Entrapment and Other Writings Read online

  And parked in the alley beneath the Congress Street station

  Until the groan of the El overhead could muffle the shot.

  He fainted once during that wait, and came to in a sweat.

  Just as the El overhead began slowing down toward the station.

  They stuffed him into the topcoat,

  Feet first for the sake of time,

  And buttoned it high so he wouldn’t catch cold

  Wrapping the collar carefully about the pointed pumps

  And draping him over the side, to let him drip:

  The moving El clattered faintly, curving south toward Twelfth.

  They turned east on the Drive and west down 34th.

  They let his heels drag for one darkened mile

  That almost ruined his shine

  And got rid of him at last, without slowing down,

  Passing the darkened park.

  He lay among other undersized weeds

  In the prairie behind the grandstand.

  The grey-gloved fingers twitched once

  And the trouser legs stirred in the wind.

  The toes scratched a bit in the sand:

  It was that that ruined the pumps

  It wasn’t the ride at all.

  NO LOUD TALKING PERMITTED.

  NO TRICK SHOTS ALLOWED.

  THIS TABLE ON TIME ONLY.

  Kindly rack up his cue.

  Local South

  Pity Pietra Lefkowicz Schmies

  Scrubbing the office of Ed. J. Kelly

  His stairs are of steel and his walls are of marble

  She scrubs his urinal on her knees.

  Pity all such on their knees in Chicago

  Pity all cabbies without a fare,

  Pity the sick thief seeking a bondsman

  Pity the city where Kelly is mayor.

  The neon sign in the funeral home

  Burns jade beside a potted palm,

  A hatless drunk in an arc-lamp’s light

  Confides to the lamp the Fourteenth Psalm.

  It is twenty to two by the potted palm

  It is twenty to two in the best hotel,

  It is twenty to two by a hatless drunk

  It is twenty to two on the Lake Street El.

  What time will it be when the last El crashes?

  What time will it be in the funeral home?

  Will a neon sign by a potted palm

  Light a hatless drunk to a crumbling tomb?

  Go home, Pietra Lefkowicz Schmies

  Grab the Lake Street El and crawl into bed,

  The wall is falling behind your mop

  The floor is falling beneath your knees.

  II.

  The War and After

  (1943–1947)

  Over the course of his life and career, Algren wrote and published a vast amount. And some things never changed. His fiction and poetry remained studies in reality (although, as his good friend Studs Terkel always noted, perhaps in part to differentiate Algren’s books from his own, Algren’s characters were different from the people he based them on). But other things about Algren’s writing did change over the years. There was an identifiable trend that differentiated his major accomplishments of the 1930s and 40s—the years that produced Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, and The Man with the Golden Arm—from the books he wrote in the 50s (Chicago: City on the Make, A Walk on the Wild Side, and the never-completed Entrapment) and those of the 60s: the travel writings that formed the bulk of Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Diary, and the short reportage and fiction collected in The Last Carousel. The trend was away from the robust ambition of the great American novelist inspired by the great Russian and European novelists of the nineteenth century, and towards a much more humble and sardonic—and more distinctly American—outsider role for Algren, although the production never stopped and hardly even slowed down for the better part of five decades.

  Here are three largely unknown works from the 1940s, Algren’s most prolific and powerful decade as a writer. One is an essay on writing, the other two are stories. “Do It the Hard Way,” the earliest of the several essays gathered here, appeared in the Writer in 1943 (“America’s Oldest Magazine for Literary Workers” is how the magazine saw itself). The burden of Algren’s argument in this piece of encouragement to young writers is that one need not sell out, that “despite the temptations of the big rewards of hack serialization and of the How-Did-He-Get-Rid-of-the-Corpse market,” it is still possible “to write honestly, for honest men; for the milkman, for the janitor, for the street-car conductor …”

  “Hank, the Free Wheeler” offers something decidedly different from Algren. Begun in the 1930s for “Chicago Industrial Folklore,” a collection sponsored by the Federal Writers’ Project (part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration), “Hank” is one of several such assignments undertaken by the cash-strapped Algren. Ostensibly told to Algren by an unnamed workingman, the story has been polished to conform to the conventions of the tall tale—here, the account of an entrepreneur who valued speed and efficiency above all else. “Hank, the Free Wheeler” was included in A Treasury of American Folklore, edited by B. A. Botkin (1944).

  “Single Exit,” first published in 1947, is one of the more interesting of Algren’s uncollected stories, and reasons for its omission from The Neon Wilderness, like that of “The Lightless Room,” are not known. The story, conjuring an aura of spooky mystery, concerns the barely respectable Katz, a man who has slept “nightly with shame” and who, after “years of furtive living in rented rooms,” dreams one midnight that he has awakened and left his sleeping wife behind for an adventure in the hotel bar downstairs, a place where all “respectability [is] suspect.”

