When Nelson Algren died on May 9, 1981, he was near-broke, living in a ramshackle rental home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and all alone. Not a fitting farewell for a writer Ernest Hemingway once rated second only to William Faulkner as America’s greatest novelist. Apart from the Tribune’s short story prize bearing his name, Algren has lived in the literary shadows for the last forty years. At one low point in his life, Algren told author Kurt Vonnegut that he was “the penny whistle of American literature.”
Such neglect seems an inconceivable fate for the writer of a dozen or so books, five of which — “Never Come Morning” (1942), “The Neon Wilderness” (1947), “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1949), “Chicago: City on the Make” (1951) and “A Walk on the Wild Side” (1956) — the Los Angeles Times ranked among the five best works by any American writer.
Now, nearly 35 years after his death, not one but two strong documentaries by veteran Chicago documentary filmmakers are shedding light on Algren’s troubled life and enduring legacy. The documentaries will be screened this week at the Music Box Theatre and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
“Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All” (Algren’s tombstone epitaph) will have its Chicago debut April 4 following on the heels of its world premiere at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, Calif. The other documentary, “Algren,” by Columbia College film instructor Michael Caplan, enjoyed sold-out showings at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival.
Both appear on the 65th anniversary this month of Algren receiving the first-ever National Book Award (from Eleanor Roosevelt at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) for the novel, “The Man With the Golden Arm.”
It may be sporting, but a false wager, to pit the documentaries in some cinematic duel as to which captures the true Algren. Both do. Each has its own distinct style and tone. The truer analogy pits the films as matching bookends encompassing the full scope of Algren’s life.
“Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All” features a richer archival trove documenting the author’s hard early life, later political persecution along with his love-hate relationship with Chicago, leading to his leaving town. By contrast, Caplan’s “Algren” is a deft, faster-paced study that skims Algren’s politics and stresses his more playful moments.
In the late 1940s, with America’s golden age underway, Algren was almost alone in reminding the nation that having an upper class required a lower class as well. Both films report on Algren’s sympathy with those on society’s margins: gamblers, junkies, pimps, hookers, addicts. He claimed his work depicted life “behind the billboards.”
“The End Is Nothing …” opens with the most striking scene of either film: It’s nighttime, and older cars are speeding past the downtown Chicago skyline. Over a jazz soundtrack, Algren, invoking Carl Sandburg, speaks: “City of the big grey flannel shoulders / where fog comes on little cat feet / You told me you were brutal / My answer, ‘What other city can I buy a judge for five bills and be so sure he’ll keep his word. What’s so brutal about that?'”
“We wanted to draw the audience in right away, introduce Nelson, the city of Chicago, tie them together and also make a subtle connection between the past and present,” said Denis Mueller, co-director of “The End Is Nothing …” along with Mark Blottner and Ilko Davidov. The film, which was recently acquired by First Run Features for distribution, was a 25-year project that used a crowdsourcing campaign to raise funds for final production.
Their documentary is a noir-ish tale of Algren’s desperate search for work — including petty thievery — during the Depression; his admitted association with radical causes, including the Communist Party; and the heavy consequences he paid for his convictions: a 1,000-page FBI file, revocation of his passport, a spot on the government’s “Blacklist” in the 1950s and painful rejections from publishers.
The Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, incensed at his books’ portrayal of his seedy Wicker Park neighborhood, succeeded in keeping his books off city library shelves. When “A Walk on the Wild Side” appeared, a new generation of Cold War critics, such as Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler and Norman Podhoretz, penned scathing reviews that broke his spirit. He didn’t publish another novel in his lifetime.
Caplan’s “Algren” takes a different tack, although it doesn’t neglect the author’s struggles. Nearly half the film is devoted to recollections from fans as varied as writer Russell Banks, filmmaker William Friedkin (a poker pal of Algren in his youth) and Philip Kaufman (who cast Algren in the 1967 underground comedy, “Fearless Frank”), and Smashing Pumpkins musician Billy Corgan.
Algren’s legendary, though ultimately heartbreaking, love affair with French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir gets a humorous animated treatment. Many photos of Algren at play — in basement poker games, working out at the gym, at the track, soaking up the atmosphere in bars — by Algren sidekick and the film’s associate producer, Art Shay, lend the film winning authenticity.
Algren had his vices. “A tarnished angel” Mueller calls him. Shay, in a phone interview, recalls, “Nelson was an addict and poker was his drug along with being a compulsive womanizer,” adding that those addictions “deprived us of three or four more excellent novels.”
The appearance of both documentaries is the latest evidence of renewed interest in Algren. Both films suggest that Algren was the victim of a bum rap. Decades after the hysteria of the Cold War era and society’s greater compassion for life’s losers, Algren might finally get his due.
Dan Simon, head of Seven Stories Press, was among the earliest advocates. All of Algren’s books were out of print by 1985. Simon began bringing back many titles, starting with “The Neon Wilderness.” He has since reissued 10 Algren works.
“Algren hasn’t gone away,” says Simon. “Writers important in the ’40s through the ’80s, now long-buried, have no present tense.”
In 1989, writer/director Warren Leming, a producer of “The End Is Nothing …,” along with Stuart McCarrell and Studs Terkel, among others, founded the Nelson Algren Committee with the aim of rescuing Algren from oblivion. Every March 28, they celebrate his birthday.
What keeps Algren’s writing alive today and resonating with new readers? For Shay, it’s one word: quality. Algren had the ability, as he said of Anton Chekhov, to “really put you in the room.” Caplan cites another: authenticity. “He walked the walk, talked the talk and lived the life he wrote about.”
Leming, who palled around with Algren in the early ’70s, thinks it’s Algren’s deep bond with the city. “Algren remains what Proust was to Paris, Joyce to Dublin, Kafka to Prague, Doblin to Berlin and Dickens to London.”
Colin Asher’s discovery in 2009 was a life-changing event. This 33-year-old Brooklyn writer has spent the last five years researching Algren for a new biography scheduled for publication in 2016.
“Algren’s life paralleled my own,” Asher says. “I was a high school dropout and from a working class family. He wrote about a world I recognized, a place filled with the cacophony of elevated train tracks, flickering neon, brash boasts backed only by louder boasting, and ambitions that could fit in shallow pockets. But he didn’t just reflect that world back to me, he explained it.”
Tom Mullaney is a Chicago arts journalist whose blog, artsandabout.com, reports on music, art and books.
“Algren”
Directed by Michael Caplan, 87 minutes, March 29-30, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., musicboxtheatre.com
“Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All”
Directed by Denis Mueller, Mark Blottnerand Ilko Davidov, 86 minutes, 3 p.m. April 4, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., siskelfilmcenter.org
