Arts and Letters

He was born in Detroit on March 28, 1909, but when he was three years old the family moved to Chicago. His father was a highly skilled mechanic who could make machines behave but couldn't give orders to people; he never became a foreman. Nelson spent his boyhood in two working-class Chicago neighborhoods, south and northwest of the Loop. Chicago was to be the city that he hated and loved, abused and celebrated, all through his life. He died last May in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where he had lately established himself after some years in New Jersey, but he will always be a Chicago author, by no means the least and not the last in a famous line.

Dreiser and Sandburg were two of his literary ancestors; Farrell was a sort of cousin, but one he found it painful to admire. These vastly dissimilar writers had in common a Chicago spirit of bluffness and down-to-earthiness that sets them apart from New Yorkers. Algren had the spirit too, but expressed it in a different way. His Chicago was "a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of Burg," as he called it; a city whose various aspects were organized into hostile pairs. It was a day city and a night city (he preferred the night). It was a city of wide boulevards and littered alleyways. It was a city of mansions torn down to build towering apartment houses on the lakefront, and behind them mile after mile of dreary streets. It was a city of prosperous, right-thinking citizens, and also—passing over with hardly a mention of the sober working class into which Algren was born—another city of junkies, pushers, hustlers, hookers, pimps, jackrollers, stewbums, crooked gamblers, and petty thieves, all living at the mercy of the corruptible police.

This last was the Chicago that Algren memorialized in the best of his novels and stories. He lived near these people for years, usually in a two-room flat with books on the floor and a broken bed. He listened to their talk, in which he found a special type of poetry, and never betrayed their secrets to the police. In a sense he became their poet in residence.

Here are two passages from his long prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, that reveal his divided feeling about the city. The first expresses his contempt for prosperous people who live on the Gold Coast or in the northern suburbs:

So if you are entirely square yourself [he says], bypass the forest of furnished rooms behind the Loop and stay on the Outer Drive till you swing through Lincoln Park. Then move, with the lake still on your square right hand, into those suburbs where the lawns are always wide, the sky is always smokeless, the trees are forever leafy, the churches are always tidy, gardens are always landscaped, streets are freshly swept, homes are pictures out of Town and Country. And the people are stuffed with kapok.

Then a second passage, full of pity and love for the dispossessed:

The nameless, useless nobodies who sleep behind the taverns, who sleep beneath the El. Who sleep in burnt-out buses with the windows freshly curtained; in winterized chicken coops or patched-up truck bodies. The useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows; that go as the snow goes, where the wind blows, there and there and there, down any old cat-and-ashcan alley at all. There, unloved and lost forever, lost and unloved for keeps and a day... there where they sleep the all-night movies through and wait for rain or peace or snow: there, there beats Chicago's heart.

I don't know why Algren adopted those nameless nobodies as the social class to which he owed allegiance. He seems to have started out with conventional aspirations. After working his way through the University of Illinois, he had graduated in 1931 with a degree in journalism and with vague dreams, as he tells us, of becoming a sports writer or a foreign correspondent. Newspapers weren't hiring young men in that second year of the Depression. Big-city editors advised him to look for work in small towns, where editors directed him back to cities. After trying his luck in Chicago and Minneapolis, he hitchhiked south through the Great Valley till he found himself in New Orleans, where he joined a crew selling coffee from door to door. Later he became one of the homeless young men—there were more than a million of them in 1932—who traveled in empty boxcars bound for they didn't know where. Unlike the others, Algren now wanted to write and be published. The desire became so strong in him that he walked into a classroom in a Texas cow college and walked out again with a typewriter under his arm. For that misdemeanor he spent four months in jail while waiting for the circuit judge to appear and try his case. Perhaps it was during those months that he lost his middle-class aspirations and began to think of himself as a mutinous soldier in the army of the dispossessed.

