A Walk on the Wild Side (3 page)

‘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 commercial and critical 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 was dedicated to Algren, and in part described a passionate affair between its heroine and an American writer called Lewis Brogan, clearly modelled on Algren. Yet what to de Beauvoir was an affirmation of their love, was to Algren – who had quarried the lives of his own friends for his own writings – a personal betrayal, and Algren now attacked de Beauvoir in the press. Yet privately he still hoped to escape to Paris and to 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 again to attack her 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 to his 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 a “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 which 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 short-cut 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 that 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.

‘The past is a bucket of ashes,’ he told friends. He took to calling himself a journalist, rather than a novelist.

Algren laughed in the face of the gods and 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 and 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.

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Praise

About the Author

By Nelson Algren

Copyright

‘HE’S JUST A pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin’ his old lady is what crazied him.’

‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he’d float upstream.’

For what had embittered him Fitz had no name. Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated – of having been cheated – that was it. Nobody knew why nor by whom.

But only that all was lost. Lost long ago, in some colder country. Lost anew by the generations since. He kept trying to wind his fingers about this feeling, at times like an ancestral hunger; again like some secret wound. It was there, if a man could get it out into the light, as palpable as the blood in his veins. Someone just behind him kept turning him against himself till his very strength was a weakness. Weaker men, full of worldly follies, did better than Linkhorn in the world. He saw with eyes enviously slow-burning.

‘I ain’t a-playin’ the whore to no man,’ he would declare himself, though no one had so charged him.

Six-foot-one of slack-muscled shambler, he came of a shambling race. That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James’ and Jeff Davis’ people. Lincoln’s people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless as ever in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed.

Whites called them ‘white trash’ and Negroes ‘po’ buckra.’ Since the first rock had risen above the moving waters there had been not a single prince in Fitzbrian’s branch of the Linkhorn clan.

Unremembered kings had talked them out of their crops in that colder country. That country’s crops were sea-sands now. Sea-caves rolled the old kings’ bones.

Yet each king, before he had gotten the hook, had been careful to pass the responsibility for conning all Linkhorns into trustworthy hands. Keep the troublemakers down was the cry.

Duke and baron, lord and laird, city merchant, church and state, landowners both small and great, had formed a united front for the good work. When a Linkhorn had finally taken bush parole, fleeing his Scottish bondage for the brave new world, word went on ahead: Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.

The first free Linkhorn stepped onto the Old Dominion shore and was clamped fast into the bondage of cropping on shares. Sometimes it didn’t seem quite fair.

Through old Virginia’s tobacco-scented summers the Linkhorns had done little cropping and less sharing. So long as there lay a continent of game to be had for the taking, they cropped no man’s shares for long.

Fierce craving boys, they craved neither slaves nor land. If a man could out-fiddle the man who owned a thousand acres, he was the better man though he owned no more than a cabin and a jug. Burns was their poet.

Slaveless yeomen – yet they had seen how the great landowner, the moment he got a few black hands in, put up his feet on his fine white porch and let the world go hang. So the Linkhorns braced their own narrow backs against their own clapboard shacks, pulled up the jug and let it hang too. Burns was still their poet.

Forever trying to keep from working with their hands, the plantations had pushed them deep into the Southern Ozarks. Where they had hidden out so long, saying A Plague On Both Your Houses, that hiding out had become a way of life with them. ‘It’s Mr Linkhorn’s war. We don’t reckon him kin of our’n,’ they reckoned.