Nonconformity by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online Page B

year after year, to given situations and characters, building up the surface almost more like a painter than a writer, until he found the emotion he wanted. When he was writing
The Man with the Golden Arm
, through a dozen drafts in some places and “forty rewritings that still aren’t right” 64 in others, the drug addiction of the drum-playing card dealer Frankie Machine didn’t enter in until nearly the very end. It was a wholly new element through which Algren gave the book, along with its title and narrative thrust, a different feeling—not the war now but the war’s aftermath, its unendingness. “I was going to write a war novel,” Algren would tell Alston Anderson and Terry Southern in a
Paris Review
interview in 1955, “but it turned out to be this
Golden Arm
thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came along and that was it,” 65 speaking as if the composition of his finest novel relied on a chain of events, really this process of layering—as outside his control as if hewere describing changes in the weather.
    Algren’s earliest published story began as a letter home. He was encouraged by an acquaintance to recast it as fiction and submit it to
Story
magazine; it was accepted, and that led to a contract for his first novel. Algren’s second novel,
Never Come Morning
, is a retelling of an early story called “A Bottle of Milk for Mother.” The last novel published in his lifetime,
A Walk on the Wild Side
, is a rewrite of his first novel,
Somebody in Boots
. Characters and situations recur from book to book—the police lineup is the classic example—with new layers of meaning and emotion.
    Nonconformity
was the result of a layering process roughly the reverse of the one that produced
Man with the Golden Arm
. In the beginning was the story of what Algren saw as his humiliation in Hollywood after a movie producer purchased the rights to
Golden Arm
and brought Algren to the coast to write the screenplay. Included here as an appendix, Algren’s sardonic account is his starting point, almost in the same way Frankie Machine’s habit was
Golden Arm’
s ending point. He then adds layers, most importantly that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical account of his nervous breakdown, as described in
The Crack-Up
. Algren keeps adding to the surface of his canvas, layer by layer, alternating the high with the low, giving glimpses of a moral universe in the most unexpected venues, scouring books and magazines for
sententiae
to shore up his arguments. Just as
Golden Arm
, through layering, became a text about theunendingness of an internalized state of war, this essay was transformed into a text about the responsibilities writers carry with them, about the unendingness, as it were, of the writer’s art. Through this startling metamorphosis, in which Algren lets his writing carry him from a state of utter self-absorption to one where the subject is in the end no longer himself at all (from a text about “my war with the United States as represented by Kim Novak” 66 to an essay that affirms the power writers wield when they resist the status quo), the nexus of the essay remains the bond he feels with Fitzgerald. From this link, the real subject of the essay emerges, which is the debt owed by writers to the lives they write about.
    Since Fitzgerald is known for imagining the very rich and Algren for writing about the poor, the two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. But in
Nonconformity
Algren cites Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald alone as father of the school to which he belongs. This is no longer the Proletarian school to which Algren had been linked by academics. Precisely
because
their subjects are so different, it is a tempting—and powerful—alternative way of reading that he is proposing. What is important about Fitzgerald, Algren is saying here, is that he put himself at the service of the characters he wrote about. And perhaps without fully realizing