Algren at Sea (33 page)

And let the word get around here that some kind of nut has been taking films of the ordinary streets of day, rather than of the interiors of salons not one Chicagoan in ten thousand has ever seen, and some fantasist from Balaban & Katz will put it down sight unseen—“Art?
Nuts.
” Someone else who admittedly hasn't seen the film will write an editorial protesting that “it presents an imbalanced picture,” and the mayor, who hasn't seen it either, will then ban it because it would not serve public interest in a city of pleasures so chaste as those of Chicago.

“What do you want? A bloody travelogue?” one of Europe's top film-makers asked when informed that the documentary he had made of Chicago could not be shown because art is nuts.

But that, of course, is precisely what is wanted. Because that's how things are in the sodden old Palatinate, men. That's what it's really like in Chicago.

There are a number of answers to the old query about why writers so often take a one-way flight from Midway or O'Hare and never come back here. One answer becomes self-evident to anyone who has witnessed a henyard full of hipless biddies entitling themselves “Friends of Literature” in the act of honoring Shakespeare and Lincoln. It looks more like they had Frank Harris in mind but I'm sure they don't eat that way at home. Another reason is that the medieval nonentities of City Hall who have outlawed the work of Rossellini, Sartre, and Denis Mitchell here don't care for the local talent either. Any bookkeeper speaking in the name of Balaban & Katz Forever can make it plain enough that the town isn't all it's cracked up to be
Town and Country.

San Francisco is more daring. It has listeners wanting to hear somebody
saying something not said before. Who will be better than anybody up till now.

Yet Chicago is the same city where a literature bred by hard times on the river, hard times on the range, and hard times in town became a world literature.

It's the same town that once carried a literature emanating from large feelings to all men in all tongues.

It was here that those arrangements more convenient to owners of property than to the propertyless were most persistently contested by the American conscience.

Chicago has progressed, culturally, from being The Second City to being The Secondhand City. The vital cog in our culture now is not the artist, but the middleman whose commercial status lends art the aura of status when he acquires a collection of originals. The word “culture” now means nothing more here than “approved.” It isn't what is exhibited so much that matters as where: that being where one meets the people who matter.

Of concern for the city's night colors, its special sounds like those of no other city, for the ceaseless drama of its lives lived out behind blind doors; for the special language of Chicagoese as spoken in its Saturday night dance halls or in its shops and bars, these have no approval. Yet it is of these that the warp and woof of true poetry is woven.

Chicago is an El-rider without remembrance.

As one Colonel Riley, speaking for the mayor, put it when a BBC documentary on the city was banned, “People in Chicago don't know about these things, so why bother them?”

Thus the Chicago of the 1940's is forgotten and unrecorded and that of the fifties is gone for keeps. A thousand dollars' worth of film and sound equipment could salvage a remembrance of the city of the sixties beyond a view of the Prudential Building. The colonel is right—we don't want to bother. We don't even care enough for the city to want remembrance of it. So why stick around just for a kick in the Palatinate?

You don't have to leave Chicago just to be gone.

 

If America's Richard Morrisons have gained the concern of her novelists, so have her novelists gained stature by concern for America's losers.

The search for the great white whale by the foredoomed hero Ahab across dangerous seas was extended across the deeps of the American conscience
by Dreiser's equally foredoomed youth, Clyde Griffiths, pursuing Success.

Emerging into a ripjaw-and-tearclaw civilization disguised by signs reading “If-You-Can't-Stop-Smile-As-You-Pass-By,” he tried smiling his defenselessness away by assuring his superiors, “Yes, sir, I will do just as you say, sir. Yes, sir, I understand, sir,” until he had smiled his way into a courtroom on trial for his life, listening to a prosecuting attorney describe one Clyde Griffiths—

“Seduction! Seduction! The secret and intended and immoral and illegal and socially unwarranted use of her body outside the regenerative and ennobling pale of matrimony!
That
was his purpose, gentlemen!”

