Entrapment and Other Writings Read online

  —Dan Simon and Brooke Horvath

  A NOTE ON TEXT SELECTION1

  Many of the hundreds of stories and vignettes or articles that Algren wrote found their way into magazines, from the Anvil, the New Masses, the Nation, Partisan Review, and Story early on, to Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, the Chicago Tribune Book World, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Cavalier, and other men’s magazines. Eventually, scenes described in the magazine pieces showed up in Algren’s many novels and nonfiction books, and a few notably appeared more than once in slightly revised versions.

  But, importantly, some of Algren’s very best writing never appeared anywhere and was left finished but completely unpublished in his archive at the Special Collections library at Ohio State University. Some of Algren’s finest stories and essays were published once, either in obscure or major magazines, then weren’t collected in book form, and so were lost. And Algren never finished the novel he set about writing right after The Man with the Golden Arm, despite wrestling with it for several years, leaving hundreds of pages of drafts to gather dust among his papers, including long fragments that were tantalizingly good.

  The never-published story masterpiece “The Lightless Room,” written around 1939, was one of the major works left in a clean, finished copy in the archive and never before published anywhere. Previously uncollected stories include one of his best early stories, “Forgive Them, Lord”; and two late great stories, “There Will Be No More Christmases” and “Walk Pretty All the Way”; among many other short works of fiction and nonfiction. The unfinished novel is, of course, Entrapment, with which Algren struggled for much of the early 1950s. He never completed the novel, only separating out a brilliant section he gave to Playboy in 1957, and a longer version of the same scenes that he inserted, almost hidden from view, all the way at the back of his giant 1973 collection of fiction and nonfiction, The Last Carousel.

  We include all the above-mentioned pieces of writing—and much, much more—in the present volume and would argue for it as an essential Algren text, one that adds intimacies and fresh insight amounting to a significant contribution to Algren’s known output, already one of the most prolific in American literature. Returning again to Entrapment, the two long sections we chose will give the reader some sense of the ambition Algren had for the novel. It was to include at its core a romantically improbable couple and, towards the end this couple was to split to reveal a lonely man and a woman who escapes. Had it been completed Entrapment might have turned out to be Algren’s comical tragical masterpiece; it would in any case have been the one in which a woman’s voice is heard most resoundingly and in which the woman whose voice is heard manages to save herself.

  Algren rewrote himself constantly, and returned frequently to certain human situations. In preparing the present version, we were faced with a dilemma. In cases where Algren had clearly chosen his own definitive versions of a scene, such as the famous lineup scene in the story “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” from The Neon Wilderness, which Algren himself rewrote into various scenes in The Man with the Golden Arm, we decided we did not want to introduce yet more versions into circulation. The archive is chock-full of earlier versions of countless scenes in one or another novel. We could have filled several volumes with these, but we felt this would have been the wrong approach. Where Algren had sought to have the last word, we let him have it.

  We did allow one exception to the above, and this was, we would like to think, with Algren’s blessing. Part III of the present volume includes two previously unpublished versions of scenes from The Man with the Golden Arm that Algren himself identified as finished stories gleaned from early versions of the novel. We did this because these two passages, taken together with the finished versions in The Man with the Golden Arm, provide us with a window into the marvel of Algren’s process. To compare the early with the final version in each case is to confront the difference between good writing and the pure magic of the additionally layered, complex reality Algren was able to introduce late in his writing and revision process.

  We believe the present volume broadens and deepens our apprehension of Algren as a writer and as an individual. Some of this writing is work Algren took the trouble to complete then chose to hide, or partially hide, from view. Some is the work Algren struggled to complete, whose completion finally eluded him. Every piece in Entrapment and Other Writings is irreplaceable, and when taken together these stories, fragments, poems, and essays will, we hope and believe, add depth and complexity to our ongoing relationship with the unique artist and human being that Algren was.

  NOTE

  1. For a comprehensive listing of Algren’s published work, see Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, Nelson Algren: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. For other stories uncollected by Algren, see The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren, ed. Bettina Drew. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

  Publication Information

  I. OUT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, INTO THE WAR (1934–1941)

  “Forgive Them, Lord.” Story first published in A Year Magazine 2 (December 1933–April 1934): 144–49.

  “A Lumpen.” Story first published in The New Masses 16 (2 July 1935): 25–26.

  “Within the City.” Story first published in The Anvil 3 (October–November 1935): 9.

  “American Obituary.” Story first published in Partisan Review 2 (October–November 1935): 26–27.

  “The Lightless Room.” Unpublished story (1939). Nelson Algren archives, the Ohio State University.

  “Five Poems”: “Utility Magnate.” The New Anvil 1 (April–May 1939): 16–17. Published under pseudonym “Lawrence O’Fallon”; “Home and Goodnight.” Poetry (November 1939): 74–76; “Travelog.” Poetry (November 1939): 76–77; “This Table On Time Only.” Esquire (March 1940): 78–79; “Local South.” Poetry (September 1941): 308–309.

