Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  “It’s not a coincidence that you’re at the head of the line,” the Jew suddenly made up his mind. “Wait for me here.”

  He went into a lumber yard across the street and returned carrying two two-by-fours nailed crosswise.

  “Are you still the Head Of The Line?” he inquired, keeping his invention behind his back out of modesty.

  “Nobody has got ahead of me yet and nobody’s getting ahead of me today,” the columnist let the Jew know. “I’m from Rome and I’m getting mine.”

  “I’m from East Jesus, Kansas,” the Jew informed him, “and you are getting yours”—whereupon he brought his two two-by-fours nailed crosswise dead center on the columnist’s skull with surprising power.

  First-In-Line-Every-Time zonked out for the first time. He lay stone cold in the middle of the street.

  Still, he was still first in line.

  He was holding a house brick in either hand. Yet he wouldn’t be laying brick for some time.

  Nobody, it looked like, was going to get to do any brick laying for some time.

  “No rainchecks,” the Jew announced to those still standing hopefully in line.

  So some dropped their stones and turned for home without rainchecks. Others turned for home still holding their stones but threw them at birds on the way. Only one woman held on to hers and didn’t turn for home. She came up to the Jew and asked him to sign it.

  “What for?” the Jew wanted to know.

  “Because I didn’t come to town to rock anybody in the first place,” the woman explained. “I just came because I’m dying to have a celebrity’s autograph.”

  “In that event,” the Jew assured her, “you can give me yours. You’re the only celebrity around here.”

  So the woman signed the stone and handed it to the Jew, pleased no end to find how easy it had been to be come a celebrity. Then the Jew threw the stone away and told her to go home and sign no more.

  “I won’t go home without somebody’s autograph,” the disappointed woman insisted, producing a scroll she had picked up on the Dead Sea. So the Jew signed his name by drawing a large X on the back of the scroll, and the woman went home, to find nobody there had noticed that she had left.

  But the Jew had observed that those who had dropped their stones when informed that there was to be no stoning, and those who had used them only to aim at birds, had thrown them or dropped them in the manner of persons who had never wanted to rock anybody else in the first place.

  That evening the Governor of the province called in his Chief Scorekeeper.

  “How did the stoning go today, Chief Scorekeeper?” he asked.

  “Called off,” The C.S. had to break the bad news, “a Jew from East Jesus broke it up with two two-by-fours nailed crosswise.”

  The Governor stroked his beard, studying the Chief Scorekeeper.

  “Keep an eye on that fellow,” he decided at last. “If the sonofabitch ever learns to write, he’ll be dangerous.”

  CHICAGO III

  IF I CAN’T SELL IT I’LL KEEP SETTIN’ ON IT; I JEST WON’T GIVE IT AWAY (OLD SONG)

  Old Chicago, that seesaw town, when one end of its teeter-tawter goes up its other end goes down.

  The White Sox once stayed thirty-odd games out of first place (some were very odd), so long that someone started calling Shields Avenue Seventh Place. South Side fans, in our seasons of sorrow, had to sift the ashes of defeat to find victories. Ted Lyons was our consolation because he led both leagues in handling pitchers’ chances. Luke Appling had broken all existing records for consecutive games played by a shortstop—and he was on our side! Di Maggio had hit consecutively for over fifty straight games—and he was on their side!

  Trampled by the Yankees, we pointed out that it had taken them eleven innings to whip us. To lose by only one run was a good day in those years.

  One season a pitcher called Bullfrog Bill Dietrich won seven games while losing only thirteen. The next season he won four while losing only six—it became plain that if he had been allowed to pitch twice as often he would have won eight while losing only twelve. Such improvement encouraged Dietrich to hold out for an increase in salary—and he got it.

  He got it and he earned it. On June 1, 1937, he shut out the St. Louis Browns, 8-0, thus keeping the White Sox in seventh place and the Browns in eighth. Bullfrog Bill Dietrich had pitched the most useless no-hitter in history! He was on our side!

