Nelson Algren: A Life by Mary Wisniewski (#ParisInJuly)

I feel I am of them--

I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself--

And henceforth I will not deny them--

For how can I deny myself?

-Walt Whitman

That quote from Leaves of Grass serves as the epigraph to Nelson Algren's second novel Never Comes Morning. But it could also very well be Algren talking about himself.

Mary Wisniewski's biography of Algren came out in 2016 with Chicago Review Press. She's a fan, but not starry-eyed: she can see where he goes wrong, both personally (more often) but also in his writing. I read a bunch of Algren in the 80s when I was on a Chicago novelist kick, and I was explaining to the Other Reader what his stories were like: people in a miserable degraded situation manage to end up in an even worse plight by the end. Now you may not very often be--maybe not ever be...😉--in a mood to read such a book, but Wisniewski does an excellent job of why you might still want to. 

Nelson Algren was born in 1909 as Nelson Abraham to a mostly Jewish, though not practising, family. His middle name is Ahlgren and comes from his Swedish grandfather; it gets simplified to serve as his pen name. 

How miserable are his characters? The Man With The Golden Arm is the best-known novel; it won the inaugural National Book Award in 1950. Its protagonist, Frankie 'Machine' Majcinek, is a skilled poker dealer, where skilled means he can gull the rubes and not be detected. Poker is of course illegal in Chicago, and so he's working for a hoodlum. He's also a morphine addict, something he picked up as a soldier when he served in WWII. So he's a man with a golden arm in two senses. We first see him in a police lineup. His final appearance is a more serious encounter with the law...

Otto Preminger made a movie of the book with Frank Sinatra in Frankie Machine role.  Preminger wanted to use the movie to blow up the Hays Code, and he kind of did, but still the movie is far more upbeat than the book.

Algren lived most of his adult life on the northwest side of Chicago in the heart of Polonia, the Polish neighborhood, and it's the underclass of that area he writes about. His characterizations didn't win him many friends among his neighbors. Wisniewski quotes her father at one point: "I didn't know any people like that. Those people were bums." (Though Mike Royko, of Polish-Ukrainian stock was a big fan.)

Wisniewski's own style makes this a pretty sharp read: [Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer] "claimed that the Poles were like the Irish of Chicago,... But this was silly. The Irish were the Irish of Chicago--controlling city politics and dominating the police force." 

On Never Come Morning, Algren's first novel about Polonia: "Nelson presented an exceedingly narrow view of Polish-American life...This claustrophobia was the effect Nelson wanted--but it is so complete it can feel like a distortion." This is astute and could be said of a lot of Algren's fiction.

Algren wrote four novels, the last a ground-up rewrite of the first, two volumes of short stories, and a fair amount of non-fiction. Not a bad career, but also not tremendously prolific, which was the result of a lot of personal troubles--mostly self-inflicted--and insecurities. He died in 1981.

 

But wait! What sort of bait and switch is this? I put #ParisInJuly up there in the header. But this is a biography of a grim, naturalistic, Chicago novelist. Well, that brings us to...

The Crazy Frog and the Crocodile

"The romance of Nelson Algren and the French writer, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was the most ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible, unreasonable, and amazing thing to come into both their lives."

They first met in Chicago in 1947. De Beauvoir was in Chicago and she'd been given Algren's phone number as somebody she might want to look up. Algren had been warned this French philosopher was going to call, but he still managed to hang up on her twice, either because he couldn't understand her accent, or out of cussedness. Nevertheless they managed to meet that February, and pretty soon they were both hopelessly in love. De Beauvoir at one point says it's the best sex she's ever had.

Crazy Frog and Crocodile were their nicknames for each other.

Theirs was mostly a long-distance romance, though. Both were writers who felt they had to be in 'their' city to write, Chicago for him, Paris for her. De Beauvoir also wouldn't leave Sartre, though she told Algren she was no longer sleeping with him. Algren found this hard to understand (and for going on three-quarters of a century now, that's true of a lot of people). Algren wanted to be married, though Wisniewski at one point dryly remarks he wasn't very good at it. (There were three marriages, though only two wives.)

Algren gets to Paris to visit her, hang out at the Café de Flore, meet Sartre and the crowd. "By this time in my life I was ready to vote existentialist," he writes in a letter, and it's not Sartre he's thinking about. When the romance is in its first flush, they're both writing their major books: Golden Arm for him, The Second Sex for her.

Later it gets more difficult. Algren, who had a bunch of communist friends, and who may have been a communist himself in the 30s, (though he denied it, and was willing to do so on oath) can't get a passport in the 50s. Both have affairs with others, and eventually Algren remarries his first wife, though it's even less of a success the second time than the first. He's portrayed as Lewis in de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, and Algren wasn't fond of his portrait. But de Beauvoir is buried with Algren's ring on her finger.

And I was amused to see in that first flush they enjoyed watching Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a Chicago program whose reruns still showed up mixed in with Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid:

So innocent.

The photo Wisniewski uses for the cover of her book shows Algren was rather a good-looking guy--so maybe de Beauvoir had taste?--but why are his pants so grease-spotted? But I think that's rather representatively Algren: he probably chose to wear grease-spotted pants for his formal portrait.

Anyway, Wisniewski's bio made me want me to read (reread) Algren, and is there a better recommendation for a literary biography than that? I'm currently in the middle of Never Come Morning.

And while de Beauvoir's imprimatur is probably of more use to Algren these days--she thought his novels were great, and was instrumental in seeing they were translated into French--I can't resist quoting Hemingway's pretty famous blurb. It's Hemingway being so much his clichéd Hemingway self it's kind of hilarious. [He's writing of The Man With The Golden Arm]:

"This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."

Though it has to be said Algren was thrilled with the blurb, and posted the letter from Hemingway containing it on his refrigerator, that new refrigerator the success of The Man With the Golden Arm enabled him to buy.

For some strange reason I haven't been able to comment on any WordPress-based blogs lately. Argh. Has anybody else seen this?