Did you see Hatful of Rain?
Yes; I went with a friend of mine. We had to leave in the middle of the second act.
Not long ago, in Time magazine, there was an article telling how certain writers get in the mood to write. Faulkner takes a shot or two of whiskey, Hemingway sharpens pencils. Do you have a device of this sort?
Yes, as a matter of fact. You might laugh, but sometimes I go over to the gym and work out on a punching bag. It loosens me up.
Incidentally, have you ever met Hemingway?
Yes, a couple of years ago. It was a Christmas Eve, and I had been bumming around Key West and Havana for a while. I was drinking in Havana, and I decided to call his house. At first, I couldn’t get to talk to anyone. But I left my number with one of the servants, and later on his wife called back. She said he wasn’t well, he was in bed, but that I should come up. I told her if he was sick, maybe I shouldn’t come. But she said it would be all right. She said one of her duties was keeping people away, and if he didn’t want to see me, she wouldn’t be inviting me. Well, I went on up. Hemingway was in bed. It was a strange sight: he looked something like a professorial Santa Claus, with this white beard of his, and his steel-rim glasses. He was lying there, with a baseball cap on, to keep the light out of his eyes. He looked a lot older than I thought he would. You know, his belly was swollen from injuries from that crash in Africa. He still hadn’t recovered from that. Well, I saw he wasn’t feeling too good, so I thought I’d do most of the talking. The doctor had limited him to one scotch an hour, but he kept telling me to have as much as I wanted. Well, you see, I had just seen this Walt Disney Technicolor picture, The African Lion, which I thought was a great movie. Some of the shots they had were magnificent—you know, with these lions sticking their paws out like this for these impala that were leaping over them, reaching out and snagging the things as they jumped past, like a damn outfielder grabbing a fly-ball or something. Well, I told him all about how great this picture was, and all the while he kept giving me this funny look. Here he had these gigantic stuffed heads hanging in the front room—rhinos, lions, deer, everything—and there I was, telling him how it was in the movie. I caught myself before filling him in on what it was really like in the First World War. But it was very interesting, meeting him.
What did Hemingway talk about?
As I said, he didn’t talk much about anything. When he did talk though, it wasn’t easy to follow him: he’d go from one subject to another, a phrase about this, a phrase about that, like something from James Joyce. After a while, though, you saw how it all tied together. He’s really very complicated, and always on the alert. He watches you like a hawk, digs everything you say. It’s almost like he’s waiting for you to say something that doesn’t ring true, something that isn’t straight. Really, he’s a very sharp old man.
(Reading from notes): Last year, in an editorial, Life magazine directed contemporary American authors to use the “raw stuff of saga” provided by advances in research and industry. It urged the “bad boys” of American literature to “look the industrialist in the eye without spitting in it.” What is your comment on this?
Life wants writing that’s so hygienicized and so cellophanized that it’s lost all its vitality. This kind of writing breeds a sort of spiritual isolationism. There is something more to our life … it shouldn’t be merely a collection of gadgets, two cars in a neat garage. So many lives are made up of gadgets and nothing more. There are all these myths, you know. Our society is full of them: the General Motors myth, the gray flannel suit myth. And the biggest myth of all is that of the gadget, gadgets everywhere, a collection of things: two Fords in the garage, a deep freeze in the basement, and an all-purpose wife in the kitchen. There was never a time when men lived more tidily in such disorder. There were never more analysts telling other analysts what to do. There was never a more rigid moral code adopted so flexibly … so much abundance with so little satisfaction …
You think, then, that Americans are deceiving themselves most of the time?
We live in an age where self-deception is at its height. Nowhere is there such discrepancy between people’s lives and what they hear every day about their lives. Magazines like Life exist by fostering this kind of self-deception.
Well, Life feels that America’s virtues haven’t been extolled loudly enough.
That’s right, but hallowing institutions is not the writer’s job. There are professional hallowers, like Norman Vincent Peale. Writers like Herman Wouk and Sloan Wilson are cutting into his territory. They are the spokesmen for the whole gadget-infested middle class.
What is the writer’s job?
To accuse, to play the wasp. Zola is a perfect example, by the way. For the novelist’s place has traditionally been on the side of the loser. I can see no purpose in writing about people who seem to have won everything. There’s no story there … nothing happens as far as I’m concerned. Most writers of the new school, and Wouk is the prize example, seem to be on the side of the winners. Nobody seems to want to defend the accused, the underprivileged. Why write about happiness, anyway? There’s nothing there … no conflict, no catalyst for discovering anything about humanity.
