THE CROCODILE
On Nelson Algren
I will be reading at the Red Room at KGB Sunday night for Kevin Maloney’s book launch. On February 15 I will be interviewing Colm Toibin at 192 Books about his new essay collection A Guest at the Feast. Below is another essay from my Bookforum archive, from 2019.
NEVER A LOVELY SO REAL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF NELSON ALGREN BY COLIN ASHER. W. W. NORTON & COMPANY. HARDCOVER, 560 PAGES. $39.
Call it a curse for an American writer to be born in 1909. These authors matured into the Depression; were subject, if male, to the draft during wartime; passed into middle age during the Red Scare; and, if they were lucky enough to see the 1960s, witnessed liberations they were too old to savor. They also witnessed a sea change in American literary fashions, as the naturalism of the 1930s was demoted by a cadre of critics reorganizing the canon around Henry James. Some of them weren’t very lucky at all. A roll call includes James Agee, dead at forty-five of a heart attack in the back of a taxi; Daniel Fuchs, a Brooklyn prodigy whose talents were drained dry in Hollywood; Chester Himes, imprisoned at age nineteen and later self-exiled to France, where he suffered a stroke at age fifty-three. Happier were Eudora Welty, a genius fully recognized in her lifetime, and Wallace Stegner, who became the model of the novelist as creative-writing professor.
The sorrows of Nelson Algren, as Colin Asher’s new biography Never a Lovely So Real shows, have the particular flavor of twentieth-century American pathologies. Split the career into halves, and the first is a triumph over adversity, a steady rise founded on dedicated research into life on the streets of Chicago and other destitute zones and a monastic devotion to the craft of writing. The second half of his career reads like a conspiracy to spoil a real talent—a plot in which the malefactors are the New York Intellectuals, Manhattan publishing, the FBI, and a few of Algren’s own demons. By breaking his heart and then telling the story to the world, Simone de Beauvoir didn’t exactly help matters. It was de Beauvoir who recognized Algren’s dual nature: “the smart, daring, talented, conceited local youth” and “the stupid, shy, off-balanced crocodile.”