  DO IT THE HARD WAY

  A book, a true book, is the writer’s confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting, publicly, his own inmost feelings. But the young writer is often abashed by these feelings into glossing them over and modifying them, out of a fear of a publisher’s disapproval. He wants to write what he truly feels, and yet he wants people to buy what he says too. So he compromises. He writes a solid first act to a three-act play and glosses the last two into ruin. Or he writes a good half novel and lets fear of censure cloud the last half. Or he writes one good novel, a true book, sustained all the way. And then never writes another, out of fear that he has gone too far, because some aunt of a reviewer has termed it “brutal.”

  This literary reneging is the commonest kind of occurrence in America, in painting as in poetry, in the drama as in the short story. A certain short story writer, of Armenian extraction but who shall be nameless here because of his aversion to publicity, once quipped: “There is such a thing as growing tired of being poor. There is such a thing as saying to hell with art. That’s what l said.” And thousands of aspiring writers are forced to say that every day. Yet the truth still holds that great rewards do, at last, come to the boldest; to those who permit neither avarice nor shame to modify what they truly feel and truly know.

  As examples, among novelists, l think of Steinbeck, Wright, Farrell, and Dreiser. Men with something to say who have said it, each in his own fashion, without fear of public censure; and have been more fully compensated thereby than had they been timid or venal or abject.

  Not to say, of course, that the great rewards do not commonly go to the most abject. It is only to say that it is not necessary to crawl in order to be rewarded. Their books—and we see them on the best seller lists every day—are artful dodges, tours de force which say nothing gracefully, or nothing lyrically, or nothing wistfully, or nothing hopefully, or nothing nostalgically, or—best of all—nothing mystically. But still: nothing. Like eating cotton candy—a mouthful of the stuff and wisp—nothing left but a sweetish taste and a clinging coat on the tongue.

  And the penalty for saying something with nothing to say? I suppose part of the penalty is in being forgotten three months
after the last white lily, placed in your palm by your severest critic, has wilted. Not that it is necessary to dedicate oneself fiercely to posterity. But only, in all sincerity, to write in the hope of being remembered a while. Because that is the use of the printed word: to stand up against time when our tongues are stopped; to represent those aspects of the human spirit which stand up against time, since those are the only things that do stand up. lf one is not to say, at least occasionally, something memorable, then why not just tell it to the milkman and forget it?

  The answer to that, of course, is that the milkman won’t leave any grade A to hear you say it; but he may buy a book if you write it. You can write seriously, of memorable things, and still have the milkman buy. It remains possible, despite the temptations of the big rewards of hack serialization and of the How-Did-He-Get-Rid-of-the-Corpse market, to write honestly, for honest men; for the milkman, for the janitor, for the street-car conductor, and the mailman, and still have the satisfaction of getting a contract renewed.

  It’s not the easy way, because neither the milkman nor the street-car conductor are likely to wait for payment until the rewards of doing it the hard way come in. But willingness to do the thing the hard way is part of the serious writer’s equipment. He plans, forever, even when disappointed, to go to Niagara Falls for a larger purpose than simply to spit in the cataract from the Canadian side.

  For the American press is, truly, a great cataract, an endlessly moving tide which catches up most writers almost as soon as they can spell. It is well, for those who believe in the necessity of writing with conviction of both feeling and thought, to regard this tide with a degree of scepticism, knowing that the biggest bubble in the torrent will burst any moment, that the only things which remain intact upon it, even after they go over the falls themselves, are those things which the writer has himself learned and felt and absorbed, in his very brain and tissue, and by his own most intimate experience. For ultimately, not only the worldly rewards go to those willing to do it the hard way, but also the reward of being remembered, of gaining the satisfaction of having said a thing of one’s own in one’s own fashion.

  So it isn’t strictly essential, in order to live by writing, to write only of the safest, most-sure-to-sell subjects. That market, to speak frankly, is overcrowded. And although we hear every day of the cautiousness of publishers who steer wide of anything dealing with people who don’t live in comfort, who go only to Junior League occasions and never say offensive words even secretly, the happy truth of the matter is that there isn’t a solid publisher going who won’t take a book dealing with any strata of any society so long as it is a true book; so long as the writer is not contriving his realism out of his head instead of out of reality; so long as he speaks with a degree of clarity and a degree of force; so long as he is writing with his eyes on his subject and not on his reader; so long as he isn’t trying to pull a Sweetness-and-Light in reverse. That is to say, so long as he isn’t aiming deliberately at a shocker with the identical venality employed by those who write to comfort the reader at all costs.

  For publishers are in business, and the American public, war or no war, still buys books that speak convincingly of reality. The average American reader is a knowing sort of cuss, and he knows when a book is false or true. Publishers aren’t afraid of the American reader. If the writer will speak boldly, he will find that the best publishers are bold enough to publish him, that the average American is bold enough to buy.

