Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  “But that referee! It took him eighteen seconds to count to six. He gave him six more to get to the count of eight. If he gave the man another half-minute it looked like he might get up. In fact, he rolled over at the count of ten. I held up my own hand before the ref could call it a draw. Then I went back to my corner and put on my cap and—”

  “Hold it,” I interrupted him, “hold it right there, buddy. You didn’t go to your corner until the man was counted out? No referee, nowhere, ever started a count until a man got back to his own corner.”

  I had Smith cold.

  “Sir,” he reproached me gently, “when I told you I came into that ring wearing a cap I assumed you understood we weren’t fighting according to the Marquis of Kingsbury. How could I have won by holding up my own hand if we’re going by the rules? But you know—” he resumed quickly—“that fellow took so long to come to, that by the time he got back to his corner his handlers had left? That poor guy had to carry his own bucket all the way back to his dressing room. Nobody in that whole house offered him a hand. Isn’t that a shame, sir?”

  “It wasn’t the Marquis of Kingsbury,” I answered irritably, “it was the Marquis of Queensbury.”

  “Thank you,” Smith answered, “I stand corrected. My point was simply that, whoever he was, you could have him. The reason he made up a set of rules about fighting fair was to cover up ways of fighting dirty. If he wasn’t a dirty guy why did his son wait till he had him on the street to whip him, where the people could see? Why didn’t he take the old man on at home? Believe me when I tell you, the Marquis of Kingsbury, you could have him.”

  “Let me ask you something else, Smith,” I told him. “When a sailor dies at sea and is sewn up for sea-burial, does the last stitch go through his nose?”

  “That’s right,” Smith assured me, “an old sea-tradition.”

  “Why? ”

  Smith studied me. When he studied you he rotated his head gently before reaching his decision.

  “I’d like very much to fill you in on this, sir,” he decided at last, “but the way I look at it is that any man who knows that the Marquis of Kingsbury was really the Marquis of Queensbury knows all there is to know. So what would an ignorant seaman like myself be doing trying to fill him in?”

  He began dealing himself a hand of solitaire.

  Sailors are a touchy lot.

  JULY 13TH

  INDIAN OCEAN: “I CAN SEE YOU HAVE BEEN WOUNDED”

  Had Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair died the same day as Ernest Hemingway, it would have been difficult to distinguish her work from his by some of the summaries.

  “Hemingway’s prose was as chaste as a mountain stream,” one Magoo claimed of a stream bearing mules with their forelegs broken, stiffs floating bottoms-up and the results of several abortions.

  “He was dedicated to Truth and Beauty,” another mad groundskeeper claimed of a man who had always disposed of both abstractions in his “built-in shockproof shit-detector,” as he described it.

  The overpraisers were judges as useless after his death as had been the begrudgers before. Of whom one, describing a critical anthology about Hemingway, wrote: “He is still a sacred cow, and readers will look in vain through these pages for any sustained and fundamental attack on the American master. This must be accounted a reverential weakness in the editor’s principles of selection. True we are given Barea’s notable assault on For Whom the Bell Tolls—but this is an attack on only one book and only from one angle. The total considered rejection will not be found in these pages.”

  I hadn’t known of Barea’s notable attack. Indeed, I hadn’t even known Barea was sick. Yet the reviewer’s own affliction is plainly the same as that of the man who once explained to me why he opposed equality of opportunity for Negroes—“God-damn it, I feel inferior enough already!” It wasn’t Hemingway’s prose, but his life, which demanded “total and considered rejection.” It wasn’t his economy of language which made them feel small-it was his free-handedness. To men whose self-doubt put them in need of formal respect from others, the ease with which Hemingway earned the informal respect of workaday men and women felt like an accusation. It certainly never ceased to raise the hackles of such a domesticated peacock as Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald couldn’t even bear Hemingway’s beard.

  “He was a big man with a bushy beard,”17 Macdonald wrote upon Hemingway’s death, “and everybody knew him. The tourists knew him and the bartenders knew him and the critics knew him too. He enjoyed being recognized by the tourists and he liked the bartenders but he never liked the critics very much. He thought they had his number. Some of them did. The hell with them. He smiled a lot and it should have been a good smile, he was so big and bearded and famous, but it was not a good smile. It was a smile that was uneasy about the edges as if he were not sure he deserved to be quite as famous as he was famous.

