Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  A burst of applause—then he hit the ground on his face. Bashing his forehead and bending the hell out of the pulley.

  “Greener’s balance is so good upside-down he can’t walk to the garage straight up anymore,” my mother commented—and rapped me one that spun me half across the kitchen—“let that be a warning to you!” A warning not to walk straight up to a garage or not to glide upside-down to it I didn’t know.

  Yet in that week nobody walked the wonderful wire. Greener had holed up in his garage. He was sleeping in there now.

  “He hasn’t come out for two days,” my mother reported to my father.

  “He’s thinking,” I assured them.

  What Greener thought of was a double-cable, one length tightened from porch to garage and a lower strand drawn from garage to porch.

  I saw the problem: how would he make it to the lower strand? When, through his garage window, I saw him somersaulting on an old mattress, I got an idea.

  He came out of the garage somersaulting. Cheers—then apprehensive silence as he clamped on the helmet, slid on the cable straight-up to the garage; balanced himself upside-down on the wire—then somersaulted onto the lower strand and glided triumphantly home!

  I stood on my head in upside-down joy. My father whacked the upside until I put it down—“Why can’t you be a good boy like I like I was when I was a boy?” he wanted to know. I didn’t know why, but no whacking could lessen my joy: a man had but to be foolishly daring and the world was changed, from sunlessness to sun, for everyone.

  Hard times returned to the back porches of home. Greener had to travel farther, and take greater risks with his neck, for less money. One Monday the Model-T ran out of gas five blocks from home and we had to push it—half a dozen other kids and myself—to his garage. He did not wheel away to a county fair the next Friday evening: no gas.

  “Greener will think of something,” I promised my mother.

  “May it be to walk on his feet,” she hoped.

  Greener thought of something. He jacked up the Model-T and crawled underneath it. He was converting it to a kerosene-oil burner. My father took alarm.

  “The Stanley Steamer has already been invented!” he called the news down to Greener through the car’s open hood—“It doesn’t work out!”

  Greener crawled out, looked up at my father, shook his head—yes—for him it would work out. And crawled back under the hood. His will was forged of the same stuff as his tightwire cable. But it wasn’t as flexible.

  Now he lay against the November earth. In the slant yellow light of the last of day, coldly framing his garage door, we glimpsed the soles of his ragged sneakers, and saw his toes twitching with the cold. After dark he worked on by candlelight. It looked like the good times were over.

  “If that boy had a mind he’d be dangerous,” my father felt.

  “He’s only saving electricity,” my mother hoped.

  “He’ll wind up in a room without corners,” my father decided.

  “May he never lift anything heavier than money,” my mother wished.

  Her washing was whipping whitely in the bright blue winter weather when a long, low, dripageous pall of coal-oil smog, sufficiently light to clear fences but too soggy to clear a clothesline, emerged from the hood of the Model-T, enwrapping sheets, shirts, petticoats, panties and pants, blankets and handkerchiefs, pillowcases and flannel underwear, leaving line after line dragging blackly toward earth.

  Some Stanley Steamer.

  Through this belching pall two policemen groped, with flashlight and gun, ready for anything. When Greener did not respond to a billy rapping the soles of his sneakers, one cop seized one naked ankle and the other seized the other, and dragged him forth, looking more like a miner coming up from a cave-in than an acrobat. Under the coal-oil his face was ashen. On the step of the hurry-up wagon he stumbled. I laughed.

  It was like seeing a cat trip over itself.

  Ten days later he returned, with a shuffling, brokenhearted walk. The Room Without Corners had done for that pale youth.

  For neither upright nor upside-down, Greener never walked another wire. Nor wheeled off to farewells waved by small pinpointed flares from back porches on either side of his steering wheel. Nor ever in honking triumph returned.

  Greener went to work in a neighborhood factory that manufactured endless belting for other factories. The acrobat stood at an endless belt making belting endlessly. He grew thin.

