Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  For these were not innocents in the sense of being untouched by the world but rather of having been caught by it. There is no accomplishment in being innocent of rain when one has lived in a windowless room. The only true innocent is one who has withstood the test of evil. Which is why the protected woman is never so innocent as your real true eleven-times-through-the-mill-and-one-more-time-around whore who has seen every breed and color of male with his pants flung over the bedpost.

  These were the heroes and heroines the best of American writers sought, and the search led from New York’s Bowery down Main Street to the edge of Winesburg, where the town’s last gas lamp made the last wagon road look haggard. And in town or out, on either hand, both sides of the highway, past backland farm and railroad yards, faces of men and women living without alternatives stood revealed.

  A search past country ball parks under a moon that said Repose. Repose. To where the 3:00 A.M. arc lamps of Chicago start, down streets that Sister Carrie knew. Everywhere men and women, awake or sleeping, trapped with no repose.

  The city of no repose that Dreiser found; that Richard Wright reached and Sandburg celebrated.

  Today its arc lamps light a city whose back streets are more dangerous than a backtrack of the Kalahari Desert. Where every 3:00 A.M. corner looks hired.

  Where a street-corner nineteen-year-old once replied to a judge who had just handed down a verdict of death in the electric chair, “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow,” and snapped his bubble gum.

  A novel written around this same bubble-gum snapper, in the early 1940’s, by the present writer, sustained the antilegalistic tradition toward society which had distinguished Chicago writers since the early years of the century.

  Another novel, told more forcefully at the close of that decade, was lost to this tradition through a film presentation which confused it, in the public mind, with a biography of Frank Sinatra.

  Yet the literary spirit of “I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself,” from which these novels derived, were written for a reader who was no longer around.

  That reader and that spirit had been overwhelmed by the newly affluent cat asking querulously, “What are they doing to me?” because he had just charged off ten thousand dollars in entertainment of friends to the government and was having trouble making it stick. What this new reader wanted was not to feel there shall be no difference between him and the rest but that the difference between himself and the rest be officially recognized by the federal government.

  Whitman’s offer, bred by hard times on the Middle Border, “If you tire, give me both burdens,” holds no interest for the boy who came unburdened into his own the day Daddy had his name painted beside his own on the frost-glass office door. To say “Each man’s death diminishes me” today only rouses interest in Blue Cross.

  Well, we’re all born equal. Anyone in Chicago can now become an expatriate without leaving town.

  Town and Country reports that “anyone who knows Chicago today will admit it is a beautiful place to live.” Now, it isn’t too difficult for an editor in New York to put a man on a plane to O’Hare Field and helicopter him onto Michigan Boulevard long enough to take a snapshot of a chewing-gum heir stuck up against the side of Papa’s building and distribute the Juicy-Fruit mess as a “Chicago” edition—but Town and Country is putting us on. Because anyone who lives inside Chicago today has to admit it is a gray subcivilization surrounded by suburbs.

  Or are these loveless castaways watching Clark Kent battling the forces of evil in the shadowed lobby of the stag hotel merely awaiting the wave of the future the easy way?

  Otherwise, what did the fifteen-year-old mean when he answered the judge who had asked him what he did all day, “I just find a hallway ’n’ take a shot ’n’ lean. Just lean ’n’ dream”?

  And what did another teen-ager mean when he told the arresting officers, “Put me in the electric chair; my mother can watch me burn”?

  From the bleak inhumanity of our forests of furnished rooms, stretching doorway after anonymous doorway block after block, guarding stairways leading only to numbered doors, out of hallways shadowed by fixtures of another day, emerge the dangerous boys who are not professional burglars or professional car thieves or pete men or mobsters (who never fly blind), but are those who go on the prowl without knowing what they’re after. Their needs crisscross, they’re on the hawks, and will take whatever comes along first-a woman, money, or just the cold pleasure of kicking a queer’s teeth down his neck. Whatever wants to happen, the dangerous boys let the damn thing happen—and we’ll all read about it in the papers tomorrow.

