Street corners, beerhalls, slum bedrooms, brothels and racetracks, police line-ups and prison cells become exotic habitats when described by Algren, and his stories play out to dramatic effect beneath arc lamps and twenty-watt bulbs (it’s always too late in an Algren novel), in places ‘filling with noises and rumours of noises’, the rattle of freight cars, the hiss of downstairs laundry presses, the sound of far-off screams.
In 1949 came his first masterpiece, The Man with the Golden Arm. The story of a Chicago junkie trying to go straight was an immediate triumph. By 1950 Nelson Algren seemed destined for only ever greater things. Never Come Morning was on its way to being a million seller. In March 1950 The Man with the Golden Arm was awarded the first ever National Book Award, a hugely publicised event at that brief moment, now so long gone it is hard to imagine, when American novels seemed to be central to American culture and life. Algren was given the award under a blaze of lights by Eleanor Roosevelt.
‘OK, kid,’ Hemingway privately noted in his copy of Man with the Golden Arm, ‘you beat Dostoevsky’, while publicly hailing Algren as the best American writer after Faulkner (‘He said after Faulkner,’ Algren commented later, ‘I was very hurt.’). For a moment the man who celebrated loss had success as only America can bestow.
And then there was his love affair with one of the most famous European writers of the time: Simone de Beauvoir, who joked in a letter to Algren in 1949 while writing what became The Second Sex that she would call her new book Never Come Woman—‘Is that not clear?’—a play on Algren’s Never Come Morning.
De Beauvoir had met and fallen in love with Algren in Chicago in 1947. The affair continued off and on for several years. While de Beauvoir had a complex relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and Algren was a womaniser who had been unhappily married to Amanda Kontowicz for ten years, it does seem to have been on both writers’ part a grand passion. In October 1947, following de Gaulle’s election victory, Simone de Beauvoir wrote to the man she called ‘her husband’: ‘I do not want to care for politics anymore. God let me live just some more years to love you and be loved by you.’
She goes on to write at letter end:
Dearest, beloved one, this letter seems so poor, reading it again. I should have put in it all my love and heart and body, all the autumn in Paris, the yellow trees, the peaceful sky, the feverish people. And just words. Dry words. But I hope you’ll know how to read it; maybe you are smart enough to find in it all I wanted to put. Maybe you’ll even find me. I’ll wait for you, Nelson. I’ll wait until you come to me.
But politics and history were undoing her ‘beloved Chicago man’ and their love affair. Gathering were the dark clouds of the Cold War. Against the determined conformism of the 1950s, the possibility of a nuclear winter, Red scares, growing blacklists and the emergence of McCarthyism, Algren’s destiny irrevocably altered. The times were no longer his.
In a septic climate of rising fear, Algren used his celebrity to speak out—for the Hollywood Ten, for the Rosenbergs and against McCarthyism. In books such as Chicago: the City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker. In January 1951, Algren along with Arthur Miller and fifteen others placed a letter as an ad in the New York Times calling on people to speak up for freedom.
Half a century later the persecution of Algren that ensued is all the more terrifying for its insidious nature. As the FBI assembled a five-hundred-page dossier on Algren that could establish him guilty of nothing, as other writers went silent, Life magazine, a major force in American popular culture of the era, cancelled without explanation a major photo essay on Algren. In March 1953 his application for a passport to travel to France was denied by the State Department ‘in light of his former connection to the Communist Party’. Algren, according to his friend Dave Peltz, now ‘lived in terror . . . he would appear before the [House of Un-American Activities] Committee’.
In September 1953, Algren’s publisher Doubleday refused to publish a short non-fiction book he had written that in part attacked McCarthyism, an extraordinary act given that at the time Algren was one of the best known and most popular writers in the USA. The book was not to be published till nearly a quarter of a century later as Nonconformity—one of the strangest and most strangely compelling meditations on writing by a twentieth-century writer. In a clipped, laconic prose with ironic jabs delivered in deftly told anecdotes, Nonconformity maps out a duty, an aesthetic, a politics that for Algren is also an inexorable destiny; to swim against the current, to give everything, and know it will destroy you as a writer.
It is an indictment of the American project from a position inescapably American in its humour, references and language. It is both the final manifestation of the lost voices of a different America—the America of Whitman and Twain and Fitzgerald—and speaks to the future in its attempt to remind its readers of an indigenous tradition of American radicalism founded in the experience of the lost and dispossessed.
Animating this book of fear and desire is his love for Simone de Beauvoir, and some have seen it as an attempt to prove to her that there was a basis, political, artistic and intellectual, for a radical writer in the USA.
At another level it is a writer weighing up the immense spiritual costs of writing: how one may write great works and in the end be less as a human being for the effort. This is the Algren who would shortly be writing A Walk on the Wild Side: lost, heartbroken, trying to hold on to the last thing he has, which is slipping through his very fingers as he types the next word: his belief writing might still matter in a country as lost as the USA, and that he still has something left to write for his country; a patriot who knows he is now viewed as a traitor.