It was then too late for the youth to learn that the images along the chamber of mirages were false. That the signs saying “Smile-Darn-You-Smile” camouflaged a struggle for survival as ferocious as that between bulldogs in a bulldog pit.

Yes, sir, I understand, sir; I will do just as you say, sir.

“I didn't know I was alive until I killed,” another youth who walked through mirages explains himself in the final chapter of Wright's
Native Son.
But Bigger Thomas was one who smashed mirrors rather than accept his own reflection in them.

Yet each, although pictured by the prosecution as men who had sought victims, were themselves society's victims. Dreiser's method of challenging the legal apparatus and Wright's method were different, but the purpose of both was to demand that those economically empowered disprove their complicity in the crimes for which Clyde Griffiths and Bigger Thomas stood accused. Both writers made literature by demanding that the prosecuting attorney show his hands.

The outcast Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale was followed by other strange innocents more alive in their fictional lives than were the men and women who were reading about them: heroes and heroines, each foredoomed.

For these were not innocents in the sense of being untouched by the world but rather of having been caught by it. There is no accomplishment in being innocent of rain when one has lived in a windowless room. The only true innocent is one who has withstood the test of evil. Which is why the protected woman is never so innocent as your real true eleven-times-through-the-mill-and-one-more-time-around whore who has seen every breed and color of male with his pants flung over the bedpost.

These were the heroes and heroines the best of American writers sought, and the search led from New York's Bowery down Main Street to the edge of Winesburg, where the town's last gas lamp made the last wagon road look haggard. And in town or out, on either hand, both sides of the highway, past backland farm and railroad yards, faces of men and women living without alternatives stood revealed.

A search past country ball parks under a moon that said Repose. Repose. To where the 3:00 A.M. arc lamps of Chicago start, down streets that Sister Carrie knew. Everywhere men and women, awake or sleeping, trapped with no repose.

The city of no repose that Dreiser found; that Richard Wright reached and Sandburg celebrated.

Today its arc lamps light a city whose back streets are more dangerous than a backtrack of the Kalahari Desert. Where every 3:00 A.M. corner looks hired.

Where a street-corner nineteen-year-old once replied to a judge who had just handed down a verdict of death in the electric chair, “I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow,” and snapped his bubble gum.

A novel written around this same bubble-gum snapper, in the early 1940's, by the present writer, sustained the antilegalistic tradition toward society which had distinguished Chicago writers since the early years of the century.

Another novel, told more forcefully at the close of that decade, was lost to this tradition through a film presentation which confused it, in the public mind, with a biography of Frank Sinatra.

Yet the literary spirit of “I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself,” from which these novels derived, were written for a reader who was no longer around.

That reader and that spirit had been overwhelmed by the newly affluent cat asking querulously, “What are they doing to me?” because he had just charged off ten thousand dollars in entertainment of friends to the government and was having trouble making it stick. What this new reader wanted was not to feel there shall be no difference between him and the rest but that the difference between himself and the rest be officially recognized by the federal government.

Whitman's offer, bred by hard times on the Middle Border, “If you tire, give me both burdens,” holds no interest for the boy who came unburdened
into his own the day Daddy had his name painted beside his own on the frost-glass office door. To say “Each man's death diminishes me” today only rouses interest in Blue Cross.

Well, we're all born equal. Anyone in Chicago can now become an expatriate without leaving town.

 

Town and Country
reports that “anyone who knows Chicago today will admit it is a beautiful place to live.” Now, it isn't too difficult for an editor in New York to put a man on a plane to O'Hare Field and helicopter him onto Michigan Boulevard long enough to take a snapshot of a chewing-gum heir stuck up against the side of Papa's building and distribute the Juicy-Fruit mess as a “Chicago” edition—but
Town and Country
is putting us on. Because anyone who lives
inside
Chicago today has to admit it is a gray subcivilization surrounded by suburbs.

