Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  Another way of doing it might be to have the houseman tell the girl that his master doesn’t want to marry her.

  The success of Playboy Enterprises demonstrates that the question of how to be recognized as a man by the world of men is not so easily solved now as when it could be achieved by dropping a fourteen ball into the corner pocket. The problem then was not what to do about girls but how to get into long pants. We knew what to do about girls.

  The mystery of sex outweighed its fears; its perils were outweighed by its joys. We pursued a rumor of a Chinese whorehouse around Twenty-second and Wentworth but never found it. Later, Kitty Davis used to advertise EVERY GIRL A COLLEGE GRADUATE. We didn’t know we’d ever see the day when the appeal would be that the girl was a businesswoman. It would now appear, running through these ads, that for the young American today, love’s terrors often far outweigh its joys. By allocating sex to “those areas where sex is important,” the mystery of sex is taken away for mere safety’s sake. When one does not commit himself to the world, the retreat continues through love.

  Yet it is not possible to live without developing an attitude toward women. However paradoxical it may appear, the young male who assumes early that physical relationships with women are part of life is more likely to develop respect toward women than is the young male who abstains from such relationships.

  Abstinence makes the heart contemptuous, and Playboy combines both by pinning a tail on a girl’s behind. This is not to make her cute, but to encourage contempt of her. Playboy laps the magazines-for-men field because contempt is more needful to our middle class than suggestiveness.

  Nothing conceals fear so well as contempt, but the Playboy Man is never fearful. If it seems that the young man who is fretting because a beautiful, passionate girl has a key to his apartment is not precisely Richard the Lion Heart, be assured that in his own orbit the Playboy Man is a tiger—and a relentless one.

  A lyricist employed by Playboy to write a lyric descriptive of the magazine came up with one depicting the Playboy reader as exactly that—a tiger. His afterthought, however, was that it was a tiger that was “sometimes gentle and sometimes square.” Lyric and lyricist were dismissed: the Playboy image is that of a tiger by day, by night, never restless and never relenting. Women have no choice but to surrender. And once the tiger has enjoyed them, they have no choice but to get out of the way so as not to impede his next leap.

  This stance of male superiority possesses an aristocratic tradition asserted with confidence by the French essayist Montherlant:

  “The wreaths we bestow upon ourselves are the only ones worth wearing,” Montherlant repudiates dependent love; yet is drawn to that woman he meets on a train who had “so besotted an air that I began to desire her.” As if he withdraws from an unbesotted woman. “I do not love in equality,” he explains, “because I seek in woman the child.” A besotted child would, of course, be even safer.

  “The lion with good reason fears the mosquito,” Montherlant excuses a fear that his leonine dignity may be too easily compromised. French lions and American tigers alike are aware that any of these girls can feint any forty-year-old businessman out of position and abandon him standing on his head with his socks falling. Strapping her into a contract, thus reducing her to an ornament upon peril of being out of work, is his one chance with her-tigers and lions both alike.

  The scene which revolves around an iron suit to the tunes of a shadowy orchestra has been reported variously as the realization of the American dream, as a perversion of that dream, and as a semimonthly orgy. It is neither this nor that nor the other.

  Neither the realization nor the perversion of a dream because it is not a dream at all. It is the extension of a PR image as empty of sex as that of the Borden cow. If it were real somebody would get drunk.

  Nor is this American scene comparable to that representation of contemporary Rome we witnessed in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The film derived tragedy from its depiction of a sensitive man degraded into a purchasable commodity. But when it is assumed that life’s highest purpose is to proceed through it boyishly bunnyhopping, the only tragedy can be loss of money. As the only triumph can be that of being richer than anybody.

  The heroic American, to Playboy, is a twenty-eight-year-old college-educated bachelor whose reason for driving a car is that he needs something that doesn’t drive him.

  The world is a threatening place to a young man who has been abruptly blessed with money and leisure.

  In our teens we obtained a spurious maturity from comic books that we obtained from ads in Ring: “FEAR NO MAN”

  “Now for the first time, through my amazing course, learn how to use centuries-old methods of combat taken from the archives of the Indian and Japanese killercult temples, the ferocious Aztecs, Nazi and Communist Secret Police, all yours for the asking! You will immediately see and learn how a small weak man or woman can overpower and even cripple a 200 lb. brute—in a flash!”

  BECOME A TERRIFYING SELF-DEFENSE FIGHTING MACHINE IN JUST 30 DAYS!

  Playboy is presently fulfilling the same need by saying, “Don’t hesitate—This assertive, self-assured weskit is what every man wants for the fall season.”

  Who would want an assertive, self-assured weskit except a hesitant man? Playboy speaks to those who wish desperately to know what it means to be male. It speaks to the reader whose masculinity depends upon his choice of deodorant or cigar, one who can maintain respect for a woman only so long as she abides by a tacit assurance not to arouse him sexually. It does not sell sex. It sells a way out of sex.

