Interview with Nelson Algren conference members

Studs Terkel You know, this is a memorable moment for me: Nelson Algren being discussed by four members of the American Academic Academy, America program. [laughing] I've never heard before, as we -- you probably know Nelson Algren, perhaps one of the most original of American writers, whether it be a novelist or his -- a poem on occasion or even an, an essay. Nelson was unique, an American original, and yet you would think he never really lived and existed. And so to correct that, my four guests will be discussing Algren. Carla Cappetti, who teaches, professor of the City College in New York and she wrote a book called Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel, that sounds fancy but also another paper called The Beast in the Garden and the Writings of Nelson Algren, and Jim Giles, James Giles of DeKalb, Northern Illinois University, Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren, and he also wrote one connecting Nelson and Sherwood Anderson too, Winesburg, Ohio, interesting, the study of two innocents, and Jim Lewin, who teaches at Shepherd, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia who's been following Algren for years, most of his academic and prior to that life was a Chicago cab driver once, put them right in Algren's, as, as Bill Savage would say, part of Algren's canon, and William Savage who got his doctorate in Northwestern.

James Lewin But I tend bar, so I'm still part of

Studs Terkel You tend bar, so you're part of the Algren -- and also contributed some of the papers to Newberry Library. So when I say Algren, Carla Cappetti, what comes to mind immediately for you?

Carla Cappetti Most prominently a writer of poetry who writes in prose, and who writes a poetry that comes out of people's mouths rather than books. And that speaks in the rhythm, the idioms, the lexicon of people in the street, in the streets of the cities and in the poorest areas of

Studs Terkel What, what attracted you to him? You're a scholar from Italy originally, and what attracted you to Algren?

Carla Cappetti I've always worked on working-class literature and on the 1930s, and I was always struck by the fact that even in the 1930s, even though there was all this interest in proletarian characters, working-class characters, the distance between the narrator, the person who tells this story and the character was always so huge that it felt like a, an abyss. In Nelson Algren, that distance has diminished immensely and I feel that he's doing for a working-class character what Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and other people have done for more bourgeois characters, putting the language of working-class street people into the literary language and transforming the literary language by doing that.

Studs Terkel Jim Lewin, in your case, what is it, you're a Chicagoan, what is it drew you to the writings of

James Lewin Well, knowing the neighborhoods that Algren writes about, but also you mentioned my experience as a cab driver. I spent several years driving cab, always at night, and Chi -- and Algren is the poet of Chicago at night, and the city at night is a different city than the city in the day. And of all the writers about Chicago, it's only Algren who really captures the thing of the Chicago at night, and it's that other side of the city, it's that other side that the, that the day people don't know about. While they're sleeping something else is happening. And this is what interests me in Algren, is he presents the other side of American literature. He presents a different perspective. He presents American literature not from the point of view of the winners, but of the losers, the people that are on the outside of the, of, of, of the, of the system, and he presents a picture of the system from the point of view of those who are outside the system. And so he's, as an outsider he understands the insiders. As an outsider, he knows what the insiders are really all about, and he represents the outsiders and shows what the insiders really are through those outsiders. So what I'm saying is that he understands the, the essence of this, of this actually established cultural tradition from the point of view of the outsiders of the Shakespearean fool and of the biblical prophet in the wilderness.

Studs Terkel Jim Giles. James Giles.

James R. Giles I think Nelson Algren is the most important voice of the urban outcast in American literature. One of the most important voices of the urban outcast in 20th century literature, period. And what -- a couple of things I think make him distinctive. He refers to, in his appreciating I think it's Tennessee Williams he's talking about, his appreciating Tennessee Williams' harsh compassion. I, I think that phrase gets Algren. He has compassion for these people, but it is not a sentimental, romantic, easy compassion. It's compassion, he shows these people in their most absurd and often grotesque states, and says, okay, but these are human beings, and in, in in, and you, the middle-class reader, like to pretend that they're not there, and but they are. That and one other thing that makes Algren unique. He's funny. And you know, you don't expect that in a proletarian novelist. Yeah, and when I started reading Algren, that's what really I didn't expect and really quite caught me off guard, and what I loved.

Studs Terkel William Savage, you're the most recent con-- not convert, recent

William J. Savage I wrote the latest dissertation on Algren, the fifth ever. And I was drawn to him as a, a native Chicagoan who grew up reading Chicago writers at home, and then when I was an undergraduate I began to, into what I call the law of counter-recommendation, that there were certain people whose taste I just knew I disagreed with, so if they condemned someone I considered that a recommendation, and so many pointy-headed academics I knew dismissed Algren out of hand and then eventually admitted not having read him, so then I knew I was on to something worthwhile right there.

Studs Terkel You know what's interesting in how four of you talk: all chose different aspects, yet all connected. As Carla Cappetti saw the guy who is behind the billboards, the outcasts, the proletarian novel, she [unintelligible]. But more, and then Jim Lewin saw also the guy who saw the grotesque in all, and Giles, and Giles saw that plus the fact that he was funny too, funny, and you thought that as a combination

William J. Savage Well he's all those things, and, and one sign of a truly great writer is that numerous people can see different valuable things about his work that are neither, that are not mutually exclusive by any means, that, that sort of complement each other, but on their own sustain an, a good critique.

Studs Terkel You know what's so funny, you know, Diane Arbus, remember the photographer who chose the grotesque of people, and her whole point is this the grotesque in all of us through them, she loved Nelson Algren's writing quite obviously. You could tell that, immediately. Suppose we hear Nelson's voice, you've got to hear the -- here's that nasal drawl kind of voice that of course accentuates the humor telling about, this was shortly after a police scandal in Chicago. The Summerdale police were convicted because a, a burglar babbled, he told, informed on them.

James Lewin Richard Morrison.

Studs Terkel Richard Morrison, the singing burglar they called him, or the babbling burglar. He says he robbed various appliance stores with the help of a number of Chicago cops!

James Lewin In uniform

Studs Terkel He pointed out places for them, and he gave them mink coat for their wives and color TV. And so that was a big scandal that led to a new police commissioner at the time. So in, on the heels of that Nelson tells about a man named Lost Ball Stahouska, who was involved in various -- he's in a baseball game. Suppose we hear Nelson's voice.

Nelson Algren I once knew a here-and-there fellow whose name was Lost Ball Stahouska, and when we were both younger he played centerfield for the Intrepid Arrows SAC and I played right field, and once when we were playing the Kosciuszko Warriors for 60 cents a man, and Stahouska hit a squibbly grounder to third and would have been out by eight feet, except for getting it into his head to slide, and he slid headfirst, as that was Stahouska's idea of how to slide into any base, only he did it so hard he upset the Kosciuszko first baseman, who dropped the ball. So Stahouska was safe. He dusted himself off and then he noticed the first baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the pitcher, and neither was the second baseman. So he raced down to second and slid again, only this time he did it feet-first just to show he could do it the easy way, too. Then he dusted himself off again and after a while he noticed the second baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the pitcher, and neither was the third baseman. "I guess you fellows just don't want me," he told the second baseman, and marched down to third. Two slides a game is all Stahouska would ever make. Well, then he dusted himself off again anyhow and after a while he noticed the third baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the second baseman, and neither was the pitcher, because they're all over at first helping the first baseman look for the ball. So only the catcher was in position, and he was straddling the plate just in case someone should find it. So Stahouska took it out of his pocket and threw it home and came in after it and got himself tagged out after all. Now, the way this thing looked to me was as if that catcher had dropped it, Stahouska would have picked it up and tagged himself out. Later he claimed he did it because his conscience bothered him, but where was his conscience the night he helped move ten thousand six hundred dollars' worth of office furniture out of somebody else's back door with only two cops for protection? Well, the way Stahouska explained that was that moving office furniture out of somebody else's back door with police protection at night has nothing to do with his conscience, because he was only doing something a lot of other people do, in uniform or out, but doing something like hiding a baseball in your pocket and taking extra bases while the other fellows are looking at the ball was definitely taking advantage, and then something nobody else had done before. And that was what made his conscience hurt him. "Next time you want to confess," I told him, "Go to church, Stahouska."

Studs Terkel In hearing Lost Ball Stahouska, what do we get? He says -- you Jim, you were going to say?

