The murder of meaning is a crime Nelson Algren spent his life trying to get people interested in, and it scarcely ended with his death in 1982. Shortly after that year, in fact, one of the greatest admissions of that crime began appearing on t-shirts nationwide. They said, “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”
To which Algren’s great love, Simone de Beauvoir, had long ago replied, “’It is because of the abstract climate in which they live that the importance of money is so disproportionate. . . . It isn’t that young Americans don’t wish to do great things . . . but that they don’t know there are great things to be done.’”
Not too long ago, one of the culprits was quoted proudly rationalizing the murder: “Advertising is a means of contributing meaning and values that are necessary and useful to people in structuring their lives, their social relationships and their rituals.” Another culprit explained how this is done. The conductors of four of her “focus groups” using children reported to her that the kids seemed apprehensive about the looming dangers of adolescence – violence, drugs, std’s – and she proved ready for the challenge: “So I stopped the research and I said, ‘Just go in and ask them what Nickelodeon can do for them.’ And in all four groups: ‘Just give us back our childhood. . . .” And that became our battle cry. That became our platform.”
And though he’d been dead for seventeen years, Nelson Algren had long before his death heard this kind of self-congratulatory cant, and known what the words “contributing” and “give us back our childhood” meant in practice. “So accustomed,” Algren darkly suspicioned, “have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, 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 is perjured.” Then he went on to give his evidence: “For it is not in the afternoon in Naples nor yet at evening in Marseilles, not in Indian hovels half-sunk in an ancestral civilization’s ruined halls nor within those lion-colored tents pitched down the Sahara’s endless edge that we discover those faces most debauched by sheer uselessness. Not in the backwash of poverty and war, but in the backwash of prosperity and progress.”
For if the “meaning and values necessary and useful to people” must be “contributed” to people -meaning sold to them – and “childhood” must be “given” back to children – meaning sold to them – then some kind of crime has surely transpired, and it behooves us to investigate it. For how did those values necessary and useful to people escape their grasp in the first place? And had those children looking to be given back their childhood given it away – or had somebody stolen it . . . the better to be in a position to sell it back to them?
Nelson Algren keenly observed modern life and wrote about what he saw for fifty years. While his observations coincided with those of some other contemporaries, none of the others surpassed Algren’s ability to “cut in close” – a favorite phrase of his – to the heart of our anguish or to find and express the beauty as well as the horror of living in it.
I want to bring you Algren in his own words as much as possible because he created a unique style, an unmistakable voice that rises from his pages and makes good company in the bleakest hours before dawn. But style was never what he sought. In Notes From a Sea Diary, Algren’s book-length essay on Hemingway, he wrote, “Nor was his style a clever trick, an acquired device. . . . His style was the means by which he fulfilled a need uniquely his own; thus filling a need in the company of men. This need was for light and simplicity. In achieving it for himself he achieved it for others enduring a murky complexity. By strength of his own love he forced a door. That opened into a country in which, for those willing to risk themselves, love and death became realities.” As Algren had alleged earlier, “Style is that force by which a man becomes what he most needs to become.”
Nelson Algren, born Nelson Algren Abraham in 1909 in Detroit, needed to become Nelson Algren of Chicago. His family moved to Chicago in 1913, but it took him a lot more years than that to become Nelson Algren. The historical circumstances that first formed Algren, then rewarded him, and finally maneuvered him into relative obscurity are customarily known as the “Roaring ‘20s,” the “Great Depression,” and “McCarthyism,” the post-World-War-II syndrome under which we still in so many ways labor.
In the Chicago of the Teens and Twenties, Algren grew up in a working-class family whose two elder sisters and whose mother, Goldie, harbored middle-class aspirations. To Algren, success as seen by such would-be succeeders as his mother was best expressed by Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: “but to pass, safe and dry-shod, down the rushing stream of time. . . .” Which, to Algren, meant that you survived your life by failing to ever live it.
