A Walk on the Wild Side Read Free

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 ethical: 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,