First Trade Paperback Edition, January 1998
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1996 by The Estate of Nelson Algren
Afterword © 1996 by Daniel M. Simon
Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means or stored in a data base or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981
Nonconformity : writing on writing / by Nelson Algren : edited and with an afterword by Daniel Simon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-273-8
1. Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981—Authorship. 2. Authorship—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Simon, Daniel, 1957-.
II. Title.
PS3501.L46257465 1996
813’ .52—dc20
[8] 94-35205
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Nonconformity
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
Afterword
Historical Note and Acknowledgements
Appendix
Notes
About the Author
Q: What is sentimentality? What is sentimental?
Algren: Oh, it’s an indulgence in emotion. You want men and women to be good to each other and you’re very stubborn in thinking that they want to be. Sentimentality is a kind of indulgence in this hope. I’m not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don’t think you get a true picture of people without it in writing.
Q: Go on.
Algren: It’s a kind of poetry, it’s an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don’t think anything is true that doesn’t have it, that doesn’t have poetry in it.
—H. E. F. Donohue
from Conversations with Nelson Algren
1963
Nonconformity
I.
THE STRUGGLE TO WRITE WITH PROFUNDITY of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.
“So … I would cease any attempts to be a person—to be kind, just or generous,” he planned. “I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train …, men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses …, who said: ‘I’m sorry but business is business.’ Or: ‘You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.’ Or: ‘I’m not the person to see about that.…’
“This is what I think now,” Fitzgerald continued: “that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are … only adds to this unhappiness in the end.…”1
An observation so melancholy as to recall Mark Twain, after one of his last lectures, turning to a friend to say, “Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.”2
The writer’s lot, like the policeman’s, is never a happy one. A hardy life, as the poet says, with a boot as quick as a fiver. But it isn’t till now, in the American Century as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” William Faulkner puts it. “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.…”3
I purely doubt that the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the heart in conflict with itself. I doubt he’s forgotten a thing. And knows as well as any man that he labors under a curse. But how can a young unknown be expected to risk that consultation of the heart from which the older hands flee? The spectacle of artists like Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer and Maxwell Anderson4leaping through the hoop at the first sight of the whip doesn’t encourage the younger man to hold his ground. He knows enough of the heart to know it cannot conform. He knows there is no Feinberg Law and no Broyles bills5 for the heart; that the heart’s only country is the earth of Man.
But what, when Howard Hughes discovers that somebody on the payroll once belonged to ADA,6 will the accused be able to say in self-defense? Whether he’s in writing, TV, radio, teaching or lecturing, he sees very well, the way things are going, that the main thing is not problems of the heart, but to keep one’s nose clean. Not to trouble oneself about the uneasy hearts of men. But to pass, safe and dry-shod, down the rushing stream of time.7
Between the pretense and the piety of American business in praising peace everywhere while preferring profits in warplanes anywhere, between the H Bomb and the A, the young man or woman whom you remind of the eternal verities this morning will only reply, “You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.”
… Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
—William Faulkner,
Address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm, December 10, 19508
II.
“IF YE’D TURN ON TH’ GAS IN TH’ DARKEST heart,” Mr. Dooley liked to say, “ye’d find it had a good raison for th’ worst th
ings it done, a good varchous9 raison like needin’ th’ money or punishin’ th’ wicked or tachin’ people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin’ th’ liberties iv mankind, or needin’ th’ money.”10
If you turn up the gas in the hearts of our business brass you’ll find a good reason—a good varchous reason—for investing more and more heavily in the Korean adventure. Such as protecting the liberties of mankind. Or needing the money. Just as the Russians employ various alarms—Trotskyism, Zionism, counter-revolution—to divert criticism, so do our air force magnates use the bogey of Communism to keep the war-orders mounting.
Charles E. Wilson, writing in the Army Ordnance Journal as far back as 1944, feels we ought to be less secretive about such orders: “War has been inevitable in our human affairs as an evolutionary force.… Let us make the three-way partnership (industry, government, army) permanent.” “Those nations that profess to fear our methods most will soon be most closely imitating those methods,” was how Adolf Hitler put it. And echo answers: “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.” “So soon as you have a military class,” Woodrow Wilson agreed with Mr. Dooley, “elections are of minor importance.”
Five years have passed since we began, once again, to rearm. Do we therefore feel more free from attack than we did five years ago? Have we thereby established an abiding trust in the hearts of other peoples? Do we therefore find ourselves with more friends in the world? Are our rights as free men thus made more secure? Or have we not once more demonstrated that keeping industries that depend for profit upon war and the preparation of war (such as the aviation industry) in private hands is equivalent to putting a hot-car thief in charge of a parking lot?
So it must be that, in the present senatorial passion for investigation, the reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating. The Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, reporting on Joe McCarthy’s bilking of Lustron and Seaboard Airlines,11 and his manipulation in futures, announced that “this is a matter that transcends partisan politics and goes into the very core of the Senate body’s authority and the respect in which it is held by the people of the country.” Yet not a single senator protested when the worst con man to be elected to the United States Senate took his seat. Not a single one dared. “They know by this time they cannot turn me aside,” McCarthy explained—and for the first time he spoke the truth. Between the pretense and the piety. Between the H Bomb and the A.