  These were the years of hitless wonders who couldn’t field, either. Our heroes were Banana-Nose Bonura, who never lost a ball in the sun because his nose would get in the way instead; of Moe Berg, the only backstop in the majors with a Ph.D.; and of Great-Man Shires, whose biggest asset was a right hook to the jaw. Nobody called them the Go-Sox then because every time they started to go, they went.

  Yet if we lacked first-division athletes through the twenties and thirties, we were still the city that made the big music, wrote the big books, and brought up the unbeatable fighters. It became the place where the song was first felt, in a South Side cave or West Side honkytonk, that would be cut into a million recordings after the singer was dead. It was the city where the play, lived out by men and women unknowingly behind shadowed doors, would later become box office in Hollywood and New York. It was the city that made the singers who never made New York; the place where the fighters came up who never got to Madison Square.

  New York is the place of casual acquaintances who become your Great-and-Good-Friends in Time. It is the glasswalled place where the junior editor whose editorship began in the howling chair of infancy evolves to the high-chair of senior editorship—still behind glass doors. It is where the real thing is turned to the unreal thing yet everyone gets his cut: the place of sharp lawyers, quick girls, and agile cats; where culture is conducted by Great-and-Good-Friends.

  Chicago is the place that Louis Armstrong and Lil Green came to from New Orleans a few years before Banana-Nose Bonura came from there too.

  Up from New Orleans, up from Springfield, up from Galesburg and Terre Haute, downriver singers and trumpet players, fighters who carried their own shoes, and poets without fellowships—Vachel Lindsay and Bessie Smith, King Oliver and Tony Zale, Dreiser and Anderson and Carl Sandburg—each had his go-go day.

  Then each went.

  Down into the lamplit yesterday, into the go-gone dark, the best who came up swiftly with the least who came up slow.

  Who changed the city of ceaseless change.

  That stays changeless for keeps.

  Old seesaw Chicago town where you start going up, then feel yourself going down.

  No city ever owed its poets more. No poet could owe any city less. A city that will honor the South Side cop because he killed more people in one year than all the rest of the officers of his district combined, yet has not yet understood the simple truth told by a poet during the South Side race riots: “The slums take their revenge.”

  Chicago today is a massive brute that, like that dog devised by the Russians, has two heads. The head of a feisty poodle is yapping out of the neck of an inarticulate, bearlike dog—and the poodle does the talking for both heads. Chicago’s press never ceases yapping. Yet the city itself is no yapper. Its heart is that of the dark slow brute below; for the city has a somber heart.

  Pay no heed to the upper pup: its yip has no meaning, its bark has no bite.

  For in times of our deepest corruption, we have heard the city’s dark conscience cry out.

  Culturally, our southernmost outpost (bounded on the north by Comiskey Park), is presently supervised by a passionless pedagog named Adler; while the spiritual life of the North Side is guarded by a cheerful Shakespearean buff named Bradley. The West Side has to fend for itself.

  Chicago is justly proud of both these philosophers, since both are readily distinguishable from sixteen-fingered pickpockets. Although Doc A. has the most degrees, Doc B. is nearer to God. He got in on the ground floor by learning the customers’ first names some time ago.

  Doc B. pos
sesses a leonine head adjustable to any microphone five and a half feet off a platform. He so combines the figure and self-assurance of Stephen A. Douglas with a jolly St. Nick’s air that he doesn’t lend the impression of being fat so much as of having been constructed along these lines deliberately. He is an orator of the William Jennings Bryan school whose resonance gets him ashore when his logic breaks up in the shallows. He prefers the personal popularity of a flesh-and-blood flock to the ghostly multitudes available to TV prophets. He is a Christian businessman and a businessman’s Christian speaking for a Kiwanis-Club Christ that lost its nerve before World War I.

