Algren (33 page)

Still filled, like Stub, with the feeling that someone has cheated him but not a killer, Fitz now rails on the courthouse steps against the “Papist rapists” as Byron stands by, coughing into a handkerchief and pointing out contradictions. Fitz gives a wild sermon that seems like a parody of every midnight mission and Salvation Army spiel Nelson ever heard, mashed with William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech. Fitz revs up the crowd so thoroughly that they feel certain that even hellfire is too good for them.
“Un-
utter
-uble sorrows is in store for all,” Fitz promises. He is a “Santa Claus with nothing save horrors in his sack.” Religion is presented as spectacle—a way for those who own nothing to pass the time. Fitz is not a murderer anymore, but a fool. “Had there been an International Convention of White Trash that week, Fitz would be the chairman.”

Searching for affection, Dove becomes friendly with Teresina Vidavarri, a voluptuous Mexican woman who runs the local chili parlor. She gives him work fixing tires, and starts teaching him to read. Through her, he hears the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and the image of the marred soldier who has one leg because of a shortage of tin is carried through the book—representing a world of people who are in some way crippled and subject to the whims of fate. Teresina had been married as a teenager to a sadist, and has sworn off men forever. She feels an attraction for the healthy young Dove, and they become lovers, making Dove feel like he's “a born world-shaker.” But then Teresina is ashamed, and correctly suspects that Dove has stolen money from her. She takes it out on Dove by first firing him, and then, when he refuses to leave, making him work harder. He rapes her as she hangs out her wash. Like Cass and Bruno Bicek, he has brutally destroyed a chance at love. But this scene differs from the rape in
Never Come Morning
in that it seems inexplicable—Bruno and Cass are weak kids driven by peer pressure, while Dove acts alone, and seems driven only by a temporary urge for power. Later he tells himself he would have helped her up, but heard the train whistle and could not stay.

He gets out of town immediately afterward on a freight train, and meets the young runaway Kitty Twist, a savage character who enjoys causing mayhem. “You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It's when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That's the
best
.” She sounds like Knifey Sawicki, snapping his gum. They do a robbery
together, and Dove gets the money while Kitty gets pinched. While counting his money, he finds Teresina's handkerchief in his pocket, and feels remorse, “a shadowy apprehension that he might never hurt anyone except those who were dearest.” However, he is not haunted by guilt in the way of Cass, Bruno, and Frankie—remorse glimmers, and then is forgotten. Because of this, it is hard to sympathize completely with Dove.

Dove travels to New Orleans, where he has a series of misadventures trying to survive, in the manner of Huck Finn or Candide, but with more raunch. Nelson re-creates some of his own experiences in New Orleans in the early 1930s—the girl showing her breasts while selling pop, along with the door-to-door sale of coffeepots and skin lighteners and phony certificates for marcel waves at the Madame Dewberry Beauty Parlor. “I was only tryin' to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,” Dove explains. Later he gets work at a home condom factory, run by a cynical ex-abortionist, before finding his true calling as a performer in a live sex show, pretending to deflower prostitutes pretending to be virgins.

The novel mocks the American Horatio Alger ideal of climbing the ladder of success—“Those with better sense began at the top and worked their way down, the route being faster…. The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top.” Though the maxims from
The Communist Manifesto
that began sections of
Somebody in Boots
are gone, the book is even sharper against the false promises of capitalism, though it offers no alternatives. It compares the ordinary struggling working American to a turtle waiting to be cut up into soup—“they believe all things will come to him who will but struggle.” The novel scorns both the Chamber of Commerce “do-righters” who sleep with hookers and then feel they need to purge their guilt by going to a preacher who will blame the sinful women, and the politicians who believe the poor can take care of themselves while the rich need government
help. “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.” Some of the book's sexual humor has not aged well, but the political satire is sharper than ever.

Dove's sex show is run by Oliver Finnerty, the villainous proprietor of the bordello, who brutally mistreats the impoverished women who become prostitutes there because they have no other options. When their mill jobs close, they find work in the streets. Most of the women become mindless creatures for Finnerty because he treats them with such contempt. He does not even want them to pick their own names. “You can
always
treat a woman too good,” he advises Dove. “But you can never treat one too bad.” Algren shows how the stereotype of the mindless, subhuman hooker is actually the creation of the pimp and the john, in the same way the fragile, dependent female was created by her culture, as Beauvoir had explained in
The Second Sex
. Algren had read
The Second Sex
in translation, and while he may have disagreed with the idea of total equality between the sexes, he understood how societal conditions could dehumanize people.