Say I’m standing knee-deep, and sinking, in the muddy waters of the Little Calumet. Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker bringing men tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I’d be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he’d really done something for me.
He hasn’t done a thing, this roving mercenary with the shaky gerund. Not even when he warns me that I better stop saying Ouch when McCarthy gives the screw another turn—lest the Kremlin overhear my yip and tape-record it for rebroadcasting to Europe. Who’s paying him for God’s sake?
The insistence of these long-remaindered intellectuals on the short leashes that, compared to the drive for conformity in the USSR, we don’t have any notion as yet of what the real thing can be like, reveals loyalty to nobody save Henry Luce. Whose dangerous dictum it is that it is now America’s part “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
“America does not go abroad,” John Quincy Adams corrects him, “in search of monsters to destroy.” Monsters enough roam in the woods at home. And watching Luce and McCarthy battle is like watching a couple of dinosaurs go at it—it doesn’t make any difference which wins, because they’re both extinct.
If they’re not, then we are. The great confident majority of Americans Adlai Stevenson described as “the generous and the unfrightened, those who are proud of our strength and sure of our goodness and who want to work with each other in trust, to advance the honor of the country.” If they’re not extinct, then the philosophy of strength through freedom of speech is being replaced, Justice Douglas warns, by the philosophy of strength through repression.
No people to date has obtained a corner on Truth. And when we elect a pair of ragged claws to the Senate of the United States we forfeit something of our own claim. It no longer suffices to doubt such war heroes privately. The out-loud kind of doubting that rescued American thought, in the twenties, from the files where the McCarthys and McCarrans12 and Jenners of that decade had locked it, is what is most needful to the States in the fifties. For Dreiser and Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and Veblen and Steffens and all, all are down in the dust of the twenties.13
And once again the little editorial fellows in the London collars, and the underwear unchanged for weeks, are hawking the alarm on every newsstand that only by napalm and thunder-jet may the American way of life be saved. That no man may now call himself loyal who will not pledge allegiance to the commander of the closest American Legion Post and to that mob-mindedness for which he stands.14 That by placing economic boycotts on dissenters we thereby ensure the liberties of conformists. That what is good for Jake Margarine is good for the country. That by hobbling our scientists and teachers we guarantee academic freedom. That if we can but build a space platform before anyone else we shall thus ensure national contentment for keeps. And that in its capacity to wage technological warfare across another people’s soil lies proof enough of any nation’s greatness. Babbitt has risen from the dust of the twenties, his fingers fit the levers of power and the lid is off on the price of nonconformity.
“Before long,” Mark Twain wrote, “you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with these stoned speakers—but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.”15 For every time you find an inquisition you find editors and politicians and preachers justifying it by saying, “We are imperiled.”
When we can make a half-hero out of a subaqueous growth like Whittaker Chambers,16 and a half-heroine out of a broomstick crackpot like Hester McCullough, and then place a government employee under charges because unidentified informants alleged that “his convictions on the question of civil rights extended slightly beyond that of the average individual,” it is time to call a halt.
“Risk for risk,” the wonderfully named Judge Learned Hand writes, “for myself I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust.…”17 “I do not believe in democracy,” Mr. Herbert U. Nelson of the National Association of Real Estate Boards differed during a congressional hearing. “I think it stinks.”
Between the pretense and the piety. Between the H Bomb and the A.
Risk for risk, for myself I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry. I believe that that community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until
we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that these will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to aboriginal savagery. But of this I am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas.
—Judge Learned Hand,
Speech given at the University of the State of New York, Albany October 24, 195218
III.
LEAVING AMERICAN WRITERS TODAY WITH a choice easier for some than for others. “I try to give pleasure to the reading public,” suggests Mr. Frank Yerby, smiling pleasantly: “The novelist has no right to impose his views on race and religion and politics upon his reader. If he wants to preach he should get a pulpit. I mean all this,” the Emmett Kelly of American letters adds, “from a professional, artistic point of view.”19
“To think that it is the duty of literature to pluck the pearl from the heap of villains is to deny literature itself,” Chekhov has to put in his nickel’s worth. “Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is.… a writer is not a confectioner, not a cosmetician, not an entertainer.”20Take your change and leave, Anton, there’s somebody knocking at the door.
“Now when I read Anna Karenina,” Mr. Yerby shows Chekhov out to have a fatherly chat with Tolstoy, “I find myself skipping the peasant-in-relation-to-the-land parts. That sort of thing just isn’t the novelist’s job.”
How come the Duke in relation to the Duchess, that sort of thing, is the novelist’s job? How come Kelly never skips those parts? If the peasant in relation to the land isn’t the novelist’s affair, it must follow that the city man’s relationship to the street he lives on isn’t any skin off his hide either. What, indeed, comes of any inquiry into the street upon which humanity—including Kelly—lives? If it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated—lest he find himself passing not safe and dry-shod, but in angry waters up to his ears and no shoreline in sight.