Algren’s sister Bernice, his elder by seven years, was the only member of the family to whom he looked with respect. Bernice was a lively young woman who embraced every aspect of her life, equally devoted to history, physics, atheism, poetry and swimming. She introduced Algren to the belief that life was to be lived, and a vital part of living for her was literature, to which she also introduced him by reading to him and bringing him books from the library.
In addition to serving as heroine and teacher to Algren, Bernice also may have given birth to another of Algren’s lifelong themes, the betrayal of love, when in 1926 she married a staid chemical engineer. Algren seems to have viewed this as a sort of selling out, an abandonment of life; perhaps also as an abandonment of himself. But however he viewed her marriage, Algren owed one more experience to Bernice. She prevailed upon Algren’s reluctant father to allow him to go to college at the University of Illinois in 1927, and prevailed upon her husband to help pay his tuition while he worked himself through.
The John Held era came to an abrupt end in 1929, and by 1931, when Algren graduated with a degree in journalism, he found no work available in Chicago. He described the next step- and the rest of his life – on the jacket copy of his 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side: “I’d come to New Orleans with a card entitling me to some editorial position because I’d attended a school of journalism. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a columnist or a foreign correspondent but I was willing to take what was open. What was open was a place on a bench in Lafayette Square if you got there early. I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life.’ I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since.”
While Algren’s tone is insouciant, his experiences on the road were far from lighthearted. He hooked up with a pair of drifters, both named Luther, in New Orleans, and they wound up in the Rio Grande Valley, where one of them attempted to leave Algren at the mercy of farmers the other Luther had flummoxed out of their crops. Eventually, Algren served time in jail for attempting to steal a typewriter. These experiences, and the lives of the men and women he encountered in the hobo camps and shelters and soup kitchens, came as a shock to Algren, who had set out still a basically optimistic, middle-class young fellow.
“Everything I’d been told was wrong. . . . I’d been told, I’d been assured, that it was a strive and succeed world. . . . But this is not what America was. America was not socialized and I resented very deeply that I’d been lied to. . . . You had to reverse everything you’d been taught, mechanically as well as morally,” Algren much later told H.E.F. Donahue. Algren had set out to see America, and what he had found, in the words of Bettina Drew, was a “world where relationships meant nothing, where money was more important than life, and life was so cheap as to be valueless.”
Back in Chicago, Algren began to put his experiences into short stories, and one of them drew the attention of the publisher Vanguard, who enquired about a novel. In a typically ruinous financial deal, Algren negotiated an advance of one hundred dollars to produce what became his first novel, Somebody in Boots. He put a year and a half into the book, and wound up owing money on the advance to Vanguard, for in 1935, books were simply not selling.
In his preface to a later edition of the book, Algren described it as “an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.” This is a fair characterization. Throughout his career, Algren worked by feeling rather than plan, and the lives he wrote about worked in much the same way. In this first novel, he chronicles the wanderings of Cass McKay, son of “that wild and hardy tribe. . . . the slaveless yeomen who had never cared for slaves or land. . . . But,” Algren wondered, “now that the frontier had vanished, where did the man go whose only skills were those of the frontier?”
Through Cass, a gentle, ignorant boy who flees the hopelessness of a rural Rio Grande valley in which he has never known anything but hunger and scorn and his father’s raging sense of being cheated, Cass sees at first hand all that Algren had seen – the danger and violence of life riding the rails, the exploitation of the homeless and of the women, the hopelessness of millions of people cast adrift, drawn eventually to the cities like Chicago where they find no more recognition of their humanity or hope. They are all exiles, like Cass, “exiled from himself and expatriated within his own frontiers.”
Even in this first novel, infused occasionally with the communist rhetoric he’d absorbed in the John Reed Club he frequented in Chicago, Algren’s vision pierced beyond rhetoric. Kurt Vonnegut saw how Algren differed from other “proletarian writers” of the period: “He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently.”
All his life, Algren saw that the lives of the majority of this world’s citizens were expressions of their particular regions and pasts, and that little true individuality was available to the many. And yet he saw within each individual at least the faint residue of aspiration, hope, and love – of humanity. In Vonnegut’s words, “he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.”
