A Walk on the Wild Side (2 page)

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 had an affair, but the emotional strength of which would seem to derive from his love for de Beauvoir. But he couldn’t 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 him feeling exploited and further depressed. ‘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. He hoped to use the money from the book for the ever more unlikely purpose of getting to Paris.

‘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 and finds work as a stud in a peep-show. He worked in some of his old short stories, and drew on some of his experiences as a young drifter working scams in New Orleans.

Algren returned to New Orleans in the summer of 1954 but, finding it of little help, he went home to Chicago where 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 black madam on the South Side, in whose establishment Algren picked up stories for the novel’s brothel scenes.

Whereas
The Man with the Golden Arm
was built, he said, sentence by sentence, the new novel, Algren told an interviewer 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 Kontowicz 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 speakeasies 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 Švejk-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 collie whose owner apologises: ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a
white
man before’, and who declares when, seeking a job as scabbing seaman, he is asked if he belongs to a union, ‘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 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 conmen. In a society where people die of usefulness, Algren’s inverted Big Easy is a place 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 in 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 the ensemble casts of its 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 realistic a 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. The book in consequence is not what it sets out to be, and its structure is sometimes looser than its language.

What remain 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 be beheaded by a black man, naked to the waist, who grabs the next topmost turtle for decapitation, a symbol for 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 that these ‘lonesome monsters’ 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’ had ‘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… our literature has moved on and left him almost a museum piece – the Last of the Proletarian Writers’.

The political crime was unmistakable, 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 of 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 mankind 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 1930s; 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 no longer a new and great dream of exploding possibility, but 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’, describing mid-twentieth-century perfectly.

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.

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 programme, 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. 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 simply as a victim of the Cold War. His literature threw down a question to the fundamental nature of the USA.