Nonconformity (12 page)

23.
Hearn (1850-1904) wrote stories and essays based in the Far East; Sterling (1869-1926) was a lyric and dramatic poet.

24.
André Gide’s journal entry for October 8, 1891, included this observation: “This terrifies me: To think that the present, which we are living this very day, will become the mirror in which we shall later recognize ourselves; and that by what we have been we shall know what we are.”
The Journals of André Gide
, Volume I: 1889-1913, Translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 16.

25.
Fleur Cowles was an editor for
Look
magazine.

26.
“Books” by Joseph Conrad, a 1905 essay reprinted in
Joseph Conrad on Fiction
, edited by Walter F. Wright (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 81. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

27.
Clarence Budington Kelland was an author of juvenile novels and editor of
The American Boy
.

28.
Algren seems to have taken this passage from an English language edition of
The Illuminations
available at the time he was writing, and then perhaps condensed it—or he was quoting from memory. The Louise Varèse translation of this passage differs substantially: “The poet makes himself a
visionary
through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of
all
the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sick-man, the accursed,—and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul—richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them!” From an 1871 letter from Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, printed as a preface to
The Illuminations
, by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1946), pp. xxx-xxxi.

29.
Popular 1940s novels by Frank Yerby and Louis Bromfield, respectively.

30.
Conrad, pp. 81-2.

31.
The
Saturday Evening Blade
was a Chicago tabloid newspaper, hawked by Algren in his boyhood. See Algren’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Mark” in
The Last Carousel
, pp. 293-4.

32.
“Our April Letter” in “The Note-Books” in Fitzgerald, p. 165.

33.
Fitzgerald, p. 81.

34.
Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and short story writer, author of dozens of books, including
The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Alice Adams
, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize.

35.
Fitzgerald, p. 84.

36.
Ibid., p. 80-3.

37.
In his autobiography,
Nice Guys Finish Last
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975, pp. 13, 15 and 26), Durocher gives substantially the same account and adds that in his early years his mother read his words in a newspaper and gave him hell. Algren probably got his version from the same newspaper story as Durocher’s mother.

38.
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In
Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
and
Selections from The House of the Dead
translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 129.

39.
Soon after completing
Nonconformity
, Algren would begin his most ambitious novel ever, with a plot line that turns on characters closely linked to those invoked here. Called
Entrapment
, it tells the story of Baby, a country woman turned prostitute (modeled after Algren’s very close friend, a prostitute named Margo), and Daddy, her heroin-using husband. When Daddy gets busted, Baby robs from her tricks to get him out of jail. Algren never finished the book, although there exist several hundred manuscript pages.

40.
The Diary of a Writer
, by F. M. Dostoevsky, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol. (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 7. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Algren has chosen a passage early in
Diary of a Writer
in which Dostoevsky is actually quoting the Russian literary critic Belinsky. The section from which the passage is taken deals not only with the misery of those excluded from mainstream society, but goes on to discuss Dostoevsky’s near execution and four years of hard labor, which he later described as vitally important to his development as a writer, where his enforced contact with other convicts gave him knowledge of the Russian lower classes possessed by no other contemporary Russian author. See below.

41.
The Second Sex
, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952, renewed 1980. Vintage Books Edition, 1989), p. 713.
     As noted by Algren’s biographer Bettina Drew, in the summer of 1953—which began with the June executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which horrified Algren, and while he still waited to hear from Doubleday on the publication plans for this essay—Algren claimed he read all 750 pages of de Beauvoir’s magnum opus. De Beauvoir, though still deeply bound to Algren, had by now distanced herself from him sufficiently to be deeply at work on
The Mandarins
, the novel that would recreate their love affair, and to have taken on a new lover in the future documentary filmmaker Claude
(Shoah)
Lanzmann. But Algren was still deeply in
love with de Beauvoir, even though more than a year had passed since he’d seen her, a period during which he’d reconciled with his first wife Amanda. And just as missing Simone must have been part of the experience of reading
The Second Sex
, so writing
Nonconformity
was also in part an attempt to prove to her that he was as worthy of her as Sartre was. The passage in question precedes by a few pages the conclusion to
The Second Sex
and comes as part of an argument whose polemical thrust is that, as she writes, “to explain her limitations it is woman’s situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence.” Both Algren and de Beauvoir extend the analogy beyond the specific context—from the condition of women to that of blacks, the French proletariat or the American underclass. See Afterword. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

42.
Dostoevsky,
Diary of a Writer
, p. 16. At the peak of his career, during the period of his last years that produced
The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoevsky also produced this huge and unwieldy work of autobiographical journalism pieced together from a variety of sources in the form of a diary. Informal and colloquial in tone, dealing in large part with political questions of the day, the work has been compared to Rousseau’s
Confessions
or Goethe’s
Poetry and Truth
. See above.

43.
America Day by Day
, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Patrick Dudley (pseud.). (New York: Grove Press, 1953), p. 294.

44.
The phrase sounds distinctly like one of Algren’s, and indeed he is paraphrasing and condensing de Beauvoir here so freely that he has rewritten her, perhaps without fully realizing it. To have restored her wording in this case would have been to change his meaning.
     Here is a passage from the conclusion of
America Day by Day
, de Beauvoir’s account of her four-month trip across America in 1947 in which she first met Algren, which may have been the source for Algren’s sentence: “There are very few ambitious people here.… Ambitions for greatness are often the source of many deceptions, and indicted by faults Americans do not know; they have virtues born of indifference to themselves. They are not embittered, persecuted or ill-willed, envious or egotistical. But they have no inner fire. In order to lose themselves in the pursuit of an object, they find themselves without an object at all.” p. 294.

