Novelists From The United States

"Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lay down with a woman who's got more troubles than you."

"What country is there for a white man who isn't white?"

"I am the penny whistle of American literature."

"A man who won't demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking."

"[Chicago is] the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap."

"Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser."

"[About his legacy:] I'll be all right so long as it has been written on some corner of a human heart. On the heart, it doesn't matter how you spell it."

"A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much."

"‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work. / Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.’"

"The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. [...] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit."

"For Algren, writing is not a trade or a hobby. It is a calling that requires practitioners give more of themselves emotionally than they can afford, and demands they tell the truest stories they possibly can, the kind that make the teller partner to the actions of their subjects, and create complicity in the telling. Everything else is just words on a page. In exchange for these sacrifices he guarantees no reward. Instead he promises commercial failure and the risk of emotional collapse, yet keeps faith with his vision and claims the other side asks more. They demand conformity."

"Algren had his vices – he never did see a dollar that wouldn't look better at the center of a poker table – but it was virtue that unwound his life."

"[Nelson Algren] was a type of loser we can't stomach in this country. [...] America has always been able to countenance beggars, short-con men, and nine-to-fivers who just can't get ahead, but we've never known what to do with the type of person who could have been really big but chose not to make the concessions required."

""Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America's traditions," Borges wrote. "Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville." And so too Nelson Algren."

"During Algren's childhood, America was a symbol of an ideal that could still seem revolutionary. For Whitman, a seminal influence on Algren, American democracy was a new event; for Algren, it is one more lost cause in a life devoted to lost causes, the greatest of which was writing, the act of which demanded you spend of your soul until there is nothing left but the prospect of death."

"Algren's epitaph for Fitzgerald could apply equally to himself: "Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them. And so he died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin.""

"The American dream was one of materialism, its hope that, even if you had lost everything yesterday, you might regain it today. Algren's dream is one of humanity: of how you might live a fully human life when you have lost everything and nothing can be regained – through humour, small victories and love."

"Algren's characters fail even at failure. They manage to mismanage crime, vice, sin. Nothing is so worthless that it cannot be lost, and Algren's mean streets are revealed by the passing of time to be both as real and as allegorical as Kafka's courtrooms and castles. It is a hell, and it is the ultimate test of our humanity. / Like Chekhov, Algren believed a writer's role was to side with the guilty."

"Everything in Algren is transformed into a particularly American agony, comic and tragic, and he created an idea of a spiritually compromised America so potent that for some decades no one wished to know of it. In consequence, his aesthetics were not what the new empire wanted, and nor was his subject – the dispossessed – any longer of interest."

"[About his persecution by McCarthyism:] This is the Algren who would shortly be writing A Walk on the Wild Side: lost, heartbroken, trying to hold on to his belief that writing might still matter in a country as lost as America, and that he still has something left to write for his country, a patriot who knows he is now viewed as a traitor."

"Algren's work was soon attracting attention for its unusual marriage of sumptuous prose and dry humour, describing a subject – the lives of those at the bottom – normally rendered in the dreariest of naturalistic tones. Algren's world, in one of the many phrases he brought into common usage (including "walk on the wild side", "monkey on the back", and "I knew I'd never make it to 21 anyway") was "neon wilderness"."

"Algren in person was a lot like his books – large-hearted, funny, angry, lonely. He spoke the truth to power wherever he met power (and he saw injustice where most people preferred to see only good intentions gone awry, which made him no friend to bourgeois academics and intellectuals: he trusted a brutal, racist Chicago cop more than a suburban Republican banker). To those of us who loved him, he could sometimes seem perversely self-defeating: he was unable to resist any chance to tweak the beard of somber authority."

"He wrote brilliantly, especially in A Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man With the Golden Arm, which are, to my mind, his best, most artistically successful books. His language lasts: the voice of an Algren story or novel is unmistakably his, as permanently, flat-out American as Twain's and Crane's and more authentic than Hemingway's."

"It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the best novelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the "kill the messenger" syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's works brings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all like our own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for a long, long time. In an Algren novel or story, the only thing that trickles down to where most folks live is disdain, violence and sometimes, on a good day, benign neglect; [...]"

