Frequently categorised, with the passage of years no category seems sufficient to label the rich, fecund world of Algren’s greatest works. He was a naturalist who wrote unnaturalistic prose; an absurdist whose work reeked of reality; a realist whose best effects are often comic, a determined stylist who in the end believed passion mattered more than style, a passionate writer who fully understood that the measure of great writing was in its capacity to escape the writer’s intentions, politics and passions.
Those who ascribed to him a program, an ideology, failed to understand Algren’s humility in the face of the power of art to tell truths often unknown to the artist and even unpalatable to them. He believed good writing came out of compulsions unknown to the writer.
‘A writer who knows what he is doing,’ he once said, ‘isn’t doing very much.’
Algren’s characters fail even at failure: they manage to mismanage crime, vice, sin; nothing is so worthless that it cannot be lost; and Algren’s mean streets are revealed by the passing of time to be both as real and as allegorical as Kafka’s courtrooms and castles. It is a hell, and it is the ultimate test of our humanity.
It would be too simple to see Algren as a victim of the Cold War. His literature threw down a question to the fundamental nature of the USA. ‘So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV,’ Algren wrote, ‘establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured.’
The American dream, the American century, the American way, the American empire: Algren didn’t buy any of it. The USA, Algren declared in an interview in 1963, was ‘an imperialist son-of-a-bitch’, and Algren did not conceive the role of the writer to sing of its triumphs.
‘The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock,’ Algren wrote, ‘has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.’
Like Chekhov, Algren believed a writer’s role was to side with the guilty.
‘American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anyone on my side?” . . . More recently I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair—my mother can watch me burn.”’
And so Algren wrote with courage and love against the grain of the American empire he clearly recognised coming into being around him, as doomed as a bard of slaves would have been in first-century Rome.
‘The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is in essence a denial of life,’ Algren wrote in Nonconformity. ‘And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.’
According to his friend Kurt Vonnegut, ‘No matter how famous he became, he remained a poor man living among the poor, and usually alone.’ But there was about this something that went beyond identification or Algren’s belief in people. For Algren it seems that it also enabled a form of spiritual transcendence that he found necessary in order to write.
‘Innocence is not just the lack of something,’ Algren once said. ‘Innocence is an achieved thing. You can’t be unworldly without first being worldly . . . to be an innocent in the best sense is to have that kind of unworldliness that comes out of worldliness, to be able to see how people waste their whole lives just to have security.’
The American Dream was one of materialism. Its hope was that even if you had lost everything yesterday you might regain your fortune today. Algren’s dream is one of humanity; of how you might live a fully human life when you have lost everything and nothing can be regained: through humour, through small victories, through love of others.
In the wake of the critical and commercial failure of A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren’s life took an increasingly tragic turn.
The same month as it appeared, a literary sensation from Europe received its first US publication. The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir’s new novel dedicated to Algren, in part described a passionate affair between its heroine and an American writer called Lewis Brogan, clearly modelled on Algren. What to de Beauvoir was an affirmation of their love, was to Algren, who had quarried the lives of others, a personal betrayal, and Algren now attacked de Beauvoir in the press. Yet privately he still hoped to escape to Paris and de Beauvoir.
On 26 June 1956 this dream was cruelly ended when his passport was once more denied. On 1 July 1956 he rang de Beauvoir and apologised, though he was to attack her again publicly. On 12 July 1956 she wrote to Algren how ‘in The Mandarins, the love story is very different from the true truth; I just tried to convey something of it. Nobody understands that when the man and woman love each other for ever, they are still in love and maybe this love will never die.’
Now a deeply depressed man, Algren returned to what had been his own home in Gary and asked Amanda Kontowicz to take him in. There he spent most of his days sitting in his room, unable to work, often weeping. In August, he suffered a breakdown that led him to being hospitalised.
‘Amanda called me,’ Dave Peltz recalled in a radio interview many years later, ‘and she said, he’s ready, he wants, he’s going to allow himself to be put into hospital care, and I came over to the house . . . he was half-dressed, he wouldn’t put on a shirt, and then he put on his shirt, then he wouldn’t put on his jacket, then he put on the jacket, he wouldn’t put his shoes on, then he put his shoes on and finally, after an hour, I said I have to go. He got dressed and he sat in the car.
‘We drove all the way north to this psychiatric hospital, got out, went into the lobby and he was supposed to sign in, he wouldn’t sign in . . . He would make an “S”. He took an “N”, he made an “S”, he would make an “A” over here, and then come back and put an “E” in between the “N” and the “L”, and after an interminable two hours he filled in his name, and the minute he did that, it was like in a B movie.
‘Two guys in white coats came out and they just literally picked him up and hauled him right through a big solid core door, and, as they’re doing that, he’s hollering “Dave! Dave!” And they took him through the hallway and I could hear him hollering “Dave!” And I’ll tell you it’s still in my ears, that scream, that “Dave!”.’