  There was, in pre-revolutionary Russia, a novelist who wrote of Russian prostitution. When asked why he had turned to such a subject, while his more successful contemporaries wrote of people in more pleasant circumstances, he explained himself:

  “With us, you see, they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones—and really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse and talent. But after all, these people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture … tinsel … gingerbread.…”

  What happens here in America, where there are a hundred gifted writers to every one of old Russia? Where the levelling processes of Democracy have given us, from all classes and all callings and all colors, legions of brilliant writers: writers of verse, of short stories, of biographies, of mysteries, of jingles and ghost stories and fairy tales, endlessly stylized novels of endlessly stylized clothes-horses. They, too, write with talent and finesse. Without conviction of feeling or thought, of a world that does not exist.

  How then does the serious writer go about putting down the world of reality? I fancy it is basically a matter of living and reacting. The chief thing should be to share, as fully as one is able, in the common experiences of common humanity. The incidental thing would be the recording on the typewriter of reactions obtained in this sharing process. For, to the creative writer, all experiences, whether noble or mean or sordid or simply pathetic, are the seeds from which his writing must grow. Which means that they must not only be planted, but that their growth must be unforced. That no studied effort at invention of literary images can ever replace the simplest sound of experienced reality.

  To write without haste, as the story grows within, regardless of all social and moral ideas, regardless of whom your report may please or offend, regardless of whether the critics stand up and cheer for a month or take hammer and tongs after you, or simply ignore you—regardless of all forms, of all institutions, of all set ways of conduct and thought. Regardless, chiefly, of what the writer himself prefers to believe, know, hear, think or feel.

  And that aspect—the ability to feel your way into a story rather than to regard it from the sidelines by some formal outline—is the most encouraging aspect of this business of defying the grocer in order to write seriously. For practically everyone can feel. If you can’t do that, of course, you’re gone. You can’t go out and get a new set of emotions. But if it’s simply a matter of not knowing anything, that’s not so serious; because most writers don’t. But they do develop an ability to listen. To listen to people talk. And in the talk of people, especially of those on the streets, lies an endless wealth of story-stuff.

  Nor is it necessary to go about haunting street corners with a notebook in your pocket and an amplifier in your ear. It is necessary only that you do not stop your ears with smugness or indifference or indolence. Going about your workaday rounds, assuming you’re neither in solitary confinement nor a hermit, you’ll hear all the words of which people’s lives are constituted. And, if you listen long enough, the commonest speech will begin to ring like poetry.

  For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded, in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn’t tell you, though he try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop.

  I recall being caught recently by the language of a girl in an all-night hamburger joint. I didn’t have to eavesdrop. I was there for coffee, and there she was, an unprepossessing little thing in some small trouble all her own, confiding some of it to the counter-jumper:

  “I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come so bad,” she was telling him, “I just don’t seem so good as other people any more. Sometimes I’m that disgusted of myself I think: ‘Just one more dope, that’s you.’ I won’t set up there in that room another Spring alone, thinkin’ stuff like that. It just starts goin’ through my head as soon as I come in that door. Like someone who lives there I can’t see, somebody who knows better, tellin’ me: ‘Just one more dope, that’s you.’ I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come. So bad.”

  lf that isn’t poetry, Saroyan is a dentist.*

  Poetry it is, the best and the truest: the poetry of the ball-park and the dance hall, of the drugstore at noon, of the pool room and the corner new
sstand, of the Montgomery-Ward salesgirls reminiscing on the nearest streetcar or bus.

  And it is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can’t give you the first syllable of reality, at any cost, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. There never was a time, a place, and a country like our own in which the opportunity to write truly of common men and women was so accessible—to those bold enough to seize the chance.

  Whitman himself never had the chance to write of Democracy as we have today, when a hundred nations, as one nation, pass before us every day. And Whitman could never take a camera along either.

  Which can be an asset even to writers not planning a picture book with captions. The simple selective process of snapping relevant aspects of the life of our streets assists the writer visually as fully as does listening to street talk. It doesn’t matter that the pictures turn out poorly—the business of going about looking and discriminating is the main idea.

  Then set your pictures, whether from the film or from your mind, on the typewriter, in your own good time, in your own way—the way it felt and looked when you snapped it. Then you’ll feel you’re writing something you know.

  You may find, in time, that doing it the hard way is the easiest way of all.

  *No deprecation intended: there never was another writer to take such simple pleasure out of spitting into Niagara, nor any other to do so so entertainingly.

  HANK, THE FREE WHEELER

  Hank Lord was a man that wanted everything on wheels and moving about long before he owned an automobile factory. When he was still in his didies, he yelped till his poor old dad had to rollerskate the floor with him instead of walking to and fro like it’s always proper for dads to do.