Entrapment and Other Writings

In 1949, Ernest Hemingway praised Nelson Algren as “a man writing,” adding that “Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.” Concluded Papa, “Mr. Algren, boy, are you good.”
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It was not long, however, before Algren became discouraged with his personal life, the cold-war America of Joe McCarthy, and the increasingly lackluster reception of his work as the conformist 1950s wore on and wore Algren down. Soon, he was calling himself “the tin whistle of American letters”
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—his version of comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect.” It was, however, a whistle he continued to blow loudly to make sure the serious criminals—the politicians and the cops, the businessmen and the smug suburbanites, the know-nothing academics and the risk-nothing writers—did not get away scot-free. In the late 1940s, he was already warning that, for the foreseeable future, American foreign policy would be dominated by a continuing need for oil, and in 1953 he published an essay in the
Nation
that, with a few changes of detail, might have appeared there in 2008:

One can only imagine how long and how loudly Algren would have been working his whistle in response to the War on Terror and the Patriot Act, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the swords rattled in Iran’s direction, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the 700 billion dollar bailout of American financial institutions and the epidemic of home foreclosures hitting the already battered working and lower-middle classes, the outsourcing of jobs, the cynicism of power, the extraordinary renditions, and the hubris of American exceptionalism.

Algren, after all, was a man who—in an anecdote related by his friend, the photographer Art Shay—could read a story in the morning newspaper about the cold-blooded murder of a family of five and feel sorry for the murderer: “Can you imagine,” Algren remarked, “what it took to make a guy do a thing like that?”
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Here was a writer who, two years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, could observe compassionately of Lee Harvey Oswald, “Belonging neither to the bourgeoisie nor to a working class, seeking roots in revolution one week and in reaction the next, not knowing what to cling to nor what to abandon, compulsive, unreachable, dreaming of some sacrificial heroism, he murders a man he does not even hate, simply, by that act, to join the company of men at last.”
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From his earliest stories to his final novel,
The Devil’s Stocking
, Algren blew his whistle for exactly the sort of people taken in yesterday by the subprime mortgage scam that has today put them out on the street, the sort of people who put their lives on hold or hoped to find the American Dream by joining the military to fight and to sweat and sometimes to die in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly to return home damaged, the sort of people victimized by NAFTA and
Wal-Mart, the World Trade Organization, globalization, and the conviction that national health care is the slippery slope to the bugaboo of socialism—the people who live, as Algren would have put it, behind the billboards and down the tin-can alleys of America, the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who know they will never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

As Algren wrote in
Nonconformity
—his personal state-of-the-union message finished in the early 1950s but unpublished until Seven Stories published it in 1996 (the FBI having successfully pressured his then-publisher, Doubleday, to kill the project)—“From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how.”
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The solution for those Americans at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile was that, lacking means, they lived as they could, as much as they could, whenever they could, and to hell with what polite people considered proper, to hell (whenever one could get away with it) with the rules the polite people made and hired the cops to enforce. For those in the middle and at the top, the solution was otherwise: hypocrisy, complicity in wrongdoing and suffering, indifference, willful ignorance, and complacency—all of which left the nice people living lives of conformity, stifled desires, and little self-awareness.

For someone playing a tin whistle, Algren got a lot of music out of it, sometimes shrill, sometimes hauntingly beautiful. If that music has a message—and it does—it is captured in part in the epigraph Algren chose for
The Man with the Golden Arm
from the Russian novelist Alexander Kuprin: “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all
the horror is in just this—that there is no horror!” To which the counter-theme is that voiced by the “defrocked” preacher being grilled by
Man’s
police captain Record-Head Bednar: “We are all members of one another.”
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When the novel’s jailed “Sparrow” Salt-skin hears a girl cry out as she is being brought in, “Ain’t anyone on
my
side?” Sparrow can only answer silently, “Nobody, sister. Not a soul,” for “he knew not one man on the side of men.”
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Yet—as every piece included in this volume testifies—Algren saw writers generally—and himself in particular—as being one with those who don’t otherwise have defenders. Quoting again from
Nonconformity
, here invoking Joseph Conrad: “ ‘A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling,’ Conrad tells us.”
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But Algren’s no-bullshit toughness was tender as well as tough, full-hearted in a fundamental way reminiscent of Christ’s second great commandment, to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Algren titled his 1963 collection of travel writings with a question:
Who Lost an American?
One answer, of course, is that all of us have lost countless Americans in countless ways. We have lost the American Carl Schurz, who affirmed on the floor of the US Senate in 1872—to deafening applause from the galleries—“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” We have lost the American anarchist Adolph Fischer, executed following Chicago’s Haymarket rally of 1886, who told us that “the strongest bulwark of the capitalist system is the ignorance of its victims.” We have lost the American socialist Eugene Debs, who, having been convicted of violating the Sedition Act of 1918, told the federal court of Cleveland, Ohio, “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I am not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” We have lost the American Woody Guthrie, who sang in 1939, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen.”
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