  II. THE WAR AND AFTER (1943–1947)

  “Do It the Hard Way.” Essay first published in The Writer 56 (March 1943): 67–70.

  “Hank, the Free Wheeler.” Story published in A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People. Ed. B. A. Botkin. New York: Crown, 1944. 540–42.

  “Single Exit.” Story first published in Cross Section 1947: A Collection of New American Writing. Ed. Edwin Seaver. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947. 217–24.

  III. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1949)

  “Little Lester.” Unpublished story marked in Algren’s hand on title page, “Unpublished story from ‘Man with the Golden Arm’—Algren.” Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University.

  “Paper Daisies.” Unpublished story marked in Algren’s hand on title page, “Unpublished story from ‘Man with the Golden Arm’—Algren.” Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University. An almost identical unpublished manuscript variant, under the title “Hustler’s Hearts,” marked in Algren’s hand, “Early version of ‘Man with the Golden Arm’—Algren” is also in the Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University.

  IV. ENTRAPMENT (1951–1953)

  “Watch Out for Daddy.” Short story. Originally identified as a fragment from Entrapment. The middle section first appeared as a short story in Playboy, April 1957, as “All through the Night.” First complete publication in The Last Carousel (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), 1973. Currently available in paperback (New York: Seven Stories Press), 1997.

  “Entrapment.” Unpublished novel fragment. Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University.

  V. AND ALL THE REST (1957–1981)

  “G-String Gomorrah.” Reportage first published in Esquire (August 1957): 47–48.

  “Ain’t Nobody On My Side?” Reportage first published in The Race for Space! Ed. Paul G. Neimark. Chicago: Camerarts, 1957. 13.

  “Stoopers and Shoeboard Watchers.” Reportage first published in Sports Illustrated 15 (June 1959): E12–E16.

  “Afternoon in the Land of the Strange Light Sleep.” Story first publi
shed in Cavalier 12 (September 1962): 24–25, 27.

  “Nobody Knows Where Charlie’s Gone.” Unpublished reportage fragment in the Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University.

  “Down with Cops.” Essay first published in Saturday Evening Post 23 (October 1965): 10, 14.

  “The Emblems and the Proofs of Power.” Essay first published in The Critic 25 (February–March 1967): front cover, 20–25.

  “On Kreativ Righting.” Essay first published in The New York Times 29 (March 1975): 23

  “Topless in Gaza.” Reportage first published in New York 30 (October 1978): 88–90.

  “ ‘We Never Made It to the White Sox Game.’ ” Essay first published in The Chicago Tribune Book World 2 (September 1979): 1.

  “No More Whorehouses.” Unpublished completed reportage from typescript in the Nelson Algren archives, Ohio State University.

  “There Will Be No More Christmases.” Chicago (July 1980): 132–34. One of the last two stories Algren wrote and published in his lifetime.

  “Walk Pretty All the Way.” Chicago (June 1981): 160–64. The other of the last two stories Algren wrote and published in his lifetime.

  “So Long, Swede Risberg.” Essay first published in Chicago July 1981: 138–41, 158, two months after Algren’s death on May 9, 1981.

  INTERVIEW

  Perlongo, Robert A. “Interview with Nelson Algren.” Chicago Review 11 (1957): 92–98.

  I.

  Out of the Great Depression, Into the War

  (1934–1941)

  “Forgive Them, Lord,” the first uncollected story gathered here, appeared in 1934; it is the second story Algren published.1 It tells of a black World War I veteran who witnesses three white men gun down a black man and his daughter.

  The next three brief pieces date from 1935. “A Lumpen” sketches an unnamed drifter who emerges from a Chicago mission in time to be disgusted by blacks and whites marching together in a solitary parade. “Within the City” and “American Obituary” are vignettes, the former of Chicago, where “every man seems to go alone,” the latter of one of the decade’s homeless, slugged and dumped into the river “for ninety cents.”

  “The Lightless Room,” written “about 1939,” according to a note in Algren’s hand on the manuscript, sees daylight here for the first time, having never been published before in any form. Inspired by a news clipping, the story concerns small-time boxer Blackie Cavanaugh—a man who “didn’t care, one way or another, whether he lived or died.” Blackie is recalled by his girlfriend, mother, father, and manager, before stepping out of the darkness to speak for himself. Why this story was never published—Algren’s collection The Neon Wilderness would have been its natural home—is difficult to explain.

