A Walk on the Wild Side Read Free Page B

nation whose culture seemed ever more hostile to irony, tragi-comic art had less and less place.
    Not the least of Nelson Algren’s charms to those of us not American is the way he is at once both entirely of the USA in all its extraordinary vibrancy, and yet able to tally and report accurately and honestly the immense human cost of that vibrancy: a USA no longer a new and great dream of exploding possibility, but a nightmare of receding hopes.
    ‘The pimps,’ he wrote of 1930s New Orleans in
A Walk on the Wild Side
, ‘didn’t seem to catch on that the country was progressing downward to new rates of normality’, describing mid-twentieth-century perfectly.
    And Algren achieved all this in a lush language at once immediate and vernacular, but steeped in the tradition of his culture’s greatest writers: the poetry of his sentences harked back to Whitman; his wry humour and vernacular power to Twain; his novelistic largeness to Melville; his pained humanity to Fitzgerald.
    But everything in Algren is transformed into a particularly American agony, comic and tragic, and he created an idea of a spiritually compromised USA so potent that for some decades no one wished to know of it.
    Frequently categorised, with the passage of years no category seems sufficient to label the rich, fecund world of Algren’s greatest works. He was a naturalist who wrote unnaturalistic prose; an absurdist whose work reeked of reality; a realist whose best effects are often comic, a determined stylist who in the end believed passion mattered more than style; a passionate writer who fully understood that the measure of great writing was in its capacity to escape the writer’s intentions, politics and passions.
    Those who ascribed to him a programme, an ideology, failed to understand Algren’s humility in the face of the power of art to tell truths often unknown to the artist and even unpalatable to them. He believed good writing came out of compulsions unknown to the writer.
    ‘A writer who knows what he is doing,’ he once said, ‘isn’t doing very much.’
    Algren’s characters fail even at failure, they manage to mismanage crime, vice, sin; nothing is so worthless that it cannot be lost. Algren’s mean streets are revealed by the passing of time to be both as real and as allegorical as Kafka’s courtrooms and castles. It is a hell, and it is the ultimate test of our humanity.
    It would be too simple to see Algren simply as a victim of the Cold War. His literature threw down a question to the fundamental nature of the USA.
    ‘So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV,’ Algren wrote, ‘establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured.’
    The American dream, the American century, the American way, the American empire: Algren didn’t buy any of it. The USA, Algren declared in an interview in 1963 was ‘an imperialist son-of-a-bitch’, and Algren did not conceive the role of the writer to sing of its triumphs.
    ‘The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock’, Algren wrote, ‘has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.’
    Like Chekhov, Algren believed a writer’s role was to side with the guilty.
    ‘American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anyone on my side?”… More recently, I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair – my mother can watch me burn.”’
    And so Algren wrote with courage and love against the grain of the American empire he clearly recognised coming into being around him, as doomed as a bard of slaves would have been in