Algren at Sea (18 page)

Had the big crapout to them been simply in being born? Or had it begun later, and all Daddy's fault too, when he'd forbidden his boy to ride a bicycle for fear of a skinned knee? Had the fathers, out of love, built a picture-window world wherein well-behaved sons could watch others ride no-hands with no risk to themselves? Was Junior so grim about everything because his true self had been left looking out of a picture window?

While campus fellows, authentic paperfish authorities, began seeking ways and means of bringing the arts into a picture-window world where the artist would be both safer and richer, certain prebeatnik cats went searching Chicago's South Side for ways and means of passing for black.

Through Richard Wright we had become aware that those who ran the white world had lost the will to act honestly. We had learned from Wright that it is those who have nothing to lose by speaking out who become the ones to speak the truth. And to these, all the horrors of poverty—schizophrenia, homosexuality, drug addiction, prostitution, disease, and sudden death on the gamblers' stairs—were no more remarkable than the sight of a man with a fresh haircut. In the midst of life, where there are nothing but horrors, there is no horror.

Crafty madams and ancient midwives, tenor-sax players and policy-runners, con men, quacks, pimps and tarts, poolroom sharks and intellectuals, all were citizens of a country whose capital was Forty-seventh and Indiana. But only the latter had divorced themselves, intellectually, from Negro life. Talking in phrases picked up in evening courses at the University of Chicago or at Northwestern, we knew that the phrases, so high-sounding to their own ears, were as artificial as hairstraighteners
and skin-lighteners. We had been made suspicious of the values of the white world by Wright. Our suspicions had been confirmed in war.

Wright had made us aware that the Christianity of the white American middle class had lost it nerve: now we saw it to be a coast-to-coast fraud. And the fraud lay in this: that property was more valuable than people. The Negro had come up in America, putting the value of people above that of property simply because he had no property to evaluate.

This fraud, as essential to successful merchandising as making a profit, had by 1948 so pervaded the American white middle class that its ancient image of Jesus Christ had become that of The Young Man On His Way Up whose total purpose was accumulation of securities; and whose morality was confined by the warning: “Don't Get Caught.”

By 1948 everything went, in the race through the supermart of publishing, advertising, television, and bond-selling; and Christianity had lent its blessing to the Supermart. The image of America reflected in editorials in
Life,
on TV, in movies and on the stage, was a painted image that had nothing to do with the real life of these States.

“The horror, gentlemen, lies precisely in this: that there is no horror.”

But in Negro music we heard voices of men and women whose connection with life was still real.

Still heard—and yet were already being overwhelmed by Negro voices in praise of hair that was no longer nappy. They became so cool that they surpassed themselves; causing whites to imitate their coolness.

Under the impetus of a new American affluence, a new Negro elite, as eager as the white middle class ever had been to put aside feeling for ownership, began to emerge.Taking its cue from the enormous circulations of
Time, Life, Look,
and
Reader's Digest,
the Negro press now began presenting an image of the Negro bourgeoisie, as flattering to that class as the white journals to theirs. In it we saw the same disconnection between the life of the States and its representation that marked the white bourgeoisie.

This saddening change was never demonstrated more inadvertently than in a soap opera so corny that it would scarcely have been tolerated on afternoon TV.
Raisin in the Sun
gained instant acclaim by white critics because it presented the identical aspirations, among Negroes, as had led the white American middle class to founder in a world of gadgets.
Raisin in the Sun,
enacted by Negro players, was not a play about Negro life at
all. It came straight out of the turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater by way of Clifford Odets.

Its characters, like those of
The Motor Boys in Mexico,
were immediately identifiable. The only dimension was that which faced the audience. The story moved flatfootedly about an investment in real estate; and, indeed, it was nothing more than a play about investing in real estate. For its reality was the make-believe reality in which the white merchandising class had invested. And had never been able to understand how life, lived for acquisition, rather than for living, leaves the liver dead long before he dies.

The new Negro elite, in adapting the hypocrisy of the white ruling class, had now made their adaption theatrical.

This elite found its apologist in the expatriate novelist James Baldwin.

“All I can do,” Baldwin wrote, “is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people can be better than they are.”

This admirable sentiment would have rung less hollowly had it not been composed in Corsica.

And had the writer not been sporting a papier-mâché fez.

The hypocrisy, having become theatrical, had now become hilarious.

The Bartender-Who-Didn't-Get-a-Prize began a long rigmarole about how he used to run a café but didn't get a prize for that either. He didn't want to serve coffee with milk because once you started something like that it led to serving ham and eggs, and there was no end to
that
but bankruptcy. Why he thought bankruptcy was worse than the condition he was in he didn't explain.

He appeared to have suffered some more recent loss, because he kept peeking inside my camera to see if he could find it in there. Then he would hand it to his wife and she would peek in, but she couldn't see anything either. Finally I took a peek myself and what do you know: I'd forgotten to load it.

This was a shock, because I have been trying to get a start in life since 1929 and if it isn't one damned thing, then it's another. One decade it's a nationwide depression, so that if you make a living you're a fink; the next decade it's a war, if you don't go you're 4-F; and the next decade if you don't get your picture on the cover of
Time,
your relatives are ashamed of you, especially your mother.

What I ought to do right now to start getting a start, is to load this camera with color film and do a photograph book called
Poor People of Barcelona
and follow it up with
Poor People of Andalusia.
When I finish with the poor people of Spain I'll do the poor people of Italy. I'll do
Poor People of Naples, Poor People of Sicily, Poor People of Rome
—any place where they have a good hotel. Great journals like
Playboy
will hire me to make their subscribers even more self-satisfied. I will cater slavishly to the utterly complacent; I will be the poor man's Cecil Beaton. In my work, children bitten by dock rats in Istanbul will come to serve a social purpose by helping subscribers to
Heritage
who read in bed to feel that much the more contented. What was it that brush salesman wrote in
Saturday Review—
“There is no
true
compassion in these modern works. The degraded and the criminal are identified with. One has to be a pervert or a savage to elicit sympathy.” Al
right,
I'll work along
these
lines—compassion is for the healthy and the well-to-do and by the time I hit Budapest we'll
all
feel more secure.