The failure of Somebody in Boots threw Algren into a long depression, from which he gradually emerged. He was hired on by the Federal Writers’ Project, a branch of the WPA, and worked for a number of years as a researcher and writer, deepening his knowledge both of Illinois history and of the dispossessed of Chicago, and regaining a sense of worth that allowed him to begin work on his second novel, Never Come Morning. He later said of the Writers’ Project that “It served to humanize people who had lost their self-respect by being out of work and then living by themselves began to feel the world was against them.”
Thus began Algren’s most productive period, one which brought him great critical if not financial success. Never Come Morning appeared in 1940, illuminating the lives of the poor Poles of Chicago’s Northwest side, and receiving glowing and intelligent critical praise. Chicago novelist James T. Farrell – hardly a friend of Algren’s – called it “one of the most important novels that I have read,” and Philip Rahv, writing in The Nation, observed the strides Algren had made since his first novel: “Algren’s realism is so paced as to avoid the tedium of the naturalistic stereotype, of the literal copying of surfaces. He knows how to select, how to employ factual details without letting himself be swamped by them, and, finally, how to put the slang his characters speak to creative uses so that it ceases to be an element of mere documentation and turns into an element of style.”
This last observation is particularly important to Algren’s work. In Somebody in Boots, he had tried to render, with uneven success, the slang and accent and cadence of Texas, a dialect he’d only experienced briefly. But in Never Come Morning, and in the two books that followed it, he was working with the English spoken by the people he’d lived among most of his life. Further, Algren had continued to refine his ear and his skill at reproducing its testimony on the page as he worked for the Writers’ Project, and the results were far more convincing. Here, for example, is a debate between Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, the novel’s protagonist, and a character contemptuously nicknamed “Bibleback” because of his devout religiosity:
“’You gotta believe somethin, Left,’” [Bibleback] concluded apologetically.
“’I believe I got to take care of number one, then,’ Bruno answered. ‘That’s my faith.’
“’Oh, I see – God been around a thousand years ‘n’ you been around seventeen ‘n’ you know as much as He does awready – Boy, Lefty, you’re sharp – you learn faster’n Him even!’
“’How come you know so much, Polack?’ Bruno countered, an idea dawning in him – ‘How come you’re so sure I been here only seventeen years? How you know I didn’t have a in-car-nation somewheres before – How you know I wasn’t Jesus Christ before I was livin’ in this neighborhood? How you know? Maybe I was Adam even.’”
While Algren went reluctantly off to serve as a Corpsman in the Army, seeing action in the last days of the war in Germany, his work became a target of the “respectable” Poles back in Chicago. The president of the Roman Catholic Union wrote Algren’s publisher, “I protest against further publishing of this book, for it fosters national disunity and should have no place in our libraries and homes.” The Polish daily Zgoda added that “It is doubtful whether Goebbels’ personal adjutant could have ordered a juicier Pole-baiting tale than this Swede has dared. . . . At 32, Algren, a Scandinavian, cannot possibly be without malice in his heart against the Poles.”
The Polish establishment prevailed upon the Chicago Public Library to remove the book from its collection. It remained removed as late as 1962, when Algren wrote in the preface to a new edition, “Thus through the furious logic of illiteracy we had come full cycle. We had fought in snow and slept in rain because somebody had said that every time he heard the word ’culture’ he reached for his gun, and now we had won him the right of reaching for it. The man who had lost the war was not necessarily German nor was the man who had won it necessarily American. . . . The victor in any land was the man who feels himself terribly wronged if his ultimatum on what his neighbors should read, what they should wear and what they should think is questioned. We had crossed an ocean only to find that that bore lived on the same street as ourselves.”
But that was written after fifteen years of political reaction, after fear and hatred of Nazis had been smoothly transformed into fear and hatred of Communists. When Algren returned from the Army, he returned filled with optimism and energy. In 1947, he published The Neon Wilderness, a collection of short stories old and new, capturing the victories and defeats of “men and women forced to choices too hard to bear.” The collection again received good notices and sold little.
