Nonconformity (9 page)

Algren offers up an unbroken line of assenting voices in
Nonconformity
to bolster his point of view, and then, with his novelist’s instinct, breaks that line with the Fitzgerald figure, returning the whole to the very real dilemma from which he could not separate himself. Twain, Conrad, Faulkner, de Beauvoir, Whitman—all come across as winners, men and women who run no risk of conforming, no risk either of going hungry or being forgotten. Not so Fitzgerald. He is the writer Algren feels most passionate about, but he is also the one whose presence in the essay never stops troubling Algren. Fitzgerald is shown as having given too much, one for whom the price had been too great, one who became the victim of his own gift. And Algren has too much respect for Fitzgerald to try to unravel that knot, so that while the essay goes further, Fitzgerald’s price, like K.’s in Kafka’s novel—which he also quotes—is not forgotten and in the end saves the essay, with irony and weariness, from mere optimism.

A decade after writing
Nonconformity
, Algren had not forgotten about it. He lent a version of the manuscript, now ironically titled “Things of the Earth: A Groundhog’s View,” to H. E. F. Donohue, who was interviewing him for the book that would become
Conversations with Nelson Algren
, and Donohue questioned him about the essay at great length. At first Algren’s answers center on the importance of “working out of straight compassion.” Then he brings up anger: “Nobody who is really angry goes around being angry,” he tells Donohue. Algren next begins to talk about the writer’s compulsion: “There were things [writers like Hemingway and Faulkner] had to do for their own survival … it had to be total.… It goes all the way.”
⁷⁷
The battle is never-ending and never won.

Coming several years after Sartre’s
What Is Literature?
(1947), in which the Frenchman first introduced the idea of the “engaged” writer as a philosophical essence, and several years before Robert Frank’s
The Americans
(1956), in which the reality Algren is fighting against in
Nonconformity
could already be described lushly, elegiacally, as part of a world breathing its last, Algren’s essay had a sociological urgency when it was written. For us today, it is a powerful expression of optimism, of hope, by a great talent who within a few years and then for the rest of his life would be without the ebullience and earnestness he shows here in such abundance. There is a great ocean of feeling in this essay; and it is important for us to remember that that precious
commodity is not something to be taken for granted. So many American writers of this century have given in, one way or another; and their lives inhabit Algren’s essay, since it is a plea to writers not to give in. Along with its many assertions of the strength of writers, it also speaks of their vulnerability.
Nonconformity
reminds us of the essential truth that people whose faith in humanity is most forceful are often also those in whom it is most evanescent.

Ultimately Algren, like his early contemporary John Steinbeck, would lose his faith that the American reading public considered his books to be important. And yet, as Kurt Vonnegut recently reminded me, that loss of faith was pure paranoia on the part of both men. Their work is appreciated. And in its own way their public has never stopped telling them so.

Daniel Simon

New York

April 1996

S
OMETIME IN MAY 1956 NELSON Algren called up Van Allen Bradley, then literary editor of the
Chicago Daily News
, and invited him to a drinking session at Riccardo’s, a dark and respectable restaurant that was one of Algren’s favorite haunts. At the appointed hour Algren showed up with his ex-wife Amanda, who had recently come back into his life, and the occasion turned out to have a double edge. First, Algren announced that he had bought Amanda an engagement ring, which he showed off, “proudly and rather schoolboyishly” in Bradley’s telling. Algren then produced, and here was the other purpose of the evening, the sole remaining carbon of this essay, and dictated to Bradley the following few words:

“The original of this essay on nonconformity was apparently lost in the mails. This carbon is all that’s left.”
⁷⁸

Thereupon Algren signed and dated the statement and gave it to Bradley along with the manuscript carbon, which Bradley had earlier requested as a souvenir. Algren had chosen to celebrate his decision to remarry Amanda and at the same time to close the door on publishing this essay by giving away his only copy. The two decisions together expressed a loss of innocence for Algren, giving the celebration that night an ironic flavor. He found himself walking backwards into a past marriage without deep attachment and resigning himself to never seeing in print a long piece of writing on which he had been working for several years. There would no longer be any question of marrying Simone de Beauvoir—who had signaled the end of their long and intense affair by moving on to other lovers—or publishing this book, conceived and written during the time of his passion for Simone. Bradley would later refer to the evening at Riccardo’s as the dramatic end to “a unique episode in Nelson Algren’s career in which I had a share.”
⁷⁹
But it is possible that Bradley didn’t grasp the real emotional depths of the drama he had witnessed.