Or are these loveless castaways watching Clark Kent battling the forces of evil in the shadowed lobby of the stag hotel merely awaiting the wave of the future the easy way?

Otherwise, what did the fifteen-year-old mean when he answered the judge who had asked him what he did all day, “I just find a hallway 'n' take a shot 'n' lean. Just lean 'n' dream”?

And what did another teen-ager mean when he told the arresting officers, “Put me in the electric chair; my mother can watch me burn”?

From the bleak inhumanity of our forests of furnished rooms, stretching doorway after anonymous doorway block after block, guarding stairways leading only to numbered doors, out of hallways shadowed by fixtures of another day, emerge the dangerous boys who are not professional burglars or professional car thieves or pete men or mobsters (who never fly blind), but are those who go on the prowl without knowing what they're after. Their needs crisscross, they're on the hawks, and will take whatever comes along first-a woman, money, or just the cold pleasure of kicking a queer's teeth down his neck. Whatever wants to happen, the dangerous boys let the damn thing happen—and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow.

Town and Country
's congratulations to us for having “an old-shoe guy” for mayor (one of the best kinds that there are) because he once took a walk to the corner drugstore to bring back an armful of milkshakes (instead of having a detail from Central Police deliver them), seems almost too good to be true. Yet watching the ceaseless allnight traffic moving
without a stoplight down the proud new perfect thruway to O'Hare, headlight pursuing taillight, taillight fleeing headlight, it is as if each dark unseen driver were not driving, but were driven.

So the city itself moves across the thruway of the years, a city in both flight and pursuit. And surely more driven than driving.

Love is by remembrance, and, unlike the people of Paris or London or New York or San Francisco, who prove their love by recording their times in painting and plays and books and films and poetry, the lack of love of Chicagoans for Chicago stands self-evident by the fact that we make no living record of it here, and are, in fact, opposed to first-hand creativity. All we have today of the past is the poetry of Sandburg, now as remote from the Chicago of today as Wordsworth's.

“Late at night, and alone, I am touched by an apprehension that we no longer live in America, that we no longer love her. We merely occupy her,” Dalton Trumbo writes, reflecting a disconnection, on a national scale, transpiring locally.

For at the very moment when a national effort is being made to extend the great American beginning—“not one shall be slighted”—to grass huts of the Congo, Hoovervilles of Caracas and to the terribly deprived peoples of India, our press is preoccupied with the pursuit of barroom drudges sitting in front of whiskey glasses with false bottoms, poor girls trying for their rent money from week to week; or with a woman drawing state aid in support of an illegitimate child who has been entrapped drinking a beer.

The presumption that immorality derives largely from acceptance of welfare assistance is a Hearstian concept. So that, although there are no Hearst-owned papers here, whatever paper you buy you still read Hearst.

This disregard of human dignity in the interests of circulation makes it more appropriate to regard the men who run the Chicago newspapers as auditors rather than editors. Of what newspaper owner here cannot the same thing be said as the American poet once said of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—“These people made you nervous.”

Nor can I see in what fashion depriving a woman of her personal dignity, no matter how demeaning her trade, can be justified. If an Eichmann is to be held responsible for lacking a conscience, is not a newspaper owner to be held responsible for employing a columnist who has parlayed an urge to punish into a press pass?

That entrapment, as practiced by an aforementioned columnist here, is illegal even when used by the Police Department is not the point. The point is that construction of a thruway running without a stoplight from state to state doesn't make any city “a beautiful place to live in” so long as no restraint is put on men armed by the power of the press to hunt down anybody if the hunt will help circulation.

And should you say such a woman cannot go unpunished, I must ask in what fashion has she harmed anyone? She has assaulted nobody, robbed nobody, done nothing criminal, yet her chance of staying out of jail is nowhere near so good as that of a utility executive who has made a fortune by price fixing. Still, everyone feels entitled to punish her.