Satire Books

"The nameless, useless nobodies who sleep behind the taverns, who sleep beneath . Who sleep in burnt-out busses with the windows freshly curtained; in winterized chicken coops or patched-up truck bodies. The useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows: that go as the snow goes, where the wind blows, there and there and there, down any old cat-and-ashcan alley at all. There, unloved and lost forever, lost and unloved for keeps and a day, [...] there were they chop kindling for heat, cook over coal stoves, still burn kerosene for light, there where they sleep the all-night movies through and wait for rain or peace or snow: there, there beats Chicago's heart. / [...] For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart."

"By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and the sun goes by on the wind. By nights when the moon is an only child above the measured thunder of the cars, you may know Chicago's heart at last: / You'll know it's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making in the city of all cities most like Man himself – loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth."

"A Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of burg, where one university's faculty members can protest sincerely against restrictive covenants on the blighted streets bordering their campus – not knowing that the local pay roll draws on real estate covered by covenants like a tent. Let's get back to them saints, Professor. It's awful cold out there."

"The giants cannot come again; all the bright faces of tomorrow are careworn hustlers' faces. / And the place always gets this look of some careworn hustler's tomorrow by night, as the arch of spring is mounted and May turns into June. It is then that the women come out of the summer hotels to sit one stone step above the pavement, surveying the men curb-sitting one step below it. Between them pass the nobodies from nowhere, the nobodies nobody knows, with faces cut from the same cloth as their caps, and the women whose eyes reflect nothing but the pavement."

"It's hustle and bustle from day to day, chicken one day and feathers the next, and nobody knows where went."

"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they've been – the ring of a city's awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."

"Every day is under ."

"These are the pavement-colored thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole long night to kill."

"It used to be a writer's town and it's always been a fighter's town. For writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes, cat-bandits, baggage thieves, hallway head-lockers on the prowl, baby photographers and stylish coneroos, this is the spot that is always most convenient, being so centrally located, for settling ancestral grudges. Whether the power is in a .38, a typewriter ribbon or a pair of six-ouncers, the place has grown great on bone-deep grudges: of writers and fighters and furtive torpedoes."

"Make the Tribune bestseller list and the Friends of American Writers, the Friends of Literature, the Friends of Shakespeare and the Friends of Frank Harris will be tugging at your elbow, tittering down your collar, coyly sneaking an extra olive into your martini or drooling flatly right into your beer with the drollest sort of flattery and the cheapest grade of praise: the grade reserved strictly for proven winners."

"Wise up, Jim: it's a joint where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up head-down from the hook. [...] / A town where the artist of class and the swifter-type thief approach their work with the same lofty hope of slipping a fast one over on everybody and making a fast buck to boot. “If he can get away with it I give the man credit,” is said here of both bad poets and good safe-blowers."

"The very toughest sort of town, they'll tell you – that's what makes it so American. / Yet it isn't any tougher at heart than the U.S.A. is tough at heart, for all her ships at sea. It just acts with the nervous violence of the two-timing bridegroom whose guilt is more than he can bear: the bird who tries to throw his bride off the scent by accusing her of infidelity loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. The guiltier he feels the louder he talks. That's the sort of little loud talker we have in Chicago today. He isn't a tough punk, he's just a scared one. Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt."

"Town of the flagpole sitters, iron city, where everything looks so old yet the people look so young. [...] And of that adolescent who paused in his gum-chewing, upon hearing the sentence of death by electrocution passed upon him, to remember ever so softly: “Knew I'd never get to be twenny-one anyhow.”"

"Now it's the place where we do as we're told, praise poison, bless the F.B.I., yearn wistfully for just one small chance to prove ourselves more abject than anyone yet for expenses to Washington and return – You Too Can Learn to Trap Your Man – and applaud the artist, hanging for sale beside his work, with an ancestral glee. And cannot understand how it can be that others are happier than ourselves. And why it seems that no one loves us now as they once did."

"Giants lived here once. It was the kind of town, thirty years gone, that made big men out of little ones. It was geared for great deeds then, as it is geared for small deeds now."

"Out of the Twisted Twenties flowered the promise of Chicago as the homeland and heartland of an American renaissance, a place of poets and sculptors to come, of singers and painters, dancers, actors and actresses of golden decades yet to be. [...] / Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara with not a camel in sight. The springs dried up and the sands drifted in, and the caravans went the other way."

"Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young. / And grew up too arrogant, too gullible, too swift to mockery and too slow to love. So careless and so soon careworn, so challenging yet secretly despairing – how can such a cocksure Johnson of a town catch anybody but a barfly's heart?"

"Yet on nights when, under all the arc-lamps, the little men of the rain come running, you'll know at last that, long long ago, something went wrong between St. Columbanus and North Troy Street. And Chicago divided your heart. / Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. / Yet knowing it never can love you."

"The city today is more a soldier's than an artist's town. [...] You can't make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its great cities to produce artists. It's in the nature of the overbraided brass to build walls around the minds of men – as it is in the nature of the arts to tear those dark walls down."

"Town of the small, cheerful apartments, the beer in the icebox, the pipes in the rack, the children well behaved and the TV well tuned, the armchairs fatly upholstered and the record albums filed: 33 rpm, 45 rpm, 78 rpm. Where the 33 rpm husband and proud father eats all his vitamin-stuffed dinner cautiously and then streaks to the bar across the street to drink himself senseless among strangers, at 78 rpm, all alone."

"In books such as Chicago: City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker."

"However do senators get so close to God? How is it that front-office men never conspire? That matinee idols feel such guilt? Or that winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?"

"I used to hang open-mouthed around that sort of thing, coming away at last feeling nothing save some sort of city-wide sorrow. Like something had finally gone terribly wrong between the cross atop St. Columbanus and that wrought-iron gate, out of an old wrought-iron war, forever guarding the doubly-dead behind us. / [...] With the city spreading all about. Like some great diseased toadstool under a sheltering, widespread sky."

"Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while."

"It isn't hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home."

"too knew that Chicago's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago [...] forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares. / [...] / For all the poolroom tigers in checkered caps who've never seen a cow, and all the night-club kittens who've never seen a cloud. / [...] For all our white-walled asylums and all our dark-walled courtrooms, overheated district stations and disinfected charity wards, where the sunlight is always soiled and there are no holiday hours. / For hospitals, brothels, prisons and such hells, where patronage comes up softly, like a flower."

"The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences. [...] / So if you're entirely square yourself, bypass the forest of furnished rooms behind The Loop and stay on the Outer Drive till you swing through Lincoln Park. Then move, with the lake still on your square right hand, into those suburbs where the lawns are always wide, the sky is always smokeless, the trees are forever leafy, the churches are always tidy, gardens are always landscaped, streets are freshly swept, homes are pictures out of Town and Country. And the people are stuffed with kapok."

"A town of many angry sayings, some loud and some soft; some out of the corner of the mouth and some straight off the shoulder. / “You make rifles,” the Hoosier fireman told ten thousand workingmen massed at a Socialist picnic here, “and are always at the wrong end of them.” / “Show me an honest man and I'll show you a damned fool,” the president of the Junior Steamfitters' League told the visiting president of the Epworth League. / “I don't believe in Democracy,” the clown from the National Association of Real Estate Boards reassured his fellow clowns. “I think it stinks.” / “I'll take all I can get,” the blind panhandler added, quietly yet distinctly, in the Madison Street halfway house."

"It's still an outlaw's capital – but of an outlawry whose colors, once crimson as the old Sauganash whiskey-dye, have been washed down, by many prairie rains, to the colorless grey of the self-made executive type playing the percentages from the inside. Under the pale fluorescent glow."

"Good times or hard, it's still an infidel's capital six days a week. / [...] Where only yesterday the evening crow crossed only lonely teepee fires, now the slender arc-lamps burn. / To reveal our backstreets to the indifferent stars."

"For always our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted."

"When put in the fix for he tied the town to the rackets for keeps. / [...] Big Bill greeted his fellow citizens correctly then with a cheery, “Fellow hoodlums!” / The best any mayor can do with the city since is just to keep it in repair."

"They'd do anything under the sun except work for a living, and we remember them reverently, with , under such subtitles as “Founding Fathers,” “Dauntless Pioneers” or “Far-Visioned Conquerors.” / Meaning merely they were out to make a fast buck off whoever was standing nearest."