  Doc A., on the other hand, is the fellow for a fast turnover, a saintly distributor and a distributor’s saint. Every time a new saint appears on his sightline he leaps like a jackrabbit goosed by a porcupine. Perpetually seeking to get closer to God, he once made a panicky dash from Minyan to Mass without getting appreciably nearer. Eyewitnesses to this remarkable event say they never saw anything like it until Sherman Lollar was caught flatfooted in the 1959 series. If you want to blame St. Thomas (who was coaching Doc A. at the time), bear in mind that it was Tony Cuccinello who waved Lollar home. Both Tony and St. Thomas should have known they were working with heavy men.

  I don’t know what Cuccinello’s excuse was, but Doc A. explained himself in a radio interview—“I now know so much about everything that I can no longer express myself simply.”

  In short, Doc A. has not only forgotten how to slide: he has forgotten how to move.

  Yet one must give the philosopher his due. Dr. Adler, it has to be conceded, has broadened American thought. His application of the principle of All-The-Chicken-You-Can-Eat to All-The-Ideas-You-Can-Repeat for a flat $1.50 has not only broadened thought, but has led to better packaging of drumsticks from coast to coast.

  Safaris leave Doc’s Institute for Philosophical Research just before dawn, to trek waterless wastes through burning noons and return, having found no oasis, but bearing a hard-won wisdom. That might have been obtained without all that trekking at Ann Landers’ less pretentious bazaar in the same newspaper. For the ambiguities the Doc peddles there is no need to go out of the house.

  “Women have traditionally let men dominate them,” Mrs. H. De Pree addresses Doc’s Institute, “but today she has advanced to the position of equality. Would the great thinkers of the past have welcomed this change, or would they have insisted that the little woman stay home?” Ann Landers here might have pointed out that no little woman to date has ever stayed home because a great thinker has insisted on it. But for ambiguity, Mrs. De Pree came to the right place.

  “While St. Paul enjoins women to be submissive,” Doc replies, “Don Quixote felt that she should be treated as a relic to be adored but not touched”—an answer reminiscent of Ring Lardner’s report of a rookie shortstop that “although he doesn’t move well to his right he can’t hit a lick.”

  “We are about to become parents,” Mr. and Mrs. M. A. Ossey announce as if resolved not to be taken by surprise; “naturally, we are concerned with the development of our expected child’s character. We are curious to learn what virtues should be instilled in our offspring.”

  “Understanding, knowledge and wisdom are the basic intellectual virtues,” Doc assures Mr. and Mrs. Ossey, and the baby is ready to be born.

  The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. In Chicago, in our own curious span, we have seesawed between blind assault and blind counterassault, hanging men in one decade for beliefs which, in another, we honor others.

  And that there has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate, was an observation which, when somebody first made it, was still true. God help the poor joker who comes up through the Chicago Palatinate today. Between TV poseurs, key-club operators, and retarded Kilgallens in charge of columns, any writer whose thought is simply to report the sounds and sights of the city is unlikely to create interest. It isn’t a matter of whether he has anything to say as it is whether he can give a performance. Anyone who doesn’t own a key with a bunny on it must be Some-Kind-Of-Nut.

  And let the word get around here that some kind of nut has been taking films of the ordinary streets of day, rather than of the interiors of salons not one Chicagoan in ten thousand has ever seen, and some fantasist from Balaban & Katz will put it down sight unseen—“Art? Nuts.” Someone else who admittedly hasn’t seen the film will write an editorial protesting that “it presents an imbalanced picture,” and the mayor, who hasn’t seen it either, will then ban it because it would not serve public interest in a city of pleasures so chaste as those of Chicago.

  “What do you want? A bloody travelogue?” one of Europe’s top film-makers asked when informed that the documentary he had made of Chicago could not be shown because art is nuts.

  But that, of course, is precisely what is wanted. Because that’s how things are in the sodden old Palatinate, men. That’s what it’s really like in Chicago.

