Regarding Nelson Algren 7/25/21

The halfway house has wifi which I can access with my flip phone. I need to read and so I will probably burn out what is left of my eyes. Meanwhile…

Reading about Nelson Algren on Lithub makes me wonder if I have engaged enough with the marginalized, with criticizing those in power. 

I read A Heroic Line of Losers by Brook Horvath which is just one of the pieces to be found about how great a writer Algren was and why he is now such an obscure one. Long-Awaited ‘Algren’ Documentary to Open in Chicago is another but has the advantage of a video excerpt. (Now I have to spend time on YouTube not looking up Pretenders videos.) There is an interview with his latests biographer here: Nelson Algren’s Strange Midnight Dignity. This one may explain why Algren does not go away:

J.H.: Yours will be the third biography of Algren. Most writers are lucky (or unlucky) to get one. Why do you think there has been so much interest in his life?

C.A.: The simplest answer is also the truest: Algren’s life remains interesting because of his work.

Algren’s writing has several things going against it. He uses vernacular extensively, which can be difficult to parse now that it is decades old. His books are lightly plotted, and his protagonists are deeply flawed. The environments he conjures are brutal. And yet, Algren’s books have aged well. One reason for that is the singularity of his prose. It’s possible to orient Algren’s work within the American tradition—his stuff contains some of the naturalism in Farrell and early Steinbeck; he writes with a rhythm that’s reminiscent of Hemingway, occasionally; and he uses imagery that has echoes of Carl Sandburg’s poems—but he was not derivative; as a stylist, he stood alone. He consciously tried to appeal to the eye and the ear simultaneously, and as a result his work is complex, closely observed and precise, but also propulsive and pleasurable to read. 

‘Because of the singularity of Algren’s style, people still feel they’ve discovered something new when they first encounter his work.’

A brief anecdote: I recently introduced an acquaintance to Algren. Trying not to say too much or sell too hard, I suggested she read The Man with the Golden Arm. When I saw her the following week, she enthused: “The book reads like poetry. The sentences have a rhythm. I can hear the rhythm of the El tracks in everything.”

Because of the singularity of Algren’s style, people still feel they’ve discovered something new when they first encounter his work. I had that experience with his writing, and I have heard the same from many people since. Given that Algren wrote his best work more than sixty years ago, and millions of copies of his books have been purchased, this is a remarkable phenomenon, and goes a long way toward explaining why people remain interested in his life.

But Algren’s subject matter is also a factor in his enduring relevance. It’s a cliché to say that a writer whose career peaked and then faded suffered because he was ahead of his time, but in Algren’s case it’s true.

Algren focused almost exclusively on the lives of people who, he felt, had been marginalized or discarded by America—prisoners, itinerant laborers, alcoholics, morphine addicts, petty criminals, prostitutes, and boxers. Other writers, of course, have done the same. But Algren’s work is distinct because of the convictions that motivated it. He chose his characters advisedly, and saw their stories as an integral part of the American story. He focused on the portions of society that benefit least from America’s wealth because he believed the quality of their lives was an accurate gauge of the country’s moral health, that the struggles they faced foretold the challenges the remainder of society would soon face. This insight allowed him to produce insights that were decades ahead of their time.

LitHub has a podcast link of an interview with the the same biographer under the title of On the Excoriating Speech Nelson Algren Delivered to College English Students.  Oh, it kept me listening.

The Nation reviews this biography under Rediscovering Nelson Algren, which includes this paragraph:

Does Algren matter? His legacy across the decades has been kept alive by other writers (Don DeLillo, Barry Gifford, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell Banks, his good friend Studs Terkel, among many others); a handful of academics (Malcolm Cowley, Brooke Horvath, William Savage, Carlo Rotella, Hazel Rowley); and a belief in him that’s a powerful mixture of loving the work and loving the man. He was lovable and beloved, not simply because the things he stood for still hold true and remain important, even if we believe they do, but because he embodied them and couldn’t help himself. Algren wasn’t against selling out; he just couldn’t do it, even when he tried. How can you not love someone who is incapable of profiting, whose anti-capitalism runs that deep?

I wonder if I understood A Walk on the Wild Side - if having come to it late I am confusing what Algren did first with his successors. Something I called long ago the Chuck Berry effect - people had heard Chuck’s songs by others and failed to give him credit for starting the whole mess.

Nonconformity comes under discussion which left me thinking I understood that book.

In fact, "Nonconformity" could hardly be more relevant to our own time -- when lawmakers can speak without blinking of "cutting the budget" as they actually cut the throats of various powerless classes of people. American writers, says Algren, must report "the defeats in which everything is lost . . . [that] cost everything of real value." They must write from "ruthlessness and alienation" of "the unswept streets where most of humanity has always lived." Their attitude to both politicians and society must be: "This ain't what you rung for, Jack -- but it's what you're damned well getting." Smugness and tidiness must be tossed in the garbage can, along with the other accoutrements of a literary career. "American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody," he holds. "American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, `Isn't anybody on my side?' "

Sch