Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘I do not want to care for politics anymore. God let me live just some more years to love you and be loved by you.’

She goes on to write at letter end:

‘Dearest, beloved one, this letter seems so poor, reading it again. I should have put in it all my love and heart and body, all the autumn in Paris, the yellow trees, the peaceful sky, the feverish people. And just words. Dry words. But I hope you’ll know how to read it; maybe you are smart enough to find in it all I wanted to put. Maybe you’ll even find me. I’ll wait for you, Nelson. I’ll wait until you come to me.’

But politics and history were undoing her ‘beloved Chicago man’ and their love affair. Gathering were the dark clouds of the Cold War. Against the determined conformism of the 1950s, the possibility of a nuclear winter, Red scares, growing blacklists and the emergence of McCarthyism, Algren’s destiny irrevocably altered. The times were no longer his.

In a septic climate of rising fear, Algren used his celebrity to speak out – for the Hollywood Ten, for the Rosenbergs and against McCarthyism. In books such as Chicago: City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker. In January 1951 Algren, along with Arthur Miller and fifteen others, placed a letter as an ad in the New York Times calling on people to speak up for freedom.

Half a century later the persecution of Algren that ensued is all the more terrifying for its insidious nature. As the FBI assembled a 500-page dossier on Algren that could establish him guilty of nothing, as other writers went silent, Life magazine, a major force in American popular culture of the era, cancelled without explanation a major photo essay on Algren. In March 1953 Algren’s application for a passport to travel to France was denied by the State Department ‘in light of his former connection to the Communist Party’. Algren, according to his friend Dave Peltz, now ‘lived in terror… he would appear before the [House Un-American Activities] Committee’.

In September 1953 Algren’s publisher Doubleday refused to publish a short non-fiction book he had written that in part attacked McCarthyism, an extraordinary act given that Algren was one of the best known and most popular writers in the USA at the time. The book was not to be published till nearly a quarter of a century later, as Nonconformity – one of the strangest and most strangely compelling meditations on writing by a twentieth-century writer. In a clipped, laconic prose with ironic jabs delivered in deftly told anecdotes, Nonconformity maps out a duty, an aesthetic, a politics that for Algren is also an inexorable destiny; to swim against the current, to give everything, and know it will destroy you as a writer.

It is an indictment of the American project from a position inescapably American in its humour, references and language. It is both the final manifestation of the lost voices of a different America – the America of Whitman and Twain and Fitzgerald – and speaks to the future in its attempt to remind its readers of an indigenous tradition of American radicalism founded in the experience of the lost and dispossessed.

Animating this book of fear and desire is Algren’s love for Simone de Beauvoir, and some have seen it as an attempt to prove to her that there was a basis, political, artistic and intellectual, for a radical writer in the USA.

At another level this is a writer weighing up the immense spiritual costs of writing: how one may write great works and in the end be less as a human being for the effort. This is the Algren who would shortly be writing A Walk on the Wild Side : lost, heartbroken, trying to hold on to the last thing he has, while watching it slipping through his very fingers as he types the next word: his belief that writing might still matter in a country as lost as the USA, and that he still has something left to write for his country, a patriot who knows he is now viewed as a traitor.

At about the same time as Nonconformity was rejected, Algren began a novel called Entrapment , the story of which was based on the life of a heroin addict with whom he had had an affair, but the emotional strength of which would seem to derive from his love for de Beauvoir. But he couldn’t get the novel moving.

His torment was only beginning. His marriage to Amanda seemed increasingly a matter to him of pity and not love, and, a compulsive gambler who seems invariably to have lost, he was losing large sums in poker games. His writing stalled and censored, his love affair with de Beauvoir transformed into an impossible anguish, despairing of his country, Algren wrote to de Beauvoir at the end of 1953 that he was depressed, and ‘felt himself trapped by both money and marriage’. He felt he had become in every way, as he now signed his letters, ‘the American prisoner’.

In 1955 came the experience of having The Man with the Golden Arm made into a film by Otto Preminger, an experience that left him feeling exploited and further depressed. ‘I went out there [Hollywood] for a thousand a week,’ he was later to say, ‘and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.’ He never went to see the movie, which he later described as ‘my war with America as represented by Kim Novak’.

While living through all this Algren began A Walk on the Wild Side . Later in his life Algren would consider it his best novel, ‘an American fantasy written to an American beat as true as Huckleberry Finn’. But at the beginning it was simply a way of making some easy money quickly, which he intended to use to escape his marriage and go to Paris.

In late 1953 he struck a deal with Doubleday to rewrite Somebody in Boots as a paperback, a hundred-dollar-a-week deal. Algren envisaged a ‘good, cheap, corny’ readers’ book. He hoped to use the money from the book for the ever more unlikely purpose of getting to Paris.

‘No, it won’t win any national book award,’ Algren wrote in a letter, ‘I’m aiming solely at the pocketbook traffic.’

But as he worked the novel transformed: the original tragic tale of Cass McKay becomes the tragi-comedy of Dove Linkhorn who drifts into New Orleans in 1931 and finds work as a stud in a peep-show. He worked in some of his old short stories, and drew on some of his experiences as a young drifter working scams in New Orleans.

Algren returned to New Orleans in the summer of 1954 but, finding it of little help, he went home to Chicago where the novel – now called Finnerty’s Ball – began to take shape, as Algren played ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ over and over, spending his spare time in the Chicago underworld or visiting Iris van Etten, a black madam on the South Side, in whose establishment Algren picked up stories for the novel’s brothel scenes.

Whereas The Man with the Golden Arm was built, he said, sentence by sentence, the new novel, Algren told an interviewer at the time, was ‘plotted a great deal more than any other… I’m trying to write a reader’s book, more than my own book… Mechanically and, I think, technically, it’s done more carefully, and probably reads better than previous books.’

He finished the new novel, now called A Walk on the Wild Side , in November 1955 but Doubleday rejected the manuscript and demanded he repay his advance of $8000.

Having filed for divorce a few months earlier he was unable to return to his home, where Amanda Kontowicz was living. Desperately reworking the book as he went, he later recalled how he ‘had to write a book in flight – Montana, Saranac Lake, Baltimore, Havana, East St Louis’. He tried, he wrote, ‘not to regret so much time taken from the book I’d begun’, and with the money from the reprint rights he dreamed of getting ‘back to my lonely life, and the book I’d begun before’.