  Town and Country ’s congratulations to us for having “an old-shoe guy” for mayor (one of the best kinds that there are) because he once took a walk to the corner drugstore to bring back an armful of milkshakes (instead of having a detail from Central Police deliver them), seems almost too good to be true. Yet watching the ceaseless allnight traffic moving without a stoplight down the proud new perfect thruway to O’Hare, headlight pursuing taillight, taillight fleeing headlight, it is as if each dark unseen driver were not driving, but were driven.

  So the city itself moves across the thruway of the years, a city in both flight and pursuit. And surely more driven than driving.

  Love is by remembrance, and, unlike the people of Paris or London or New York or San Francisco, who prove their love by recording their times in painting and plays and books and films and poetry, the lack of love of Chicagoans for Chicago stands self-evident by the fact that we make no living record of it here, and are, in fact, opposed to first-hand creativity. All we have today of the past is the poetry of Sandburg, now as remote from the Chicago of today as Wordsworth’s.

  “Late at night, and alone, I am touched by an apprehension that we no longer live in America, that we no longer love her. We merely occupy her,” Dalton Trumbo writes, reflecting a disconnection, on a national scale, transpiring locally.

  For at the very moment when a national effort is being made to extend the great American beginning—“not one shall be slighted”—to grass huts of the Congo, Hoovervilles of Caracas and to the terribly deprived peoples of India, our press is preoccupied with the pursuit of barroom drudges sitting in front of whiskey glasses with false bottoms, poor girls trying for their rent money from week to week; or with a woman drawing state aid in support of an illegitimate child who has been entrapped drinking a beer.

  The presumption that immorality derives largely from acceptance of welfare assistance is a Hearstian concept. So that, although there are no Hearst-owned papers here, whatever paper you buy you still read Hearst.

  This disregard of human dignity in the interests of circulation makes it more appropriate to regard the men who run the Chicago newspapers as auditors rather than editors. Of what newspaper owner here cannot the same thing be said as the American poet once said of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—“These people made you nervous.”

  Nor can I see in what fashion depriving a woman of her personal dignity, no matter how demeaning her trade, can be justified. If an Eichmann is to be held responsible for lacking a conscience, is not a newspaper owner to be held responsible for employing a columnist who has parlayed an urge to punish into a press pass?

  That entrapment, as practiced by an aforementioned columnist here, is illegal even when used by the Police Department is not the point. The point is that construction of a thruway running without a stoplight from state to state doesn’t make any city “a beautiful place to live in” so long as no restraint is put on men armed by the power of the press to hunt down anybody if the hunt will help circulation.

  And should you say such a woman cannot go unpunished, I must ask in what fashion has she harmed anyone? She has assaulted nobody, robbed nobody, done nothing criminal, yet her chance of staying out of jail is nowhere near so good as that of a utility executive who has made a fortune by price fixing. Still, everyone feels entitled to punish her.

  She is not
the huntress, but the prey. She does not send for men: they seek her out. And the simple irrefutable fact is that she has been essential to every society, has outlasted every society, is essential to our own and will outlast our own.

  So long as the institution of marriage exists she remains essential, for she is not supported by single men, but by married ones.

  “Prostitutes everywhere report that their trade is in large measure financed by married men who are weary of the indifference or antagonism of their wives and turn to public women for gratification,” Houghton Hooker reports in Laws of Sex.

  Another thing I intend asking Mother about is whether the papers aren’t leaving something out. Every time a girl is made in a raid we get a full description of her: name, age, address, and place of employment. What I can’t figure out is: What was she doing in that room that was so awful if there wasn’t somebody just as awful helping her to do something awful? If there was a pair of pants on the bedpost, where is the spendthrift who walked into the room inside them? Why isn’t he entitled to get his name in the paper and a ride downtown? Why doesn’t somebody give him a chance to stand up in front of a judge and get fined a hundred dollars or fifty days in County? If everybody is born free and equal, as they say, when does he get a chance to go to the Chicago Intensive Treatment Hospital for a free checkup? If this is a true democracy, why doesn’t he have the same right as any other second-class citizen? It looks like a businessman don’t stand a chance in this country anymore.