The publication history of
Nonconformity
had begun, as recounted by Bradley, four years earlier on “a summer afternoon in 1952,” when he asked Algren to do a piece for the Christmas book section of the
Chicago Daily News
. Algren delivered a short piece, about 2,000 words, adapted from the 20,000-word essay he had been writing on and off for a year or so. Although what Algren gave him was different
from what he had asked for, Bradley published it, under the headline “Great Writing Bogged Down in Fear, Says Novelist Algren.”
⁸⁰
As Bradley remembers, “It was a strong and moving indictment, honestly written, and I printed it, expecting a reader controversy to break over my head. It never came. Instead there came an outpouring of applause that amazed us all.” Bradley goes on to recount how “the head of the Department of Religion at a famous Catholic college used it as a sermon text, as did an Episcopal minister in Mississippi.” One reader ordered a hundred copies to use as a Christmas greeting.
The Nation
“asked, and received, the right to reprint the article, as did other publications.”
⁸¹

A Chicago publisher offered to bring it out as a book. Then Doubleday, which had published Algren’s last novel,
The Man with the Golden Arm
, insisted on publishing the essay. At that point, in Bradley’s account, Algren “began to rewrite, enlarging the essay with fresh thoughts and with extracts from a lecture he had given at the University of Missouri.”
⁸²

In early March 1953, as recounted in Drew’s biography, Algren’s passport application was denied. “It has been alleged that you were a Communist,” he was informed by the passport office. In April, as part of an ongoing FBI investigation, two informants “of known reliability” gave evidence that Algren had been a Party member in the late thirties. In June another informant produced a 1937 letter from Algren allegedly proving that he’d been a Communist.
⁸³
In early
June Doubleday was still preparing to publish the book, and Algren sent them the reworked manuscript with their preferred title, “The State of Literature.” In addition to Bradley’s prefatory note, they had commissioned an introduction from the esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar, who had done the best scholarly writing on Algren to date. On June 3, 1953, Geismar wrote to Algren, “This will be one of the first books they will burn: congratulations.”
⁸⁴

That month Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted, affecting Algren deeply. His letters to de Beauvoir become importunate, including descriptions of the horror of marriage without love. He plowed through the English translation of her
The Second Sex
and listed his phone in her name. By August, Doubleday had decided the book needed further changes and sent an editor all the way from New York to assist Algren at his home. “Polishing is a polite phrase you may have run [into],” Algren wrote to Geismar, “and it means polishing a passage until it is polished away. Well, we polished here and we polished there, and every time we polished one into oblivion I had a fresh rough-hewn zircon to insert.”
⁸⁵

In September Doubleday indeed refused to publish and forfeited the small sum of money ($1,500) they had paid in advance. As Bradley tells it, Doubleday “decided NOT to publish the book (which deals with nonconformity), and I accused them of being afraid of McCarthy (Senator Joe) and others of his ilk; Doubleday denied
This.…” Algren wrote to Geismar, “I put too much work in it not to feel disappointed as hell. But I’m still in the land of the living at least, and that’s a little something.”
⁸⁶
He sent it on to his agent at the time, Madeleine Brennan, with the understanding that she would seek another publisher for it. She either lost it or never received it. There Algren let the matter rest, in an act of resignation reminiscent of Mark Twain who, after writing his anti-war manifesto,
The War Prayer
, said, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.”
⁸⁷