At the end of 1956 Simone de Beauvoir received a letter from her beloved Chicago man saying a light had gone out in him.
He had abandoned Entrapment—the novel he had stolen time from to finish A Walk on the Wild Side. Of its unfinished manuscript a later editor of Algren’s, William Targ, said, ‘In it he seemed to reach the deep-down essence of the blackest lower depths: drugs, pimping, prostitution, at their most grim level . . . It would have been an extraordinary achievement . . . it could have been his major opus.’
According to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Simone’s daughter, who has possession of these Algren letters, Algren confessed he had ‘hit rock bottom, having lost himself in draining battles against his marriage, his publishers, his agents, his lawyers and his poverty. He felt he had lost his driving force, the spark fuelling his writing and his entire being. He realised he was losing Simone de Beauvoir forever, and in this dire mood was not afraid to admit that he missed her terribly. The best days of his life were spent with her. Why had he let her drift so far away?’
On 31 December 1956 he took a shortcut across a frozen lagoon, the ice broke, and Algren would have died in its freezing waters, had he not been rescued by workmen. Close friends speculated that Algren had tried to kill himself.
Of the remaining twenty-five years of Algren’s life there is little to tell. Though he wrote more books, including one posthumously published novel, the great creative period of his life was over. Like the police captain Record
Head Bednar in The Man with the Golden Arm, obsessed with the sense he should write his own name on the list of the guilty, Nelson Algren had ended up inscribing his own name on the guilty list, the black list, then the reviled and finally the lost and forgotten list. He took to calling himself a journalist, rather than a novelist.
‘The past is a bucket of ashes,’ he told friends.
Algren laughed in the face of the gods, made merry, but his fate is no less tragic for his own particular enduring courage.
In later years Nelson Algren gave the impression that there was nothing he wanted more out of life than to see a fight, or go to the track, or play poker.
‘This was pose, of course,’ Kurt Vonnegut has written, ‘and perceived as such by one and all.’
But it was pose with a price, and pose with a point. The poverty, the gambling, the losing continued; the novel writing did not; he posed, until, one suspects, the pose became too fixed to escape.
‘For years he was exhausted,’ Dave Peltz has said, ‘trying to get over what he had done with his life, what he had done with this great opportunity that he had, and many people described him as America’s foremost writer . . . He felt he blew it, something happened in his life [and] that he blew it . . . towards the end when he was not writing all he thought about was fame and fortune, like someone who went to the crap table and lost it all. I think gambling was the metaphor for his life, for pissing away his life . . . he stayed disciplined in the early days before he achieved success and somehow after success was when he lost hold, and I can’t account for it. Unless . . . he needed to be consistent with being a loser, needed to be consistent with having a pocket full of money and going to a crap table and losing it.’
Nelson Algren died in 1981, Simone de Beauvoir in 1986. She was buried with the ring Algren had given her.
Algren’s epitaph for Fitzgerald could apply equally to himself:
Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them.
And so he died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin.
The USA was at the time of Algren’s childhood a symbol of an ideal that could still seem revolutionary and democratic. For Whitman, a seminal influence on Algren, American democracy was a new event; for Algren it is one more lost cause in a life devoted to lost causes, the greatest of which was writing, the act of which demanded you spend of your soul until there is nothing left but the prospect of death.
The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Walk on the Wild Side takes on an odd resonance given the recent tragic events in what was the Big Easy, not only because the town is the setting for the novel, but because Algren’s principal concern—the USA’s contempt for so many of its own people—is, perhaps for the first time since the 1930s, threatening to become a major political issue. In rebuilding the levies of New Orleans, Americans could do worse than reread A Walk on the Wild Side.
And not only they.
‘Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America’s traditions,’ Borges wrote. ‘Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.’ And so too Nelson Algren.
Introduction, Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side (2006)
IN 1962, THE WRITER Vasily Grossman met with Mikhail Suslov, chief ideologue of the USSR’s Politburo. The KGB had confiscated all known manuscripts of Grossman’s epic novel of World War II, Life and Fate.
Once one of the most celebrated Russian war journalists, once an acclaimed novelist, the now disgraced Grossman was dying of stomach cancer. He had come to beg Suslov that the book be published.
Suslov told Grossman that his novel was more damaging to the USSR than Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. It could not be published, said Suslov, for two hundred years.
Unknown to either Grossman or the KGB, one of Grossman’s friends had made a secret copy. Nearly twenty years after Grossman’s death, it was smuggled out of the USSR. Though it made little impact on publication in Switzerland in 1980, it has in the decades since come to be hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace, and with this changing fortune, Grossman has secured a reputation as a latter-day Tolstoy.
All praise is a form of misunderstanding, and Grossman is a writer more difficult than most to divine. Unlike the great Soviet writers who were products of pre-Revolutionary Russia—Babel, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova—Grossman was a product of the new order, an insider, a Soviet man.