  First he worked on wide-belt belting, but, as he grew still thinner, he was transferred to narrow-belt belting. There he began to gain weight. Greener had begun drinking.

  He began drinking as soon as he had finished making belting endlessly, and his drinking went on all night without end. When he began drinking as endlessly as he tended to belting, he was replaced by a beltless machine that makes machines for manufacturing endless belting.

  Greener never tried anything again. His summer had been brief, the applause only fleeting, the good times soon done. The first heavy frost split the kitchen pane of the house in which he had once lived. One of the cables, that he’d drawn so tightly, snapped under its burden of ice; entangling itself with the lower cable. At last both wires hung uselessly dangling. I felt disappointed in everything. In March I shattered the window of his garage.

  From time to time, in winters that followed, I saw Greener, diminished to a beer-drinking fly of the tavern corners, again. On the kind of night when cats freeze on fire escapes, I watched him shuffling about a bar with a shot-glass of whiskey on his head, inviting somebody to knock it off and make the whiskey run into his eyes, because some of it ran into his mouth. Once a bartender put him down on all fours and rode him across the floor, standing up in the saddle and then bringing his full weight down on his horse. Greener sprawled, rolled over laughing, onto his back, and lay with his mouth wide until the bartender paid for his ride with a shot of bar whiskey; that he sloshed down Greener’s throat.

  There was simply no end of the fun when Greener was in good form. People don’t know what good times are any more.

  Wandering about a Mammoth Cave of the paperback trade, through a fluorescent basement mist a few days before I boarded this ship, was what had brought the memory of Greener back. For it returned a phrase I’d read long ago—“We don’t even know what living is now”—as though, watching men and women adrift through an underground glow, it wasn’t titles of books we were seeking, but the names of our true selves.

  Even the titles seemed adrift: The Quest of Meaning, The Quest of Man, Man’s Quest, The Quest of Being, The Meaning of Man, Meaning and Existence— they began revolving as on some endless unseen belt. I closed my eyes and held on.

  When I opened them the titles had steadied, yet they were still there: Man’s Destiny, Man’s Hope, Man’s Fate, Man’s Place, The Past of Man, The Path of Man, Hillbilly Nympho—now how had that gotten in Man’s path?—Be Glad You’re Single, Be Glad You’re Neurotic, Be Glad You’re Ugly, Be Glad You’re Paraplegic, Be Glad You’re White—isn’t anybody pleased to be black anymore? Be Glad You’re You, Be Glad You’re Absurd, Growing Up Absurd—is Paul Goodman arranging our booklists? What is more absurd than to be so grown-up that the Meaning of Man concerns you more than men and women? Since when does abstracting the life from the poetry of living entitle a hollow hack to the honorable name of thinker?

  I saw three biographies of Melville but not a copy of Typee; four studies of Dostoevsky but where was Crime and Punishment? About D. H. Lawrence the safest statement anyone can now make is that yet another “definitive edition” of his work will be issued within the year, although eleven of his books are out of print—definitively. Who hooked that tightwire up? Would their publication dump all “definitive editions” onto the remainder tables? Who’s standing on his head now?

  “Where are they? Where are they?” were Dylan Thomas’ last coherent words.

  They went thataway.

  Our most daring minds, from Mailer to Murph the Surf, are now so high
above ground with no net below, that the only people still looking up are those on pot.

  “What I really object to,” one Home Ec thinker claims, “is the writer who offers me the world’s horrors without offering a solution”;19 thus advising us that Flaubert behaved badly in sending Madame Bovary to the publisher without appending a solution to small-town adultery. (That the world offers hardly a horror more deadly than a bourgeois antiquarian imposing a merchandiser’s morality upon all art not subserving his personal comfort, he is too complacent to suspect.)

  Dostoevsky’s underground man, born from an idea instead of a father, lost and confused when left alone without books—a creature who did not know what living was—has strangely risen bearing a critic’s credentials.

