Nelson Algren 8-16

Keep reading here and you will learn my fascination with Nelson Algren. Today, I found some articles I want to pass along. I pass them along in the hope you will read him.

Cybersoleil Journal reviews Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing.

About the novel, the reviewer writes:

The tone of Nelson Algren’s novel Walk on the Wild Side is not macabre, gothic, or noir; nor does it encapsulate the idea of enchantment, although the spirit of joie de vivre is definitely evident in this work of picaresque fiction. And while the landscape Algren paints with concrete and vivid language has the ability to disturb the reader’s sensibilities with an unrelenting portrayal of a vagrant transient who is at home in some of the world’s most contemptible places, a certain lightness of air seasoned with a palatable sprinkling of satiric commentary compels the reader to travel along with Dove Linkhorn on an episodic adventure that often mirrors the sights and sounds of a carnival midway. 

About Nonconformity, a book that slapped me upside my head, the reviewer makes this point about writers and writing:

For the reader to understand the nature of the story, perhaps Nelson Algren’s ideas about writing a novel will provide some insight. He writes in his nonfiction work Nonconformity: Writing on Writing that, “You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich.” He goes on to add, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.”

Kurt Jacobsen discusses Nonconformity under the heading of Lost and Found Books

makes this point (amongst several other excellent points):

Rather than smarmy beady-eyed Horatio Algers, Algren lauds Dreiser, Mencken, Veblen, Steffens, and Lewis. Our singular American genius Mark Twain towers among even that splendid company. Algren skewers popular novelists who disingenuously yearn only ‘to give pleasure to the reading public” and plead they have “no right to impose [their] views on race and religion.” So then, Algren deduces, ‘if it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated.’ Repelled by the businessman’s creed that “no values are greater than thrift, self-preservation, and piety,” Algren speaks of outward show, of a ‘neon wilderness’ (an Algren title) dominated by whitewashed high-rise sepulchers full of schemers. He flatly accused the American middle class of adoring “personal comfort as an end in itself” which “is, in essence, a denial of life.”[20] He detested cozy ingrown literary cliques, pulling themselves up the ladder by each other’s Gucci bootstraps. “When [a writer] sees scarcely anyone except other writers,” says Algren,  “he is ready for New York” and what Algren terms “bellhop writing” – writing to order.  “No book was ever worth writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that ‘This ain’t what you rung for, Jack – but its what you’re damned well getting.”

Back in 2019 Colin Asher wrote a new biography of Algren and was interviewed and I found this paragraph may explain a bit of what I liked when I re-read A Walk on the Wild Side:

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.

Algren was known as a Chicago writer. 

Liebling's "rhapsodist" label fits Chicago's business boosters well enough and embraces as well some of the critical boosters of its literary golden age, but the label fits badly with important elements of Chicago's literary tradition. Even Sandburg's canonical "big shoulders" poem, relentlessly quoted and misquoted by civic boosters, devotes itself as much to considering the industrial city's endemic brutality as it does to valorizing its heroic productivity. Algren and the other neighborhood novelists who dominated Chicago writing in the 1930s and 1940s—Farrell and Wright chief among them—were in no sense rhapsodists: social and cultural critics might be a more accurate label. But Algren did see himself as the last figure in a line of Chicago writers that extended back to Sandburg, Dreiser, and other writers of a clearly defined golden age. When Algren discussed Chicago, he did not mean the Chicago of boosters who "talked of growing bigger than New York"; but he did mean, at least in part, the composite Chicago assembled by a set of writers who aspired to literary significance in representing the city that exemplified industrial urbanism. One important chapter of the narrative of decline recounted the fading from prominence of a literary tradition that drew imaginatively upon the rich materials of Chicago to assemble a Chicago of feeling—a "Chicago Dream" built by writers.

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If Algren was the last of the Chicago writers, a label applied to him by more than one narrator of decline, it meant that he was the last well-known writer in Chicago with generally acknowledged ties running all the way through that tradition. Liebling presents Algren, who was in 1949-51 enjoying his greatest popular success following the publication of The Man with the Golden Arm, as the last of the Chicago writers who "had stuck by his West Side Poles after all the rest of the stark Chicago realists had fled to Hollywood." In Liebling's account, Algren becomes a 1930s writer adrift in midcentury Chicago. "Still wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a turtle-neck sweater"—which Liebling apparently regarded as an outdated proletarian-intellectual uniform—a forlorn Algren makes the rounds of dull literary parties at which he eats the free turkey, Virginia ham, and cocktail shrimp ....

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

SCH