  Sex that—in Karl Barth’s meaning when he names the basic relationship of man’s life—Mitmensch—co-humanity—is out of bounds to the Playboy believer. For him sex can be indulged in only as a recreation—“virtue in those areas where virtue is important.” Virtue, like an assertive weskit, may be put on for an evening or for the fall season; but is not something to which one is to commit oneself.

  Because one is not to commit oneself at any time, anywhere: not to a weskit, not to another human being nor to an issue alive in the world.

  “We hold that man is free,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “but his freedom is real and concrete only to the degree that it is committed to something, only if it pursues some end and strives to effect some changes in the world. Man is free only if he sets himself concrete ends and strives to realize these: but an end can be called such only if it is chosen freely. The cult of money which one encounters here does not spring from avarice or meanness: it expresses the fact that the individual is unable to commit his freedom in any concrete realm; making money is the only aim one can set oneself in a world in which all aims have been reduced to this common denominator.”

  To seek to be free by avoiding involvement with the world, which is the commodity Playboy pitches, cannot be achieved. There never was a world—or a woman—who could be turned on and off like a faucet. The woman may run hot and she may run cold, but in all Man’s time she has never been turned off.

  The man who constitutes the backbone of Playboy readership by buying the magazine regularly from a newsstand for sixty cents is a man under thirty. After thirty, readership drops off abruptly: something happens to most of its readers between twenty-eight and thirty-one. You know what I think? I think he finds out you can’t turn her off.

  The reassurance that Playboy thinking offers the young American is that, by going into a blind retreat upon himself, arranging his own room comfortably and adopting those attitudes prescribed by the world of advertising, he has justified his existence; simply by protecting himself from disappointment, risked by falling in love with either the world or a woman, he has fulfilled himself.

  “The reality of a man is not hidden in the mists of his own fancy,” Mme. de Beauvoir wrote before these mists began to rise, “but lies beyond him, in the world, and can only be disclosed there . . . it is in economic success that the American finds a way of affirming his personal independence; but this independence remains
wholly abstract, for it does not know on what to bestow itself.”

  Male failure is always attributable, with Montherlant, to mother, sister, or wife.

  “The only place on his body where Achilles was vulnerable,” he writes, “was where his mother had held him.”

  Woman, by the fact of being a woman, incarnates failure simply through lacking virility. She fails doubly by loving the man for his weakness instead of for the grandeur of his masculinity. Her justification for her existence is that she affords him pleasure.

  This corresponds with Hefner’s answer to an interviewer asking him, “What do you look for in a woman?”

  “Virtue in those areas where virtue is important,” Hefner replies as precisely, as politely, as a floorwalker saying, “Ladies’ hosiery first aisle other side of the soda fountain, madam.” Hefner’s assertions are those of a small authority in a large department store, Montherlant’s those of a poet.

  Poet and floorwalker alike derive the total submission of woman from Oriental attitudes. Montherlant, finding his truth in Ecclesiastes—“the man who wishes you ill is better than the woman who wishes you well”—sees himself in an ancestral Hebraic light. Playboy’s thinkers arrange Hefner as an American caliph surrounded by lounging beauties, his bed in the background and a pipe in his teeth, for Time.

  There is no tobacco in the pipe. Like the bed strewn with beauties, the pipe is a prop.

  Caliphs and pashas, khans of times long gone, herded their harems with the warlike dignity of bull walruses herding their cows. True voluptuaries, they peopled Heaven with women of whom one never wearied. On earth or in Heaven they had but one use for a woman, and in Heaven or earth they put her to it.

  Yet no women walk the heavenly home of a key-club caliph. There are no bosomy nudes in that great key club in the sky. There is only a shadowy three-piece band playing cool music for executive-angels. There is no Scotch, there is no rye. There are only vending machines from which may flow Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola. But no booze.

  There is only a spacious guest room that has no guests. Dominated by a suit of medieval armor wearing its helmet affronté.

  On the fleshless intellectual Montherlant, the stance of an Eastern potentate looks weird enough. But in adapting it to Hugh Hefner it becomes a downright riot. The image of Dick Nixon being kind to a puppy is less preposterous, as Nixon may actually have liked the pup.

  Hefner doesn’t like his bunnies. Whenever a man perverts love to moneymaking, he builds resentment against the money-maker.

  “What are you doing to me, Little Baby?” I once heard a procurer complain to his girl, “Why did you make a pimp out of a nice guy like me?”

  I was brought to myself by the falling of a shadow. A dark-haired girl with a taut, wan look, was standing over me, fully dressed.

  I did not have to ask who she was.

  “Hello, Connie,” I said.

  “It wasn’t five-thirty,” she told me in a low voice; “it was a quarter to six. He slapped me at a quarter to six.”

  “I read something about it,” I assured her. She didn’t seem to hear.

  “He didn’t slap me because I was high. He slapped me because I lost my job.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked along the lake up to North. It’s where I used to go swimming when I was a kid. I started to walk back to my old neighborhood. Then I remembered everybody I knew was gone—what was the use? What was the use of anything? I didn’t even belong to a neighborhood any more. Before I got back to the room I had it in mind—if he wasn’t there, that was it.”