James R. Giles Yeah, that's a good example of the very distinctive original Algren humor. It's not just that he's funny, he's funny in a way that I don't know any other American writer being funny. And the, the, the scene that gets Algren's humor for me is in The Man with the Golden Arm, and is referred to as the great sandwich battle, which is this wildly outrageous love scene between one of the great characters in American literature, this Sparrow Saltskin, and, and a woman named Violet. And it is this absurd, outrageous, and everything, and it ends with, they start to make love, and the Sparrow is eating a sausage, and he has a sausage string hanging out of his mouth. [laughing] Now I would say he's not going to have that anywhere else in American literature, but then there is a line that makes the whole scene, and the line is, "Well, it's better than no love at all."

Studs Terkel Yeah.

James Lewin Yeah, Violet thinking that, yeah.

Studs Terkel As he says that, you were going to say something.

William J. Savage It's not only the humor, but there's a point to the humor. It's a, it, it, it's humor that's got, that's got something to say as well. It's got a message that, that, that is coming through. It's, that's why I compare him to the Shakespearian fool, because he's, he's the one who, who confronts those in power and who, who, who shows the people in power that they're the ones that are the real fools. And this, like Lost Ball Stahouska, it's not just Lost Ball Stahouska, but it's like making a point about the conscience and the morality of the, of the, the, the, the do-right righteous people, the hypocritical righteous people. And what is the real morality? What is the real truth? And it's done in this humorous way, which

James Lewin And the joke is always right on the crux of the moral issue. Here the joke is, this guy will steal the ball and feels guilty enough about it to make himself out in the end, because you don't turn on the people you play baseball with. But he has no problem stealing, you know, office furniture with the help the police

Studs Terkel But also, nobody steals baseball. Everybody robs.

William J. Savage Yes, exactly!

Studs Terkel No good

James Lewin Exactly!

Studs Terkel Turning -- Carla.

Carla Cappetti And also the, that passage repeatedly refers to the conscience of this character, and that's an element that appears over and over in Nelson Algren. He will have a petty criminal, a thief, even a murderer not able to feel guilty for what society is really placing him in jail for, but feeling immensely guilty for something else.

William J. Savage Not tipping a bartender, or

Studs Terkel Right. Yeah.

Carla Cappetti And the emphasis is on the fact that there is a conscience there, there is a consciousness that to me goes completely against the grain of the way working-class characters have been represented. They have been represented as having no soul, no consciousness, no subjectivity, nonpersonality.

Studs Terkel It makes them human come to life. Now here we come to some -- you were going to say something.

James Lewin Algren says that "Literature is made on any occasion that a, a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity."

Studs Terkel That's it. And by the way, on that point, as we're talking about Nelson, the comic, the clown, Sparrow, he breaks your heart. In short stories, for example, Stickman's Laughter. It's about a little guy, ex-guy, ex-fighter, and he loses all the money and he comes home, because I thought of that because of what Jim Giles said about, "Better than no love at all," he comes home and there's the old lady waiting for him, and suddenly you realize, she understands, she forgives.

William J. Savage And that story is great because he wins at first. Most Algren characters lose right away and perpetuate it, but this guy goes, doubles his paycheck, comes back and the wife still isn't home, and that's the one reason he'd gone out to gamble in the first place, otherwise they're going to go down to the shows. So then he goes out and gets drunk and loses all the money

Studs Terkel And it's that feeling of compassion, and perhaps in a story called Leave It to Aunt Elly.

James Lewin Oh, yeah.

Studs Terkel Here's a girl who's a hooker, alleged to this Mexican fighter, and there's this bond between them and then he finds out about her. But the line -- we, perhaps we should hold that, because the actress Geraldine Page admired Nelson very much, and she pointed something out. Remember she was a great Tennessee Williams heroine. Tennessee Williams banked on her a great deal, but she admired Algren, she says, "Something about his characters. If only one of them had said something!" And they didn't, you know, you know, they can't bring themselves to say it. And so that ache is there that is not resolved because someone did not make -- it's rather -- for the, well, we'll come to you guys, I want to hear more from my guests Carla Cappetti and James Giles and Rod -- James Lewin and Bill Savage, all four scholars of Nelson Algren. [pause in recording] You don't mind my calling you academics, you are, in the best sense of the word, you're teachers.

Carla Cappetti [laughing] We

William J. Savage I'm still, I'm still unemployed, so I'm, I'm not quite an academic yet.

Studs Terkel So we come -- why is it? Now a big question. You've offered reasons why you're attracted to Algren. What is it that makes him, let's face it, a non-person? You take The New York Review of Books if name something, the most prestigious of all literary publications, I don't recall his every being mentioned outside of a letter of protest from me and another guy when some guy was rapping him. Now

Carla Cappetti What do you think?

Studs Terkel Well, I'm asking you, Carla.

William J. Savage I'll take

Carla Cappetti But we want to hear it from you, too. My sense is that his take on working-class characters and the underclass is so out of line with anything people are used to expect, people, not just academics, everybody. They expect either a sentimental version, they want to feel good. They're -- the poor are not so bad. They're not all evil. There's something good there. They want the sentimental feeling-good version, or they want just the version that the naturalists used to give, they're all alcoholic, they're all depraved, and there's nothing there to be saved.

Studs Terkel Social Darwinism.

Carla Cappetti Exactly. Algren stays away from both. He manages to makes us laugh, without caricaturing. He manages to show the grotesque distortions of people's humanity without making them into grotesques, pure grotesques, which is the stereotype of these characters that is predominant in the literature. I think that's what it is. When people don't recognize something, it doesn't exist, and that's true of literary critics of academics of

Studs Terkel That's great.

James Lewin I think that Algren unmasks the respectable establishment by showing those, by showing the, the inner soul of the people who've never had respect, and by, by, by putting it from the point of view of the outsiders, he is really representing the insiders' establishment values and showing how much that establishment is lacking the values that it's espousing and that it's claiming. So he's, he's unmasking the hypocrites. Because he's unmasking his hypocrites, they don't want to hear from him. They don't want to know about it. He's, he's like the, the prophet in the wilderness who comes into the king's court and who tells the king and who tells the priest and who tells the, the, the inner sanctum that this is not what the, the, what God wants from you. This is not the real holy worship. He's like the Shakespearean fool who tells the king exactly the truth, and except for the fool can't get away with it. So he's in a sense bringing too much of the true values of the culture to the cultural establishment, and the cultural establishment therefore wants to kick him out.

Studs Terkel James Giles.

James R. Giles It's, it's interesting to point out that the decade that did Algren in in terms of the academic canon was the 1950s, which is a pretty horrible decade in every way. An interesting thing to say to remember about that, and nobody much remembers this, Algren won in 1950 the first National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm, but then later in the decade, very conservative critics like Norman Podhoretz, whom Algren called "Norman Poodlespitz"

Studs Terkel Perjuretz.

James R. Giles Yes, right, [laughing] and then Leslie Fiedler whom Algren referred

Studs Terkel By the way, the word he could -- something -- "Hinkle Finkle the footnote king."

James Lewin Yes, right, that was

James R. Giles And Fiedler, Algren called Leslie Fleacure, and it was those people who basically ran Algren out of the canon. And you could just see it deliberately happening.

William J. Savage And they didn't just run Algren out of the canon, they changed the ground rules for what was serious literature. Before the mid-to-late '50s and the ascendance of new critics and foremost critics, socially engaged literature about the down and out was considered serious literature, even if it wasn't funny or as good as Algren. And then they just changed the rules, they pulled the rug out from under him and, and Dreiser and Richard Wright and everybody else who worked in that tradition.

James R. Giles And Farrell.

William J. Savage And Farrell, but also it comes down to a matter of, well you just brought up the humor. Algren as a human being didn't play by the rules that the academic canon makers wanted to play by. So when he responded to criticism with jokes and with funny names and with grotesqueries and, and these sort of antic responses, they just took that as proof that see, he isn't a really serious writer because he engages in this silliness instead of, you know, talking man to man.

Studs Terkel They didn't know how to handle him. I remember certain events moments he's debating William Buckley, Jr. but

William J. Savage -- I'd have paid money to see that.