One woman who does not lose her dignity under Finnerty is Hallie Breedlove, an educated mulatto who is a schoolteacher before the discovery of her mixed ancestry causes her to be driven away. Hallie is the mulatto heroine Nelson had wanted for
Somebody in Boots
, but had been forced to transform into the white Norah. When Dove first comes to Oliver's house trying to sell phony beauty certificates, he discovers that Hallie has the same book of fairy tales that Teresina had, and he sees the picture of the tin soldier. Hallie continues Dove's education using Algren's old favorite, Robert Louis Stevenson's
A Child's Garden of Verses
. Hallie must be a terrific teacher, because in no time Dove moves from Hans Christian Andersen to Shakespeare and the history of Pompeii. Their
brief affair is another of those strange, sunlit stretches in Algren's books—with Dove and Hallie going to the zoo and sharing Cracker Jack prizes, and then seeing a production of
Othello
. Dove sees a glimpse of real happiness, and feels compassion and gentleness for Hallie. Love has transformed him—sent down its golden thread of escape—and his eyes are open to beauty again. “Dove marveled at the way the changeful light followed rain across the littered grass; he had never noticed how light fell before.” But this is an Algren novel, and it cannot last. Hallie is brooding on a child who died, and wants to raise another child away from the men who have tried to control her. One morning, Dove wakes up to find her gone, back to her old lover, Schmidt the legless man.

Dove gets drunk and winds up in Nelson's old prison, afflicted with Nelson's case of nettle rash. The jail is filled with characters telling stories, as if on a stage, taking their turns under the spotlight. A cell mate named Kline gives Dove the advice Nelson frequently used in his public speeches: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” On his release Dove goes back to Perdido Street, looking for Hallie, and finds Legless Schmidt, who is also looking for her. With Kitty Twist and everyone else at the bar egging him on, Schmidt beats Dove so brutally that his face is a mere paste. The scene is a redo of the short story “The Face on the Barroom Floor” from
The Neon Wilderness
, only this time, the legless man is killed by the crowd. After just having learned to see again through love, Dove is blinded. Dove has become the steadfast tin soldier, returning to his love only to be thrown into the fire. Somehow, Dove finds his way back to Arroyo, Texas, back to the chili parlor in search of Teresina. The novel ends without saying whether she takes him back.

A Walk on the Wild Side
is a strange book—it is full of brilliant, poetic writing and is more fun to read than the earlier novels. But its
emotional tone is uneven. It is neither a tragedy nor a comedy; this would not be a problem except that Dove sometimes seems like a human being and sometimes like such a drawling
Lil' Abner
cartoon that it is hard to accept his struggles as real. Simone de Beauvoir, with her usual rapid perception, put her finger on the problem in a letter; in the second part of the book, she does not see Dove as a “living boy, but just a puppet with things happening around him.” But the book itself is alive, especially in the comic scenes, such as when Dove tries to get the coffeepot back from a lusty housewife, or in the grotesque kitchen factory where the “O-Daddy” condoms hang to dry.

The book was a success and got onto the
New York Times
bestseller list for fifteen weeks between June 10 and September 23, 1956. But the reviews were widely divided—with particularly vicious notices in prominent publications. There were great reviews from Algren's friend Maxwell Geismar in the
Nation
and by Milton Rugoff in the
New York Herald Tribune
, which lauded its vitality and exuberance. In a private note to Algren, Geismar praised the book as funny and sexy in a comic way, and like Algren's own letters. The white-haired poet Carl Sandburg also sent a private letter of congratulation, saying the book had balanced elements of the sacred and the sordid. James Kelly in the
Saturday Review
found
Wild Side
a “better-made book” than any Algren had written before, with plenty of freaks and hookers, “without a dull one in the lot.” There were also some interesting half-favorable notices—Harnet Kane, for example, in the
Houston Post
said that the novel was “probably not Algren's best, for it is diffuse and fuzzy in spots; and yet it remains a work of integrity and a certain and lumbering comprehension.” Kane recognized that unlike Mickey Spillane, Algren was not playing with sadism for its own sake, though the reader is advised not to give the novel to Aunt Matilda. (Book critics of Algren were interested in what people gave their aunts—a
Neon Wilderness
critic worried about Aunt Martha.)
Newsweek
acknowledged that Algren
took on a difficult job with the book, with the risk of falling into bathos and theatricalism. The review faulted the book's shifts in tone, but said the reader is “seldom unaware of Algren's concern and compassion” for his cast of derelicts and finds sections with “an accumulative, phantasmagoric power.”