"As I understand [Nelson Algren], he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off."

"His penchant for truth again shoved him in the direction of unpopularity."

"[Nelson Algren] broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently. [...] Reporting on what he saw of dehumanized Americans with his own eyes day after day, year after year, Algren said in effect, ‘Hey – an awful lot of these people your hearts are bleeding for are really mean and stupid. That's just a fact. Did you know that?’"

"[Nelson Algren] is buried in Sag Harbor – without a widow or descendants, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and with whose underbelly he had been so long identified. Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were."

"Recurring in all of Algren's work – novel, short story, poem – is the theme of the rigged ball-game. Offered in his unique lyric style, they are memorable."

"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. [...] Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."

"Unlike Father William, Algren does not stand on his head. He just shuffles along. His appearance is that of a horse player, who, this moment, got the news: he had bet her across the board and she came in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his is not a mournful mien. He's chuckling to himself. You'd think he was the blue-eyed winner rather than the brown-eyed loser. That's what's so funny about him. He has won. A hunch: his writings may be read long after acclaimed works of other Academe's darlings."

"[Nelson Algren] may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may be the most serious. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day – indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue – the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours."

"Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of “squalor” and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to what Algren observed and animated in his best fiction; thanks to Algren and a few others, Chicago framed American conversations about urban reality from the Thirties all the way through the Seventies and Eighties. [... Algren was] the most perceptive and humane novelist produced by Chicago in the 20th century."

"Two of his novels - A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man With the Golden Arm - and several of his short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs. But all his life, Nelson Algren chose to walk on the losers' side."

"Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies and deaths, can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity. I join with Ernest Hemingway in hoping that Algren lives on, holds to his standards, and writes a long shelf of books."

"As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It‘s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination."

"Some mysteries are better off with their throats slit."

"“I say again, impossible.” “And I correct you again. Difficult. ‘Difficult’ and ‘impossible’ are cousins often mistaken for one another, with very little in common.”"

"Master Kosta...What a pleasure! Selendri tells me you’ve expressed an interest in getting killed."

"“That’s a sweet piece,“ said Jean, briefly forgetting to be aggravated. “You didn’t snatch that off a street.“ “No,“ said Locke, before taking another deep draught of the warm water in the decanter. “I got it from the neck of the governor’s mistress.“ “You can’t be serious.“ “In the governor’s manor.“ “Of all the—“ “In the governor’s bed.“ “Damned lunatic!“ “With the governor sleeping next to her...It is possible,“ said Locke with a sheepish grin, “that I have been slightly too bold.“"

"“When I get this door open, you’re dead, Jean!“ “When you get that door open? I look forward to many long years of life, then.“"

"“You needed a bath,“ Jean interrupted. “You were covered in self-pity.“"

"The trouble with creating military dictators, Locke reflected, was getting rid of them after the immediate crisis was past."

"“I suspect that drink has made you impulsive.“ “Drink makes me see funny; the gods made me impulsive.“"

"“What do you have to say to that?“ “Oh, very little, to be sure, Master Kosta. It’s so hard to think, overawed as I am with the sublime genius of your plan.“ “That bears some vague resemblance to sarcasm.“ “God forfend,“ said Jean. “You wound me! Your inexpressible criminal virtues have triumphed again, as inevitably as the tides come and go. I cast myself at your feet and beg for absolution. Yours is the genius that nourishes the heart of the world.“ “And now you’re—“ “If only there was a leper handy,“ interrupted Jean, "so you could lay your hands on and magically heal him.“"

"“Here's to charming losers, I suppose.“ “If only we knew where to find some.“"

"“What’s your hand [of cards] look like?“ “A parched desert...How’s yours?“ “A wasteland of bitter frustration.“"

"I make it a point never to trust men with weapons to my windpipe."

"Hard lessons were handed out. As many men learned to their sorrow, it’s impossible to be intimidating when one angry woman has your cock between her teeth and another is holding a stiletto to your kidneys."

"I can’t live forever. Each time something like this affair lands in my lap, I suddenly recall that I don’t want to live forever."