Everything he had, he wrote in a letter to the NKVD chief Yeshov begging for the release—really, the life—of his arrested wife, ‘I owe to the Soviet government.’
Why this man—a conformist who made his accommodations with the Soviet tyranny, turned his back, averted his eye, held his tongue, signed accusing letters—came to a point where he said No to his masters is perhaps unknowable.
Certainly his experience of the war, his witnessing of the Holocaust, the death of his mother at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, Stalin’s post-war anti-Semitic campaign, his discovery of love in middle age—a large life, in short, that cannot be detailed here—led Grossman to finally conclude that Fascism was simply a mirror response to the ‘cosmic violence’ of Soviet Communism. But why this then liberated him into writing two masterpieces of the twentieth century remains mysterious.
A few months after his meeting with Suslov, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis on 26 October 1962, the Central Committee heard that Grossman was at work on a new ‘anti-Soviet’ novel. The informer is suspected to be his stepson, who lived with Grossman.
As the world teetered on the abyss, Grossman’s novel was discussed at the highest levels of Soviet leadership. Is it possible to imagine any book be- queathed such strange honour, such fear, today?
That novel was at the time of his death in 1964 unfinished. It was perhaps unfinishable. Yet in the abyss between ambition and failure often lies greatness. So it is with Everything Flows, in its way as remarkable an achievement as Life and Fate.
Yet when first published in English in 1972 as Forever Flowing, translated by Thomas Whitney, the translator of The Gulag Archipelago, the novel failed to garner anything like the attention that Solzhenitsyn had in the West. Grossman’s idea of history was heretical to almost all. He didn’t compare or rank the horrors of the Gulag and collectivisation or the Holocaust. Rather, and most chillingly, he connected them.
His anti-politics, of a type that anticipated the great revolts of the 1980s, rendered his work undivineable for many. The book offered neither succour to the left, in breaking the ultimate taboo of revering Lenin and Leninism, nor to the right, by offering a damning critique of pre-revolutionary Russia.
His humanism, placing kindness and goodness, truth and freedom, at the centre of life, as both the meaning and fullest expression of life, seemed weak, even quaint in the face of the cocaine rush of turbo-capitalism that took all before it in the final decades of the twentieth century with its material wonders and ideological triumph.
This new translation of Grossman’s last novel by Robert Chandler is more poetic, more lyrical than Whitney’s original translation. It is better, but not fundamentally different.
What has changed, perhaps, is us.
Suddenly, this story seems not about another world many years ago, but speaks to our world now and tomorrow.
The novel is ostensibly simple and could hardly be simpler. A man returns to society in 1957, after thirty years as a zek in the Gulag. He visits a friend, meets the man who betrayed him, finds a menial job as a metal worker, boards in a house and falls in love with his landlady, a war widow, who tells him her story of the Ukrainian famine consequent on Stalin’s collectivisation policy, before she dies of lung cancer.
So far, one might think, so very Russian.
Within
it, though, is a book constantly breaking boundaries, flooding over, travelling far from the strange anti-socialist realist, social realist Life and Fate; pointing to the great philosophical novels of Kundera, constantly keeping faith with the idea of story as the vehicle of truth.
There is an almost unbearably sad chapter—unrelated to anything else in the book, yet wholly integral to the novel—of a woman zek who dies after hearing dance music coming from a gaoler’s cottage and who realises that her husband has been shot, that she will never see her daughter again, and that there is no hope.
Then there is the story of the cannibal mother who eats her two children, is tried and shot. ‘We are all cannibals,’ observes Grossman. About a loving couple, two Ukrainian collective farm workers and their child who starve to death and whose ‘skeletons spent the winter together . . . smiling whitely, not separated even by death’.
And perhaps most extraordinary, a sympathetic portrait of the monstrous Jewish commissar Lev Mekler, from the shtetl of Fastov, the man who becomes the Commissar of Justice for the entire Ukraine, a romantic, even saintly figure in his torn leather jacket and Budyonny helmet with a red star ‘that had faded as if from loss of blood’, who brings suffering and death everywhere.
Mekler is faithful to the Revolution even after the Revolution ‘had put him in a cell in the Lubyanka and knocked out eight of his teeth’. ‘His faith did not waver when he lay on the floor and saw the polished toe of a box-calf boot beside his blood-filled mouth.’
Grossman compares Mekler’s fate to that of a loyal dog whose owner hates it for its love.
‘This is what is so terrifying: that there is so much good in them, so much good in their human essence,’ writes Grossman. ‘Whom then should we judge? Human nature?’
The book contains multitudes, and not only of people. Its moods range from the near mystical, in its depiction of women, particularly mothers; to hard political, in its study of Lenin; to epic and elegiac. Grossman somehow penetrates to the essence of the USSR in a way few ever did—alive to the psychology and the humanity of its revolutionaries, cannibals, zeks, commissars and secret policemen. Its pitiless descriptions of the horrors of the Ukraine famine make one shudder today; I suspect they will have the same effect in centuries to come.