Entrapment and Other Writings (2 page)

And we have lost the American Nelson Algren, who wrote, in his afterword to
Chicago: City on the Make
, that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity,” that “the hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”
¹¹
We have not, of course, lost Algren entirely, any more than we have lost Schurz and Fischer, Debs and Guthrie and all the rest who would not be cowed. If Algren soon began to lose the literary celebrity he enjoyed briefly following the success of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, this was perhaps to be expected. After all, how could a man whose FBI file grew thicker than that of any other American writer
¹²
hope to continue echoing Herman Melville’s “No! In thunder!” and remain for long the darling of the suburban matrons and zoot-suit cats—to say nothing of
Life
magazine, corporate America, J. Edgar Hoover, or the stuffed shirts of the New York literary establishment? Nevertheless, or perhaps because all this is so, Algren’s work lives on, its timeliness reconfirmed in every piece collected here: by the man in
Entrapment
carrying on a conversation with himself in a hotel mirror; by the two fourteen-year-old runaway girls of “Walk Pretty All the Way” who are headed for a future that may well prove their undoing; by the strip clubs of Calumet City, Illinois (“G-String Gomorrah”) that will never be cleaned up because they constitute “the town’s economic jugular”; by the observation that unless we know the executed Vietnamese peasant—or the executed Iraqi or Afghan—“we do not know who we are” (“The Emblems and the Proofs of Power”).

Amidst much humor, much outrage, many cutting observations, striking sentences, and memorable characters, Algren in
Entrapment and Other Writings
speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do. This is in part because, unlike Hemingway or Faulkner, or Wright or Ellison, Algren hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite his being held up as a talismanic figure. He is beloved,
remembered, taught, discussed, read, but he is still an outsider, still misunderstood, his vast achievement still overshadowed by a sense of his personal disappointments in love and literature both. All this makes him interesting to us in ever new and surprising ways. There is indeed much sorrow in the selections that follow, as Algren whistles up America’s failures to live up to the stories it likes to tell about itself and the damage we do to one another and to ourselves through such failures.

And perhaps the sorrow here comes closest to Algren’s own. The long fragment we have included from his unfinished novel
Entrapment
, dealing with an abandoned lover, coincides with and speaks revealingly of Algren’s own disappointment in his love affairs. One was with the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Less well known, although longer lived, was the love and companionship he found with Margo, a some-time prostitute and junkie whom Algren helped to kick her habit, and who, like de Beauvoir before her, also turned her back on Algren in the end. An amazing early story, “The Lightless Room” from 1939, may well have been left out of his classic 1947 short story collection,
The Neon Wilderness
, only because it brushes up against his own self-destructive urges, as evidenced by at least one later suicide attempt and intimations that the later attempt had been preceded by one or several earlier ones.

Algren was a decidedly private person. And we believe that some of the best writing in
Entrapment and Other Writings
was kept quiet by Algren because he felt, consciously or unconsciously, that this was writing that cut to the bone of his own demons. Algren’s handwritten notes on the copies of some of the finished manuscripts in his archive in the Special Collections department at Ohio State University, Columbus—indicating that they were unpublished but otherwise complete—leave us with the sense that he himself was leaving the door open a crack.

Laugh if you like, contend if you can, but finally, as the gambler said, “Read ’em and weep.”

We would like to thank here those without whom this project would never have seen the light of day. First of all, each other. Brooke Horvath conceived of this project and submitted a finished manuscript several years ago to Seven Stories. Dan Simon read and initially hesitated. But together we collected ourselves and began to talk and to search for the pieces of the puzzle that in the end, with patience and persistence, would produce a collection we are proud of and that perhaps even Algren himself would be proud of. Bill Savage played a key role, arguing for the merits of the book early on and staying the course for the duration. Neil Olson, on behalf of the estate of Nelson Algren, offered sage counsel and always saw his role as providing
succor and sustenance. Due credit and appreciation must be paid to Bettina Drew, author of the major biography of Nelson Algren, who was the first to begin to understand the larger story of Algren’s life in all its intricacies and who, by getting down on paper the words of so many of Algren’s friends, many of whom have since died, and by exploring before we did the Algren archive, helped make possible in some sense the work that we have done on Algren’s behalf. Rebecca Jewett, of the Ohio State University Libraries, provided copies of manuscripts in a pinch and kept looking for other ones until we found them. Art Shay, irrepressible and brilliant, has ever kept us company in our work on Algren. Christine Newman of
Chicago
magazine always brings Algren back when she speaks of him. Martha Lavey, David New, and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company stepped forward at the mention of Algren’s name, to lend a hand. Harold Augenbraum and the National Book Foundation, and Jo Chapman, Patrick Lannan, and the Lannan Foundation all helped us ensure that the name Nelson Algren would be remembered on his birthday, throughout the 100th year of his birth, and ever after. At Seven Stories: Veronica Liu, Jon Gilbert, and Ruth Weiner all did outstanding work beyond the call of duty on this project and on the Algren Centennial Project generally. Filmmaker Hugo Perez volunteered to be a part of the Algren Centennial before asking a single question as to whether this might be a wise or a foolhardy thing to do. Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, Matt Dillon, Estelle Parsons, and, especially, Barry Gifford likewise threw themselves onto the barricades, taking action clearly before taking the time to think clearly. Our families, too, deserve thanks, since living with people making books is never as much fun as it sounds. To all these, for their reckless humanity, thank you.

—Dan Simon and Brooke Horvath

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.