  “He liked being a celebrity and he liked celebrities. At first it was Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was an athletic young man from Oak Park, Illinois, who wanted to write and he made friends with them. He was always good at making friends with celebrities. They taught him about style. Especially Gertrude Stein. The short words, the declarative sentences, the repetition, the beautiful absence of subordinate clauses. He always worked close to the bull in his writing. In more senses than one, señor. It was a kind of inspired baby talk when he was going good. When he was not going good it was just baby talk. Or so the critics said and the hell with them. Most of the tricks were good tricks and they worked fine for a while especially in the short stories. Ernest was fast and stylish in the hundred-yard-dash but he didn’t have the wind for the long stuff. Later on the tricks did not look so good. They were the same tricks but they were not fresh any more and nothing is worse than a trick that has gone stale. He knew this but he couldn’t invent any new tricks. It was a great pity and one of the many things in life you can’t do anything about. Maybe that was why his smile was not a good smile.

  “After 1930 he just didn’t have it any more. His legs began to go and his syntax became boring and the critics began to ask why he didn’t put in a few more subordinate clauses just to make it look good. But the bartenders still liked him and the tourists liked him too. He got more and more famous and the big picture magazines photographed him shooting a lion and catching a tuna and interviewing Spanish Republican militia-men and fraternizing with bullfighters and helping liberate Paris and always smiling bushily and his stuff got worse and worse. Hemingway the writer was running out of gas but no one noticed it because Mr. Hemingway the writer was such good copy. It was all very American and in 1954 they gave him the Nobel Prize and it wasn’t just America any more. Hemingway’s importance is almost entirely that of a stylistic innovator.”

  Style is that force by which a man becomes what he most needs to become. When this need is one common to multitudes and the man’s force suffices, we call him an artist, because in saving himself he saves others.

  Ernest Hemingway’s need was not to write declarative sentences with a beautiful absence of subordinate clauses. It was not to meet celebrities: he was on speaking terms with Georges Clemenceau, Benito Mussolini and Mustapha Kemal before he had heard of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was one of the most highly paid correspondents in Europe.

  Therefore the man had at his disposal a lifetime of meeting celebrities, while living comfortably with his wife and children in the capitals of the world; enjoying that degree of fame a foreign correspondent earns.

  It was a lucky way of living—but he didn’t want it. He didn’t want it because, to him, it wasn’t living at all. To Dwight Macdonald it would have been living. To have a respectable name with the Establishment and be a dissenter tool What more could a man ask than to have it both ways?

  Hemingway didn’t care for it either way. He wasn’t an athletic young man from Oak Park. He was a soldier whose life had been broken in two. He didn’t come to The Moveable Feast as to a picnic begun in Kansas Cit
y now being continued in the Bois de Boulogne. He had seen the faces of calm daylight looking ashen as faces in a bombardment. He had been the man who did not know where he went each night nor what was the peril there; nor why he should waken in a sweat more frightened than he’d been in the bombardment:“But I must insist that you will never gather a sufficient supply of these insects for a day’s fishing by pursuing them with your hands or trying to hit them with a bat. . . . Gentlemen, either you must govern or you must be governed. That is all, gentlemen. Good-day.”

  “I can see you have been wounded,” the adjutant said.

  Hemingway had felt his life fluttered like a pocket-handkerchief by the wind of death. In the watches of the night he had heard retreat beaten. Out of dreams like Dostoevsky’s, endured in nights wherein he had lost his life yet had not died. Hemingway forged an ancestral wisdom in terms usable by modern man: that he who gains his life shall lose it and he who loses it shall save it; into a prose magically woven between sleep and waking.

  Those were the nights the river ran so much wider and stiller than it should and outside of Fossalta there was a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal, and he had been there a thousand times and never seen it, but it was there every night as plain as the hill, only it frightened him. That house meant more than anything and every night he had it. That was what he needed but it frightened him especially when the boat lay there quietly in the willows on the canal, but the banks weren’t like this river.

  “Life is everywhere life,” Dostoevsky had written after hearing himself sentenced to hard labor. “I am not dismayed. Life is in ourselves, not in outward things. There will be people beside me, and to be a man among men, and remain a man forever, not to falter nor fail in any misfortune whatever—that is what life is, that is where its task lies.” Like Dostoevsky, Hemingway was a moralist whose waking resolutions were drawn from nocturnal visions. And in this he is much closer to the writers of the American twilight—Hawthorne and Poe—than he is to the image of the blood-and-guts adventurer that he projected—and Life swallowed whole.