Bradley’s prefatory note (written at Doubleday’s request in 1953, while Algren was still working on the original essay), Algren’s two-sentence
envoi
from that May of 1956, along with Bradley’s memo on the whole affair, various copies of the shorter adaptations published in the
Chicago Daily News, The Nation
and elsewhere, and the carbon of the essay itself—all found their way into the Algren archive at the Ohio State University Library in Columbus a few years later, where they lay untouched for another quarter-century.
⁸⁸
In November 1986 I found them at OSU among Algren’s other papers. I was not the only one to notice them. Bettina Drew, Algren’s biographer, came across the essay a few months before I did; others may have noticed it too. I felt strongly, as I read it for the first time that November, that even a generation later than originally planned, it still demanded to be published.

Nonconformity
is not like any other literary essay, and perhaps for that reason, even now, it is not an easy book to read. For the last ten years I’ve wrestled with it and tried to understand it. Since it is a very short book, people have occasionally asked me what’s taking so long, and I’ve said that researching Algren’s quotes takes time. But that is only partly true. The rest of the answer is that trying to understand what Algren means here takes time. What he means when he describes the particular responsibility of writers, or the addict’s “special grace,” or what he calls “the American disease”—our blindness to our own pathos—or national characteristics he thought were common to writers and criminals, including the need to get back at society. I believe
Nonconformity
to be Algren’s credo, and at the same time an expression of profound crisis within Algren. And I believe
Nonconformity
is one of the strangest, toughest and truest essays in the history of American letters, linking high and low as they have not been linked before or since, rendering a harmony to the whole that was new on this earth when Algren created it. I can think of no other literary work that resists and then yields its meanings so powerfully.

Nonconformity
in manuscript form presented my associate C. S. O’Brien and me with a dilemma. It was clearly a major find: Algren’s only book-length work of nonfiction, a work from the period of his finest writing. On the other
hand, the essay was unpublishable as it stood: a mess of impossibly long quotes by others interrupted its flow; Algren’s own words often read too much like a notebook, too little like an essay; its passion itself also made it seem unlike an essay. To simply publish it in the form in which I’d found it would have been no service to Algren or his readers. To bring it into publishable shape would be difficult, but it was the only choice other than not to publish it at all.

Given my conviction that
Nonconformity
represented a major effort on Algren’s part, I did not want to bring it out without verifying his quotes—a major stumbling block as none were referenced. In some cases he indicated his source, in some cases not. I could not publish it as a
fonds du tiroir
, a tidbit of no importance left behind in his desk drawer. If it were to be published at all, every possible quote and reference would have to be verified.

That work, although time-consuming, turned out to be both possible and gratifying. Generally a quoted author could be identified, either because Algren indeed named him or her, or from the context of the quotation. In some cases our starting point was nothing more than a gut feeling that the source might be this writer or that one, because it sounded American, French or Russian, 20th century or 19th. Most often Algren chose from books popular at the time he was writing. Once a particular author was identified, O’Brien and I would check which books by that
author had been released between 1947 and 1953. In the case of Simone de Beauvoir, for example, that narrowed it down to two English translations of her work,
America Day by Day
, published in England in 1952, and
The Second Sex
, published in America in 1953. De Beauvoir never quite believed that Algren really read the whole 750-page
Second Sex
, as he told her he had, but we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We found several of the de Beauvoir quotes easily in
America Day by Day
, and one day, on my third or fourth assault, after nearly giving up, the last quote from
Nonconformity
stared back at me from near the end of
The Second Sex
.

Of the ninety-odd endnotes we have appended to
Nonconformity
, nearly all were the product of investigations of various degrees of absurdity by myself or O’Brien. I’d reached the point of unquiet desperation after skimming all Dostoevsky’s major novels, again and again, without locating the long passage Algren quotes, when O’Brien showed up one day with Dostoevsky’s obscure, 1,100-page, autobiographical
The Diary of a Writer;
there, the next day, on
this page
, I found my quote. We spent untold hours rereading Shakespeare, among others, in an effort to place a suspicious rhyming couplet. We never found it anywhere and in the end I deleted it from the text, with some trepidation, but correctly I think.