At about the same time as Nonconformity was rejected, Algren began a novel called Entrapment, the story of which was based on the life of a heroin addict with whom he had an affair, but the emotional strength of which would seem to derive from his love for de Beauvoir. He could not get the novel moving.
His torment was only beginning. His marriage to Amanda seemed increasingly a matter to him of pity and not love, and, a compulsive gambler who seems invariably to have lost, he was losing large sums in poker games. His writing stalled and censored, his love affair with de Beauvoir transformed into an impossible anguish, despairing of his country, Algren wrote to de Beauvoir at the end of 1953 that he was depressed, and ‘felt himself trapped by both money and marriage’. He felt he had become in every way, as he now signed his letters, ‘the American prisoner’.
In 1955 came the experience of having The Man with the Golden Arm made into a film by Otto Preminger, an experience that left Algren feeling exploited and further depressed him. ‘I went out there [Hollywood] for a thousand a week,’ he was later to say, ‘and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.’ He never went to see the movie, which he later described as ‘my war with America as represented by Kim Novak’.
While living through all this Algren began A Walk on the Wild Side. Later in his life Algren would consider it his best novel, ‘an American fantasy written to an American beat as true as Huckleberry Finn’. But at the beginning it was simply a way of making some easy money quickly, which he intended to use to escape his marriage and go to Paris.
In late 1953 he struck a deal with Doubleday to rewrite Somebody in Boots as a paperback, a hundred-dollar-a-week deal. Algren envisaged a ‘good, cheap, corny’ readers’ book.
‘No, it won’t win any national book award,’ Algren wrote in a letter. ‘I’m aiming solely at the pocketbook traffic.’
But as he worked, the novel transformed: the original tragic tale of Cass McKay becomes the tragi-comedy of Dove Linkhorn, who drifts into New Orleans in 1931. He worked in some of his old short stories, and drew on some of his experiences from Depression-era New Orleans working scams.
Algren returned
to New Orleans in the summer of 1954 but, finding it of little help, he went home to Chicago. There the novel now called Finnerty’s Ball began to take shape, as Algren played ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ over and over, spending his spare time in the Chicago underworld or visiting Iris van Etten, a middle-class black woman on the South Side who was a madam, and in whose establishment Algren picked up stories for the novel’s brothel scenes.
Whereas The Man with the Golden Arm was built, Algren said, sentence by sentence, the new novel, he said in an interview at the time, was ‘plotted a great deal more than any other . . . I’m trying to write a reader’s book, more than my own book . . . Mechanically and, I think, technically, it’s done more carefully, and probably reads better than previous books.’
He finished the new novel, now called A Walk on the Wild Side, in November 1955, but Doubleday rejected the manuscript and demanded he repay his advance of $8000.
Having filed for divorce a few months earlier, he was unable to return to his home where Amanda was living. Desperately reworking the book as he went, he later recalled how he ‘had to write a book in flight—Montana, Saranac Lake, Baltimore, Havana, East St Louis’. He tried, he wrote, ‘not to regret so much time taken from the book I’d begun’, and with the money from the reprint rights he dreamed of getting ‘back to my lonely life, and the book I’d begun before’.
Algren’s own ambivalence about the new novel mirrored the growing ambivalence he felt about everything around and about him: his personal life, his prospects, his country.
‘What country is there for a white man who isn’t white?’ Algren once asked. Maybe it was the Big Easy he created in A Walk on the Wild Side.
The novel begins with Dove Linkhorn, drifter, fleeing his Texan hometown after raping the Mexican woman who has deflowered him, evading a recruiting sergeant who wants to enlist him to fight Sandino in Nicaragua, and after some adventures coming ‘at last to the town that always seems to be rocking’, a fairytale place of speakeas- ies and flophouses full of ‘old time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads [who] made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hardtime breath’.
Dove Linkhorn is a good soldier, Schweik-like idiot with a dash of Tom Jones, an illiterate who goes to the segregated town’s black toilets and drinks from the blacks only water fountains; who at one point gets attacked by a dog whose owner apologises: ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before.’ When seeking a job as scabbing seaman and asked if he belongs to a union, he declares, ‘Mister, I’m a Christian boy and don’t truckle to Yankee notions.’
In New Orleans, Dove Linkhorn finds work variously running scams, making condoms and as a stud in a peepshow, where he deflowers women pretending to be virgins, finally ending up in jail.
As if to mock the USA’s yearnings, Algren attributes them in A Walk on the Wild Side to pimps, panders, whores and con men. In a society where people die of usefulness, Algren’s inverted Big Easy is one where people ‘died of uselessness one by one, yet lived on behind veritable prairie fires of wishes, hoping for something to happen that had never happened before: the siren screaming toward the crashing smash-up, the gasp of the man with the knife on his side, the suicide leap for no reason at all’. The true perversity of Algren’s society is not sexual, but ethical: unlike the USA, where work is a virtue, here it is understood that ‘nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labour’.
