So, I was putting my name on the list at my library of Kushner's new novel Creation Lake (I'm currently 256 and my library has 127 copies) but then I saw there was this book The Mayor of Leipzig that came out in 2021. Where did that come from? I never heard about it. Send me that!
They did. Conveniently, it turned out to be novella length.
An unnamed woman artist, forty-five years old, based in New York, tells her story. She goes to Germany. She meets her gallerist in Cologne and from there travels on to Leipzig, where she will have an exhibition. "After lunch I went to the exhibition space where I would have my show and that part gets technical, so I'll spare you." We're given some speculation on art, learn about her artist friends, about her analyst, whom she doesn't see any more.
We also learn that her story is being ghostwritten by Rachel Kushner, who "probably understands less about me than you will, after you read this." Amusingly the protagonist accuses Rachel Kushner of being an art groupie, though based on The Flamethrowers, maybe she is.
We also learn about Spencer Schlosnagle, the mayor of Friendsville, who's a real person. Google him, the protagonist says, and I did. A strange enough story.
There may be a ghost involved--our protagonist says she ought to talk to her analyst about it, but then she's not seeing her analyst anymore--and then there's the 'Mayor' of Leipzig, who's probably not the mayor, but is like Spencer Schlosnagle in Spencer's other famous feature.
Interesting enough, occasionally amusing. It's not The Flamethrowers and I assume it won't be the equal of Creation Lake either.
70p., but it's large print with lots of white space. It's short for a novella, maybe more long short story instead.
Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make
I'd wanted to read this since I read the biography of Nelson Algren in summer. (Well, I'd probably wanted to read it before then, but had half-forgotten.) My library didn't have a copy, but I found one when I was in Chicago recently.
It comes out in 1951 and it's Algren's personal history of Chicago until that time. Or maybe it's a prose poem. "By its padlocked poolrooms and its nightshade neon, by its carbarn Christs punching transfers all night long; by its nuns studying gin-fizz ads in the Englewood Local, you shall know Chicago."
Algren is interested in the underside of Chicago life, and likes the people who also care about the downtrodden. Jane Addams and Richard Wright are heroes in the book; the first edition was dedicated to Carl Sandburg. He doesn't like the rich and the powerful and the righteous, and goes after them hard.
It's pretty fascinating, even if it's more atmosphere than actual information. You probably want to get the edition shown, and I don't just say that because I went to high school with the editor Bill Savage. 😉But the notes (by Bill Savage and David Schmittgens) are nearly essential. I grew up in Chicago, I know who Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin were (shady Chicago politicians, are you surprised?) but even I found the notes hard to do without.
130p in this edition, with those notes, a fun introduction by Studs Terkel, and a somewhat sour afterword from the second edition by Nelson Algren himself, who'd become a bit of a grump by the sixties.
This book is the source of the famous description of Chicago:
"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."
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.)
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.
"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.
Full Disclosure: Mary Wisniewski is the friend of a friend, though I've never met her. (I think.) If I thought the book was poor, I simply wouldn't have mentioned it. But instead, I thought it was quite good.
For some strange reason I haven't been able to comment on any WordPress-based blogs lately. Argh. Has anybody else seen this?