  There are a number of answers to the old query about why writers so often take a one-way flight from Midway or O’Hare and never come back here. One answer becomes self-evident to anyone who has witnessed a henyard full of hipless biddies entitling themselves “Friends of Literature” in the act of honoring Shakespeare and Lincoln. It looks more like they had Frank Harris in mind but I’m sure they don’t eat that way at home. Another reason is that the medieval nonentities of City Hall who have outlawed the work of Rossellini, Sartre, and Denis Mitchell here don’t care for the local talent either. Any bookkeeper speaking in the name of Balaban & Katz Forever can make it plain enough that the town isn’t all it’s cracked up to be Town and Country.

  San Francisco is more daring. It has listeners wanting to hear somebody saying something not said before. Who will be better than anybody up till now.

  Yet Chicago is the same city where a literature bred by hard times on the river, hard times on the range, and hard times in town became a world literature.

  It’s the same town that once carried a literature emanating from large feelings to all men in all tongues.

  It was here that those arrangements more convenient to owners of property than to the propertyless were most persistently contested by the American conscience.

  Chicago has progressed, culturally, from being The Second City to being The Secondhand City. The vital cog in our culture now is not the artist, but the middleman whose commercial status lends art the aura of status when he acquires a collection of originals. The word “culture” now means nothing more here than “approved.” It isn’t what is exhibited so much that matters as where: that being where one meets the people who matter.

  Of concern for the city’s night colors, its special sounds like those of no other city, for the ceaseless drama of its lives lived out behind blind doors; for the special language of Chicagoese as spoken in its Saturday night dance halls or in its shops and bars, these have no approval. Yet it is of these that the warp and woof of true poetry is woven.

  Chicago is an El-rider without remembrance.

  As one Colonel Riley, speaking for the mayor, put it when a BBC documentary on the city was banned, “People in Chicago don’t know about these things, so why bother them?”

  Thus the Chicago of the 1940’s is forgotten and unrecorded and that of the fifties is gone for keeps. A thousand dollars’ worth of film and sound equipment could salvage a remembrance of the city of the sixties beyond a view of the Prudential Building. The colonel is right—we don’t want to bother. We don’t even care enough for the city to want remembrance of it. So why stick around just for a kick in the Palatinate?

  You don’t have to leave Chicago just to be gone.

  If America’s Richard Morrisons have gained the concern of her novelists, so have her novelists gained stature by concern for America’s losers.

  The search for the great white whale by the foredoomed hero Ahab
across dangerous seas was extended across the deeps of the American conscience by Dreiser’s equally foredoomed youth, Clyde Griffiths, pursuing Success.

  Emerging into a ripjaw-and-tearclaw civilization disguised by signs reading “If-You-Can’t-Stop-Smile-As-You-Pass-By,” he tried smiling his defenselessness away by assuring his superiors, “Yes, sir, I will do just as you say, sir. Yes, sir, I understand, sir,” until he had smiled his way into a courtroom on trial for his life, listening to a prosecuting attorney describe one Clyde Griffiths—

  “Seduction! Seduction! The secret and intended and immoral and illegal and socially unwarranted use of her body outside the regenerative and ennobling pale of matrimony! That was his purpose, gentlemen!”

  It was then too late for the youth to learn that the images along the chamber of mirages were false. That the signs saying “Smile-Darn-You-Smile” camouflaged a struggle for survival as ferocious as that between bulldogs in a bulldog pit.

  Yes, sir, I understand, sir; I will do just as you say, sir.

  “I didn’t know I was alive until I killed,” another youth who walked through mirages explains himself in the final chapter of Wright’s Native Son. But Bigger Thomas was one who smashed mirrors rather than accept his own reflection in them.

  Yet each, although pictured by the prosecution as men who had sought victims, were themselves society’s victims. Dreiser’s method of challenging the legal apparatus and Wright’s method were different, but the purpose of both was to demand that those economically empowered disprove their complicity in the crimes for which Clyde Griffiths and Bigger Thomas stood accused. Both writers made literature by demanding that the prosecuting attorney show his hands.

  The outcast Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale was followed by other strange innocents more alive in their fictional lives than were the men and women who were reading about them: heroes and heroines, each foredoomed.