Meanwhile, Algren was working on a new novel, The Man With the Golden Arm , about a Chicago Pole, Frankie Machine, who returns from the war with painful wounds and the memory that morphine can ease all sorts of pains. Frankie, a small-time card dealer, is a man trapped in almost every way conceivable – trapped by his own guilt, with which his pathetic wife Sophie keeps him chained to her, trapped by his addiction, trapped, finally, by his murder of the dope-dealer whose political connections make his otherwise unlamented death one that must be avenged by the authorities. Hunted through the furnished rooms of Chicago, Frankie ultimately hangs himself rather than face arrest and execution.
The book reflects Algren’s growing perception that the War had not ended, just come home and changed enemies. When Sparrow, Frankie’s only friend, is lying in jail under threat of a life sentence unless he betrays Frankie, he hears the voice of a young woman being brought down into the cells, crying out, “’Ain’t nobody on my side?’ . . .
“’Nobody, sister. Not a soul,’ Sparrow answered, she suited his own mood so well. ‘You’re all on your own from here on out. Ain’t nobody on anybody’s side no more. You’re the on’y one on your side ‘n’ I’m the on’y one on mine.’”
This state of affairs is described at one point by Frankie, in a line that recurs throughout the book like the chorus of a popular song, as “’the new way of doin’ things, you might call it.’”
The Man With the Golden Arm left Algren feeling that he had finally written the book he’d wanted to write, and the critical reaction supported his conviction. Reviewers compared Algren to Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Gorky and Dickens; even The New Yorker praised the book, and in 1950 it received the first National Book Award. Hemingway told his editor that Algren was “the best novelist under 50, or you name it, writing today.”
But this, as it turned out, marked the high water mark of Algren’s career, for a different wind was already blowing, and writers who suggested that American democracy was less than perfect and that money and material success were not the proper measure of the good life were going to go abruptly out of style. In 1947, the House Unamerican Activities Committee had begun hearings on Communist influence in the entertainment industry, leading to the conviction of ten prominent screenwriters, directors and producers, the “unfriendly witnesses,” who refused to comply with the Committee’s demand that they reveal their political convictions and name others who shared them. This began the period known now as the “McCarthy Era,” during which private vigilantes joined the Committee in smearing the names and blackmailing the employers of thousands of American citizens.
Novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten,” wrote of the period: “What a curious era it was, and how sad: actors driven from radio, television, films and theatre – their fellow actors working all the while; doctors removed from the registry of such hospitals as Cedars of Lebanon in Los Angeles – their colleagues never once considering a move en masse to more civilized quarters; professors hounded from lecture halls, musicians from recording studios and symphony orchestras, artists from galleries and museums – their brothers contentedly continuing to teach, perform, exhibit; scientists banished from laboratories, ministers from pulpits, students from colleges, reporters from newspapers, editors from publishing houses, craftsmen from unions, lawyers, economists, sociologists, and statisticians from government posts. . . . Colleagues, friends, fellow workers stepped softly into the jobs of the damned, and the hole which their disappearance left in the fabric of the community life was scarcely noticed except when one of them killed himself or required commitment.”
Many factors came together to give the national paranoia now known as “McCarthyism” its terrible destructive force. The fear inspired by the close shave applied by Adolf Hitler was certainly one of them, and perhaps the guilt created by our own use of the atomic bomb, and our consequent terror of Russia’s acquisition of the bomb was another. Surely McCarthy, and Nixon and McCarran and J. Parnell Thomas and others of their ilk were strongly supported by industry, which also eagerly supported the Taft-Hartley anti-labor-union act. For America – at least some of America – had been left by the war holding nearly all the marbles, and the marble-holders were not eager to share them.