  “The critics had his number,” Macdonald wrote. But it was Hemingway who had the critics’, and particularly Macdonald’s, number. Because Macdonald, who apparently has never read anything of Hemingway unless Life printed it,” fell for the myth that Hemingway was a reporter of the bullring, the fight-ring, warfare, fishing and safari expeditions, but no more. Yet he was much more. Otherwise how explain these death-drawn visions?

  They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the court-yard. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officers told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

  Hemingway only began to write like this after he had learned how to sleep again. His life that had been broken in two, had healed strangely. As though his hold on life, having been loosened, now took a grip that possessed iron control. And from it derived a tension that fixed scenes dead-still as in dreams—yet that flowed with a secret life of their own:Jack’s sitting on the chair. I’ve got his gloves off and he’s holding himself in down there with both hands. When he’s got something supporting it his face doesn’t look so bad.

  “Go over and say you’re sorry,” John says in his ear, “it’ll look good.”

  Jack stands up and the sweat comes out all over his face. I put the bathrobe around him and he holds himself in with one hand under the bathrobe and goes across the ring. They’ve picked Walcott up and they’re working on him. There’s a lot of people in Walcott’s corner. Nobody speaks to Jack. He leans over Walcott.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says, “I didn’t mean to foul you.”

  “Memory remains,” Dostoevsky wrote, “and the images I had created but not yet clothed with flesh. These will rend me to pieces, true, but my heart is left to me.”

  This conviction, so close to Hemingway’s own resolve, explains why he had no more need of being a professional dissenter than he had for ingratiating himself with the powers that be. It wasn’t his syntax, but the man inside the prose, that makes Macdonald struggle and fret to secure a hold on the man. For, to one so devoid of inner sinew as Macdonald, literature is explainable only in terms of declarative sentences; his own life being invested in syntax. He must of necessity assume that Hemingway’s style was a matter of being an athletic youth sufficiently clever to pick up some tricks from Gertrude Stein to serve his ambition.

  Hemingway’s emulators thought so too. For his art was so hidden it seemed easily imitated: one had only to talk tough and cut it short. Some imitated him boldly, some secretly, some mockingly and some slavishly.18 But what they wrote had no tension: his prose was invulnerable.

  Though his prose was invulnerable, his life was not. He flaunted a personality as poetic as Byron’s and as challenging as Teddy Roosevelt’s; before timorous men whose lives were prosaic. It was necessary, no, absolutely essential, to get his number.

  “He thinks like a child,” someone remembered Goethe saying of Byron. So Norman Mailer said “Hemingway has never written anything that would disturb an eight-year-old.” So Professor Fiedler said it and Professor Podhoretz said it and Professor Edel said it and Professor Macdonald said it. First they said it one by one. Then, gathering courage, they all said it together in chorus: Now we have his number: Now we really have his number.

  And of all our thinkers, from Paul Goodman to Ronald Reagan, who has given us a passage so certain not to disturb an eight-year-old as this:

  “If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot define completely but the feeling comes . . . when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it had flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of government, the richness, the poverty, martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm-fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light-globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm-fronds of our victories, the worn light-bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single lasting thing—the stream.”

  Call that baby talk.

  JULY 14TH

  RAFTS OF A SUMMER NIGHT

  Every morning of that lost summer came as a fresh surprise: a sallow youth wearing a bright red sweater practiced
walking a tightwire right next door! He traversed the air from his back porch to his little garage, glided to the ground, then trotted lightly. We cheered as though the circus had come to our neighborhood. Nothing like it had ever happened on our street before.

  He never spoke. My father called him “The Greenhorn”—but from what green country he had come he never told.

  Yet we knew that the green country to which he went was Wisconsin. In the first hours after Friday night had fallen, when every back porch wavered, like rafts of a summer night, with the pinpointed flares of sticks of punk; that we burned, and moved as we burned them, to ward off mosquitoes, Greenhorn cranked up his Model-T and wheeled off to some county fair. I went to the backyard gate to watch him go: his taillight winked Goodbye Forever to me.

  Goodbye to summer, goodbye to fun: goodbye to the weekday-morning sun.

  Until a triumphant Monday-forenoon honking and a neighbor’s cry—“Greener back! On wire going up!” brought summer back in a Model-T.

  He rode the air and we rode the fence and the very air seemed daring.

  Strangely, I anticipated scenes yet greater to come.

  They came.

  Greener soldered a pulley onto an ironworker’s helmet, turned himself upside-down in it and rolled, upsy-downsy, along a cable to his garage!