Studs Terkel No, on a program monitored, moderated by a conservative guy, a radio program and Buckley's going crazy because Algren's and he's, "When you were a member of the Communist Party or whatever," Nelson accused of various things, "When you were," he says, "When you robbed that grocery store when you were 4 years old in Paterson, New Jersey," he says "I beg your pardon!" "Well, when you robbed that store, do you remember when that the," said, he would do these crazy things to in-- to show how horrendous the junk was that destroyed people, but I think that you pointed out, all of you, in this, all four of you did, that, that decade of the '50s. He did win the first national -- but that was 19 -- I didn't realize.

James Lewin Forty-nine and fifty.

Studs Terkel Boy, that's interesting, and so of the dec -- yes

William J. Savage And it's also it's not just that the rules for everything changed, it's that the, the canon became an academic canon.

James R. Giles Right.

William J. Savage Before the, the, expansion of the university system with the G.I. Bill after the war and all the rest, the canon was made by journalists, by people like you, Studs, by people writing in newspapers and for general po-- circulation magazines. When the Academy expanded by tremendous amount, then they started making the canon in universities with people who frankly didn't have any contact with the

Studs Terkel When you say the canon, just word or two. I know it to be, just to be elementary

William J. Savage The canon, my definition of it is, that list of books which, if you claim to be educated you either have to have read, be able, pretend to have read, or be able to fake having read.

Studs Terkel So therefore he's out of

James Lewin He's out of

Carla Cappetti Although it's a very specific canon that is promoted after the war. And it's the canon of what is now called the modernist canon.

William J. Savage Modernist, critical, new

Carla Cappetti Now, [incidentally?] the modernist they

Studs Terkel When you say, like the new criticism

Carla Cappetti The new critical canon, and the modernist that were promoted, a modernism in many ways then are used by Algren in his work, but he uses them not in a, in bourgeois setting, in middle-class characters, but he uses them among poor lumpen proletariat working-class characters. So it's not that he's out of the tradition, it's just that he uses the devices, the techniques

William J. Savage And they, and the critics who dismiss him define him not by the fact that he participates in modernism, but by the things he does that isn't like the rest of modernism. So they label him by the things that don't fit what they like in order to dismiss

James R. Giles You know, you talk about modernism, it's, it's interesting that Ernest Hemingway, probably the peak of the modernist canon, admired Algren a great deal.

Carla Cappetti Immensely.

William J. Savage Said he was better than Faulkner.

James R. Giles Right. Yeah, and you know, I always have wondered about if Algren had responded to those attacks in the '50s with a kind of humility if it might have gone differently.

William J. Savage I'd rather

James R. Giles But I'm saying I'm glad he didn't, 'cause that, then he wouldn't have been

William J. Savage Right.

Studs Terkel He would have had

William J. Savage The thing is that there was these, there were these social forces within the new criticism, it was the McCarthyism.

James Lewin Right.

William J. Savage And this was

James Lewin He couldn't get a

William J. Savage This was very much a part of the whole background of it.

Carla Cappetti It was also a New York centrality in this all, the intellectual New York center.

William J. Savage Which Algren refused to, to kowtow to as well. And, and Leslie Fieder -- Fiedler called him "the bard of the stumblebum," very sort of, you know, catchy phrase which it's like, it's like pinning, like pinning a, a, a sign on his back.

James Lewin "Kick me."

William J. Savage Yeah, and saying, you know, and, and, and making him the outcast, the bard of the stumblebum, the one who we, writes about what we don't want to hear about, what we don't want to care about, people that we would never invite to dinner, and that's what, you know, defined him as being outsider. One

Studs Terkel One we'd never invite to dinner. By the way, that,

James Lewin But no, out for drinks maybe.

Studs Terkel You know, I hate to be personal, but Bellow used the phrase "a tavern writer." "Tavern writer."

James Lewin Well, as a bartender, I take offense at that. But it's interesting, the, the review of Walk on the Wild Side, where Fiedler labeled Algren bard of the stumblebum, he also dismissed him in that same paragraph as writing about the, the last of the noble savages at the farthest removed from its, from the audience for literature, which has a really weird assumption, and which is that people only read literature to read about people who are like them.

James R. Giles Right.

Carla Cappetti Right.

James Lewin And that's something that, before the formalist new critical canon might have been the case, was not the case, and now since then is the case. It is, you read a literature, a literary book to read about people like you as opposed to read about people not like you, and Algren wrote about people who aren't readers of books, whose, whose, whose cultural reference are all movies and, and popular culture.

Carla Cappetti I want to ask a question to Studs.

Studs Terkel Yes, ma'am.

Carla Cappetti In your opinion, since you knew him and you knew, you know where he came from, what were the most important ingredients that made Algren so difficult to handle for traditional Academy?

Studs Terkel Because he

Carla Cappetti -- What

Studs Terkel They didn't how to handle him because they were accustomed to a certain kind of ritual, and he defied those rituals. Like he'd make jokes, most outrageous jokes, that they were offended by but didn't quite understand. [laughing] You see? And so he would, I think, the truth of the matter is, I think they were, if, I may be romanticing, they were scared of him. Because how do you handle someone you can't handle? And so he also was saying stuff that deep, deep down they may have suspected was true, and that's what you never forgive somebody who is able to get at a core of truth that you are denying. You'll kill him! And so in a sense they had to kill him, as far as reputation is concerned.

James Lewin I want to follow that up, Studs. You knew him really well personally. You were the one person that, that, that was, he stuck by throughout the whole time. If, if, if Algren was the, the Hamlet of Chicago literature, you were the Horatio.

Studs Terkel Well [laughing]

William J. Savage Talk about a canonical reference!

Studs Terkel And the rest is silence!

James Lewin No, no, but why, why, why did he, why was it that you were the one person he never blew off?

Studs Terkel I don't know. Which, I think I do. His second wife, Betty, said married to Nelson is a, is like, because he's, Nelson's a strange or volatile kind of figure, married to him is like living with a wheel of fire, or the wheel of fire. So it's very hard -- so I think I never

James Lewin -- The

Studs Terkel I never, I never dug -- oh, he'd stay at the house overnight a lot of times and we friends for the years. I would, knew something told me, the wife said this, "Never, ever ask very personal things." Like he, he did, he broke friendships, I must say this, very, you know, ungallantly

James Lewin With Richard Wright, with a lot of people.

Studs Terkel With a lot of people, oh, even things he said about Simone de Beauvoir were not exactly the kindest in the

William J. Savage Have you read The Mandarins? That's not the kindest thing in the

Studs Terkel Although I must admit, very funny. You see, he was a very, even when he does a cruel thing at times, he's very funny. But there's that private life. You know, he always signed inscribed with a cat, figure of a cat. A cat to him is the alley cat. A cat to him is unmastered. A cat to him is -- a dog is no good. A dog is just a [head?] -- but a cat! So he always was the cat, and that's his -- so he was as -- well, obviously I loved him very much, and admired him very, because he was unique. He was, I suppose you used the words American original, he was, which we'll lead to before we take our break and maybe hear his voice once more, to why it was that Sartre and de Beauvoir, and certain people in Europe were drawn to him. What is it that drew them to him? But should we hear his voice once more? Here's Nelson, now he has these recurring figures like Lost Ball Stahouska or some fellow Willie who's always feeling suspicious, so the cops arrest him all the time because he feels suspicious and looks suspicious, and he has a police line, a police file an eighth of an inch long, the cop says, to be more respectable it should be used to have a bigger, a half an inch. He's finally arrested and finally he decides to become a cop himself. But he's also called sometimes Ipso Facto. Ipso Facto, I'm here. So this Ipso Facto as he is drafted into the army just a phrase or two of Nelson describing Ipso as a, as a rookie soldier.

Nelson Algren Ipso's draft board was a bit startled when he materialized at the induction center. Had he not been three inches over six feet and weighing only 129 pounds, the manner in which his head was set on his shoulders wouldn't have been so conspicuous. All the inducting officer could think to ask was, "Are you going to be on our side?" "Well sir, I'd like to die for my country," Ipso announced, "Only, I have bad teeth." "Oh, that's all right," the officer decided, having recovered from his first surprise. "We don't want you to bite the enemy." It was only his neck which deprived Ipso of becoming a force for law and order in Chicago. Had they ever let him ask the questions in the query room, he would have asked all the right questions. "If you're not guilty of something, why are you trying to make fools of us by having us stand around asking you questions? If you're so innocent, what are you bleating about? If you're not guilty of something, you must be innocent of something, and that's even more serious." Ipso hated work. He hated work so much that he not only hated people who went to work, but he hated unemployed people [fades out].

