Praised by such different souls as Ernest Hemingway, Donald Barthelme, Simone de Beauvoir and Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Algren remains at best a rumor in his own time. They misspelled his name on his tombstone, and when the City of Chicago renamed a street in his honor, the residents complained so bitterly about the change that it was rescinded.
If his name rings a bell, it’s usually one forged in Hollywood, where his novels The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side were pillaged into movies.
Rumor or not, I think Algren’s writing will be read for a long time. And while the two books I’ve mentioned and his great collection of short stories The Neon Wilderness will probably remain the hub of his work, I want to recommend a later book, Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way, as the place to make the acquaintance of Chicago’s greatest writer.
Notes resembles no other book I’ve read. It is partly a journal of Algren’s trip on a tramp steamer from Korea down through Kowloon to India. It is partly a reworking of Nonconformity, a long essay on writing fiction which Algren’s then publisher (Doubleday) got scared out of printing by Joe McCarthy in the early ‘50’s. And it brings alive the bleak compassion with which Algren lived and from which he wrote about the lives of men and women who never had the money to buy the T-shirt that proclaims, “You Can Have It All.” Whose T-shirts instead proclaimed, “They Went Forth to Battle, But They Always Fell,” the title of a poem by Seamus O’Sheel that Algren was fond of quoting. (“Bravely they fought/And nobly, but not well/And on the hard-fought field they always fell,” is how the rest of the first stanza goes.)
The men who keep Algren’s steamer barely afloat are lonely, desperate, homeless; funny, independent, sly; sentimental and cold-hearted; each is unique. The women they buy and use and sometimes failingly love in ports of call are much the same. Algren is moved to quote Chekhov by the women who live in cages on the streets of Bombay: “’ When one is peacefully at home, life seems ordinary. But when one goes into the street and questions women life becomes terrible.’”
“Nelson Algren broke new ground,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, ‘by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently .”
Algren’s literary criticism – couched as an attack on Hemingway’s critics and explainers – is most briefly expressed by Joseph Conrad’s remark that “A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling.”
“You want men and women to be good to each other,” Algren once said to fellow writer H.E.F. Donahue. “Sentimentality is a kind of indulgence of this hope. It’s a kind of poetry, and…I don’t think anything is true that doesn’t have it, that doesn’t have poetry in it.”
I’ve made this book sound chaotic, as it first appears to be and perhaps is, if human life is chaotic. If it is, it’s the kind of chaos you experience in a long, late-night conversation with a friend you don’t see often enough. The kind of night after which you wake up feeling terrible, but inexplicably happy you’re alive. In fact, more alive.
(As well as the books mentioned, Algren also edited a remarkable collection of short stories, Nelson Algren’s Book of Lonesome Monsters, that brought the work of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, James Blake and others to public attention.)