  “And?”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  That Hefner’s entertainments pretend to taste but come no closer than a ludicrous vulgarity is merely a local circumstance. But, as a stage whereon young Americans are revealed as lacking any way of bestowing themselves upon the world, it is disturbing.

  For those who cannot bestow themselves become severed not only from the world but from themselves. And in such severance, whether that of Connie Petrie or of Hugh Hefner, each takes his own: measures against his deprivation.

  Each devises his own vengeance.

  The winter day falls with a colder light today than the light that once fell between the blinds of a Sommerhaus.

  It was always summer in the Sommerhaus. A grandfatherly light came down on the world that year and slanted between the blinds of the little old-world cottage; when many grandchildren ran in and out before dinner. But I was the only one of the many to whom my grandfather confided the name of the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar.

  And the farm boy from Black Oak who worked for McCormick Reaper himself became a grandfather who had no Sommerhaus. He became an old man lying on a Westside bed with his wife and son looking down at him.

  They saw his right hand take the fingers of his left, feeling something had gone wrong with the machinery of that hand; that had to be fixed with his right.

  They saw him pass from life into death still trying to fix the machinery of everything. His old woman saw him go, and his son saw him go. Yet neither mother nor son wept for the father’s death.

  So it was that the son knew that, for all his fixing, the old man had not been able to fix anything after all.

  EPILOGUE

  Tricks Out of Times Long Gone

  Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home

  Before the trolley-buses start to run

  And snow dreams in a lace of mist drift down

  When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel

  All those whose lives were lived by someone else

  Who never had a choice but went on what was left

  Return along old walks where thrusts of grass

  By force of love have split the measured stone.

  I think hep-people leave small ghosts behind

  For haunting of winter ball parks and locked bars

  That ghosts of old time hookers walk once more

  That no ghost follows where a square has gone.

  Tonight when chimneys race against the cold

  Tricks out of times long gone, forgotten marks

  Come seeking chances lost, and long-missed scores

  Faces once dear now nameless and bereft

  Hepghosts made of rain that softly try old doors

  Forever trying to get down one last bet.

  Tarts out of times long gone

  Booth-broad, bluemoon cruiser, coneroo

  Come once again, palms outstretched to claim

  What never was their own.

  Drifters of no trade whose voices, unremembered,

  Speak in the city wires overhead—

  Now is the victims’ hour where they go

  Where winoes used to drink themselves to death

  Or merely slept away their 29c woes.

  Upon the just-before-day bus I saw a woman,

  The only one who rode

  Look wanly out at streets she used to know—

  “And here I went”—“and there I slept”—“and there I rose”—

  Again by evening in a billboard’s cold blue glow

  She came forever toward me

  Walking slow

  Saying za za-za-zaza-za-zaza-za-zaza

  Walking slow.

  All day today old dreams like snowdreams drifting down

  Faces once known now nameless in a mist

  Return from hospital, prison and parole

  Mouths that once the mouth of summer sweetly pressed

  Saying zaza-za-zaza-za-zaza-za-zaza.

  Within a rain that lightly rains regret.

  Notes from a Sea Diary

  Hemingway All the Way

  For Max Geismar

  Some of the anecdotes herein related have been told, here and there, before: in Cavalier, Dial, Dude, Gent and the New York Herald Tribune.

  And to Miss Kamala Rao and Mr. S. D. Punekar, for their assistance, the author expresses his thanks.

  PREFATORY

  An essay
on Ernest Hemingway was a labor to which I felt compelled. Everyone else was acting so compulsively I had to do something compulsive too or I wouldn’t get invited to any more parties. How is a writer to make The Hot Center unless he mills around where The Center is simmering?

  Since Hemingway once announced to me that “it is now 0230 hours,” I can make trouble for anyone who asks me to wait in the hall. I don’t have to know what hour 0230 is to be on time for dinner.

  But after dinner some stiff is certain to ask—in the tone of a bonds-man recognizing a bail-jumper—“Well! What are you up to now? What’s next?”

  “Nothing, my key-shift is stuck,” would serve as an answer but a short chop to the ear would serve better. Yet that would only confirm his suspicion that I must be dealing with half a deck—otherwise I’d be in a respectable field. Such as Criticism.

  He assumes that the critic and the novelist are cats of the same litter though of various stripe; actually they are hostile breeds dammed in the same basket.

  “We are oppressed at being men,” Dostoevsky wrote, “and contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized Man.”

  The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy—yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

  He demands that perilous voyages be taken and storms be endured but himself stays on the dock. He reminds us that the proper study of mankind is man yet keeps his own distance from men and women. The goodness of his intention is ‘lent expression, while his conscience is afforded ease, by the practice of Criticism. The risk of becoming identified with the objects of his compassion is obviated by his sagacity.

  Yet the greater the creative man’s sagacity, the less is his creativity. It is easy to replace art by profundity. Present examples of those whose harsh artistry has flattened into smooth profundity are Arthur Miller, John Hersey, Saul Bellow and Paul Goodman. (Although the latter had no art to start.) Their maps are drawn; their risks have been taken.