But Alfred Kazin, who expressed admiration for
The Man with the Golden Arm
, said in the
New York Times
that Algren's latest novel was filled with “over-colored writing” and a “boozily artificial and contrived quality that makes me think of it as a fantasy.” Kazin suspected that Algren didn't feel much for his subjects as human beings, “only a vague literary pity.” “It is impossible to feel that he really cares about these people, that he is interested in them, that these are human beings he has observed.” Though the review angered Algren, Kazin seemed honestly disappointed in what he saw as the book's unreality, in comparison with
Golden Arm
.

The harshest, most wounding reviews attacked not only the execution of the novel but its subject matter, set among the Depression-era underclass. Did not Algren know that it was 1956, not 1935, and the public in the comfy postwar economy had better things to do than to invite home the poor, the maimed, and the blind?
Time
magazine said that Algren had kept alive the “literary cliché” that prostitutes have hearts of gold and bums are “somehow more steeped in humanity than people who work.”
Time
pointed out that Algren had to find a second publisher for the work, and his readers “may well wonder if his sympathy for the depraved and degraded has not carried him to the edge of nonsense.” In a scalding
New Yorker
column called “The Man with the Golden Beef,” Norman Podhoretz attacked Algren for letting his theory that the under-class was better than respectable people get in the way of his art. “As a protest novel, ‘A Walk on the Wild Side' is merely petulant, with nothing, really to protest about except, perhaps, the current prosperity.” He also goes back to knock
The Man with the Golden
Arm
for never discovering what it wanted to say. Podhoretz had not yet abandoned the left to become a leader in the neoconservative movement, but the review foreshadows his future. Leslie Fiedler in a
Reporter
piece called “The Noble Savages of Skid Row” complained that “what final pleasure we find in his novels we find, alas, as voyeurs.” Fiedler ruled that Algren was made “unfortunately, once and for all in the early 1930s,” and that literature has moved on and left him “a museum piece.” William Root in
People Today
questioned Algren's entire attitude, wondering if his compassion for his subjects “might well be spent on worthier objects.” He argued that the compassion “represents a form of inverted sentimentalism”—the type that leads to the idea of the noble prostitute.

These harsh reviews did not exist in a vacuum, but came at a time of change in the way some critics were looking at novels. The New Critics of the mid-twentieth century took a scientific approach to the study of literature, viewing it as existing apart from history and politics, and even separate from the reader's reactions to it. Social protest was not only politically dangerous during the Cold War—it was out of fashion. Fiedler, famous in critical circles for finding homosexual undercurrents in
Huckleberry Finn
, had once been a member of the Young Communist League but had seen the error of his ways. His indignation at Algren is like that of an ex-smoker coughing theatrically when someone lights a cigar. Nelson's old friend Lawrence Lipton wrote in the
Chicago Review
in 1957 that Fiedler never lost a chance to confess “the guilt of his ‘innocence' during the New Deal ‘united front' thirties.” Fiedler's and Podhoretz's reviews read more like attacks on Algren himself than on the book, an argument with his statements on the dust jacket. There is no prostitute with a heart of gold in
A Walk on the Wild Side
—Hallie runs away from Dove, and Kitty is excited about his injuries. Lipton noted that voyeurism is actually condemned in
A Walk on the Wild Side
by Legless Schmidt, a character of great
integrity who turns away from Dove's sex show in disgust. The characters in
Wild Side
are not portrayed as actually better than ordinary working people—only as just as human. Fiedler's and Podhoretz's reviews read like premeditated attacks on the proletarian protest novel in search of a target—and Algren, with his National Book Award and the Preminger movie playing at the theaters, presented a nice fat one. Post–World War II American literature was “to put it mildly, unsympathetic to social literature and sociological criticism,” noted Algren scholar Carla Cappetti. Having written about the real ghetto, Algren was put into an ideological one. Nelson felt as though his critics were asking him why he could not be a good boy, as Gerson had asked with more justice long ago. Algren was presented as yesterday's news—the big man of literary Chicago in the mid-1950s was Saul Bellow, who had won the 1954 National Book Award with
The Adventures of Augie March
. His hero had started in the ghetto, but had the good sense to get out.