Nonconformity (7 page)

Faces to destroy the faith that a man’s chief duty in the world is to make himself as comfortable as possible in it, stay comfortable as long as possible and pop off at last, as comfortably as possible.

The faith that the good life means coming into the
world with a Ford in one’s future and leaving it at last with a Nash in one’s past. That success is a TV aerial on the roof, a faithful wife in the kitchen and a deep freeze in the cellar wherein she may keep his useless memory ever-fresh.

(Let me hurriedly interpose that I am not opposed to TV, Fords, Nashes, refrigerators, nor fidelity. I favor all mechanical improvements about the modern American home. I wish only to voice a suspicion that a house full of functional goodies, and all in good working order at that, does not of itself tote up to happiness.)

Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?

If so, this is the truly American disease. And would account in part for the fact that we lead the world today in insanity, criminality, alcoholism, narcoticism, psychoanalysm, cancer, homicide and perversion in sex as well as in perversion just for the pure hell of the thing.

Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder. Never has any people lived so hygienically while daily dousing itself with the ritual slops of guilt. Nowhere has any people set itself a moral code so rigid while applying it quite so flexibly. Never has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities.
In no other country is such great wealth, acquired so purposefully, put to such small purpose. Never has any people driven itself so resolutely toward such diverse goals, to derive so little satisfaction from attainment of any. Never has any people been so outwardly confident that God is on its side while being so inwardly terrified lest he be not.

Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic.

“I say,” Walt Whitman prophesied, “we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States.… It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.”
⁶¹

Our assumption of happiness through mechanical ingenuity is nonetheless tragic for being naive. For the bulletins are as false as Mr. Whittaker Chambers, hand over heart, confessing, “I never inform on anyone but I feel something die inside me”—and in the same dying breath murmuring, “Thank you,” for $75,000 in magazine serial rights. To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below.

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

“Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,” Mr. Dooley decided, “ ’tis hard to tell it from murther.”
⁶²

But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure.

The lost and the overburdened who have to meet life so head-on that they cannot afford either the tweeds that make such a strong impression in certain business circles or the deodorant that does almost as much for one socially. The lost and the overburdened too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set.

It is there that the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Theirs are still the defeats in which everything is lost, theirs victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope. Whose defeats cost everything of real value. Whose grief grieves on universal bones.

And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.

I
say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the
littérateurs
is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investigate frauds, has talked much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and
municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and moneymaking is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best class we show is but a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discovered, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results. In vain do we march with
unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annexed Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul
.

—Walt Whitman,

from
Democratic Vistas

1871
⁶³

N
ELSON ALGREN’S WRITING METHOD relied on accretion. He returned, year after year, to given situations and characters, building up the surface almost more like a painter than a writer, until he found the emotion he wanted. When he was writing
The Man with the Golden Arm
, through a dozen drafts in some places and “forty rewritings that still aren’t right”
⁶⁴
in others, the drug addiction of the drum-playing card dealer Frankie Machine didn’t enter in until nearly the very end. It was a wholly new element through which Algren gave the book, along with its title and narrative thrust, a different feeling—not the war now but the war’s aftermath, its unendingness. “I was going to write a war novel,” Algren would tell Alston Anderson and Terry Southern in a
Paris Review
interview in 1955, “but it turned out to be this
Golden Arm
thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came along and that was it,”
⁶⁵
speaking as if the composition of his finest novel relied on a chain of events, really this process of layering—as outside his control as if he
were describing changes in the weather.

Algren’s earliest published story began as a letter home. He was encouraged by an acquaintance to recast it as fiction and submit it to
Story
magazine; it was accepted, and that led to a contract for his first novel. Algren’s second novel,
Never Come Morning
, is a retelling of an early story called “A Bottle of Milk for Mother.” The last novel published in his lifetime,
A Walk on the Wild Side
, is a rewrite of his first novel,
Somebody in Boots
. Characters and situations recur from book to book—the police lineup is the classic example—with new layers of meaning and emotion.