Perhaps the Innerspring Mattress people will send me to India. Benares, or Indore. I'll get to photograph the Maharajah of Indore outdoors and the Maharanee indoors. In no time at all my picture will be on the cover of
Time
and Clare Luce Tooth will be on the phone telling me there is a little party at Fleur Scheisskopf 's place and
I
am invited!

What shall I say
then?
Why, that I'm not able to leave my typewriter, thank you all the same, until my masterwork,
Inside the Inside of Europe
is completed.

“I can't wait to read it,” Clare will tell me, “I'm
terribly
interested in Europe.”

“The book has nothing to do with Europe,” I'll have to forewarn Clare; “it deals only with what it is like on the inside of the inside. What it's
really
like.”

This touristic fantasy left me faint, and I came around only because someone kept tugging at the loose piece of my jacket. It's that clown of a porter again, I realized. But it wasn't. It was the bartender returning my
camera. What was I doing leaning against somebody's wall? I hadn't noticed at the time but it sure looked like I'd left the bar.

“That was pretty good
carraquillo
,” I congratulated him.

No, I didn't tip him either. “Honesty is its own reward,” I let him know and, pushing him gently yet firmly to one side, went on my way contentedly.

Well, how would
you
feel if
you
had been Zane Grey when James Jones came along?

Not only that, but how would you feel hauling a stupid camera by a stupid strap and feeling stupider by the minute? It's true nobody asked me to start a thing like this, but looking at it another way, I'd like to know who is going to stop me.

Tomorrow I go up on the roofs. There must be
something
up there.

 

The Porter-Who-Has-It-Almost-Made knocked this morning when I came out of the bathroom. The reason I came out was that there was no soap in there. The reason there is no soap, of course, is that the clown steals it and sells it on the black market. Sure enough, when I opened the door there he was, bearing a tray on which there rested a token of affection: a bar of Palmolive. I didn't miss the point of the tray. But all I did was take the soap and slam the door. Later, I realized I hadn't heard him walk away, and opened the door again. There he still stood, tray, smile, and all.

“Arriba, España!”
I told him, and shut it again.

You'll never reach a rooftop in Barcelona by going up a well-lighted stair, because buildings that take good care of themselves don't let people climb onto their roofs. The stair you want is one in a building that don't give a damn, lights or no lights, the hell with the broom and all like that, because that's exactly the kind of house that leaves a little door, at the very top of its creaking rickety stair, open just enough so you can force it the rest of the way and there you are: On top of Barcelona.

The first door I made was held by a wire from the outside, that I could have made sooner but for a dog who stuck his nose in the crack of light and pretended he was guarding Darryl Zanuck. A woman lifted the wire from the outside and took the pooch off. It was some roof. It was one hell of a roof.

People had built shacks up there and on the roofs all around that made
me wonder whether Hoover was running again. They had made them out of wine-barrel staves, orange crates, paper, iron and tar, and all the litter of the Barrio-Chino. A few pesetas to the
concierja
and what the landlord don't know won't hurt him was the idea.

They even kept chickens up there. I didn't see any hens but a rooster came out who looked married.

The woman looked young but haggard, the way mountain women often look in the States. Well, we were pretty high up at that; maybe it's altitude does it. Her husband came out and stood beside her and I offered him a pack of cigarettes. He took one and handed the pack back.

“Gracias, señor.
”

They weren't from New York, either.

He asked me did I
sprechen Deutsch
and I said if I did it would come as a pure surprise as I wasn't
Deutsch,
I wasn't even German. It developed that if he had a choice of who should be on his roof, he would prefer a German; but if he couldn't get one an American was better than nothing. The reason for this is that the Germans have a better record than we have here for fighting Communism. That is the thing you say you are doing here when you want to get cheap labor. It covers a surprising number of holds, all of which are unbreakable.

The man didn't want a photograph of himself and I hardly blame him. Besides, they were in the way of my sky and so was their damned rooster. I sent them all back to the shack, but told the rooster he could stay outside and peck at things. I wanted to see if he'd hit a worm. I hadn't had breakfast myself and I couldn't remember anyone saying Stay for lunch. Were they planning to surprise me? If they just had coffee and a spot of flour, I know how to make poor-do gravy. But I didn't come to Barcelona for a good time, I came here to get a start in life.

The reason I am a little late in getting a start is that just when I got my Pfc stripe, that war was over. One more week and I would have been an acting corporal!

It goes that way for me for days at a time. Then it gets worse. The time it got
really
worse was when I left the dog tags on the bedpost and didn't miss them until the M.P. asked me where they were. He was just a fellow who enjoyed making a bet on something now and then and had nobody to bet with, so he'd made a bet with himself that the next fellow coming out would have left his tags on a bedpost. He was as surprised as I was.
Both of us were even more surprised when it turned out I didn't have a pass either.

In fact, I had no evidence, outside of a uniform, that I was in anybody's army at all. Speaking English didn't prove I was an American, as the English had an army around somewhere that was making a good thing out of singing
Lili Marlene
and smoking American cigarettes. (Nevertheless it had been recognized by Truman Capote.) What I demanded to know of the M.P. was whether he was for us or Churchill. Just because he spoke English didn't make
him
an American either. He kept getting in deeper and deeper until he started feeling suspicious of himself. He felt he was either trying to arrest somebody from another army or was being a big fink for pinching an American.