Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

At the end of 1956 Simone de Beauvoir received a letter from her beloved Chicago man saying a light had gone out in him.

He had abandoned Entrapment – the novel which he had stolen time from to finish A Walk on the Wild Side . Of its unfinished manuscript a later editor of Algren’s, William Targ, said, ‘In it he seemed to reach the deep-down essence of the blackest lower depths: drugs, pimping, prostitution, at their most grim level… It would have been an extraordinary achievement… it could have been his major opus.’

According to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Simone’s daughter, who has possession of these Algren letters, Algren confessed he had ‘hit rock bottom, having lost himself in draining battles against his marriage, his publishers, his agents, his lawyers and his poverty. He felt he had lost his driving force, the spark fuelling his writing and his entire being. He realised he was losing Simone de Beauvoir forever, and in this dire mood was not afraid to admit that he missed her terribly. The best days of his life were spent with her. Why had he let her drift so far away?’

On 31 December 1956 he took a short-cut across a frozen lagoon, the ice broke, and Algren would have died in its freezing waters had he not been rescued by workmen. Close friends speculated that Algren had tried to kill himself.

Of the remaining twenty-five years of Algren’s life there is little to tell. Though he wrote more books, including one posthumously published novel, the great creative period of his life was over. Like the police captain, Record Head Bednar, in The Man with the Golden Arm , obsessed with the sense that he should write his own name on the list of the guilty, Nelson Algren had ended up inscribing his own name on the guilty list, the black list, then the reviled and finally the lost and forgotten list.

‘The past is a bucket of ashes,’ he told friends. He took to calling himself a journalist, rather than a novelist.

Algren laughed in the face of the gods and made merry, but his fate is no less tragic for his own particular enduring courage.

In later years Nelson Algren gave the impression that there was nothing he wanted more out of life than to see a fight, or go to the track, or play poker.

‘This was pose, of course,’ Kurt Vonnegut has written, ‘and perceived as such by one and all.’

But it was pose with a price, and pose with a point. The poverty, the gambling, the losing continued, the novel-writing did not; he posed until, one suspects, the pose became too fixed to escape.

‘For years he was exhausted,’ Dave Peltz has said, ‘trying to get over what he had done with his life, what he had done with this great opportunity that he had, and many people described him as America’s foremost writer… He felt he blew it, something happened in his life [and] that he blew it… towards the end when he was not writing and not writing, all he thought about was fame and fortune, like someone who went to the crap table and lost it all. I think gambling was the metaphor for his life, for pissing away his life… he stayed disciplined in the early days before he achieved success and somehow after success was when he lost hold, and I can’t account for it. Unless… he needed to be consistent with being a loser, needed to be consistent with having a pocket full of money and going to a crap table and losing it.’

Nelson Algren died in 1981, Simone de Beauvoir in 1986. She was buried with the ring Algren had given her.

Algren’s epitaph for Fitzgerald could apply equally to himself:

‘Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them.

‘And so he died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin.’

The USA was at the time of Algren’s childhood a symbol of an ideal that could still seem revolutionary and democratic. For Whitman, a seminal influence on Algren, American democracy was a new event; for Algren it is one more lost cause in a life devoted to lost causes, the greatest of which was writing, the act of which demanded you spend of your soul until there is nothing left but the prospect of death.

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Walk on the Wild Side takes on an odd resonance given the recent tragic events in what was the Big Easy, not only because the town is the setting for the novel, but because Algren’s principal concern – the USA’s contempt for so many of its own people – is, perhaps for the first time since the 1930s, threatening to become a major political issue. In rebuilding the levies of New Orleans, Americans could do worse than reread A Walk on the Wild Side .

And not only they.

‘Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America’s traditions,’ Borges wrote. ‘Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.’ And so too Nelson Algren.

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Praise

About the Author

By Nelson Algren

Copyright

‘HE’S JUST A pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fitz Linkhorn, ‘losin’ his old lady is what crazied him.’

‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he’d float upstream.’

For what had embittered him Fitz had no name. Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated – of having been cheated – that was it. Nobody knew why nor by whom.

But only that all was lost. Lost long ago, in some colder country. Lost anew by the generations since. He kept trying to wind his fingers about this feeling, at times like an ancestral hunger; again like some secret wound. It was there, if a man could get it out into the light, as palpable as the blood in his veins. Someone just behind him kept turning him against himself till his very strength was a weakness. Weaker men, full of worldly follies, did better than Linkhorn in the world. He saw with eyes enviously slow-burning.

‘I ain’t a-playin’ the whore to no man,’ he would declare himself, though no one had so charged him.

Six-foot-one of slack-muscled shambler, he came of a shambling race. That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James’ and Jeff Davis’ people. Lincoln’s people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless as ever in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed.

Whites called them ‘white trash’ and Negroes ‘po’ buckra.’ Since the first rock had risen above the moving waters there had been not a single prince in Fitzbrian’s branch of the Linkhorn clan.

Unremembered kings had talked them out of their crops in that colder country. That country’s crops were sea-sands now. Sea-caves rolled the old kings’ bones.

Yet each king, before he had gotten the hook, had been careful to pass the responsibility for conning all Linkhorns into trustworthy hands. Keep the troublemakers down was the cry.

Duke and baron, lord and laird, city merchant, church and state, landowners both small and great, had formed a united front for the good work. When a Linkhorn had finally taken bush parole, fleeing his Scottish bondage for the brave new world, word went on ahead: Watch for a wild boy of no particular clan, ready for anything, always armed. Prefers fighting to toil, drink to fighting, chasing women to booze or battle: may attempt all three concurrently.

The first free Linkhorn stepped onto the Old Dominion shore and was clamped fast into the bondage of cropping on shares. Sometimes it didn’t seem quite fair.