Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  Seven years later, cornered by death, a professor with a notebook came at him out of the shadows.

  “He had read, or glanced at, I could soon see,” the professor reported, “not only my essays, but practically everything any one had written on the modern novel in the United States. I fancied Hemingway flipping the pages, checking the indexes (or maybe he got it all out of the book reviews in Time), searching out the most obscure references to himself, trying to find the final word that would allay his fears about how he stood; and discovering instead, imbedded in the praise that could never quite appease his anguish, qualifications, slights, downright condemnations . . . ‘A whole lifetime of achievement,’ I wanted to shout at him, ‘a whole lifetime of praise, a whole lifetime of reveling in both. What do you want?’”

  For you to go away. Was that asking too much?

  “Okay, so you’ve written those absurd and trivial pieces on Spain and published them in Life,” the professor wrote, “okay, you’ve turned into the original old dog returning to his vomit. We’ve had to come to terms with your weaknesses as well as your even more disconcerting strengths—to know where we are and who, where we go from here and who we’ll be when we get there.”

  (“These damn students,” Hemingway once complained, “call me up in the middle of the night to get something to hang on me so they can get a Ph.D.”)

  “Hemingway,” the Ph.D. concluded, “sometimes puts down the closest thing to silence attainable in words, but often what he considers reticence is only the garrulousness of the inarticulate.”

  There is a corruption of prose which is jargon.

  Gentlemen, I give you jargon: “Silence and platitude. Platitude and silence. This was the pattern of what never became a conversation. And I felt, not for the first time, how close Hemingway’s prose style at its best was to both; how it lived in the meagre area of speech between inarticulateness and banality: a triumph wrung from the slenderest literary means ever employed to contrive a great style—that great decadent style in which a debased American speech somehow survives itself.”

  This is jargon: its “Yes” is not “Yes”; its “No” is not “No.” It is jargon because it diffuses meaning in order to conceal, rather than reveal, the writer’s thought. It is jargon because it conveys the impression that the writer is employing Elegant English at the same time that it enables him to falsify his thought. It is jargon because it seeks to make an idea, that is easily refutable, irrefutable. Put into prose, the writer’s thought here is that Hemingway was uniquely fortunate in having devised a great style while he had nothing to write about. Put thus honestly, the writer would appear asinine. Jargon, therefore, is the corruption of prose deriving from the writer’s own corruption.

  “But what were we doing talking of ‘next books,’” the professor continues, “when I could not stop the screaming inside my head—‘How will anyone ever know? How will I ever know unless the critics, foolish, biased, bored, tell me, tell us?’ I could foresee the pain of reading the reviews of my first novel, just as I could feel Hemingway’s pain reading the reviews of his later work. And I wanted to protest in the name of pain itself that not separated but joined us.”

  Had the man driven from Montana to Idaho to interview Hemingway or to present himself as a victim? Hemingway hadn’t sent for him.

  “But all the while he [Hemingway] kept watching me warily, a little accusingly.”

  Hemingway knew about lions and he knew about lionesses. He had been the man lying with blue wounds from elbow to wrist; he had been the English girl dreaming herself dead in an Italian rain. He had felt the wind of buzzard wings; and knew what it felt like to be an ex-fighter driving a cab. He had seen the elephant, he had seen the owl. He had smelled the hyena:Highly humorous was the hyena, obscenely loping, full belly dragging at daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to tumble end over end. Mirth-provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back, his four feet and full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of the grass by a donga, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in narrowing scampering circles until he died.

  Small wonder Hemingway kept watching warily.

  The hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while running circles madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulls his own intestines out, and then stands there jerking them out and eating them with relish.

  “I stood for a moment,” the interview concludes at last, “watching Hemingway banging at the closed doors, rather feebly but obviously tickled to be able to feel. ‘Shit,’ he said finally to the dark interior and the empty street; and we headed for our car fast, fast, hoping to close the scene on the first authentic Hemingway line of the morning. But we did not move quite fast enough, had to hear over the slamming of our car door the voice of Mrs. Hemingway calling to her husband, ‘Don’t forget your vitamin tablets, Daddy.’”