Studs Terkel Now you heard here, the, the authorities, the sargeant was saying, "Are you on our side?" [laughing] And explaining that.

James Lewin Pick a side.

Studs Terkel This is Algren's, that's the big question. They -- quite obviously people knew on whose side Nelson was. What's that quote again? Earlier you

James Lewin -- I've got it right here. "Literature is made on any occasion when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity."

William J. Savage And he's actually got a couple other things that applied both to this and the same afterword to City on the Make that apply to what we were talking about a minute ago, why he didn't stick around, or why the, the canon, the canon makers booted him out. He writes, "The history of American letters in, in this strict view, is a record of apparently senseless assaults upon standard operating procedure commonly by a single driven man," and then a little later "the hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. Well, the judges don't like being brought down

Studs Terkel off Ah,

William J. Savage Literary judges or the, the legal judges, and I think the European writers like Sartre and de Beauvoir were, were attracted to that anti-hierarchical aspect of Algren as well as I think his, his American original, as you call him. He was a writer like nothing they'd ever seen in Europe. They just don't breed them like that over there.

James R. Giles Everybody missed this for a while. There is a very strong existentialist aspect of Algren's writing, and that, that quote, "If you're not guilty of something, you're innocent of something, and that's worse" really gets the kind of Sartrean existentialism.

Studs Terkel Let's cut to that. That's a good spot right here, we'll pick this right up with, with Carla Cappetti, and Jim Giles and James Lewin and Bill Savage.

Carla Cappetti Yeah, I think the fact that Sartre, de Beauvoir admired him so much, I'm always concerned with the fact that Algren, like Richard Wright and other writers like him have been made into European writers, they're not really American. But the fact is Algren is very aware of an American tradition within which he operates.

William J. Savage Whitman, Dreiser,

Carla Cappetti And I think that if there is admiration from European writer, it's admiration for this whole tradition, not for this Algren is unique, but in a way he's also part of

Studs Terkel Ah, the idea is that they admire an indigenous American tradition.

Carla Cappetti And he's very American in that respect.

Studs Terkel Let's hold off on, that's a good spot. [pause in recording] Carla Cappetti and Jim Giles and Jim Lewin and Bill Savage. Jim Giles, you were about to say.

James R. Giles Yeah, in, in terms of the, the, the excerpt we heard, the first excerpt we heard

Studs Terkel About

James R. Giles Lost Balls, right. Notice how much that is like a, a Mark Twain tall tale.

William J. Savage Or a Marx Brothers

James R. Giles And it works the same way as a Marx Train -- Mark Twain tall tale. You just build exaggeration and absurdity on absurdity. Algren I think bought, brought something like the Twain tall tale to urban fiction, and nobody had ever done that.

Studs Terkel That's, that's a very interesting, isn't it?

William J. Savage Stuart Dybek's done it since, but I think Algren was the

Studs Terkel You remember, he mid -- he was not New York, he was Chicago, Detroit, but Chicago and his travels during the Depression with [that so?], he was covering hinterlands as well. You remember he in somebody and boots and others, on the road. But the city! The city, and tall tales, that's, Jim

William J. Savage Well I'm just saying that's, that's another way that the canon makers dismissed him. They called him just a Chicago writer, just an urban writer, as opposed to a, a writer like Bellow who writes about Chicago and he's an urban writer, but is really about the whole world. You know, they just dismiss him as a regionalist.

James Lewin See, he writes about the America that's in America, the America that's lost within itself.

Studs Terkel Jim --I'm sorry. Well, just as you're talking, and Carla's looking something up, just as you're talking, you said, you know, Chicago writer. Well, Nelson was practically flat broke, as he was most of the time [laughing] -- very

James Lewin When you never win.

Studs Terkel German, German publishers and German TV people, he was European stuff, primarily German, so you could see he was not a Chicago writer as such. They interested in what he understood about cities and those people

William J. Savage That's the label that people used to dismiss

Studs Terkel And those people who are the nonpersons, those not worth discussing he would discuss and make come alive, and they recognized that, that indigenous American thing you're talking about,

Carla Cappetti Right, and I think it's also an admiration, not just so much for something that is so American, but something that is, was missing in Europ-- in many European literary traditions that was much more advanced, much more developed, much more in contact with the street and the squares and the cities and the neighborhoods. Returning to the comment about the fact that there are elements of the tall tale, I feel there are many elements from popular culture in Algren's fiction: tall tales, ballads, the blues, you can hear these material through his stories. And if I can just read from The Face on the Barroom Floor, this is a description of Fancy, one of the character: "Thus he was a man of singular virtue, and to this single virtue he held fast: no man could accuse him of taking a dime from any woman by guile or strength or seduction. But he was a competent mechanic and a good hand to overhaul a hot car in a hurry. He could preach salvation in a voice so gentle that the mission stiffs would linger on after the doughnuts were passed; he could roar hell-fire at those walking toward the doors so fearfully that they returned sheepishly to their seats. He could mix a drink capable of knocking a man out in a minute or fix one that wouldn't take effect for five hours. He could sell a tip on a burned-out horse and sell the same sucker again, an hour after the horse had run out." And on and on. If this isn't a tall tale, spoken in the rhythms and in the, a musical voice of

Studs Terkel As you say that, he has one called Ballad for an Absconding Jockey -- no, An Absconding Bookie, and I happen to know the guy, and introduce him to a guy, and he, I changed his name. He was a petty, sort of, and he'd always give tips at the races. Nelson rarely won. But when he won, it was a triumph. So he's going to bet on a horse. He's at the track and he meets my friend who says, "Oh, that horse hasn't got a chance, about a 50 to one bet, let me take the bet. I might as well." He says "Okay, you take the bet." He thinks the guy's gonna -- the horse wins! Fifty to -- Nelson would have won about five hundred dollars, put ten bucks on him. And so the guy ab-- just disappears! And Nelson been chasing him for a long day, so he wrote the ballad "For an Absconding Bookie." "Where have you gone, Sam the Jackal, with the sky so blue and the re--" and he describes a race and it's absolutely hilarious, but also funny! He's the fall guy in it. Very often he's the fall guy. He, he's, he's he's the, he's the square.

James Lewin Right. It's interesting, they talk about the labels. The,the passage Carla read is very much the rhythm of the street and the spoken word and all that, and that's where the, the Twain tall tale comes from, but you could, if you don't like that, you dismiss it as a tavern tale, or a tavern writer. If you like it, it's a Twainian tall tale, if you don't like it, it's just tavern talk. And speaking as a bartender, that's tavern

Studs Terkel And so those who dominate in our culture, that is our taste, New York, I guess you call them sanf-self-anointed mandarins, they're the ones who more or less determine

James Lewin Yes.

Studs Terkel And so they determine he's out.

William J. Savage They determine what's in print. If, if, if you aren't gonna be in print, you're out, and he was in and out of print and out of print for most of the time until Dan Simon at Four Walls Eight Windows and the people at Thunder Mouths Press in the very late '80s, early '90s, put his stuff back in, in print and in packages that say "This is a serious writer."

Studs Terkel But Carla.

Carla Cappetti But to return to the betting situation, Nelson Algren liked to bet on losers, not only at the track, but in society. He didn't care to bet on the winner, whereas the publication industry, the critical industry, likes to bet on the winners, those that they know will be liked by everybody and will

Studs Terkel -- You know, I don't know if you have, playing poker games once in a while, poker games, invariably I find those who win regularly in poker games are pretty dull people. You know, they're the bookkeepers, they keep track.

James Lewin They can count the cards.

Studs Terkel Those who lose are like Algren, because you see there's something about gambling that's crazy and wild and unique and astonishing, to them it's keeping books and ledger. And so they win. They are the winners!

Carla Cappetti They are the systemists, a system study.