After bumming his way back to Chicago, Algren wrote a story about his adventures—I don't know on whose typewriter—and it was printed in Story magazine. A publisher was impressed by it and offered him an advance of $100 against the possible royalties of a novel on which he had started working. The novel—he called it Somebody in Boots—was finished with that modest assistance and it was published in 1935. It was a book that spoke not only for the author but for other homeless and hopeless young men; it was a cry from the depths. Not many people read it at the time, but those who did remembered it. Later, during the years when Algren was on the Federal Writers' Project, his associates called him "the Dostoyevsky of West Madison Street," which is Chicago's Skid Row.

He remained stubbornly loyal to the class for which he had chosen to be a spokesman. His second novel, Never Come Morning, dealt with low life in the Division Street neighborhood, then a Polish community, where he had lived for several years. It had been started when he was on the Writers' Project, but Algren was always a slow worker and it wasn't finished until 1942. By that time—so he told Hemingway—he was working as a boilermakers' assistant in East St. Louis. Hemingway and others warmly praised the novel, but Algren didn't try to exploit the praise; instead he disappeared into the army. He served for three years, mostly in Europe, as a private in the Medical Corps and never rose in rank to private first class.

Once more in Chicago, he went back to Division Street and lived alone in a cheap two-room flat while trying to write another novel. His method of writing was immensely wasteful of time. He started without a plot and with hardly more than a vague feeling of where he might go. "I've always figured," he said, "the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens—you know, till it finds its own plot." The Man with a Golden Arm, his third novel, not published till 1949, started as the story of a returned soldier. Algren had typed hundreds of pages before it became a different story, that of a poker dealer with a monkey on his back. It was to be his only book that appeared on bestseller lists. The movie rights were sold, if for the miserly fee of $15,000; then Algren was offered a high salary to advise on the script. His advice wasn't taken. He appeared at the studio on a Monday, he says, and was fired on Wednesday for recalcitrance. Soon afterward he left Hollywood with a lasting hatred for the place and a reputation among producers of being impossible to deal with.

That wasn't the only time that a door to affluence opened in front of him, but he always slammed it shut. Later he formed one connection after another with magazines that paid high prices for his stories, but each connection was broken. Partly that was because he never learned to meet deadlines, but chiefly it was because he couldn't write anything to order unless it was something he truly felt. The standards he set were those of what he called "the stomach"—others would call it the heart—and not of the head. He had a sort of visceral probity that made it impossible for him to become a hack. If he didn't feel that he was writing from "the stomach," he suffered from writer's block.

He always fiercely resented what he called the literary establishment. I think he feared that some of its members might seize him and drive him blindfolded in a Cadillac to one of those hated North Shore suburbs, where they would not only hold him captive but stuff him with kapok and force him to wear a necktie. Still, in his daily life he did make a sort of compromise. After the success of The Man with a Golden Arm he moved away from Division Street forever, but only to take possession of a hideous little green bungalow in a working-class neighborhood outside of Gary, Indiana. On weekends he went into Chicago to play an all-night game of poker.

That was Nelson Algren as I knew him best in 1954. I didn't closely follow his career after he left Chicago twenty years later, though I heard that he was having trouble with a novel based on the career of Hurricane Carter, the Negro boxer convicted of a triple murder. Carter is an ambiguous figure and has brought bad luck to every writer who became interested in his case. Algren was not an exception. His novel about Carter, The Devil's Stocking, was rejected by American publishers and had to be issued in Germany after his death. During the months since he died, I have been reading books of his that I missed when they first appeared. Once more I have been impressed by his talent, his probity, and his command of a tough language that he transformed into a raw and bleeding poetry. All his books are authentic, if uneven, but I still like him best when he chants about Chicago. Here is a memorable paragraph:

City that walks with her shoulder bag banging her hip, you gave me your gutters and I gave you back gold. City I never pretended to love for something you were not, I never told you you smelled of anything but cheap cologne. I never told you you were anything but a loud old bag. Yet you're still the doll of the world and I'm proud to have slept in your tireless arms.