  And the word to the Pfc instructor, wherever faculty brass and their wives compete for captaincies, is publish, publish, publish. Riding an endless belt of useless information, he becomes confident that the footnote is the road to fame and fortune. The present imbalance of books about writing, to those written from direct experience, is sufficient evidence of this. And sends throngs of young people to believing that literature derives from other books rather than from life.

  They are duped by a presumption: that the truths which can sustain them can be handed down by educators, critics, analysts, anthologists and professional distributors of safe precepts: all those who, like Greener losing his sense of life under the hood of a secondhand Ford, lose theirs in a world where terminology embalms alike the living with the dead. The man whose passion attained its peak in a course in cost accounting now emerges as a shaper of American letters.

  How else to explain that a compilation of literary allusions such as Herzog, possessing no value beyond cuteness, can be mistaken for a living book? The explanation is that dedication to accuracy no more suffices to make criticism true than does correctness in a novelist: lacking a sense of poetry, all creative work becomes false.

  “What I have termed ‘evasion’ in his work,” another big-spender-around-campus explains Hemingway, “will be borne out if we search for its roots in his life, from which an artist’s work always springs. To be able to cope with emotion only by indirection [is] like escaping from life by big-game hunting or watching violence in the bullring. These are fascinating pursuits for our hours of leisure when given proper perspective. When they become a substitute for other forms of life they become an evasion of life.”20

  This is spite-burning; not criticism. When my father scolded me—“Why can’t you be a good boy?”—he was being quite as critical while being more just. And his English was better. But then he wasn’t a terminologist whose morality depended upon personal security.

  That “always and everywhere the proper study of mankind is man” doesn’t mean to annotate Man but to live like one. The critic’s resentment here is that which the small shopkeeper has always felt for the restless wanderer. What business does anyone have, he is asking, following bullfighters from arena to arena when he could be having a rich, full life teaching young women iambic pentameter? Why go bumping in a jeep across a battlefield when one can go wheeling contentedly to class in a Porsche?

  There, there, between the “definitive edition” and the bursar’s office, between the hard cover and the soft, between an LL.D. and his next critique, is where annotated man faces up to a life of no evasions.

  Hemingway’s life could be told solely in terms of his hostility toward the petit bourgeois demand that neither love nor death be real. That he overstates his proofs does, not now lessen the usefulness of his voyage. He began with Nada, he ended with Nada: but he knew those ports-of-call where life conflicts with death. He made the voyage.

  For the risks he took were not unmeasured. Both physical and literary, they were the calculated chances of a pro. His risks were of the kind that, failing, the taker fails alone; but succeeding, succeed for everyone. To be qualified to pass judgment upon his style, therefore, a critic would himself have to be a man willing to take similar risks. Since no such man appeared during Hemingway’s career, his work remains to be judged.

  Villon, writing in the fifteenth century, brings Hemingway to us more justly than any modern critic:In my own country I am in a far-off land

  I am strong but have no force nor power

  I win all yet remain a loser

  At break of day I say goodnight

  When I lie down I have great fear of falling

  More than any other contemporary, Hemingway put the ancestral warning, that he who gains his life shall lose it, into terms usable by modern man. Of many American writers who represented their own times, Hemingway alone made his times represent him.

  For the painter no longer in touch with people who don’t look at pictures begins to die as a painter. The actor whose life has moved from the marketplace to the studio acts falsely. The novelist, grown remote from people who don’t read, becomes untrue to those who do read. The thinker who loses contact with those who never think at all, no longer thinks justly.

  As the critic whose only wellspring is the work of other men at last gets to know all there is to know about Literature.

  Except how to enjoy it.

  JULY 15TH

  ARABIAN SEA

  Between the ceaseless rocking of the sea and the ceaseless wordiness of the critics, I divided the hours until afternoon. Then I decided to visit the officer’s lounge for a cup of coffee and witty conversation.