So the airways and television screens of America were flooded, in short order, with programming such as “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” and with jingoist rhetoric and jingoist revisions of history. Perhaps more importantly, no other versions of history or anything else were able to find a platform. Defenders of the “Hollywood Ten” had a hard time even renting a hall in which to speak, and one of the Hollywood studios decided to shelve “a half-finished film on the Indian peacemaker Hiawatha for fear that it ‘might be regarded as a message for peace and therefore helpful to present Communist designs.’”
Trumbo eloquently summed up the repercussions of the great witch hunt on the intellectual life of the country: “It wasn’t the Committee or the American Legion or the DAR or Parnell Thomas or Francis Walter or Walter Judd or Joe McCarthy or Roy Cohn or Westbrook Pegler or George Sokolsky or Victor Riesel who convinced the liberal establishment that the best way to fight the committee was to ‘ghettoize’ anyone who did; it was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s ‘non-Communist left,’ bursting out of the river and crossing the trees in its first wild stampede toward the Center, startling to their feet great herds of creeping Socialists while Max Eastman and Sidney Hook, riding the flanks and bearing down hard, fired buckshot and bacon rind at the face of the wondering moon. They were going so fast they overshot their mark, but toward dawn they found themselves in some pretty fair pastureland slightly to the Right of Center.” The climate of the Fifties, now an object of truly idiotic nostalgia, was two-fold.
On the one hand was the view of America as a haven of small-town, agrarian virtue wedded to a cornucopia of technological wealth and ease – “suburbia,” it came to be dubbed; the other was the underlying reality of a country lost to its purpose and ridden with nightly terror that someone might either come in wanting a piece of the barbecue grill or come in and atomize the whole shebang. Charlie Chaplin described the situation thus: “’It’s so b-o-o-o-ring. . . . America is so terribly grim in spite of all that material prosperity. They no longer know how to weep. Compassion and the old neighborliness have gone, people do nothing when friends and neighbors are attacked, libeled and ruined. . . . and all in a sickening atmosphere of religious hypocrisy.’”
And the poet Archibald MacLeish noticed: “What is happening in the United States under the impact of the negative and defensive and often frightened opinion of these years is the falsification of the image the American people have long cherished of themselves as beginners and begetters, changers and challengers, creators and accomplishers. A people who have thought of themselves for a hundred and fifty years as having purposes of their own for the changing of the world cannot learn overnight to think of themselves as the resisters of another’s purposes without beginning to wonder who they are. A people who have been real to themselves because they were for something cannot continue to be real to themselves when they find they are merely against something.” To which Dalton Trumbo later added, “This quality of opposition has become the keystone to our national existence.”
But early in the Fifties, Algren still thought he was riding high, and when the actor John Garfield wanted to star in The Man With the Golden Arm, he thought he had it made. But then Garfield, threatened with perjury by the House Unamerican Activities Committee because he’d denied knowing any communists, died of a heart attack, and that deal went south. Algren decided to counterattack and began a long essay in which he spoke to what he saw going on in the country, and of what he believed the country – or at least its great writers – had always stood for. Parts of the essay appeared in periodicals, and he delivered another part at the University of Missouri Writer’s Conference, but in 1953, his publisher, Doubleday, refused to issue it. He sent the original to his then agent, who lost it, and the manuscript was only reassembled and published three years ago. It is this essay I particularly wish to commend to your attention, so we’ll come back to it.
The resistance to this essay, the failure of his publisher to adequately promote his previous book, and his own nose told Algren that the times were changing, and that the work he wanted to do, speaking for the losers in a society now governed and informed exclusively by winners, had come to nothing. He reacted with cynical despair, taking on a rewrite of Somebody in Boots with the comment, “I’m aiming solely at the pocketbook traffic. . . . I think that the writers of the twenties were sounder of heart. . . . While those of the [thirties] came in on themselves: gave up, quit cold, snitched, begged off, sold out, copped out, denied all, and ran. . . . I’m hacking too. Nobody stayed.”
Looking at fifty, his country a relentlessly cheerful horror, Algren reached another low point. And so, when Famous Director Otto Preminger acquired the rights to The Man With the Golden Arm, and offered Algren a trip to Los Angeles to write the screenplay, Algren accepted. “Well,” as Algren often enquired of his readers, “what would you do?”