45.
Letter from Anton Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, written from Nice on February 6, 1898. In
Letters of Anton Chekhov
, selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney and Lynn Solotaroff. (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 304. The reference here is to the Dreyfus case. Chekhov’s letter was written from France on the eve of the trial of Zola for his exposé
(J’accuse!)
of the court-martial that acquitted Major Esterhazy in the Dreyfus case. Chekhov passionately
supported Zola’s stand against the hypocrisy of the attack on Dreyfus and argued it repeatedly in letters to his friend and publisher Suvorin. The same letter that Algren quotes, for example, begins, “You write that you are vexed by Zola, but here [Nice] the general feeling is as if a new, better Zola has been born. In this trial of his he has been cleansed of superficial grease spots as by turpentine, and shines forth before the French in his true splendor. It is a purity, a moral loftiness that no one suspected.”

46.
Fulton Sheen, a Roman Catholic Bishop of New York, was a noted radio and TV preacher who won the 1952 Emmy as most outstanding male personality on television. Fulton Oursler was a writer and editor on religious themes, author of
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. Fulton Lewis was a radio commentator.

47.
America Day by Day
, by de Beauvoir, pp. 80-1. This account of de Beauvoir’s first evening with Algren was not, as is self-evident, part of Algren’s original essay. I include it here to maintain the consistency of the structure of Algren’s essay, in which he alternated his own words with long quotes from other writers, and as a rare window into Algren’s sensibility since, as in this essay itself, it shows Algren, uncharacteristically, revealing the sources of his inspiration. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

48.
Popular singer of the period, whose number one hit was called “Cry.”

49.
Mafia bosses.

50.
Hawkins and Young were jazz tenor saxophonists; the Mills Brothers are credited with founding the “black-harmony” singing style and paving the way for 50s rock and roll; the Billy Williams Quartet performed weekly on Ceasar & Coca’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s; singers in the “hep harmony” tradition, Monroe and Laine were singers of, respectively, the 1930s and 40s; Gene Krupa was a “Chicago style” jazz drummer, while Jackie Cooper, an actor, possibly made it to this list for the poetic similarity of his name to Krupa’s; or perhaps Algren mistakenly thought Cooper had played Krupa in the biopic
The Gene Krupa Story
.

51.
The Bridewell Cure was a cold turkey “cure” named after the Illinois prison where the practice was notorious.

52.
Conversations with Nelson Algren
, by H. E. F. Donohue (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 279-80.

53.
Letter from Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, February 6, 1898. In Chekhov, p. 305.

54.
Westbrook Pegler was a newspaper columnist known for attacks on corruption in politics and on labor unions.

55.
Kafka, p. 228. This passage is from the second-to-last paragraph of the novel, which concludes with K. declining to do himself in, and then losing his life anyway, at the hands of his two executioners, “like a dog.”
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

56.
New Testament
, Romans 7:19. The King James version reads, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
The New English Bible
version reads, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will.”

57.
Alice in Justice-Land: From Pippins and Cheese
, by Jake Falstaff, published as a column in
The New York World
in the summer of 1929 and subsequently reprinted by the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: ACLU Publications, 1935).

58.
Kafka, pp. 45-6.

59.
Ibid., pp 228-9.

60.
As U.S. Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959, John Foster Dulles emphasized “collective security” in foreign policy and the concept of a strong national defense capable of immediate retaliation as a deterrent to war.

61.
Democratic Vistas
, by Walt Whitman. Washington, D.C., 1871, pp. 11-12. As reprinted in
The Portable Walt Whitman
, edited by Mark van Doren, revised by Malcolm Cowley. (New York: Penguin, 1945, 1973), pp. 325-26. Algren’s
Nonconformity
is about the same length—pamphlet length—as Whitman’s
Democratic Vistas
and both embody the same broadsheet-like populist passion, both exhibit the same spirit of restlessness and impatience and both seem to allow themselves only reluctantly, almost petulantly, to be formed as essays, rather than, say, shouts from a Union Square or Madison Square soapbox. So
Democratic Vistas
is a most important antecedent for Algren in writing
Nonconformity
. In both, we are seeing writers unburden themselves of the harsh beliefs and perceptions that would usually go unsaid, and by so doing close, or move beyond, an earlier period of extraordinary fecundity—that had produced
Leaves of Grass
for Whitman, and in Algren’s case the period, just ended, that had produced
Neon Wilderness, Never Come Morning, Chicago: City on the Make
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
.

62.
“Murther” for murder, of course.

63.
Whitman, loc. cit.

64.
Letter from Algren to Joseph Haas, March 1, 1952. Quoted in
Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side
, by Bettina Drew, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), p. 198.

65.
“Nelson Algren,”
Paris Review
11 (Winter 1955) by Alston Anderson and Terry Southern, pp. 39-40. Reprinted in
Writers at Work: The Paris
Review Interviews
, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 234.
   “I’d spent almost two years on the book before I ever ran into a drug addict,” Algren adds a little later in the interview; “I had the book written about a card-dealer, but there wasn’t any dope angle at all.… It was an afterthought.” And further on, speaking of his writing method generally: “I’ve always figured 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, until it finds its own plot.… I suppose it’s a slow way of working.” (Ibid., pp. 236, 238, 240.)