A Walk on the Wild Side Read Free Page A

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.
    His aesthetics were not what the new empire wanted: what was emerging, what was wanted, was a new classicism: a pared-back modernist prose. Nor was his subject – the dispossessed – any longer of interest or concern.
    ‘I think Faulkner is too tragic about life,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren. ‘Life is tragic, and it is not. In your books one can feel very well this strange two-sided truth.’ But in a