Nonconformity (8 page)

It must have struck him as strange that at the very moment when his work was breaking through, the society at large seemed to be changing from an open to a closed one. In her biography of Algren, Bettina Drew writes that the “growing atmosphere of conformity and distress” may have changed Algren’s writing plans. And indeed, the jailing of the Hollywood Ten in 1950 cast a pall over the efforts of those who, like Algren, saw themselves as voices the government would like to see silenced. The same year, the Senate approved legislation permitting executions for peacetime spying and passed the Internal Security Act, which called
for concentration camp detention for people with radical ideas. Also that year, MacArthur’s aggressive response in Korea had brought U.S. troops so deeply into North Korea that they seemed to be threatening Chinese soil, and the world faced the possibility of an atomic conflict if Russia came to the support of the Chinese.

Algren was, both publicly and privately, to borrow Sartre’s expression, an
engaged
writer, having participated in left-leaning organizations since the late 1930s, and doing so with increasing visibility by 1950. On January 15, 1951, along with Arthur Miller and 15 others, he signed a letter placed as an ad in
The New York Times
admonishing people to “Speak up for freedom!” In 1952 Algren became the honorary chairman of the Chicago Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, which catapulted him high on the FBI’s list of suspected Communists and infuriated J. Edgar Hoover. In part inspired by the example of European intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir, Algren’s sense of his civic duties became more acute. In particular, the anti-Semitism and pressure to conform he saw behind the demonizing of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg concerned him. In March 1952 he referred to them as “a man and woman being put to death for nonconformity.”
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It is in this context that we can appreciate the large ambition which informs
Nonconformity
. Algren wrote this essay at a moment when he knew his words carried weight. He had never before, and would never again, attempt to
address the public directly in this way, eschewing the cloak of the novelist. To do so required that he overcome a host of self-protective habits.
Nonconformity
was written to open people’s eyes to the dangers, especially to writers, that Algren saw all around in the era of Joe McCarthy. Just like each of his novels—and this is one of Algren’s great strengths—
Nonconformity
describes a particular historical moment. Differently from any other book he wrote, the moment in question here—“between the H Bomb and the A” he calls it repeatedly in the essay, between one act of inhumanity and the prospect of a much greater one—was being exploited by certain groups in the government to silence people, and especially creative artists. So the temptation for Algren to speak to and of this historical moment directly and in his own voice, rather than through a novel, became irresistible. In an age when the pressure to hide—and conformity is precisely concealment and then the effects of that concealment—had become so great, Algren felt compelled to come out of hiding, to express his convictions bluntly, to connect his private credo with his public persona and to do so not just in a speech, interview or letter, but in a full-fledged book-length work of literature.

In the past Algren had usually set himself apart from the risk-takers. A few years earlier, when urged to join the Lincoln Brigade on the way to fight for freedom and the Spanish Republic, he had unhesitatingly refused. As he told H. E. F. Donohue: “I didn’t go to the war in Spain,
although I was asked. It was assumed that I would go. My defense when asked why aren’t you there was that I don’t want to get killed.”
⁶⁹

But now he felt a new confidence in his own voice. And while it is entirely conjecture to say so, perhaps he felt he had to best Sartre in some kind of imagined battle for Simone’s heart. Whatever the reason, this essay represented a new kind of writing for Algren.

