Neon Wilderness

Nelson Algren

[awl-grin]

Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.

Early life

Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, Algren moved to Chicago, Illinois, with his parents at the age of three to live in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism and a Jewish American woman, while his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. When Algren was eight years old, his parents moved from 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the far south side neighborhood of St. Columbanus to the Albany Park neighborhood on the north side, living in an apartment at 4834 N. Troy Street while his father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.

Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt), and went on to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in journalism during the Great Depression in 1931.

Career

He wrote his first story, So Help Me, in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning home, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom. For this, he spent nearly five months behind bars and faced a possible three additional years in jail. Fortunately for Algren, he was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world.

His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935. Never Come Morning, published in 1942, portrayed the dead-end life of a doomed young criminal.

Algren served as a private in the European Theater of WWII as a litter bearer. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry into Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that this may have been due to suspicion regarding Algren's political beliefs.

He articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". Art Shay wrote years later about how Algren had written a poem from the perspective of a 'halfy', street slang for a legless man on wheels. The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up and give death a wrestle". Shay wrote that Algren later commented that this poem was probably key to everything he had ever written.

He is probably best known for his 1950 National Book Award winning The Man With the Golden Arm. His next book, Chicago, City on the Make (1951), was a scathing essay that outraged the city's boosters but beautifully presented the back alleys of the town, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers.

In the fall of 1955, Algren was interviewed for the Paris Review by rising author Terry Southern. Algren and Southern became friends through this meeting and remained in touch for many years. Algren became one of Southern's most enthusiastic early supporters, and when he taught creative writing in later years he often used Southern as an example of a great short story writer.

In 1975, Algren was commissioned to write a magazine article about the trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the prize fighter who had been found guilty of double murder. While researching the article Algren visited Carter's hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Algren was instantly fascinated by the city of Paterson and he immediately decided to move there. In the summer of 1975 Algren sold off most of his belongings, left Chicago, and moved into an apartment in Paterson.

In 1980, Algren moved into a house on Long Island, in New York state. He died of a heart attack the following year.

The article about Carter had grown into a novel, The Devil's Stocking, which was published posthumuously in 1983.

In 1994 the book Nonconformity was published, presenting Algren's view of the difficulties surrounding the 1956 film adaptation of The Man With the Golden Arm. Nonconformity also presents the belief system behind Algren's writing, and a call to writers everywhere to investigate the dark and represent the ignored.

Nelson was also honored in 1998 with a fountain dedicated in his name located in Chicago's Polish Triangle, in what had been the heart of Polish Downtown, the area that figured as the inspiration for much of his work. Appropriately enough, Division Street, Algren's favorite street as well as the onetime Polish Broadway runs right past it.

Personal life

Algren had a torrid affair with Simone de Beauvoir and they travelled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), she wrote of Algren (who is "Lewis Brogan" in the book):

At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness.

FBI surveillance

According to Herbert Mitgang, the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages, but identified nothing concretely subversive.

Algren and Chicago Polonia

Algren described Ashland Avenue as figuratively connecting Chicago to Warsaw in Poland. His own life involved the Polish community of Chicago in many ways, including his Polish second wife Amanda Kontowicz. His friend Art Shay wrote about Algren, while gambling, listening to old Polish love songs sung by an elderly waitress. The city's Polish Downtown, where he lived for years, played a significant part in his literary output. Polish bars that Algren frequented in his gambling, such as the Bit of Poland on Milwaukee Avenue, figured in such writings as Never Come Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm.

His novel Never Come Morning was published several years after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a period when Poles, like Jews, were labeled as inferior as a race by Nazi ideology. Chicago's Polish-American leaders thought Never Come Morning played on these anti-Polish stereotypes, and launched a sustained campaign against the book through the Polish press, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, and other Polish-American institutions. A flood of articles appeared in the local Polish newspapers, and letters were sent to Mayor Ed Kelly, the Chicago Public Library, and Algren's publisher, Harper & Brothers. The general tone of the campaign is suggested by a Zgoda editorial that attacked his character and mental state, saw readers who got free copies as victims of a Nazi-financed plot, and said the novel proved a deep desire to harm ethnic Poles on Algren's part. The Polish American Council sent a copy of a resolution condemning the novel to the FBI. Algren and his publisher defended against these accusations, with the author telling a library meeting that the book was about the effects of poverty, regardless of national background. The mayor had the novel removed from the Chicago Public Library system, and it apparently remained absent for at least 20 years.