  Hemingway knew the action:—Trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp follower, stinking, foul with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves—

  the trip had been worthwhile.

  JUNE 29TH

  EAST CHINA SEA: WE DIDN’T COME TO GAMBLE.

  “I came to gamble” is the land-gambler’s brag and Deal is his one command. Don’t tell us about your lovelife—Deal. While one deck is being dealt another is being shuffled so not a moment will be lost: all moments tonight arc stolen from wife, children and home, we have to get in as much play as we can. And every deal seems slow.

  Poker upon the roving deep isn’t poker on dry land.

  When goony-birds dip the deadly hours, pursuing, fleeing, again pursuing, the automatic foghorn mourns, the long deck tilts as the waters shift and the waters shift once more: then a rain-dashed fleck through an open port and the dealer lays down the deck.

  Play stops. Talk stops. Even the engines below us wait; the port is closed.

  Then like a great heart hauling hard, the engines begin to throb once more, the long deck tilts as the waters shift and the waters shift once more: the automatic foghorn mourns and the cards go around and around once more.

  Seaman of The Republic, castoff care-nothing from suburb and slum, unschooled craftsman and long-schooled drunk, skilled mechanic sick of the land or drop-out dropping yet, under the moon of the East China Sea, with a pack of stained cards on a green-baize board, all are now gathered together:1. Crooked-Neck Smith, age 38, ordinary seaman who runs this seaman’s game.

  2. Bridelove, about 35, squat and dark as a piece of heavy machinery beveled to a precision function.

  3. Muncie, 22. Bridelove tells him what to do.

  4. Quong, Officers’ pantryman, an ageless, small, immaculate Chinese enormously skilled in minding his own business.

  5. Chips, Ship’s carpenter, about 50. Thirty years of exposure to the suns of Southeast Asia have left him as pale, from the folds of his neck to the folds of his belly to the folds of his mind, as though he’d been living in a sanitarium.

  6. Carey “Sparks” Concannon. A seventeen-year tour of the gin-mills of Asia has not sufficed to wash the dust out of the throat of this dust-bowl refugee.

  7. A free-lance journalist out of Chicago.

  Lowball is the game with these seaborne stiffs who settle for low in everything. Concannon appears to be the only one of the lot deeply dissatisfied with a life of many big drunks and few small cares, a pint of cheap gin and a girl by the clock; of being expendable at sea and unwanted on the beach; and of coming at last to fear any woman not for sale or rent.

  Call that a life on the roving deep.

  If your wife can’t stand your moods any more, your girl friend claims she’s broke, if you can’t dance and can’t stay sober, then a mariner’s life, a seaman’s life, a jolly life on the rolling deep, that’s the life for you.

  The Negro seaman’
s story is something else, of course: a way out of a slum with equal pay and a tour of ports where color don’t matter.

  “What. Kind. Work. You. Do. Mister?” Munde asked me.

  “I’m in iron and steel,” I told him, “my wife irons and I steal.” Quong laughed. But, then, Quong laughs at everything.

  “Quong,” Concannon saw fit to put in, “here’s a man paying to go to Calcutta—what do you think of that?”

  “Oh-oh-oh-Cay-O-Cutta,” Quong recalled, “Cay-O-Cutta gel, she treat him very nice. Very pretty gel, he glad he come Cay-O-Cutta.”

  “Wait,” Bridelove tried to wise me up, “wait till you see Calcutta.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “Wait,” Bridelove reassured me.

  “I. Don’t. Like. Memphis,” Muncie announced. Muncie didn’t stutter. He just couldn’t handle a whole sentence together.

  “This boy ain’t stupid,” Bridelove assured me quickly, “just slightly retarded.”

  “Oh. No. I. Only. Slow,” Muncie explained.

  Then the cards went around, the goony-birds dipped, the long deck tilted as the waters shifted.

  “Seven-card stud,” Concannon announced, “high-hand only,” and gave the deck to Chips, beside me, to cut.

