chronicler of mules with their forelegs broken drowning in the port of Smyrna.
It wasn’t the gulf stream of time, but the deep-floating corset borne upon it and the student’s notebook that, in the end, were most important to him.
Hemingway was the picker with the long pole.
“Life is the greatest left-hander we know,” he said—“unless it was Charlie White of Chicago.”
And of the American writers of our time now dead, which one, given a single choice, would you bring back to life?
For myself it would have to be Hemingway.
Hemingway all the way.
EPILOGUE
QUAIS OF CALCUTTA
Our rigging severed the moon the night we sailed
Into that jungle of cranes and jutting spars
The smear in that dungsmoke pall was merely day
Lighting impossible multitudes; that stirred as one.
Then rose, between the No-Beef Restaurant
And the Family Planning Store
Crying No Mama No Papa No Baby No Chowchow Papa You Give.
Kanani Mansions someone had named that ominous tenement
Where a woman of Assam wearing golden earrings slept
Her cheek upon her palm
Her ancient ayah slept upon the floor.
And all night long the ceiling fan whirred on.
O night so starred, with trees like clouds at rest
With lamps that leaned in pairs
And roses black as red—
I saw her purchased breasts
Their rise and fall.
A night that roses—one rupee per bunch—
Made shadows as of many rupees on the wall.
O chasmed love, with thighs that locked so sure
O deep-joyed dark, that makes the world come true:
Her roses choked within the burning air.
Yet in voluptuous gravity she slept on
Above the cabareting taxis’ roar.
O night that sanctifies
The seaman’s whore.
Dock-hawks followed our rigging to the sea
Then let us sail our ways alone.
Yet far, far out
With all docks gone and daylight swiftly going
Two messenger crows came cawing from the sun
Accusing me—
No Mama No Papa No Baby No Chowchow Papa You Give.
NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award; A Walk on the Wild Side ; and Never Come Morning.
1 Studs Finnegan’s Wake, by Molly Bloom.
2 Henri Motherlant, Sur les femmes.
3 Camilo Cela, The Hive.
4 Chicago Sun-Times
5 Interview by Joseph Haas in the Chicago Daily News.
6 Chicago Sun-Times
7 Saturday Evening Post
8 Wall Street Journal
9 Chicago Evening American, April 21, 1961
10 Pageant magazine, July 1961
11 1961 Starch Consumer Magazine Report and Sindlinger Audience Action Study
12 Pageant magazine, July 1961
13 Pageant magazine, July 1961
14 The Realist, May 1961
15 See “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey,” an essay by Professor Leslie Fiedler.
16 See Man in Modern Fiction, by Prof. Edmund Fuller, Vintage Press, 95¢.
17 © 1962 by Dwight Macdonald. Reprinted from Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald by permission of Random House, Inc.
18 See Something of Value by Robert Ruark, a novel slack as a severed clothesline.
19 Edmund Fuller in Saturday Review.
20 “The Art of Evasion” by Leon Edel, in Hemingway. A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Robert P. Weeks.
21 “The white community,” Mr. Baldwin commented recently upon the murder of Malcolm X” “must share the responsibility for this thing no matter who pulled the trigger; for whoever did it was formed in the Crucible of Western Civilization.”
And whoever did it was also formed in the crucible of the American Negro community. If that community’s claim to equal justice in the company of men is to have validity, it will have to assume responsibility for its own acts. Putting responsibility on Ol’ White Massa for every act of violence of our times affords the Negro a convenient cop-out; and also means he wants to hold on to the immunity of being a slave.
Copyright © 2008 by Seven Stories Press
“Who Lost an American?” © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by Nelson Algren
Originally published in 1963 by The Macmillan Company, New York, under the title Who Lost an American?
“Notes from a Sea Diary” © 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965 by Nelson Algren
Originally published in 1965 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, under the title Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-583-22937-8
I. Title.
PS3501.L4625A78 2008
813’.52—dc22
2008038735
Nelson Algren, Algren at Sea
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