James Lewin I have a, yeah I have a question for you, Studs, about Algren. One of my students at the Newberry library, [Dylan? Dillon?] [Hoya? Hoy?], a labor lawyer here in Chicago, says that he thinks that Algren left two Pulitzer Prizes on the table, that his gambling was a problem for his writing. Do you think that's a, a, a valuable insight or

Studs Terkel Well, he did, what he left, he left if, not Pulitzer Prizes, a good deal of dough, [laughing] as his second, both wives can well attest. Both can. So he did, you see, the idea, he was a romantic in his own mind. That is, he was Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, indeed he was in his imagination and his heart. But in real life, he was Sparrow! The guy, he was both, you see, and at the same time, he was attractive, I mean women found him. So I must ask a big question, what is it that drew, you hinted on it, Sartre and de Beauvoir to him? Jim Giles.

James R. Giles That he was willing to confront the kind of existential absurdist despair. And you know, I don't know Algren, I don't know how much he would -- he joked about not knowing what existentialism was. But, you know, I kind of doubt that, [laughing] and he certainly developed an art that evoked it. You mentioned the lineups.

Studs Terkel The what?

James R. Giles The lineups, the police lineups.

James Lewin In Man with the Golden Arm.

James R. Giles And, and then

Studs Terkel Or The Captain of Bad Dream. Nothing like that

James R. Giles Yeah, I, the police lineup is a kind of device Algren perfected, and, and if you think about it, you have the suspects who are behind a glass where the spectators can see them, they cannot see the spectators. Right. And then you got this character named Record Head Bednar who's developed this kind of art form where he queues with them until one of them says in effect, "We're all alike."

William J. Savage "We're all members

James R. Giles "We're all members," we're going -- yeah. And that's

Carla Cappetti "Of one another."

