NONFICTION - Oct. 20, 1996

NONCONFORMITY: Writing on Writing by Nelson Algren (Seven Stories: $16, 130 pp.). Why does this essay, an expose of the lily-livered fear ruining American literature in the 1950s and ‘60s, possess exactly the same echo as a thin dime in a tin cup? Why does it leave a reader feeling like she’s sitting in a bus station waiting to make a connection to a new life when a guy sits down next to her with books coming out of his pockets, smelling terrible, telling her what it takes to be brave, to be an artist in this country, and she feels like his advice is kind of dated but maybe eternal verities are buried therein--but maybe not? She’s supposed to follow him to the ends of the earth and absorb his ideas about justice and she knows that some day he’ll hit her and walk out. He’s full of conviction and passion and sarcasm and hatred. “It is almost as if Algren were someone we don’t want to know,” writes Daniel Simon, founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press, in his afterword; and he’s right.

“Nonconformity” began as a 2,000-word essay written for the Christmas book section of the Chicago Daily News in 1952. It almost made it into book form with Doubleday in 1953, but Algren had been accused of being a Communist in March of that year and had both his passport application and his book deal denied. Simon found the essay among Algren’s papers at Ohio State University in 1986. When Algren wrote “Nonconformity,” his most famous novel, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” had just won the first National Book Award, handed to Algren by Eleanor Roosevelt. His relationship with Simone de Beauvoir was still alive and kicking. He was a successful writer who, writes Simon, like Fitzgerald (to whom Algren likens himself in this essay), “put himself in the service of the characters he wrote about.”

“We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout,” Algren quotes Walt Whitman. “A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of.” Algren himself writes scornfully of the “spiritual desolation of men and women made incapable of using themselves for anything more satisfying than the promotion of chewing gum.” “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery,” he writes. The less a writer sees of other writers, he advises, “the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.”

The luxury of sarcasm oozes from these pages.