  He dealt me two diamonds down and one up. I paid to stay in just to see what he had in mind. Two clubs fell. I would have dropped but for that interesting exhibition Sparks had given me. When the ten of diamonds fell I took another look at my hole cards: I lacked nothing but the queen of diamonds to have a straight flush, king high.

  I centered my index finger dead-center on the back of my hole-cards.

  O little queen dressed in faggoty pink—

  I waited until the cards had been dealt around, face-down, before I peeked—fall my way and we’ll all be rich.

  Six of clubs.

  Ouch.

  Smith won the hand. When Chips threw in his cards I saw that his last card had been the queen of diamonds. Missed by one. And it had cost me sixty dollars out of a traveler’s check for a hundred.

  “Let me have what you can spare,” Chips asked me when Smith gave me forty dollars in change. I had three hundred more in traveler’s checks when I pushed the forty to Chips.

  In the next few hours I had a pat flush, a pat full-house, trips back to back three times and two straights. Sometimes the card I signaled Sparks for came; sometimes it didn’t. When it did it made no difference. Smith topped me every time.

  “Toward morning the farmer gets lucky,” he encouraged me when my last hundred-dollar check went into a pot. I was holding two pair, aces up and deuces, and the game was draw. I signaled Sparks for a third ace. I didn’t get it. I got the third deuce. As a full house it would have to do. I checked to Smith. He bet and I raised. I raised him back. He raised me.

  I felt a sudden chill and merely called.

  He had a full house with fours up.

  “If you’d filled up with aces instead of deuces,” he began to console me as he hauled in the pot—“If the rabbit had been carrying a gun he would have shot the ass off that hound,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” Sparks put in, looking too benign, “and if your ass was pointed—”

  “Deal, deal,” I demanded irritably. Something had gone wrong on the Malaysia Mail.

  Toward morning the farmer went broke.

  “Deal me out,” I told Smith, and went up to my stateroom to watch the goony-birds through the porthole.

  I waited, when I heard Sparks come up, until he’d reached his shack. Then I followed him into it.

  He already had his headphones on when I came in.

  Beep-beep-jot-jot-beep-beep-beep.

  I waited.

  Jot-jit-beep-beep-jit-jot-beep.

  I helped myself to his gin. He took the headphones off.

  “How much did you go for?” he inquired.

  “The roll.”

  “You can get it back.”

  “How?”

  “Transistors. You can buy them for twenty apiece in Hong Kong and get sixty for them in Bombay. A hundred bucks will get you three hundred.”

  “I don’t have a hundred left.”

  He pulled out his wallet and clamped on his headphones.

  “Take two out of there,” he told me.

  I took it.

  We were twenty-four hours from the Port of Pusan.

  JULY 1ST

  472 CHO-RYANG-DONG: A PARLOR ONCE PURPLE NOW FADED TO ROSE

  It is evening in this fogbound warren above the East China Sea: that low-burning hour when the sourish-sweet tenement-supper smell of kimchi cooking upstairs and down, pervades harbor, hall and street. I’m waiting for Concannon in front of the American Club. The only sound is a lone hound’s hunger-howl up the green mountain: then his echo begins sliding down. Chew your own echo, hound: call that supper.

  “Man, do you think I’m going bamboo?” is all I’ve heard from Concannon for days. He’s putting in so much time on this bamboo problem he’s keeping me from going bamboo.

  A woman naked to her waist and breast-feeding an infant comes slogging through the rutted mud toting a bucket of suds in her free hand. She’s wearing a G.I. fatigue cap and sandals chopped out of a tire. Her features are ravaged so delicately it looks like hunger has used a thin chisel to form them. Four thousand years looks down, from that ancestral mountain, upon a race of hardluck aristocrats toting buckets of slopwater.

  Slopwater is by courtesy of the American mess hall, chapeau by the Quartermaster Corps. Shod by Firestone, employed by nobody, impregnation courtesy of the American P.X. You can get anything at the P.X.

