The great Don Winslow has a book called The Winter of Frankie Machine and in it he mentions that the name comes from the late, great Nelson Algren’s book The Man With the Golden Arm.
A former English major I know has never heard of Nelson Algren, but knew the names Richard Wright and Saul Bellow. They, like Algren, were Chicago writers. Unlike them, his star and name have waned and faded.
Colin Asher’s recent Algren biography called Never A Lovely So Real traces the bumpy life and sometimes hard times of Algren from a poor Windy City street-corner kid to a writer who was as big as they came in his heyday during the late forties and fifties when he won the first National Book Award in 1950 for “The Man With the Golden Arm.” William Carlos Williams won it for poetry. Fast company.
Algren was basically a knockaround writer from the old proletarian school at first, a card-carrying Communist in the thirties and forties who staked out the demimonde of Chicago as his literary turf and got to know it by hanging around the city’s taverns and cat houses and police lineups. He made it his business to be the voice of the people he found there, the hustlers and dope fiends and hookers who were the underside of what he saw as the great fraud of the American Dream.
His life in many ways was like his novel A Walk on the Wild Side. Both Golden Arm and Wild Side were made into movies and their titles have more or less passed into American usage.
Algren was a hard way guy. It was his way or the highway. And he took to the highway when he couldn’t get a job after college, hitching and riding the rails through the great emptiness of America in the thirties, doing jail time and very nearly getting sent to the hellhole of the Huntsville penitentiary in Texas for stealing a typewriter there. He got off by a splendid lawyer pleading that it was a tool of his trade.
Like James Joyce’s Dublin, Chicago was Nelson Algren’s lodestone and touchstone. The title of Asher’s biography comes from this passage Algren wrote about Chicago for “Holiday Magazine”: “It’s like loving a woman with a broken nose. You may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
One of the great seeming incongruities in Nelson Algren’s life was his long, often interrupted love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, the French intellectual and companion/lover of Jean Paul Sartre, who went on to international fame with her ground-breaking book The Second Sex.
The two met in the grand lobby of the regal Palmer House in Chicago where de Beauvoir was staying while on tour. She had contacted Algren as an ardent reader and suggested that they meet. She found the Palmer House stifling and Algren took her on a whirlwind tour of his wart-ridden Chicago and they became lovers. She found Algren to be attentive and truly interested in her life and thoughts in a way that Sartre and his coterie were not. There were no broad shoulders in de Beauvoir’s precious Paris.
Nelson Algren was a boots on the ground writer. The grittier the better. He was on the road before Kerouac and Cassidy. His road was one of Depression necessity while the Beats took to the road to see the American elephant up close, but it came out pretty much the same because the writing was all and the material had to be lived and loved. There was no room for irony or grad school technique. “We have to stand with the accused,” Algren wrote, and the Beats backed this up. His guys were Hemingway and Dostoevsky.
Algren wasn’t much of a believer in the teaching of writing. “Well, I dunno,” he said, “but I do have the feeling that other writers can’t help you with writing. I’ve gone to the writers’ conferences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the place where you learn to write. I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books or even with people who read them. I think the further away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes.”
Yet when he was on the back nine he accepted an invitation from Paul Engle to teach a session at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in one-horse Iowa City. Algren mainly fucked around in class, endlessly blasting the Vietnam war rather than teaching about writing. By the end, he’d lost more than half the class. He actually did his real teaching in the bars in Iowa City with students who were hip enough to follow him there.
Charles Bukowski, literary race track drunken bum, was Nelson Algren’s heir, and writers like Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Thomas Pynchon, all working class guys who wanted to write when they met Nelson Algren, got encouragement and advice from him. Algren would have loved George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a minor American masterpiece of plot and dialog. Terry Southern crossed Algren’s path.
Speaking personally, Algren and I touched three times, albeit, sadly, never in person. He came to despise Otto Preminger after a contentious deal for The Man With the Golden Arm. I once interviewed Preminger. I was a little drunk and high on weed and got him to tell of taking LSD with Timothy Leary. I think Algren would have liked that. I interviewed Rip Torn, who was an Algren friend, and I once heard Rubin “Hurricane” Carter speak and was amazed at his eloquence and quiet good humor after what had been done to him by the American justice system. Algren actually moved to Patterson, New Jersey, late in life, to embark on a work on Carter which was never published in his life.
Nelson Algren’s life was not an easy one. He twice tried suicide, was married twice, the second time impulsively, moved about constantly, was usually in debt, and was quietly hounded by the FBI for almost thirty years and was the subject of more than 800 pages of files that finally came to nothing. He was never charged as a Communist, even during the worst of the McCarthy hearings.
When the hurrahs had passed, he became something of a bitter loner, grousing steadily about the betrayals and misfortunes of his life. Yet he was also friendly and gregarious when the mood was upon him, a raconteur and truly bad poker player who loved the game like he did Chicago. He could be good company or cold water.
In the end, Nelson Algren lived by the sea, far from the Windy City. He died in 1981 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and was buried in Oakland Cemetery there. Peter Matthiessen and Pete Hamill were there. They came to see a writer off.
Nelson Algren’s epitaph reads: “The end is nothing. The road is all.”
He wrote that.