Writing about Algren for the
Village Voice
in 1985, Tom Carson described him as “one of the few American writers, increasingly uncommon since Dreiser, in whom compassion for the dispossessed does not involve a sort of mental portage to reach them.” Carson continues, “The great revelation for him had been that deprivation was not an abnormal social category but a human absolute, and the pressure … comes from a writer trying to measure up to the people he’s writing about.”
⁷⁰
There was something in the way Algren treated the characters who inhabited his novels and stories, something that lent them, as Studs Terkel says, their “respectability.” Algren refused to draw a line between him and them, between us and them. Carson has it right: Algren faces the reader with the paradox of a writer trying to
measure up
to the miserable lives of his characters. Here was the essential human dilemma with which both Fitzgerald and Algren struggled. It perplexed Fitzgerald and left him distraught; he saw the struggle as a fatal weakness, one that
threatened his ability to survive as both a writer and a human being. To Algren it was an essential strength, and more than anything else, the quality that defined his work. He saw himself in a profound sense in the service of his material. And he considered his material not as a narrow stripe but as a broad swath, a representative sampling, of humanity. He felt his characters resonated with universal truths. “There is no such thing as a normal life,” Algren would say to H. E. F. Donohue. “It’s never lived that way.”
⁷¹
And no one else but Algren could write, as he did in November 1962 in a new preface to his 1942 novel
Never Come Morning
, “The source of the criminal act, I believed twenty years ago and believe yet, is not in the criminal but in the righteous man.”
⁷²

There is a line in the poem with which Algren closed his 1973 fiction and nonfiction collection,
The Last Carousel
, that codifies the enigma of his writing credo: “All those whose lives were lived by someone else.” The catalyst for his novel
Never Come Morning
had been newspaper accounts of a nineteen-year-old murderer named Bernard Sawicki who was quoted on the day of his arrest saying he “never expected to be twenty-one anyway,” virtually the same words Algren has spoken by Bruno “Lefty” Bicek in the novel. And on the day of his sentencing to death, Sawicki told the judge, “The hell with you, I can take it.”
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These are Algren’s people, the objects of what James Giles
⁷⁴
calls his “harsh compassion,” those who don’t get to live
their lives. Algren’s friend, the photographer Art Shay, remembers Algren reading in the newspaper about the murder of an entire family by someone they had picked up hitchhiking. Algren scrutinized the pictures accompanying the newspaper story, including one of the murderer, who had “HARD LUCK” tattooed across his knuckles. “That poor sonofabitch,” Algren commented. He was referring to the murderer. “My wife wanted to throw [Algren] out,” Shay remembered, adding: “Nelson’s humanity. He could see what could drive a man to something like that. Only Jesus Christ … could have that kind of attitude.”
⁷⁵

And yet, the emotional life of Bruno “Lefty” Bicek in the novel is finally completely his own and not Bernard Sawicki’s at all. Algren’s characters were always different from the people whose words and actions inspired them. He borrowed figures of speech and other details as they suited him, but the tragicomic moral universe of Algren’s novels is finally all his own. And this puts another spin on the line in the poem. Not unlike the people who inhabit his novels, Algren was so consumed by the lives he wrote about that he too, like Fitzgerald, saw his life being lived by others.

As a society we hope to be judged by the achievements of our best and brightest; individually we may wish to express our finest qualities in what we do. Algren reminds us that self-knowledge will not come by either of those routes. He believed that we can’t know ourselves except by looking deeply into the eyes and hearts of our
most forlorn, most broken-down, who are shorn of all but their essential human qualities, and sometimes even of those. Only by looking there will we be able to see into ourselves. (The last line of the poem quoted above is “Within a rain that lightly rains regret.”) He wrote about them with unparalleled beauty, writing gorgeously of hard luck cases of all kinds—as if that were the only thing worth writing about. He was not the first of his kind. Yet no other writer of his generation had Algren’s blend of radicalism with a vision that was so personal and lyrical.

There has been surprisingly little serious critical attention paid to Nelson Algren’s writing since his death in 1981. One valiant and thorough popular biography by Bettina Drew. One excellent scholarly monograph by James Giles. And that’s about it. Amazingly little, considering that Algren’s novels themselves continue to be widely read and studied, that Algren himself is considered by many to be among the handful of great American novelists of the 20th century, and that no one has yet made him known to us in the way that other writers of his stature have been made known—weighed and measured, analyzed and interpreted, and in this way inducted into the pantheon of American literature.

