Algren at Sea (68 page)

Authors: Nelson Algren

BOOK: Algren at Sea

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It wasn't the gulf stream of time, but the deep-floating corset borne upon it and the student's notebook that, in the end, were most important to him.

Hemingway was the picker with the long pole.

“Life is the greatest left-hander we know,” he saidâ“unless it was Charlie White of Chicago.”

And of the American writers of our time now dead, which one, given a single choice, would you bring back to life?

For myself it would have to be Hemingway.

Hemingway
all
the way.

EPILOGUE

QUAIS OF CALCUTTA

Our rigging severed the moon the night we sailed
Into that jungle of cranes and jutting spars
The smear in that dungsmoke pall was merely day
Lighting impossible multitudes; that stirred as one.
Then rose, between the No-Beef Restaurant
And the Family Planning Store
Crying
No Mama No Papa No Baby No Chowchow Papa You Give.

Kanani Mansions
someone had named that ominous tenement
Where a woman of Assam wearing golden earrings slept
Her cheek upon her palm
Her ancient
ayah
slept upon the floor.
And all night long the ceiling fan whirred on.

O night so starred, with trees like clouds at rest
With lamps that leaned in pairs
And roses black as redâ
I saw her purchased breasts
Their rise and fall.
A night that rosesâone rupee per bunchâ
Made shadows as of many rupees on the wall.

O chasmed love, with thighs that locked so sure
O deep-joyed dark, that makes the world come true:
Her roses choked within the burning air.
Yet in voluptuous gravity she slept on
Above the cabareting taxis' roar.
O night that sanctifies
The seaman's whore.

Dock-hawks followed our rigging to the sea
Then let us sail our ways alone.
Yet far, far out
With all docks gone and daylight swiftly going
Two messenger crows came cawing from the sun
Accusing meâ
No Mama No Papa No Baby No Chowchow Papa You Give.

NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include
The Man with the Golden Arm
, winner of the first National Book Award;
A Walk on the Wild Side
; and
Never Come Morning
.

Studs Finnegan's Wake
, by Molly Bloom.

Henri Motherlant,
Sur les femmes
.

Camilo Cela,
The Hive
.

Chicago Sun-Times

Interview by Joseph Haas in the
Chicago Daily News
.

Chicago Sun-Times

Saturday Evening Post

Wall Street Journal

Chicago Evening American
, April 21, 1961

Pageant
magazine, July 1961

1961
Starch Consumer Magazine Report
and
Sindlinger Audience Action Study

Pageant
magazine, July 1961

The Realist
, May 1961

See “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey,” an essay by Professor Leslie Fiedler.

See
Man in Modern Fiction
, by Prof. Edmund Fuller, Vintage Press, 95Â¢.

Â© 1962 by Dwight Macdonald. Reprinted from
Against the American Grain
by Dwight Macdonald by permission of Random House, Inc.

See
Something of Value
by Robert Ruark, a novel slack as a severed clothesline.

Edmund Fuller in
Saturday Review
.

“The Art of Evasion” by Leon Edel, in
Hemingway. A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by Robert P. Weeks.

“The white community,” Mr. Baldwin commented recently upon the murder of Malcolm X” “must share the responsibility for this thing no matter who pulled the trigger; for whoever did it was formed in the Crucible of Western Civilization.”

And whoever did it was also formed in the crucible of the American Negro community. If that community's claim to equal justice in the company of men is to have validity, it will have to assume responsibility for its own acts. Putting responsibility on Ol' White Massa for every act of violence of our times affords the Negro a convenient cop-out; and also means he wants to hold on to the immunity of being a slave.

Originally published in 1963 by The Macmillan Company, New York, under the title
Who Lost an American?

Originally published in 1965 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, under the title
Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way
.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Algren, Nelson, 1909-1981.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-583-22937-8

I. Title.
PS3501.L4625A78 2008
813'.52âdc22

2008038735