  I’ve seen the people who keep the shops

  Merchant or lawyer, whatever you got

  And I wouldn’t swap you the lowliest wench

  For the most high thief on the most high bench

  Merchant or lawyer, whatever you got—

  God send them mercy—

  Then job the whole lot.

  Crusades from pulpit, court, or column against prostitution can have no effect except to divert it to another part of town or from brothel to escort service, because the basic cause isn’t with the women who practice it, but in our own concept of sex. The conviction that sex is basically evil is a perversion out of which prostitution develops. So long as we remain punitive toward sex, we are going to have crimes of sex. Until we recognize sex as a natural urge, pleasant, beautiful, interesting, and useful, to be treated, like any other important faculty, such as work or learning, by welcoming it, enjoying it without reverence, and permitting discussion of it to be as open as that about art or play or science, we will have crimes of sex.

  Sandburg’s Chicago, Dreiser’s Chicago, Farrell’s and Wright’s and my own Chicago, that was somebody else’s Chicago. That was a play with a different plot. Today the curtain rises on—

  Act I: Scene One—Annual Meeting of The Chicago Greater Hollerers Association.

  On Stage: Chicago’s leaders as selected by Town and Country.

  Sitting in an aisle seat, seeing on stage my city’s suntanned elders just back from the Fontainebleau with their armpits tanned from long days under the rye-bread trees, I too applaud the brave flash of their costume jewelry and high credit ratings.

  Yet I feel a pang of secret regret that I played the black market in soap and cigarettes in Marseilles instead of staying home and playing it in automobiles in Detroit; to wait until the war was over to volunteer for overseas duty. I realize now that one must begin young to become a leader of one’s city in middle age.

  Oh, if there really is a little somebody for every boy in the world, why doesn’t some little somebody phone me? And ask in a voice ever-so-refined, if I would conduct a purple-heart cruise for my city? I too wish to stand at the helm of a water-borne scow and cry “Now, Voyager!” while peeling Eskimo pies for handless vets. I’ll peel anything to get a fringe benefit.

  And if I can’t earn a fringe benefit myself, won’t somebody let me be somebody else’s little fringe benefit? Won’t somebody send me a ten-year-old epileptic to froth for me on a TV marathon? Can’t I get to froth on somebody else’s marathon for myself? Why won’t anybody let me find prizes in crackerjack boxes for retarded kids? Is somebody in City Hall afraid I’ll steal the prizes? The only prize I want is a deduction for entertaining the stupid brats—or am I asking too much? All I want is to tie little Fourth-of-July flags in the wheels of paraplegic’s chairs. I’ll tie, I’ll peel, I’ll froth, I’ll wheel, I’ll lope and double-back—but how am I ever to be an old-shoe guy who goes down to the drugstore and brings back milkshakes for his family when nobody will let me get a start in life?

  I too wish to defend my city from people who keep saying it is crooked. In what other city can you be so sure a judge will keep his word for five hundred dollars? What’s so crooked about that? I’m tired of hearing detractors of my city say it is broo-tul. In what other city, head held high, sweating, laughing, all of that, can you get homicide reduced to manslaughter and manslaughter to a felony and felony to a misdemeanor? What do you want, for God’s sake—to get your gun back?

  “We have to keep Chicago strong and America mighty!” I heard His Honor proclaim before sentencing the girl with a record for addiction, “A year and a day! Take her away!”

  Blinking out of the window of an Ogden Avenue trolley at the sunlight she hadn’t seen for almost a year, “I guess it was lucky I done that time,” the girl philosophized later, “Chicago still looks pretty strong and America looks mighty mighty.”