James R. Giles

James Lewin You know, this is a memorable moment for me: Nelson Algren being discussed by four members of the American Academic Academy, America program. [laughing] I've never heard before, as we -- you probably know Nelson Algren, perhaps one of the most original of American writers, whether it be a novelist or his -- a poem on occasion or even an, an essay. Nelson was unique, an American original, and yet you would think he never really lived and existed. And so to correct that, my four guests will be discussing Algren. Carla Cappetti, who teaches, professor of the City College in New York and she wrote a book called Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel, that sounds fancy but also another paper called The Beast in the Garden and the Writings of Nelson Algren, and Jim Giles, James Giles of DeKalb, Northern Illinois University, Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren, and he also wrote one connecting Nelson and Sherwood Anderson too, Winesburg, Ohio, interesting, the study of two innocents, and Jim Lewin, who teaches at Shepherd, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia who's been following Algren for years, most of his academic and prior to that life was a Chicago cab driver once, put them right in Algren's, as, as Bill Savage would say, part of Algren's canon, and William Savage who got his doctorate in Northwestern. But I tend bar, so I'm still part of the You tend bar, so you're part of the Algren -- and also contributed some of the papers to Newberry Library. So when I say Algren, Carla Cappetti, what comes to mind immediately for you? Most prominently a writer of poetry who writes in prose, and who writes a poetry that comes out of people's mouths rather than books. And that speaks in the rhythm, the idioms, the lexicon of people in the street, in the streets of the cities and in the poorest areas of the What, what attracted you to him? You're a scholar from Italy originally, and what attracted you to Algren? I've always worked on working-class literature and on the 1930s, and I was always struck by the fact that even in the 1930s, even though there was all this interest in proletarian characters, working-class characters, the distance between the narrator, the person who tells this story and the character was always so huge that it felt like a, an abyss. In Nelson Algren, that distance has diminished immensely and I feel that he's doing for a working-class character what Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and other people have done for more bourgeois characters, putting the language of working-class street people into the literary language and transforming the literary language by doing that. Jim Lewin, in your case, what is it, you're a Chicagoan, what is it drew you to the writings of Algren? Well, knowing the neighborhoods that Algren writes about, but also you mentioned my experience as a cab driver. I spent several years driving cab, always at night, and Chi -- and Algren is the poet of Chicago at night, and the city at night is a different city than the city in the day. And of all the writers about Chicago, it's only Algren who really captures the thing of the Chicago at night, and it's that other side of the city, it's that other side that the, that the day people don't know about. While they're sleeping something else is happening. And this is what interests me in Algren, is he presents the other side of American literature. He presents a different perspective. He presents American literature not from the point of view of the winners, but of the losers, the people that are on the outside of the, of, of, of the, of the system, and he presents a picture of the system from the point of view of those who are outside the system. And so he's, as an outsider he understands the insiders. As an outsider, he knows what the insiders are really all about, and he represents the outsiders and shows what the insiders really are through those outsiders. So what I'm saying is that he understands the, the essence of this, of this actually established cultural tradition from the point of view of the outsiders of the Shakespearean fool and of the biblical prophet in the wilderness. Jim Giles. James Giles. I think Nelson Algren is the most important voice of the urban outcast in American literature. One of the most important voices of the urban outcast in 20th century literature, period. And what -- a couple of things I think make him distinctive. He refers to, in his appreciating I think it's Tennessee Williams he's talking about, his appreciating Tennessee Williams' harsh compassion. I, I think that phrase gets Algren. He has compassion for these people, but it is not a sentimental, romantic, easy compassion. It's compassion, he shows these people in their most absurd and often grotesque states, and says, okay, but these are human beings, and in, in in, and you, the middle-class reader, like to pretend that they're not there, and but they are. That and one other thing that makes Algren unique. He's funny. And you know, you don't expect that in a proletarian novelist. Yeah, and when I started reading Algren, that's what really I didn't expect and really quite caught me off guard, and what I loved. William Savage, you're the most recent con-- not convert, recent -- I wrote the latest dissertation on Algren, the fifth ever. And I was drawn to him as a, a native Chicagoan who grew up reading Chicago writers at home, and then when I was an undergraduate I began to, into what I call the law of counter-recommendation, that there were certain people whose taste I just knew I disagreed with, so if they condemned someone I considered that a recommendation, and so many pointy-headed academics I knew dismissed Algren out of hand and then eventually admitted not having read him, so then I knew I was on to something worthwhile right there. You know what's interesting in how four of you talk: all chose different aspects, yet all connected. As Carla Cappetti saw the guy who is behind the billboards, the outcasts, the proletarian novel, she [unintelligible]. But more, and then Jim Lewin saw also the guy who saw the grotesque in all, and Giles, and Giles saw that plus the fact that he was funny too, funny, and you thought that as a combination of Well he's all those things, and, and one sign of a truly great writer is that numerous people can see different valuable things about his work that are neither, that are not mutually exclusive by any means, that, that sort of complement each other, but on their own sustain an, a good critique. You know what's so funny, you know, Diane Arbus, remember the photographer who chose the grotesque of people, and her whole point is this the grotesque in all of us through them, she loved Nelson Algren's writing quite obviously. You could tell that, immediately. Suppose we hear Nelson's voice, you've got to hear the -- here's that nasal drawl kind of voice that of course accentuates the humor telling about, this was shortly after a police scandal in Chicago. The Summerdale police were convicted because a, a burglar babbled, he told, informed on them. Richard Morrison. Richard Morrison, the singing burglar they called him, or the babbling burglar. He says he robbed various appliance stores with the help of a number of Chicago cops! In uniform on He pointed out places for them, and he gave them mink coat for their wives and color TV. And so that was a big scandal that led to a new police commissioner at the time. So in, on the heels of that Nelson tells about a man named Lost Ball Stahouska, who was involved in various -- he's in a baseball game. Suppose we hear Nelson's voice. I once knew a here-and-there fellow whose name was Lost Ball Stahouska, and when we were both younger he played centerfield for the Intrepid Arrows SAC and I played right field, and once when we were playing the Kosciuszko Warriors for 60 cents a man, and Stahouska hit a squibbly grounder to third and would have been out by eight feet, except for getting it into his head to slide, and he slid headfirst, as that was Stahouska's idea of how to slide into any base, only he did it so hard he upset the Kosciuszko first baseman, who dropped the ball. So Stahouska was safe. He dusted himself off and then he noticed the first baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the pitcher, and neither was the second baseman. So he raced down to second and slid again, only this time he did it feet-first just to show he could do it the easy way, too. Then he dusted himself off again and after a while he noticed the second baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the pitcher, and neither was the third baseman. "I guess you fellows just don't want me," he told the second baseman, and marched down to third. Two slides a game is all Stahouska would ever make. Well, then he dusted himself off again anyhow and after a while he noticed the third baseman wasn't holding the ball, and neither was the second baseman, and neither was the pitcher, because they're all over at first helping the first baseman look for the ball. So only the catcher was in position, and he was straddling the plate just in case someone should find it. So Stahouska took it out of his pocket and threw it home and came in after it and got himself tagged out after all. Now, the way this thing looked to me was as if that catcher had dropped it, Stahouska would have picked it up and tagged himself out. Later he claimed he did it because his conscience bothered him, but where was his conscience the night he helped move ten thousand six hundred dollars' worth of office furniture out of somebody else's back door with only two cops for protection? Well, the way Stahouska explained that was that moving office furniture out of somebody else's back door with police protection at night has nothing to do with his conscience, because he was only doing something a lot of other people do, in uniform or out, but doing something like hiding a baseball in your pocket and taking extra bases while the other fellows are looking at the ball was definitely taking advantage, and then something nobody else had done before. And that was what made his conscience hurt him. "Next time you want to confess," I told him, "Go to church, Stahouska." In hearing Lost Ball Stahouska, what do we get? He says -- you Jim, you were going to say? Yeah, that's a good example of the very distinctive original Algren humor. It's not just that he's funny, he's funny in a way that I don't know any other American writer being funny. And the, the, the scene that gets Algren's humor for me is in The Man with the Golden Arm, and is referred to as the great sandwich battle, which is this wildly outrageous love scene between one of the great characters in American literature, this Sparrow Saltskin, and, and a woman named Violet. And it is this absurd, outrageous, and everything, and it ends with, they start to make love, and the Sparrow is eating a sausage, and he has a sausage string hanging out of his mouth. [laughing] Now I would say he's not going to have that anywhere else in American literature, but then there is a line that makes the whole scene, and the line is, "Well, it's better than no love at all." Yeah. Yeah, Violet thinking that, yeah. As he says that, you were going to say something. It's not only the humor, but there's a point to the humor. It's a, it, it, it's humor that's got, that's got something to say as well. It's got a message that, that, that is coming through. It's, that's why I compare him to the Shakespearian fool, because he's, he's the one who, who confronts those in power and who, who, who shows the people in power that they're the ones that are the real fools. And this, like Lost Ball Stahouska, it's not just Lost Ball Stahouska, but it's like making a point about the conscience and the morality of the, of the, the, the, the do-right righteous people, the hypocritical righteous people. And what is the real morality? What is the real truth? And it's done in this humorous way, which -- And the joke is always right on the crux of the moral issue. Here the joke is, this guy will steal the ball and feels guilty enough about it to make himself out in the end, because you don't turn on the people you play baseball with. But he has no problem stealing, you know, office furniture with the help the police because But also, nobody steals baseball. Everybody robs. Yes, exactly! No good -- Exactly! Turning -- Carla. And also the, that passage repeatedly refers to the conscience of this character, and that's an element that appears over and over in Nelson Algren. He will have a petty criminal, a thief, even a murderer not able to feel guilty for what society is really placing him in jail for, but feeling immensely guilty for something else. Not tipping a bartender, or -- Right. Yeah. And the emphasis is on the fact that there is a conscience there, there is a consciousness that to me goes completely against the grain of the way working-class characters have been represented. They have been represented as having no soul, no consciousness, no subjectivity, nonpersonality. It makes them human come to life. Now here we come to some -- you were going to say something. Algren says that "Literature is made on any occasion that