What do you think is the relation of the church to the people you write about—the accused, the underprivileged?
I’d say the church does gently what the police do roughly.
Some people, I think, feel that you take the side of the loser too readily, too completely. You’ve been criticized for wallowing in garbage, for making heroes of your vagrants and rumdums.
I think the critics have exaggerated the whole thing. I certainly did not set out to make “heroes” of these people. I do feel, however, that a thinker who wants to think justly must keep in touch with those who never think at all. There is no better way of recording the American saga than to study it from behind its billboards and comic strips, which tend to dwell more upon the American dream than upon the American reality.
Who are these people “who never think at all”?
They may be the people in Sandburg’s The People, Yes. Or the girl in court I saw once who told the judge, “I know right from wrong but I can’t get my feet on the ground either way.” Or the boy who said of his life, “I just lean and dream and take a shot, and just lean and dream.” Or the nineteen-year-old punk sentenced to the electric chair who said: “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” These people are a little less lucky than most of us, but they’re just as human. One thing for sure, they’ll never wind up in a Herman Wouk novel.
I don’t suppose you thought much of Marjorie Morningstar.
My first feeling was, “Who cares?” And it’s such sterile writing.
In what way?
For instance, sex is a dirty word in the world of Marjorie Morningstar and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I can’t see that, I can’t see it at all. Sex is a natural thing, a good thing, and sometimes it becomes really humorous. After all, nothing is funnier than sex running wild.
Some critics feel you’re too outspoken about the subject.
It’s never wise to take critics too seriously.
Why?
You see, critics have patterns. I guess it helps them think better, having these patterns. When you write a book that doesn’t fit into one of these patterns you hear shrieks, howls, all sorts of carryings-on. And, you know, critics are the hardest people in the world to please. All they want from an author is the cutting wit of an Evelyn Waugh, satire like Sinclair Lewis’s, the cosmopolitan tone of a Henry James, the scope and stamina of a Tolstoy, and local color like Mark Twain could do—and yet one mustn’t get too provincial either. They get you both ways. First they tell you to write about what you know. Then they say, “Is that all you can tell us about—your own home street?”
You sound a little bitter.
No, I’m really not. I used to be … when I still had illusions to lose. I remember when I got out of college; they gave me a little graduate’s card that said
I could be whatever I wanted to be. I had tremendous faith in that card, carried it around everywhere, trying to get a job. The times were bad; I never got much of a job at all. After a while, I got to looking as tattered as the card had become.
Do you think your journalism courses at the University of Illinois helped you in your writing?
As far as technique is concerned, yes. That’s all you can get from schools—technique. They can make a reporter out of you. But with fiction you have to be more than just a reporter. I never had much faith in going down to West Madison Street with a notebook to put down ideas for a novel. A writer’s got to live the situation out as much as possible, not just sit around watching, taking notes on everybody. But I got a kick out of journalism. I was on the school paper—The Daily Illini—on the city staff, and I always used to go down to the city jails and wait around for something to happen. It was a good time in my life.
How long was it before you began doing fiction?
Well, right about that time, during the Depression. I had a job on a newspaper, but it only lasted three weeks, then I started drifting around the South, the Southwest. Wrote my first short story down there, in a gas station. I was broke at the time.
A lot of people, I suppose, would be shocked to know a writer doesn’t always have to do a lot of research to get material for a book.
They would, wouldn’t they? Yep, I guess I did a lot of “research” in my time, except at the time I was doing it, I didn’t know it was research. Maybe if the cops who have picked me up in my time for vagrancy and such had told me I was doing research I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it.
NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and he 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. Two thousand eight is the centennial year of his birth, with events planned throughout the year.
An Algren specialist as well as an established poet, coeditor BROOKE HORVATH is a professor at Kent State University, and editor of volumes about Henry James and Thomas Pynchon. His most recent books are Understanding Nelson Algren and The Lecture on Dust (poems). He lives with his wife Virginia and their daughters in Kent, Ohio.
DAN SIMON is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. His contributions to Algren scholarship include the essay “Algren’s Question” in the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, which he coedited, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a lost manuscript that Simon found in the Algren archives, coedited, and to which he contributed the afterword.
Nelson Algren, Entrapment and Other Writings
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