  Algren’s most famous poem, “Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm,” first appeared in 1947 in Poetry—and two years later he chose the poem to close his novel of the same name. Various Algren works have poems sprinkled throughout, including Who Lost an American?, Notes from a Sea Diary, and The Last Carousel. And, of course, Chicago: City on the Make, a book-length prose poem, is one of Algren’s most enduring works. The five poems collected here are drawn from the late 1930s and early ’40s, when Algren was not yet an internationally renowned novelist and may have thought of himself as equally a poet. With the exception of “Local South,” an occasionally rhymed and loosely metered poem that appeared in Poetry in 1941, the selections are free verse. Whether sketching an urban scene or narrating the story of a life swirling like dirty water down some bathtub drain, Algren’s poems, though blown by his own inner weather, invariably concern the lives of others. They possess the virtues of directness, economy, careful but unpretentious diction, and point. In his essay “Do It the Hard Way” (included in this collection), Algren writes that “the best and the truest” sort of poetry is that “of the ball-park and the dance hall, of the drugstore at noon, of the pool room and the corner newsstand, of the Montgomery-Ward salesgirls reminiscing on the nearest streetcar or bus.” Certainly, one can hear in these poems just such language, spoken by just such people. The lyricism that underlies every prose word of every Algren novel originates with poems like these.

  NOTE

  1. The first story Algren published, “So Help Me,” appeared in Story magazine in 1933 and was then included in his classic 1947 short collection, The Neon Wilderness.

  FORGIVE THEM, LORD

  Christopher Morgan, a gaunt Negro farmer, was returning from his regular Saturday night visit to a prostitute named Queenie Lee. The sweet dark warmth of the Alabama night pressed him close about. Its closeness was a womanly closeness—all faintly perfumed breathing, deep dark calm, and eyes of velvet mist. With an inward smirk of thick self-satisfaction Christopher mused on Queenie. “She sho’ was one sweet gal to me tonight,” he reflected. Vaguely he wondered whether any of the white miners of the neighborhood patronized her.

  The turmoil she had aroused in his blood had scarcely subsided, but a gentle fatigue had already set in. He walked slower and slower. His body felt ripe and rich, heavy and solid, as though the blood had turned to warmish milk. “Ah’ll sleep right deep tonight,” he said to himself. Then he stopped, dropped to his knees, crept into the long flat shadows that bordered the roadside. Three horses, two black and one a sleek dappled brown, were tied to a dead elm not twenty paces to his left; and he knew as by instinct what business brought them there. He lay very still; he uttered no sound; he listened intently; and up from the woody declevity embanking the road came a murmur of low voices, tense, and somehow cold. Christopher Morgan crept closer.

  There were three of them, but none were robed, and Christopher knew all three. They were miners: Bryan Jenks and his two tall sons, Luther and Lloyd. Between Luther and Lloyd stood a Negro, fat and aged, gray of hair and light of flesh, who Christopher had never before seen. Half clinging to this fellow was a mulatto girl of about fifteen whose throat, Christopher remarked, was magnificently long and soft. She was pregnant.

  Suddenly his head became a lump of blue-green ice. Was it possible? Damn it, they couldn’t hang a child. Or could they? Could they kill a helpless old man also? Well, by God, they wouldn’t—not while he had red blood in his belly. He sucked in breath fiercely, between fierce jaws. The muscles behind his shoulders began to bunch and play until his entire back was quivering and his great thighs were tensed and eager. His heart set up a strong marching rhythm, then a bold laughing beat in his breast, singing ever faster and bolder. Yes, by Christ, he’d give the sneaking brutes what-for. Anxiously he darted his eyes from Bryan to Luther to the boy Lloyd and back again to Bryan. There was no rope, and his body relaxed in sudden relief. “Careful, nigger,” he cautioned himself, “careful—Heah aint no neck-tie party ay tall.”

  He watched the face of the elder Jenks. It was not a hard face. The mouth was not cruel. The eyes were not cold eyes. Indeed there was something so kindly in them that Christopher was reassured. No, old Bryan wasn’t one of them alligator whites. He had a heart in his breast, old Bryan had, not jest a dirty ol’ lump o’ hard coal. This old nigger and his girl weren’t in for anything worse than a healthy scare. Maybe it would do the heifer good. Maybe she’d been too pert. Yaller gals were always pert. It was her own fault, maybe, and after this she’d know better. Had it been Luther or Lloyd who’d sewed her up? Or Bryan himself? Christopher chuckled at the latter possibility. An old fashioned scarin’ party, that’s jest what it was. He’d watch, and maybe pretty soon they’d do something funny. What if it really had been old Bryan? He cupped his big hand over his mouth to stifle the rich black laughter that welled up in his throat.

  Bryan nodded to Luther. Swiftly Luther stepped forward, and Christopher saw the spurt of sudden flame. The old man remained erect, but he had closed his eyes now, and was swaying slightly from side to side. Then he said “Ah—ah,” waved his short arms aimlessly about his head for a moment and sagged to the earth like a gunny-sack half full of old potatoes. Luther bent over him and fired again, needless
ly. There was no further movement, and Luther rose, stepped one pace backward, and handed the revolver to his father without lifting his eyes from the poor thing on the ground. As though touched with sudden dew in the moonlight the small bent grasses beneath the dead man’s head shimmered and glistened where the damp blood began to reach it.