a, a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity." That's it. And by the way, on that point, as we're talking about Nelson, the comic, the clown, Sparrow, he breaks your heart. In short stories, for example, Stickman's Laughter. It's about a little guy, ex-guy, ex-fighter, and he loses all the money and he comes home, because I thought of that because of what Jim Giles said about, "Better than no love at all," he comes home and there's the old lady waiting for him, and suddenly you realize, she understands, she forgives. And that story is great because he wins at first. Most Algren characters lose right away and perpetuate it, but this guy goes, doubles his paycheck, comes back and the wife still isn't home, and that's the one reason he'd gone out to gamble in the first place, otherwise they're going to go down to the shows. So then he goes out and gets drunk and loses all the money -- And it's that feeling of compassion, and perhaps in a story called Leave It to Aunt Elly. Oh, yeah. Here's a girl who's a hooker, alleged to this Mexican fighter, and there's this bond between them and then he finds out about her. But the line -- we, perhaps we should hold that, because the actress Geraldine Page admired Nelson very much, and she pointed something out. Remember she was a great Tennessee Williams heroine. Tennessee Williams banked on her a great deal, but she admired Algren, she says, "Something about his characters. If only one of them had said something!" And they didn't, you know, you know, they can't bring themselves to say it. And so that ache is there that is not resolved because someone did not make -- it's rather -- for the, well, we'll come to you guys, I want to hear more from my guests Carla Cappetti and James Giles and Rod -- James Lewin and Bill Savage, all four scholars of Nelson Algren. [pause in recording] You don't mind my calling you academics, you are, in the best sense of the word, you're teachers. [laughing] We I'm still, I'm still unemployed, so I'm, I'm not quite an academic yet. So we come -- why is it? Now a big question. You've offered reasons why you're attracted to Algren. What is it that makes him, let's face it, a non-person? You take The New York Review of Books if name something, the most prestigious of all literary publications, I don't recall his every being mentioned outside of a letter of protest from me and another guy when some guy was rapping him. Now What do you think? Well, I'm asking you, Carla. I'll take over But we want to hear it from you, too. My sense is that his take on working-class characters and the underclass is so out of line with anything people are used to expect, people, not just academics, everybody. They expect either a sentimental version, they want to feel good. They're -- the poor are not so bad. They're not all evil. There's something good there. They want the sentimental feeling-good version, or they want just the version that the naturalists used to give, they're all alcoholic, they're all depraved, and there's nothing there to be saved. Social Darwinism. Exactly. Algren stays away from both. He manages to makes us laugh, without caricaturing. He manages to show the grotesque distortions of people's humanity without making them into grotesques, pure grotesques, which is the stereotype of these characters that is predominant in the literature. I think that's what it is. When people don't recognize something, it doesn't exist, and that's true of literary critics of academics of -- That's great. I think that Algren unmasks the respectable establishment by showing those, by showing the, the inner soul of the people who've never had respect, and by, by, by putting it from the point of view of the outsiders, he is really representing the insiders' establishment values and showing how much that establishment is lacking the values that it's espousing and that it's claiming. So he's, he's unmasking the hypocrites. Because he's unmasking his hypocrites, they don't want to hear from him. They don't want to know about it. He's, he's like the, the prophet in the wilderness who comes into the king's court and who tells the king and who tells the priest and who tells the, the, the inner sanctum that this is not what the, the, what God wants from you. This is not the real holy worship. He's like the Shakespearean fool who tells the king exactly the truth, and except for the fool can't get away with it. So he's in a sense bringing too much of the true values of the culture to the cultural establishment, and the cultural establishment therefore wants to kick him out. James Giles. It's, it's interesting to point out that the decade that did Algren in in terms of the academic canon was the 1950s, which is a pretty horrible decade in every way. An interesting thing to say to remember about that, and nobody much remembers this, Algren won in 1950 the first National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm, but then later in the decade, very conservative critics like Norman Podhoretz, whom Algren called "Norman Poodlespitz" -- Perjuretz. Yes, right, [laughing] and then Leslie Fiedler whom Algren referred to By the way, the word he could -- something -- "Hinkle Finkle the footnote king." Yes, right, that was -- And Fiedler, Algren called Leslie Fleacure, and it was those people who basically ran Algren out of the canon. And you could just see it deliberately happening. And they didn't just run Algren out of the canon, they changed the ground rules for what was serious literature. Before the mid-to-late '50s and the ascendance of new critics and foremost critics, socially engaged literature about the down and out was considered serious literature, even if it wasn't funny or as good as Algren. And then they just changed the rules, they pulled the rug out from under him and, and Dreiser and Richard Wright and everybody else who worked in that tradition. And Farrell. And Farrell, but also it comes down to a matter of, well you just brought up the humor. Algren as a human being didn't play by the rules that the academic canon makers wanted to play by. So when he responded to criticism with jokes and with funny names and with grotesqueries and, and these sort of antic responses, they just took that as proof that see, he isn't a really serious writer because he engages in this silliness instead of, you know, talking man to man. They didn't know how to handle him. I remember certain events moments he's debating William Buckley, Jr. but -- I'd have paid money to see that. No, on a program monitored, moderated by a conservative guy, a radio program and Buckley's going crazy because Algren's and he's, "When you were a member of the Communist Party or whatever," Nelson accused of various things, "When you were," he says, "When you robbed that grocery store when you were 4 years old in Paterson, New Jersey," he says "I beg your pardon!" "Well, when you robbed that store, do you remember when that the," said, he would do these crazy things to in-- to show how horrendous the junk was that destroyed people, but I think that you pointed out, all of you, in this, all four of you did, that, that decade of the '50s. He did win the first national -- but that was 19 -- I didn't realize. Forty-nine and fifty. Boy, that's interesting, and so of the dec -- yes And it's also it's not just that the rules for everything changed, it's that the, the canon became an academic canon. Right. Before the, the, expansion of the university system with the G.I. Bill after the war and all the rest, the canon was made by journalists, by people like you, Studs, by people writing in newspapers and for general po-- circulation magazines. When the Academy expanded by tremendous amount, then they started making the canon in universities with people who frankly didn't have any contact with the man When you say the canon, just word or two. I know it to be, just to be elementary but The canon, my definition of it is, that list of books which, if you claim to be educated you either have to have read, be able, pretend to have read, or be able to fake having read. So therefore he's out of that. He's out of that. Although it's a very specific canon that is promoted after the war. And it's the canon of what is now called the modernist canon. Modernist, critical, new critical Now, [incidentally?] the modernist they When you say, like the new criticism it's The new critical canon, and the modernist that were promoted, a modernism in many ways then are used by Algren in his work, but he uses them not in a, in bourgeois setting, in middle-class characters, but he uses them among poor lumpen proletariat working-class characters. So it's not that he's out of the tradition, it's just that he uses the devices, the techniques -- And they, and the critics who dismiss him define him not by the fact that he participates in modernism, but by the things he does that isn't like the rest of modernism. So they label him by the things that don't fit what they like in order to dismiss him. You know, you talk about modernism, it's, it's interesting that Ernest Hemingway, probably the peak of the modernist canon, admired Algren a great deal. Immensely. Said he was better than Faulkner. Right. Yeah, and you know, I always have wondered about if Algren had responded to those attacks in the '50s with a kind of humility if it might have gone differently. I'd rather he But I'm saying I'm glad he didn't, 'cause that, then he wouldn't have been Algren. Right. He would have had The thing is that there was these, there were these social forces within the new criticism, it was the McCarthyism. Right. And this was -- He couldn't get a passport. This was very much a part of the whole background of it. It was also a New York centrality in this all, the intellectual New York center. Which Algren refused to, to kowtow to as well. And, and Leslie Fieder -- Fiedler called him "the bard of the stumblebum," very sort of, you know, catchy phrase which it's like, it's like pinning, like pinning a, a, a sign on his back. "Kick me." Yeah, and saying, you know, and, and, and making him the outcast, the bard of the stumblebum, the one who we, writes about what we don't want to hear about, what we don't want to care about, people that we would never invite to dinner, and that's what, you know, defined him as being outsider. One we'd never invite to dinner. By the way, that, that But no, out for drinks maybe. You know, I hate to be personal, but Bellow used the phrase "a tavern writer." "Tavern writer." Well, as a bartender, I take offense at that. But it's interesting, the, the review of Walk on the Wild Side, where Fiedler labeled Algren bard of the stumblebum, he also dismissed him in that same paragraph as writing about the, the last of the noble savages at the farthest removed from its, from the audience for literature, which has a really weird assumption, and which is that people only read literature to read about people who are like them. Right. Right. And that's something that, before the formalist new critical canon might have been the case, was not the case, and now since then is the case. It is, you read a literature, a literary book to read about people like you as opposed to read about people not like you, and Algren wrote about people who aren't readers of books, whose, whose, whose cultural reference are all movies and, and popular culture. I want to ask a question to Studs. Yes, ma'am. In your opinion, since you knew him and you knew, you know where he came from, what were the most important ingredients that made Algren so difficult to handle for traditional Academy? Because he -- What They didn't how to handle him because they were accustomed to a certain kind of ritual, and he defied those rituals. Like he'd make jokes, most outrageous jokes, that they were offended by but didn't quite understand. [laughing] You see? And so he would, I think, the truth of the matter is, I think they were, if, I may be romanticing, they were scared of him. Because how do you handle someone you can't handle? And so he also was saying stuff that deep, deep down they may have suspected was true, and that's what you never forgive somebody who is able to get at a core of truth that you are denying. You'll kill him! And so in a sense they had to kill him, as far as reputation is concerned. I want to follow that up, Studs. You knew him really well personally. You were the one person that, that, that was, he stuck by throughout the whole time. If, if, if Algren was the, the Hamlet of Chicago literature, you were the Horatio. Well [laughing] Talk about a canonical reference! And the rest is silence! No, no, but why, why, why did he, why was it that you were the one person he never blew off? I don't know. Which, I think I do. His second wife, Betty, said married to Nelson is a, is like, because he's, Nelson's a strange or volatile kind of figure, married to him is like living with a wheel of fire, or the wheel of fire. So it's very hard -- so I think I never -- The I never, I never dug -- oh, he'd stay at the house overnight a lot of times and we friends for the years. I would, knew something told me, the wife said this, "Never, ever ask very personal things." Like he, he did, he broke friendships, I must say this, very, you know, ungallantly With Richard Wright, with a lot of