  Still, nobody seems to be laughing.

  Perhaps the reason our thinking has shifted from the informal attitude of a society that makes allowances, to the “he brought it all on himself ” position, derives from the isolation of so many Americans, bubble-gum snappers and key-club cats alike; for the isolated man is a loveless man. Although his children may call him Papa and go through the gestures of love, they yet can’t reach him. An isolation common enough to justify calling it The American Disease; and that is directly related to the lack of creativity in this city that was once America’s creative center.

  Is it that the fraudulence essential to successful merchandising becomes pervasive, leaving the class which is economically empowered to become emotionally hollowed?

  This would account for the fact that every enduring portrait in American fiction is that of a man or woman outside the upper middle-class. From Ahab to Ethan Frome and Willie Loman, Hawthorne’s branded woman to Blanche du Bois, all are people who, living without alternatives, are thus forced to feel life all the way. While the attempts at middle-class portraiture, such as Marjorie Morningstar, fade as fast as last year’s best seller.

  No use to call out the hook-and-ladders. So long as Jerry Lewis is doing such a good job of handling children’s diseases for us, and Sammy Davis, Jr., has integration in hand, I see no reason why our city should not take pride in giving America Hugh Hefner to handle sex.

  As I once heard a thoughtful young woman put it during a matinee at the Chicago theater where Sinatra was appearing in person—

  “Spit on me, Frankie! I’m in the very front row!”

  As the girl was in the second balcony, I thought the idea a little unusual.

  Mediocrity is never a passive lack: it avenges its deprivation. Like furnishing a toothless man with artificial teeth, it wishes to bite something that won’t bite back.

  Between the majestic drumroll of Chicago’s newspaper presses one hears the tiny intermittent clicking of false teeth.

  Banana-Nose Bonura once made three errors on a single play. Tony Weitzel of the Chicago Daily News once made six in a single sentence.

  “Carlson McCullough,” he wrote, “will appear here next week in his own play, ‘Remember Our Wedding.’” After that it didn’t much matter whether he got the name of the theater right or not.

  Weitzel’s façade is that of a sage who lives in a house by the side of the road, flintlock over the fireplace, being a friend to man. The tone he lends his column is that of a gentle uncle full of years and wisdom. I don’t know his age, but years is not what he is full of.

  Irv Kupc
inet is about the height of Jack Eigen standing on Marty Faye’s shoulders, and once startled his readers by adding, after reporting the death of the late Jimmy Dean—“a tough break for the kid.”

  Kup handles language with elephantine care, one “celeb” at a time, with the result that his column always is arranged, at the end of a day, in an orderly heap with the names of the day’s favorite people in heavy type so everybody can see them without bothering to read the words between. People compete to see their names there. All in all, there is no more harm done at a game of “pin the tail on the donkey.”

  Kup’s Saturday-evening TV program, At Random, really is at random, yet is of service in showing us who our bright boys are and who are our boobies. The beautiful and terrible thing about the TV screen is that it reveals the inner man like an X-ray when the man doesn’t know he’s under it. They sit together, the sound and the phoney, equally naked to thousands. Despite Kup’s panic when a controversial subject jumps up, it has been the moments of controversy that have kept the program consistently interesting. Kup himself is usually behind his guests, particularly the politically developed men and women from Africa, Cuba, and Europe, who often make generous allowances for Kup’s obvious limitations.

  Nevertheless, it is to his credit that he does get them, that he is aware of who has something to say, and thus gives a link to the outer world which our press has severed. Moreover, since he has learned to keep his own big beak out of discussions when he himself has nothing to offer, the program has improved immensely.

  The Beatnik invasion here now seems as remote as Johnny Ray, the sinking of the Lusitania or the early work of Lorraine Hansberry. Three youths appeared, as night was falling fast, who looked to be falling even faster. They bore a banner with a strange device: a pair of shoes rampant on a field of flame, and were billed as “The Holy Barbarians.”