  Homemade soap is stuffed into Palmolive wrappers here; something passing for candy is offered as Baby Ruth; and cigarette snipes are dressed in beat-up Chesterfield packs. Girls are permitted inside the Seamen’s Club; but their pimps have to wait outside.

  I’ll only stand around pretending to be a spy fifteen minutes longer. If Concannon doesn’t pick me up by then, he’s finally gone bamboo.

  Here comes an aging slicky-boy with a mug divided between a beetling scowl and a smile, sweet as apple pandowdy, under a frightwig of black-wire hair. How can a mug like this get himself a girl to work for him?

  “Number-One Joe! Welcome Club Frisco!”

  Pumping of my hand.

  He looks like he’s been creeping under a fence and part of the wire has stuck to his skull. One side of his face has been paralyzed and the other side survives only by that smile. Well, that’s what comes of crawling under other people’s barbed wire.

  “Long time you gone, Number-One Joe!”

  I feel like I’ve never been away.

  “Make yourself home, Number-One Joe! What I got for you! A-One quality for Number-One Joe!”

  The red, white and blue card he slipped into my hand framed an American sergeant embracing a slant-eyed girl under a palm. Slicky-Boy must have a Los Angeles Branch.

  We have very nice girls and all kinds of drinks—try onece, the card informed me.

  “Waiting for friend,” I explained, returning the card.

  “What frien’ Who frien’ Where frien’? You come by Club Frisco, me Number-One Joe’s good old frien’.” He took my arm—a move to which I have an aversion as it makes me feel I’m being pinched. I shook him loose and he looked dumbfounded. How could I walk out on him after he’d been waiting for me so long?

  “You Captain-Ship now or something, Joe?”

  “No,” I had to admit, “not Captain. Only passenger.”

  “Pass-in-Chair! O God!” He struck the back of his hand to his forehead at the news. “Now you Pass-in-Chair! O, you come longside me, Number-One Joe. Pass-in-Chair! I got for you A-One Quality Eng-ilsh Pass-in-Chair-gel!” He took me into custody again.

  Again I uncustodified myself; and again he didn’t like it. He stepped in close and lowered his voice to a stoolie’s whisper.

  “What you like, Joe?”

  Talent can spring up anywhere.

  “I
like you go,” I guaranteed him.

  “You give dollar, I go,” was his counter-offer, “far.”

  “Give nothing.”

  “No go far.”

  His breath was formidable. But if he could stand it all day I could put up with it a few minutes.

  Sparks was coming down the other side of the street with his specs in his hand, blind as an owl. I cut over to meet him.

  Slicky-Boy Number One, Port of Pusan, came up on Sparks’ other side. “Hi, Joe! Me your good old frien’!” Sparks adjusted his specs and looked down.

  “Who’s your buddy?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, “but he’s hard to shake.”

  Slicky-Boy followed us up to Kim’s place, where Sparks blocked him and slammed the door in his face.

  He hadn’t been hard to shake after all.

  Up a narrow stair through a cloud of kimchi, past a furlong of doors, all closed. Then an open one and a high, flat warning like a very old woman’s cry—

  “Number four-seven-two Cho-Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong!”

  It was a purple-black bird, no larger than a crow, perched in a cage big enough for a turkey. In a parlor from some age that was purple; that now had long faded to rose.

  A great old-fashioned bed of the curtained kind, stood with its curtains drawn as though they’d been drawn for years. A portable record player and a few chairs: we were home.

  “Ryang-Dong! Ryang-Dong! ” the myna bird shrieked. “Pay what you like! ”

  A slant-eyed little fireship in a green kimono, her dark hair piled, came forward as softly as a Siamese cat. I saw why communications officers go bamboo.

  “Him crazy,” she nodded at the bird.

  “Him not so crazy,” I thought to myself.

  “Meet Kim,” Concannon decided to introduce me.

  She gave me both hands so narrow, so firm; in her brief grip I felt a contained pride.

  How many a midnight seaman, on leave or on the beach, had she locked fast between those slender thighs? And held till he’d fainted within her? Then had kicked him lightly in the small of the back with her child-like slipper—“Time up, Joe!”