"Yet the Do-Gooders still go doggedly forward, making the hustlers struggle for their gold week in and week out, year after year, once or twice a decade tossing an unholy fright into the boys. And since it's a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains ' town as well as 's. The ball game isn't over yet. / But it's a rigged ball game."

"It's every man for himself in this hired air. / Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

"Yet the city keeps no creed, prefers no particular spire, advances no one color, tolerates all colors: the dark faces and the blue-eyed tribes, the sallow Slavs and the olive Italians. All the creeds that persecution harassed out of Europe find sanctuary on this ground, where no racial prejudice is permitted to stand up. / We insist that it go at a fast crawl, the long way around."

"You can belong to New Orleans. You can belong to Boston or San Francisco. You might conceivably – however clandestinely – belong to Phildadelphia. But you can't belong to Chicago any more than you can belong to the flying saucer called Los Angeles. For it isn't so much a city as it is a drafty hustler's junction in which to hustle awhile and move on out of the draft. / That's why the boys and girls grow up and get out."

"Yankee and voyageur, the Irish and the Dutch, Indian traders and Indian agents, halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed. They all had hustler's blood."

"The famous “prose poem” Chicago: City on the Make, originally an essay in Holiday magazine, remains a pungent but sentimental overview of the city [...]. Easy to miss within it is Algren's baseline concerns: how can a society nurture literature when that society devotes itself to consumerism and war?"

"Looking at Chicago after reading Chicago: City on the Make is like looking at sunflowers after seeing the Van Gogh painting – the subject has changed because of the artist's vision."

"In the three years after Golden Arm, Algren wrote two short books, both nonfiction, both brilliant, unique, and unflinching in their critique of the country's changing ethos. The first, Chicago: City on the Make, is a book-length prose poem that relays Chicago's history through the lens of criminality. It may be among the most beautiful and brutally honest love letters ever written."

"In the Indian grass the Indians listened: [...] the first sounds of a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. [...] / That was to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own particular wilderness."

"To the east were moving waters, as far as eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach. / Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea. / Till between the waters and the wind came the marked-down derelicts with the dollar signs for eyes. / Looking for any prairie portage at all that hadn't yet built a jail."

"Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust."

"Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands. / ‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I'd never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That's because he knows what a man's fists can do. Do you know that you're safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That's because one knows what killing is. The other don't.’ / ‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’ / Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that. / ‘Navy, I think that's the nicest thing I've heard anyone say since I've been in the trade,’ Hallie said – [...]"

"Because the air was so close, the whiskey so bad, the prices so high and the place so hard to climb up to, everyone came to Dockery's Dollhouse night after night while other bars stayed empty. / Everyone came, that is, but the law. To this lopsided shambles, where the floor slanted slightly, no police ever came. When the big hush fell that meant trouble was starting, the old man drew the shutters until the trouble was done. / The old man had himself never fought another man in his life – yet he took a senile pleasure in watching others go at it. He pretended that it was the manly thing, to ‘let them fight it out’ – but the titillating joy he took when the first blood flowed was a womanish delight."

"The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them."

"That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street."

"‘Why, I got a daddy friend don't take a dime off me. He buys me things. He's going to buy me a Cadillac so long I'll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth's real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that. / No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of that. Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels. / Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet. / Until that time Five would go on her feet."

"It was that slander-colored evening hour before the true traffic begins, when once again sheets have been changed, again Lifebuoy and permanganate have been rationed; and once again for blocks about, pouting or powdering or dusting their navels, each girl wonders idly what manner of man – mutt, mouse, or moose – the oncoming night will bring her. / Perdido Street, in the steaming heat, felt like a basement valet shop with both irons working. The girls in the crib doors plucked at their blouses to peel them off their breasts. In the round of their armpits sweat crept in the down. Sweat molded their pajamas to their thighs. The whole street felt molded, pit to thigh. It was even too hot to solicit. For normal men don't so much as glance at the girls in heat like that lest the watery navels stick. / Yet the very heat that enervates men infects women with restlessness and the city was full of lonesome monsters. Side-street solitaries who couldn't get drunk, seeking to lose their loneliness without sacrificing their solitude. Dull boys whose whole joy expired in one piggish grunt. Anything could happen to a woman available to anyone. Boredom of their beds and terror of their street divided each."