At least two later efforts to commemorate Algren in Polish Downtown echoed the attacks on the novels. Shortly after his death in 1981, his last Chicago residence at 1958 West Evergreen Street was taken note of by Chicago journalist Mike Royko. The walk-up apartment just east of Damen Avenue in the former Polish Downtown neighborhood of West Town was in an area that had been dominated by Polish immigrants and was once one of Chicago's toughest and most crowded neighborhoods. The renaming of Evergreen Street to Algren Street caused controversy, and was almost immediately reversed.

In 1998, Algren enthusiasts instigated the renaming after Algren the Polish Triangle in what had been the center of the Polish Downtown. Replacing the plaza's traditional name, the director of the Polish Museum of America predicted, would obliterate the history of Chicago ethnic Poles, and insult ethnic Polish institutions and local businesses. In the end a compromise was reached where the Triangle kept its older name and a newly installed fountain was named after Algren and inscribed, circling the fountain's base, with a quotation about the city's working people protecting its essence, from Algren's essay "Chicago: City on the Make".

References in popular culture

Ernest Hemingway, in his 8 July 1942 letter to Maxwell Perkins, said of "Never Come Morning": "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come our of Chicago...."
In the 1957 Jerry Kamstra book The Frisco Kid, Jerry's mentally challenged friend Scott pulls him aside and forces Jerry to promise to him that he will read Nelson Algren because "he is the one American author that hasn't sold out yet, kid."
In his 1967 novella, Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan writes about crating up and mailing a crippled wino (Trout Fishing in America Shorty) to Nelson Algren.
Leonard Cohen used images from The Man with the Golden Arm in "The Stranger Song," from his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967): "you've seen that man before: his golden arm dispatching cards, but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger".
In the documentary Classic Albums: Lou Reed: Transformer, musician Lou Reed says that Algren's 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, was the launching point for his song of the same name.
The 2002 album Adult World by guitarist Wayne Kramer (founding member of the Detroit band MC5) contains a song entitled Nelson Algren Stopped By, in which guest band X-Mars-X provides a shuffling jazz background while Kramer reads a prose poem about walking the streets of present-day Chicago with Algren.
The Minnesota based punk-rock band Dillinger Four quotes Algren as an inspiration in the song Doublewhiskeycokenoice from their album Midwestern Songs of the Americas. In that song Erik Funk sings "Nelson Algren came to me and said, 'Celebrate the ugly things' / The beat-up side of what they call pride could be the measure of these days."
In 2005 The Hold Steady mentioned Algren in the song Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night from the Separation Sunday album. The first line of the song is "Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the Dead End Alley/He told him what to celebrate" and towards the end the song goes "Hey Nelson Algren. Chicago seemed tired last nite/They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes." The name "Paddy" in the song is a reference to Patrick Costello and the "Dead End Alley" is the name of the house where the Dillinger Four's members used to live.

Nelson Algren Award

Each year the Chicago Tribune newspaper gives a Nelson Algren award for short fiction. Winners are published in the newspaper and given $5,000. The award is viewed with more than a little irony by Algren admirers; the Tribune panned Algren's work in his lifetime, referring to Chicago: City on the Make as a "highly scented object." In an afterword to that book, Algren accused the Tribune of imposing false viewpoints on the city and promoting mediocrity.

Studs Terkel, writer Warren Leming, and three others founded the Nelson Algren Committee in 1989. At the time all of Algren's work was out of print. All of it is now back in print. The Committee awards community activists an annual Algren award, and sponsors an Algren Birthday party. Leming's song Algren Street can be downloaded from the Committee's website The site also contains the short film Algren's Last Night, written by Leming and directed by Carmine Cervi.

Quotes

"It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all."

"I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write."

"The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D."

"(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap."

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." From A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

"Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." From "Chicago: City on the Make" (1951)