Algren mocks the heroic, and his New Orleans is constantly upside down and comic. There is the white naval commander who is a self-confessed ‘black mammie freak’ and pays to be beaten by old black women. After thrashing him and taking a month’s pay for her services, a black madam lowers herself onto a divan, sighs and then asks for the evening newspaper so she can see ‘what the white folks are up to’.
The novel is at its most alive describing its ensemble casts of the brothels and jailhouse, for A Walk on the Wild Side is in the end not a novel about its hero, Dove Linkhorn, nor a naturalistic rendering, precisely drawn, of Depression-era New Orleans poverty. There is little sense of the physicality of New Orleans—its heat, its stench, its polyglot nature. For all Algren’s belief in detail, his retelling of his own New Orleans experiences, this is no more a realistic world than that of Rabelais. But with it Algren created a uniquely American vision that questioned the essence of America, embodying a vision of truth that seems strikingly contemporary in its resonance. In consequence, the book is not what it sets out to be, and its structure is sometimes looser than its language.
What remains are such telling scenes as the one in which Dove Linkhorn visits a cave-like restaurant, where he watches a pyramid of snapping turtles blindly climbing on top of each other, only to then be beheaded by a black man naked to the waist who grabs the next topmost turtle for decapitation, a symbol of the USA’s pointless, destructive yearnings.
‘When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough,’ writes Algren, describing his true subject best.
Dove Linkhorn, Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie and a large collection of those Algren calls ‘the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores’ are all in search of the USA, only for the reader to discover in the end they are the USA.
A Walk on the Wild Side was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in May 1956. The hit of Broadway at the time was a new Cinderella story called My Fair Lady. The times could hardly have been less propitious.
The reviews of A Walk on the Wild Side have become legendary in their savagery; at times they seem as politically charged in their circumlocutions as any Soviet review of the era of writers deemed unacceptable by the state. There were some who defended the novel, but they were drowned out by the novel’s detractors.
Time Magazine declared that Algren’s ‘sympathy for the depraved and degraded has not carried him to the edge of nonsense . . . Algren has dressed his sense of compassion in the rags of vulgarity’. In the New Yorker Norman Podhoretz attacked what he called Algren’s ‘boozy sentimentality’ and claimed that Algren was saying ‘we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectable’.
Leslie Fiedler similarly claimed that there was no room in Algren’s world for ‘workers or teachers or clerks’ and went on to describe Algren as ‘isolated from the life of his time. He was made, unfortunately, once and for all in the early 1930s in the literary cult of “experience” of those times. He has not thought a new thought or felt a new feeling since . . . as our literature has moved on and left him almost a museum piece—the Last of the Proletarian Writers.’
The political crime was unmistakeable, as the verdict and punishment were inescapable. Book sales fell away. Though he continued to write and publish, Nelson Algren was finished. His novels went out of print, he was neglected, his reputation diminished to the extent that for a time he was largely forgotten. It is hard to think of a major American writer of similar stature who has had so little impact on subsequent American writing.
Algren sensed the change—how could he not?—and the way in which critics were increasingly not on the side of the artist, but the status quo. In 1960 he wrote of the new owners of literature, arriving ‘directly from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and the short story would have to conform . . . [forming] a loose federation, between the literary quarterlies, publishers’ offices and book review columns, presenting a view of American letters untouched by American life’. The New Criticism—with its emphasis on the search for imagery, symbols and metaphors, and its contempt for history and politics in shaping art—was for Algren a tragic misunderstanding of the role of literature; for ‘it left unheeded the truth that the proper study of mank
ind is man’.
In some way the criticisms of 1956 have mutated but remain: the charge that Algren was an overwrought word-drunk boozed up on an outdated sentimentality stuck. That he was a relic from the thirties; that the world had changed and Algren had not.
It is too simple to say that Algren was punished for his politics. His politics, left-leaning though they were, were not his real crime. Algren understood far better than those who blackballed him the nature of his offence.
His aesthetics were not what the new empire wanted: what was emerging, what was wanted was a new classicism: a pared-back modernist prose. Nor was his subject—the dispossessed—any longer of interest or concern.
‘I think Faulkner is too tragic about life,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren. ‘Life is tragic, and it is not. In your books one can feel very well this strange two-sided truth.’ But in a nation whose culture seemed ever more hostile to irony, tragi-comic art had less and less place.
Not the least of Nelson Algren’s charms to those of us not American is the way he is at once both entirely of the USA in all its extraordinary vibrancy, and yet able to tally and report accurately and honestly the immense human cost of that vibrancy: a USA not just a dream of exploding possibility, but also a nightmare of receding hopes.
‘The pimps,’ he wrote of 1930s New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, ‘didn’t seem to catch on that the country was progressing downward to new rates of normality.’
And Algren achieved all this in a lush language at once immediate and vernacular, but steeped in the tradition of his culture’s greatest writers: the poetry of his sentences harked back to Whitman; his wry humour and vernacular power to Twain; his novelistic largeness to Melville; his pained humanity to Fitzgerald.
But everything in Algren is transformed into a particularly American agony, comic and tragic, and he created an idea of a spiritually compromised USA so potent that for some decades no one wished to know of it.