people. With a lot of people, oh, even things he said about Simone de Beauvoir were not exactly the kindest in the world. Have you read The Mandarins? That's not the kindest thing in the world, Although I must admit, very funny. You see, he was a very, even when he does a cruel thing at times, he's very funny. But there's that private life. You know, he always signed inscribed with a cat, figure of a cat. A cat to him is the alley cat. A cat to him is unmastered. A cat to him is -- a dog is no good. A dog is just a [head?] -- but a cat! So he always was the cat, and that's his -- so he was as -- well, obviously I loved him very much, and admired him very, because he was unique. He was, I suppose you used the words American original, he was, which we'll lead to before we take our break and maybe hear his voice once more, to why it was that Sartre and de Beauvoir, and certain people in Europe were drawn to him. What is it that drew them to him? But should we hear his voice once more? Here's Nelson, now he has these recurring figures like Lost Ball Stahouska or some fellow Willie who's always feeling suspicious, so the cops arrest him all the time because he feels suspicious and looks suspicious, and he has a police line, a police file an eighth of an inch long, the cop says, to be more respectable it should be used to have a bigger, a half an inch. He's finally arrested and finally he decides to become a cop himself. But he's also called sometimes Ipso Facto. Ipso Facto, I'm here. So this Ipso Facto as he is drafted into the army just a phrase or two of Nelson describing Ipso as a, as a rookie soldier. Ipso's draft board was a bit startled when he materialized at the induction center. Had he not been three inches over six feet and weighing only 129 pounds, the manner in which his head was set on his shoulders wouldn't have been so conspicuous. All the inducting officer could think to ask was, "Are you going to be on our side?" "Well sir, I'd like to die for my country," Ipso announced, "Only, I have bad teeth." "Oh, that's all right," the officer decided, having recovered from his first surprise. "We don't want you to bite the enemy." It was only his neck which deprived Ipso of becoming a force for law and order in Chicago. Had they ever let him ask the questions in the query room, he would have asked all the right questions. "If you're not guilty of something, why are you trying to make fools of us by having us stand around asking you questions? If you're so innocent, what are you bleating about? If you're not guilty of something, you must be innocent of something, and that's even more serious." Ipso hated work. He hated work so much that he not only hated people who went to work, but he hated unemployed people [fades out]. Now you heard here, the, the authorities, the sargeant was saying, "Are you on our side?" [laughing] And explaining that. Pick a side. This is Algren's, that's the big question. They -- quite obviously people knew on whose side Nelson was. What's that quote again? Earlier you -- I've got it right here. "Literature is made on any occasion when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity." And he's actually got a couple other things that applied both to this and the same afterword to City on the Make that apply to what we were talking about a minute ago, why he didn't stick around, or why the, the canon, the canon makers booted him out. He writes, "The history of American letters in, in this strict view, is a record of apparently senseless assaults upon standard operating procedure commonly by a single driven man," and then a little later "the hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. Well, the judges don't like being brought down off Ah, Literary judges or the, the legal judges, and I think the European writers like Sartre and de Beauvoir were, were attracted to that anti-hierarchical aspect of Algren as well as I think his, his American original, as you call him. He was a writer like nothing they'd ever seen in Europe. They just don't breed them like that over there. Everybody missed this for a while. There is a very strong existentialist aspect of Algren's writing, and that, that quote, "If you're not guilty of something, you're innocent of something, and that's worse" really gets the kind of Sartrean existentialism. Let's cut to that. That's a good spot right here, we'll pick this right up with, with Carla Cappetti, and Jim Giles and James Lewin and Bill Savage. Yeah, I think the fact that Sartre, de Beauvoir admired him so much, I'm always concerned with the fact that Algren, like Richard Wright and other writers like him have been made into European writers, they're not really American. But the fact is Algren is very aware of an American tradition within which he operates. Whitman, Dreiser, yeah. And I think that if there is admiration from European writer, it's admiration for this whole tradition, not for this Algren is unique, but in a way he's also part of a Ah, the idea is that they admire an indigenous American tradition. And he's very American in that respect. Let's hold off on, that's a good spot. [pause in recording] Carla Cappetti and Jim Giles and Jim Lewin and Bill Savage. Jim Giles, you were about to say. Yeah, in, in terms of the, the, the excerpt we heard, the first excerpt we heard -- About Lost Balls, right. Notice how much that is like a, a Mark Twain tall tale. Or a Marx Brothers movie. And it works the same way as a Marx Train -- Mark Twain tall tale. You just build exaggeration and absurdity on absurdity. Algren I think bought, brought something like the Twain tall tale to urban fiction, and nobody had ever done that. That's, that's a very interesting, isn't it? Stuart Dybek's done it since, but I think Algren was the first You remember, he mid -- he was not New York, he was Chicago, Detroit, but Chicago and his travels during the Depression with [that so?], he was covering hinterlands as well. You remember he in somebody and boots and others, on the road. But the city! The city, and tall tales, that's, Jim Well I'm just saying that's, that's another way that the canon makers dismissed him. They called him just a Chicago writer, just an urban writer, as opposed to a, a writer like Bellow who writes about Chicago and he's an urban writer, but is really about the whole world. You know, they just dismiss him as a regionalist. See, he writes about the America that's in America, the America that's lost within itself. Jim --I'm sorry. Well, just as you're talking, and Carla's looking something up, just as you're talking, you said, you know, Chicago writer. Well, Nelson was practically flat broke, as he was most of the time [laughing] -- very When you never win. German, German publishers and German TV people, he was European stuff, primarily German, so you could see he was not a Chicago writer as such. They interested in what he understood about cities and those people -- That's the label that people used to dismiss him. And those people who are the nonpersons, those not worth discussing he would discuss and make come alive, and they recognized that, that indigenous American thing you're talking about, Carla. Right, and I think it's also an admiration, not just so much for something that is so American, but something that is, was missing in Europ-- in many European literary traditions that was much more advanced, much more developed, much more in contact with the street and the squares and the cities and the neighborhoods. Returning to the comment about the fact that there are elements of the tall tale, I feel there are many elements from popular culture in Algren's fiction: tall tales, ballads, the blues, you can hear these material through his stories. And if I can just read from The Face on the Barroom Floor, this is a description of Fancy, one of the character: "Thus he was a man of singular virtue, and to this single virtue he held fast: no man could accuse him of taking a dime from any woman by guile or strength or seduction. But he was a competent mechanic and a good hand to overhaul a hot car in a hurry. He could preach salvation in a voice so gentle that the mission stiffs would linger on after the doughnuts were passed; he could roar hell-fire at those walking toward the doors so fearfully that they returned sheepishly to their seats. He could mix a drink capable of knocking a man out in a minute or fix one that wouldn't take effect for five hours. He could sell a tip on a burned-out horse and sell the same sucker again, an hour after the horse had run out." And on and on. If this isn't a tall tale, spoken in the rhythms and in the, a musical voice of a As you say that, he has one called Ballad for an Absconding Jockey -- no, An Absconding Bookie, and I happen to know the guy, and introduce him to a guy, and he, I changed his name. He was a petty, sort of, and he'd always give tips at the races. Nelson rarely won. But when he won, it was a triumph. So he's going to bet on a horse. He's at the track and he meets my friend who says, "Oh, that horse hasn't got a chance, about a 50 to one bet, let me take the bet. I might as well." He says "Okay, you take the bet." He thinks the guy's gonna -- the horse wins! Fifty to -- Nelson would have won about five hundred dollars, put ten bucks on him. And so the guy ab-- just disappears! And Nelson been chasing him for a long day, so he wrote the ballad "For an Absconding Bookie." "Where have you gone, Sam the Jackal, with the sky so blue and the re--" and he describes a race and it's absolutely hilarious, but also funny! He's the fall guy in it. Very often he's the fall guy. He, he's, he's he's the, he's the square. Right. It's interesting, they talk about the labels. The,the passage Carla read is very much the rhythm of the street and the spoken word and all that, and that's where the, the Twain tall tale comes from, but you could, if you don't like that, you dismiss it as a tavern tale, or a tavern writer. If you like it, it's a Twainian tall tale, if you don't like it, it's just tavern talk. And speaking as a bartender, that's tavern talk. And so those who dominate in our culture, that is our taste, New York, I guess you call them sanf-self-anointed mandarins, they're the ones who more or less determine Yes. And so they determine he's out. They determine what's in print. If, if, if you aren't gonna be in print, you're out, and he was in and out of print and out of print for most of the time until Dan Simon at Four Walls Eight Windows and the people at Thunder Mouths Press in the very late '80s, early '90s, put his stuff back in, in print and in packages that say "This is a serious writer." But Carla. But to return to the betting situation, Nelson Algren liked to bet on losers, not only at the track, but in society. He didn't care to bet on the winner, whereas the publication industry, the critical industry, likes to bet on the winners, those that they know will be liked by everybody and will -- You know, I don't know if you have, playing poker games once in a while, poker games, invariably I find those who win regularly in poker games are pretty dull people. You know, they're the bookkeepers, they keep track. They can count the cards. Those who lose are like Algren, because you see there's something about gambling that's crazy and wild and unique and astonishing, to them it's keeping books and ledger. And so they win. They are the winners! They are the systemists, a system study. I have a, yeah I have a question for you, Studs, about Algren. One of my students at the Newberry library, [Dylan? Dillon?] [Hoya? Hoy?], a labor lawyer here in Chicago, says that he thinks that Algren left two Pulitzer Prizes on the table, that his gambling was a problem for his writing. Do you think that's a, a, a valuable insight or Well, he did, what he left, he left if, not Pulitzer Prizes, a good deal of dough, [laughing] as his second, both wives can well attest. Both can. So he did, you see, the idea, he was a romantic in his own mind. That is, he was Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, indeed he was in his imagination and his heart. But in real life, he was Sparrow! The guy, he was both, you see, and at the same time, he was attractive, I mean women found him. So I must ask a big question, what is it that drew, you hinted on it, Sartre and de Beauvoir to him? Jim Giles. That he was willing to confront the kind of existential absurdist despair. And you know, I don't know Algren, I don't know how much he would -- he joked about not knowing what existentialism was. But, you know, I kind of doubt that, [laughing] and he certainly developed an art that evoked it. You mentioned the lineups. The what? The lineups, the police lineups. In Man with the Golden Arm. And, and then -- Or The Captain of Bad Dream. Nothing like that anyway. Yeah, I, the police lineup is a kind of device Algren perfected, and, and if you think about it, you have the suspects who are behind a glass where the spectators can see them, they cannot see the spectators. Right. And then you got this character named Record Head Bednar who's developed this kind of art form where he queues with them until one of them says in effect, "We're all alike." "We're all members of "We're all members," we're going -- yeah. And that's -- "Of one another." Yeah. "Members