His initial meeting with Preminger was gruesome from the get-go, for he quickly perceived that Preminger had no sympathy for the characters of the book and no respect for what the book had said or for the writer who’d said it; he’d merely seen the chance to make a hot property, now that drug addicts had joined communists in the list of things for Americans to fear and hate.
Algren’s response to this was to offer Preminger a 12-page treatment which culminated with Frankie Machine – who would ultimately be played by Frank Sinatra – saying to Sophie – ultimately played by Kim Novak, to Algren’s eternal distress – “White goddess say not go that part of forest.” Things pretty much went downhill from there, and Algren never saw another dime from the movie, which made many dimes indeed, billed as “Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm.”
A writer’s books are his only assets, and Algren had been left with no other assets in his transactions with Preminger. His reputation, after the publication of his “rewrite” of Somebody in Boots, published as A Walk on the Wild Side, was left in no better shape, for the critics who were now being published in the few magazines that reviewed books at all were those who had joined the great pack on the near Right. Norman Podhoretz wondered why Algren “finds bums so much more interesting and stirring than other people.” Leslie Fiedler called him “a museum piece – the last of the Proletarian writers.” Edmund Fuller called him a “destroyer of the social order.”
Things didn’t look good. Algren himself wondered why he was doing what he was doing. Where were the readers? Why should he continue to write? “Who for?” he asked. “I used to think it was for some vague assemblage called readers. I used to think it was for some people named Cowley and Sartre and such too. But all it turns out it is for is for someone like Rapietta Greensponge, girl counselor.”
But the cynicism and bitterness seldom affected the writing, and even the “pocketbook trade” version of Somebody in Boots, A Walk on the Wild Side, was far from the sell-out Algren perceived. He saw that his time on the stage was done, all right. He perceived he’d been banished to the minors. But he never stopped throwing his best stuff, even when he had no stuff left at all.
He did, however, abandon his plans for another novel and became a sort of a journalist. During the sixties, he produced an anthology of short stories, Nelson Algren’s Book of Lonesome Monsters , and two travel books – Who Lost an American? and Notes From a Sea Diary, all for money, because writing was what he knew how to do for money. But they contain some of his best writing, for though he told himself he was writing for “the pocketbook trade,” he could never do anything except write from the heart of his own experience.
And his experience was considerable. Once he was granted a passport, he traveled to Ireland, France, Spain, North Africa, Turkey, Formosa, Kowloon, and India. Everywhere he went, he found his basic sense of “the life of man” confirmed: the vast majority of men trapped in an endless variety of snares, many of their own devising; the vast majority of women at the mercy of merciless men; the vast majority of people struggling endlessly to fashion brief moments of decency, honor or pleasure against all odds.
It was that sense of life he had sought to convey in all his earlier work and that he found in the work of what he considered the true American literary tradition. He restated a good deal of what he believed about that tradition in his preface to Lonesome Monsters and in the two travel books, but it was not until Nonconformity was finally (and beautifully) published in 1996 that his full, eloquent vision of that tradition became available.
Algren begins the essay by identifying his enemies with remarkable clarity: the military-industrial-government complex fostered by World War II and its thugs, and the apologists for that new empire among the intellectuals and writers and artists. Ten years before Dwight Eisenhower identified the “military-industrial complex” as a threat in his farewell address, (leaving the government out of the formula for obvious reasons), Algren recognized it right off, quoting Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense: “Charles E. Wilson, writing in the Army Ordinance Journal as far back as 1944, feels we ought to be less secretive about [keeping the war-orders mounting]: ‘War has been inevitable in our human affairs as an evolutionary force. . . . Let us make the three-way partnership (industry, government, army) permanent.’”
Algren juxtaposes this sentiment with Faulkner’s well-known remarks in his Nobel Prize Speech of 1950: “’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. . . .’”