  A ward for catatonics would have been as lively and the coffee might have been better. First Mate, Third Mate, First Engineer and Second, each sat by himself looking straight ahead with his assigned cup before him. Each had his rating, so no more words were needed. What was there to do the rest of one’s days but avoid gonorrhea?

  William Gibbs McAdoo Manning, Chief Purser, was the philosopher of this likable group. When I came in he had just finished not replying to something the First Mate hadn’t said. The Second Engineer appeared to be in agreement.

  I noticed that the sugar-shaker was empty but, rather than ask for sugar, I drank the coffee black: why stick my neck out?

  The thinking seemed to be to take death’s mouth softly to one’s own, in order to escape the risk of living. This, in the flesh, was the American affliction of living incommunicado even to oneself.

  One deck down the seaborne sadsacks, foulups and misfits from every state in the union were lounging around reading comic books. Chips was listening on a transistor to the Dodgers playing the Giants.

  Smith motioned to me.

  “You remind me of a fellow I knew once”—Smith adjusted his neck and shifted a hip (to favor his Monstrous Boil) in order to get me into his sightline—“because his face was purely honest, but all he was good at was stealing.”

  “Thanks,” I acknowledged Smith’s flattering way.

  “His name was Zekl,” Smith went blithely on, “and the way he was most different from you was that he was fat. Zekl was all fat. He carried an outfielder’s mitt on his hip from the time he’d played semi-pro ball but now he could barely waddle. We called him ‘Hippo’—now ain’t that a diller?”

  I didn’t see any diller.

  “Hippo Zekl was a good center-fielder on Sundays and a good Saturday-Night-Mover. A Saturday-Night-Mover is a fellow who helps cops move stuff out of back-doors Saturday nights. This was in the days before night baseball so his athletic career didn’t interfere with his criminal life.”

  Smith hitched his neck: it was going to be a long story.

  “One Saturday night he helped move 10,500 dollars’ worth of office furniture out of an office-furniture place, and the next day I was playing center and Hippo was in right. It was the last of the ninth, we were one run behind, there was two out ’n nobody on. Zekl came to bat.

  “He sliced the first pitch toward first ’n should of been out by five feet, except the first-baseman waited for the pitcher to field it and the pitcher waited for the first-baseman, then both made the move together just as Zekl slood—”

 
“He what? ”

  “Slood. Slood into first. He was trying to beat the baseman to the bag with the ball. So he slood.”

  Smith looked perfectly guileless.

  “Go on,” I encouraged him.

  “He brought up such a cloud of dust that nobody could tell what had happened till the dust cleared. Then we seen Zekl standing on the bag and the first baseman looking for the ball.

  “He made sure the baseman wasn’t trying the hidden ball play on him. Then he took off for second. This time he slood spikes-first.”

  Smith glanced at me to see whether I had any objection. I had none.

  “When Zekl made second, he seen that the pitcher was helping the first-baseman find the ball, so he said to the second-baseman, ‘I guess you fellows just don’t want me’—and took off for third. This time he slood right under the baseman. When he got up and begin dusting hisself off, the right-fielder came in to help find the ball before Zekl took off again, because now there was nobody left but the catcher to stop him. But Zekl just stood on the bag as if we didn’t have four dollars apiece going on him.

  “‘Home!’ we hollered at him. ‘Home, Hippo! Home!’”

  Zekl began strolling toward home like he had all day.

  ‘Slide, Zekl! Slide! ’ everybody began hollering.”

  “And he slood?”

  “No sir,” Smith told me reproachfully, “he didn’t slide. He took the ball out of his own pocket and tossed it to the catcher when he was still ten feet from the plate. The catcher got so excited he put Zekl out by shoving the ball in his face. Zekl sat down in the middle of the base-path saying the same thing over and over.”

  “What was he saying over and over?”

  “‘I had it coming,’ Zekl kept saying, ‘I had it coming.’”

  Smith looked at me smugly confident I would be unsatisfied with the story.

  “What was the final score?” I wanted to know.