Algren’s own ambivalence about the new novel mirrored the growing ambivalence he felt about everything around and about him: his personal life, his prospects, his country.
‘What country is there for a white man who isn’t white?’ Algren once asked. Maybe it was the Big Easy he created in A Walk on the Wild Side.
The novel begins with Dove Linkhorn, drifter, fleeing his Texan hometown after raping the Mexican woman who has deflowered him, evading a recruiting sergeant who wants to enlist him to fight Sandino in Nicaragua, and after some adventures coming ‘at last to the town that always seems to be rocking’, a fairytale place of speakeasies and flophouses full of ‘old-time sterno drinkers and bindlestiff nomads [who] made the flophouse forenoon murky with their hardtime breath’.
Dove Linkhorn is a good soldier Švejk-like idiot with a dash of Tom Jones, an illiterate who goes to the segregated town’s black toilets and drinks from the blacks-only water fountains; who at one point gets attacked by a collie whose owner apologises: ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before’, and who declares when, seeking a job as scabbing seaman, he is asked if he belongs to a union, ‘Mister, I’m a Christian boy and don’t truckle to Yankee notions.’
In New Orleans Dove Linkhorn finds work variously running scams, making condoms and in a peepshow where he deflowers women pretending to be virgins, finally ending up in jail.
As if to mock the USA’s yearnings, Algren attributes them in A Walk on the Wild Side to pimps, panders, whores and conmen. In a society where people die of usefulness, Algren’s inverted Big Easy is a place where people ‘died of uselessness one by one, yet lived on behind veritable prairie fires of wishes, hoping for something to happen that had never happened before: the siren screaming toward the crashing smash-up, the gasp of the man with the knife in his side, the suicide leap for no reason at all’. The true perversity of Algren’s society is not sexual, but ethicaclass="underline" unlike the USA, where work is a virtue, here it is understood ‘that nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labour’.
Algren mocks the heroic, and his New Orleans is constantly upside-down and comic. There is the white naval commander who is a self-confessed ‘black mammie freak’ and pays to be beaten by old black women. After thrashing him and taking a month’s pay for her services, a black madam lowers herself onto a divan, sighs, and then asks for the evening newspaper so she can see ‘what the white folks are up to’.
The novel is at its most alive describing the ensemble casts of its brothels and jailhouse. For A Walk on the Wild Side is in the end not a novel about its hero, Dove Linkhorn, nor a naturalistic rendering, precisely drawn, of Depression-era New Orleans poverty. There is little sense of the physicality of New Orleans, its heat, its stench, its polyglot nature. For all Algren’s belief in detail, his retelling of his own New Orleans experiences, this is no more realistic a world than that of Rabelais. But with it, Algren created a uniquely American vision that questioned the essence of America, embodying a vision of truth that seems strikingly contemporary in its resonance. The book in consequence is not what it sets out to be, and its structure is sometimes looser than its language.
What remain are such telling scenes as the one in which Dove Linkhorn visits a cave-like restaurant, where he watches a pyramid of snapping turtles blindly climbing on top of each other, only to be beheaded by a black man, naked to the waist, who grabs the next topmost turtle for decapitation, a symbol for the USA’s pointless, destructive yearnings.
‘When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough,’ writes Algren, describing his true subject best.
Dove Linkhorn, Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie and a large collection of those Algren calls ‘the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores’ are all in search of the USA, only for the reader to discover in the end that these ‘lonesome monsters’ are the USA.
A Walk on the Wild Side was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in May 1956. The hit of Broadway at the time was a new Cinderella story called My Fair Lady. The times could hardly have been less propitious.
The reviews of A Walk on the Wild Side have become legendary in their savagery; at times they seem as politically charged in their circumlocutions as any Soviet review of the era, of writers deemed unacceptable by the State. There were some who defended the novel, but they were drowned out by the novel’s detractors.
Time magazine declared that Algren’s ‘sympathy for the depraved and degraded’ had ‘carried him to the edge of nonsense… Algren has dressed his sense of compassion in the rags of vulgarity’. In the New Yorker Norman Podhoretz attacked what he called Algren’s ‘boozy sentimentality’ and claimed that Algren was saying ‘we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectable’.
Leslie Fiedler similarly claimed that there was no room in Algren’s world for ‘workers or teachers or clerks’ and went on to describe Algren as ‘isolated from the life of his time. He was made, unfortunately, once and for all in the early 1930s, in the literary cult of “experience” of those times. He has not thought a new thought or felt a new feeling since… our literature has moved on and left him almost a museum piece – the Last of the Proletarian Writers’.
The political crime was unmistakable, as the verdict and punishment were inescapable. Book sales fell away. Though he continued to write and publish, Nelson Algren was finished. His novels went out of print, he was neglected, his reputation diminished to the extent that for a time he was largely forgotten. It is hard to think of a major American writer of similar stature who has had so little impact on subsequent American writing.
Algren sensed the change – how could he not? – and the way in which critics were increasingly not on the side of the artist, but of the status quo. In 1960 he wrote of the new owners of literature arriving ‘directly from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and the short story would have to conform… [forming] a loose federation, between the literary quarterlies, publishers’ offices and book review columns, presenting a view of American letters untouched by American life’. The New Criticism – with its emphasis on the search for imagery, symbols and metaphors, and its contempt for history and politics in shaping art – was for Algren a tragic misunderstanding of the role of literature; for ‘it left unheeded the truth that the proper study of mankind is man’.
In some way the criticisms of 1956 have mutated but remain: the charge that Algren was an overwrought word drunk boozed up on an outdated sentimentality stuck; that he was a relic from the 1930s; that the world had changed and Algren had not.
It is too simple to say that Algren was punished for his politics. His politics, left-leaning though they were, were not his real crime. Algren understood far better than those who blackballed him the nature of his offence.