But Algren finds the causes of the anguish of the early ’50s more complex than the simple fear of physical atomization. Implicit in his argument is the adage that “all government depends upon the consent of the governed,” and he looks to the state of the “governed” for his explanation of that “general and universal . . . fear.”
He finds it in the guilt and consequent fear of the middle class, a class whose very existence and burgeoning affluence depends on the money generated by the war machine. Wilson’s quotation suggests that America exist in a state of perpetual war, as indeed it very nearly has since 1950. (See Seymour Epstein, The Permanent War Economy .) Yet we have continued to tell ourselves that we are a nation “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” a nation that wouldn’t say “war” if we had a mouthful. And our middle class has prospered to a level of affluence so far beyond the aspirations of most of the six billion human inhabitants of the planet as to seem, to the objective observer, obscene.
But all this profit has not come without cost. The greatest cost, in Algren’s view, is in the isolation of the individual. An isolation endemic in the puritan-capitalist structure of American society, but encouraged to “psychotic” extremes by the actions of the government: “We have come to the point where, in order to avoid the face of our own psychosis, we insist that all good men be psychotic. For if we have not, as a nation, gone psychotic, how is it that we now honor most those whom we once most despised? Now the professional perjurer is called an ‘informant’ – we used to call them something else. Blackmail in the name of ‘anti-Communism’ is now dignified by the name of ‘research services.’ Though we always believed, by and large, in rugged individualism, we didn’t until now like the idea of dog eat dog. “
What Algren found gnawing at the middle class was the same agenbite he had observed chewing up the lower classes – the terrible isolation of American society – an isolation bred by the equation of material success with spiritual success; with virtue: “Our practice of specializing our lives to let each man be his own department, safe from the beetles and the rain. . . .” Now, institutionalized and sanctioned by every center of power from Time Magazine to General Motors and General Electric to the Senate of the United States, this specialization had led to a situation in which, “out of a conviction that every man should be his own department we have specialized ourselves into a condition where every man is actually his own broom closet.”
George Orwell had observed the same process at work in England, describing, in 1984, a society in which terror forced each person to live in his own broom closet, lest his own family inform upon him. Orwell set his vision in the future, now our past, and it was dismissed then, as it is now, as fantasy, or, at best, as a minor sidelight of literature known as “dystopia.” In Nonconformity, however indirectly, Algren described American society as composed of three levels: the bosses and their thugs, the house servants (well paid and comfortable), and the masses, poor, ignorant, self-loathing and doomed to remain so. A society of universal mutual distrust, in which the masses are relegated to invisibility even from themselves, the middle class is rendered guilt-ridden, frightened, impotent by its undeserved affluence and the upper class is invisible behind its media screens.
Algren finds the artists and intellectuals serving this state of affairs most nauseating of all. They provide popular diversions and preach the virtue of ignoring present reality, as, for example, does historical novelist Frank Yerby. They join forces with McCarthy and Nixon, as did playwright Maxwell Anderson and actor Jose Ferrer and director Elia Kazan, informing on their colleagues. Worst of all, perhaps, they write and speak as mere “reporters,” creating a narrative voice so neutral as to be unassailable by any opponent whatsoever: “Babbitt has risen from the dust of the twenties,” Algren sums it up, “his fingers fit the levers of power, and the lid is off on the price of nonconformity.”
Algren differs from Orwell in one regard; being an American, he retains an optimistic vision. And, being an American, he couches it in nostalgic terms. Against his bleak and foresighted view of America in the post-war Empire period, Algren sets his view of what America had long said it wanted to be, ought to be, was. American literature, according to Algren, has historically taken the side of the disenfranchised, has refused to buy the prevailing myth that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” and has sought to “vindictively” assert the reality and humanity of the despised, the unsuccessful, the fallen.
His pantheon of American writers begins with Whitman, and with lines of Whitman he quoted again and again in his writing:
I feel I am of them –
I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself –
And henceforth I will not deny them –
For how can I deny myself?