Nonconformity
was the result of a layering process roughly the reverse of the one that produced
Man with the Golden Arm
. In the beginning was the story of what Algren saw as his humiliation in Hollywood after a movie producer purchased the rights to
Golden Arm
and brought Algren to the coast to write the screenplay. Included here as an appendix, Algren’s sardonic account is his starting point, almost in the same way Frankie Machine’s habit was
Golden Arm’
s ending point. He then adds layers, most importantly that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical account of his nervous breakdown, as described in
The Crack-Up
. Algren keeps adding to the surface of his canvas, layer by layer, alternating the high with the low, giving glimpses of a moral universe in the most unexpected venues, scouring books and magazines for
sententiae
to shore up his arguments. Just as
Golden Arm
, through layering, became a text about the
unendingness of an internalized state of war, this essay was transformed into a text about the responsibilities writers carry with them, about the unendingness, as it were, of the writer’s art. Through this startling metamorphosis, in which Algren lets his writing carry him from a state of utter self-absorption to one where the subject is in the end no longer himself at all (from a text about “my war with the United States as represented by Kim Novak”
⁶⁶
to an essay that affirms the power writers wield when they resist the status quo), the nexus of the essay remains the bond he feels with Fitzgerald. From this link, the real subject of the essay emerges, which is the debt owed by writers to the lives they write about.

Since Fitzgerald is known for imagining the very rich and Algren for writing about the poor, the two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. But in
Nonconformity
Algren cites Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald alone as father of the school to which he belongs. This is no longer the Proletarian school to which Algren had been linked by academics. Precisely
because
their subjects are so different, it is a tempting—and powerful—alternative way of reading that he is proposing. What is important about Fitzgerald, Algren is saying here, is that he put himself at the service of the characters he wrote about. And perhaps without fully realizing it, Algren is describing himself as well, since this is precisely the point that has been made over the years by the few critics writing astutely about him.
⁶⁷
Algren is achieving something approaching self-awareness through his empathy with Fitzgerald, at the same time as he is also attempting to seek a higher appreciation for the kind of writing they both do. The “I” of the first section (now the appendix) is transmuted into the “he,” the nonconforming writer, of the body of the essay. Quoting long passages from many of the most radical defendants of free speech of the last hundred years—Whitman, Twain, Faulkner, Learned Hand, de Beauvoir (and not forgetting Mr. Martin Dooley, barkeep, and Leo Durocher, utility infielder)—Algren seeks to replace the image of the defeated writer with which he began with that of a writer-archetype whose profession as guardian of certain necessary truths is unimpeachable, and who has a role to play in society as basic and essential as that of the policeman, the judge or the teacher, although different from each of these.

Nonconformity
was written between 1950 and 1953. In the arc of Algren’s life, this period was the absolute high point:
The Man with the Golden Arm
, published to near-universal acclaim, had won the first National Book Award; in March 1950 Algren flew to New York to receive the award at a black-tie ceremony from Eleanor Roosevelt herself. His fans included Hemingway and the esteemed critic Malcolm Cowley. Hollywood agent Irving Lazar was wooing him and movie idol John Garfield wanted to star as Frankie Machine, the young man at the heart of
Golden Arm
struggling under all the trouble in the world.

In his personal life there was also a fullness—or at least the possibility of a fullness—that Algren had come to know only recently. Simone de Beauvoir had called him out of the blue in February 1947, on the recommendation of a mutual friend. They had begun an affair that developed into the most passionate attachment either of them had ever known. While by the early 1950s the distance between them had grown, Algren was unable to give up on this once-in-a-lifetime attachment to a woman who was both an intellectual equal and a writer with aspirations every bit as large as his own; his hope was that she might yet leave Sartre for him. Thus it was that after the success of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, there was a short-lived period of enormous self-confidence for Algren. He was famous, sought after, in love and, still in his early forties, looking forward to a long career among the first circle of novelists.