It is almost as if Algren were someone we don’t want to know. Someone to be respected, but not included. A writer who somehow slipped past those who stand as our nation’s self-appointed literary gatekeepers, rather than
being accepted by them. He is still the quintessential outsider. Unlike the writings of, say, Faulkner or Hemingway, Algren’s works comprise a literary backwater, known to many but visited with understanding by few. For most readers, his world is a landscape we lack either the words or the desire to find familiar.

Like Fitzgerald, he published his first novel in his early twenties, but unlike Fitzgerald, Algren did not succumb to weaknesses of spirit and misfortunes of circumstance. At the time he wrote
Nonconformity
he had been a practicing writer of fiction for twenty years. After
Nonconformity
he would go on writing books for another thirty years—until the end of his life at the not-unripe age of 72. There is a completeness to his artistic output—four major novels, a half-dozen other books of lasting importance written over a span of fifty years—that saves him from the sense of doom that has engulfed so many other American writers in this century. Algren is not a tragic figure in the way that Fitzgerald is.

He began as a Proletarian novelist, a member of the John Reed Club, a contributor to Jack Conroy’s
Anvil
and the Canadian
Masses
, who wrote with the belief that the disenfranchisement of the Depression was going to turn our society on its head. Twenty years later his vision had taken on greater complexity and depth. Along with the things he’d always known to be true, his personal journey had taught him much that gave his mature output broader definition.
Nonconformity
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
are the work of a different writer from the one who penned
Somebody in Boots
. He had learned a different faith, and a willingness to continue wrestling with the world whether or not he was able to change it. Alongside his apparent tragic vision, there is in Algren by this point, as in Beckett, a corresponding non-tragic one.

Into this literary situation,
Nonconformity
lands with a very specific and relevant history and much to say about Algren, in his own words, that was not generally known. It shows him as isolated, and as self-isolating. Indeed, his subject in
Nonconformity
emphatically is not the importance of solidarity among living writers. He cruelly attacks James T. Farrell, and jabs at other lesser lights of his epoch. And the name of the one writer with whom Algren had had the closest and most mutually supportive relationship, Richard Wright, comes up only once in passing. The enthusiastic reception Wright’s
Native Son
(1940) received on publication had fueled Algren’s faith that his own work would be appreciated, and Wright had written the introduction to
Never Come Morning
. But by 1952, the emotion Algren attached to his connection with Wright belonged to a different decade.

Nonconformity
nonetheless shows Algren to be much more thoughtful, literate and “literary” than the image he cultivated over the years of someone who, when he wasn’t writing novels, was playing cards, betting on horses, or
socializing with killers and drug addicts. He did all that. At the same time, as he shows here, he took the responsibility of the writer in deadly earnest, and could examine the history of free expression not just in terms of the immediate crisis of McCarthyism he was facing in 1952, but as a centuries-long struggle.

In
Nonconformity
, Algren turned to subject matter that was, for him, quite banal—himself, other writers, the writing art, the responsibility of the intellectual, the dangers of conformity for those who create. This once in his life he chose to write at length about the state of literature because he felt that suddenly something was happening to our nation to cause artistic creation generally, and his own artistic output in particular, to be under an extraordinary threat.

Sadly, after completing
The Man with the Golden Arm
, Algren did not publish another novel for seven years, and then abandoned the novel altogether for two decades, although he wrote many more books.
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His decade of unabated achievement had been as amazingly fertile as anything in the history of American literature. It had generated, in chronological order,
Never Come Morning; Neon Wilderness
, his now-classic story collection;
The Man with the Golden Arm; Chicago: City on the Make
, his prose-poem paean to Chicago; and
Nonconformity: Writing on Writing;
five very different major works of the imagination, each an enduring work. None were written easily, and by the end he had spent himself. The self-assurance he felt by 1949-50,
and still had in 1952, progressively dissolved thereafter into an anguished battle between his compassion and a newfound bitterness and cynicism.
Nonconformity
, which he wrote in defiance of an era, was also a plea to himself to persist in the face of increasing opposition from within, opposition based in his own mounting loss of faith that his writing was truly valued. And in the end Algren’s own life would share something of the aimlessness and pathos of his characters.