It continues through Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Thorstein Veblen, Lincoln Steffens, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Ultimately, Algren’s vision, American in its optimism, its nostalgia, its rage and sense of betrayal, is a larger vision than that of most of his exemplars. Algren read widely and deeply in history and western literature, and he saw at least as much of the world as did many of the great American writers. From this experience of the world, he arrived at two teachings from the New Testament that informed everything he ever wrote: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of them, you have done it unto me”; “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
Both of these verses urge compassion and empathy; that is, first, feeling for, then feeling with. Compassion and empathy: hard to imagine two traits more completely lacking from our public life; our attempts to replace them with politically correct legal stratagems have proved a boon to lawyers but done little to fill the emptiness of our hearts. Without these traits, American culture has become increasingly arid and strident, and our children reflect these qualities. They don’t know there are great things to be done.
Teachers of literature – now universally known as “Freshman Composition” – have succumbed to the elimination of any sense of the existence of a literary tradition. They teach out of anthologies filled with half-baked journalism on trendy topics the publishers suppose their students will find engaging because television talking heads find them so. They teach extraordinarily bad essays like Brent Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space,” and utter drivel such as Pete Hamill’s “Crack and the Box,” or “Neat People Versus Sloppy People.” If their students don’t know there are great things to be done, is it not their mission to introduce students to the great things that have been done by their countrymen and women?
Decades ago, Nelson Algren wrote this:
For it was not only their homes, and their associations with one another that the winners of the Middle Border walled, but their mills and factories as well. This was not only a means of protecting private property, but also a way of removing their lives from those of the men and women who worked for them. They thus effected a separation of their lives form the life of American multitudes; and subsequently created a dream-world more real to them than the world of struggle going on in the streets. The men that their power and wealth nominated for public office, therefore, were consistently men who prided themselves upon their “practicality.”
A practicality as wholly dedicated to keeping their dream-world inviolate as it was to keeping trespassers off their property: they had more success in keeping the violators of property out than in keeping out violators of their dreams.
Among the footmen of literature . . . defending a world in which property and prestige were more real than love and death were such writers as Tarkington . . . and William Dean Howells; whose classic comment was that literature should be written for maiden eyes alone.
But American literature has not been made by writing about lives undeflowered. Literature is made upon those occasions when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.
When the city clerk of Terre Haute refused to issue warrants for the arrest of streetwalkers despite his sworn duty to issue warrants for the arrest of streetwalkers, and instead demanded of the Terre Haute police, ‘Why don’t you make war on people in high life instead of upon these penniless girls?” that little sport performed an act of literature.
For he was sustaining the great beginning Whitman had made. . . . A beginning marked by an exuberant good humor; that yet sought darkly for understanding of America.
And sought through New York’s Bowery and down Main Street of Winesburg to the edge of town; where the last gas lamp makes all America look tired.
A search past 4 a.m. gas stations upon nights when cats freeze to death on fire escapes and chimneys race the moon; down streets that Sister Carrie knew.
Beyond the grandfathers’ walls there began to flow a blood-colored current of vindictive life; that was fed into America’s heart by violators of the grandfathers’ dreams. These were impractical men who lived upon a street for whom nobody prayed; where the cries of the sick, the tortured and the maimed had gone unheard.
They were the accused with whom Whitman had taken his stand when he wrote “I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself.” Guilty or not guilty, Whitman pled the defense.
As Stephen Crane had taken his place beside Maggie; as had Dreiser beside Clyde Griffiths. As had O’Neill beside Anna Christiansen; as had Richard Wright beside Bigger Thomas. As had Tennessee Williams beside Blanche du Bois. And where James Baldwin made his still-unanswered challenge: “If you don’t know my name you don’t know your own.”
In this passage, Algren suggests that literature is not about style or ideas or criticism, but about the actual, felt lives of human beings. I argue that it is time we devote our attentions to these things and communicate our own love for them to others who may then come to see that there are, indeed, great things to be done if this country is to be brought back to a remembrance of “the meanings and values that are necessary and useful,” of the truths we once claimed were self-evident.
