The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Nonconformity: Writing on Writing by Nelson Algren
Jack Byrne

Nelson Algren. Nonconformity: Writing on Writing. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996. 130 pp. $16.00.

To understand Nelson Algren’s Nonconformity, the reader should first make his way through David Simon’s afterword which documents his struggle with what “was clearly a major find. Algren’s only book-length work of nonfiction, a work from the period of his first writing.” But then he adds that “the essay was unpublishable as it stood: a mess of impossibly long quotes by others interrupted its flow; Algren’s own words often read too much like a notebook, too little like an essay.” Unfortunately, in its published form it still reads too much like a notebook, too little like an essay. To add to the confusion, there is the question of how much of the nine brief sections is Algren’s and how much comes from his favorite sources: Fitzgerald, Twain, Faulkner, Mr. Dooley, Henry Adams, Adlai Stevenson, Chekhov, Conrad, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, de Beauvoir, Kafka, Whitman, to name only the more important sources. After subtracting the afterword, the historical note, the appendix, the notes, and the many long quotations throughout the nine short sections, there are less than thirty-five pages of Algren’s credo, “a text about the responsibilities writers carry with them, about the unendingness, as it were, of the writer’s art” (editor’s afterword). Simon sees the real subject as the “debt owed by writers to the lives they write about.” However, Algren’s subject matter is too often “quite banal—himself, other writers, the writing art, the responsibility of the intellectual, the dangers of conformity for those who create.” I write this knowing that Algren is one of my favorite writers. He and Studs Terkel are to Chicago what Henry Mayhew and Dickens were to London. Like Dickens before him, Algren wrote passionately of the dank underbelly of the city he saw as being perpetually “on the make.” I wouldn’t trade “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” and the novel based on it, Never Come Morning, or The Man with the Golden Arm for all of Algren’s nonfiction. Having said that, what there is of Algren in this critical mélange is worth noting and preserving, for it is, apparently, all we have of Algren’s thinking about the state of literature. [Jack Byrne]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Nonconformity: Writing on Writing by Nelson Algren Jack Byrne Nelson Algren. Nonconformity: Writing on Writing. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996. 130 pp. $16.00. To understand Nelson Algren’s Nonconformity, the reader should first make his way through David Simon’s afterword which documents his struggle with what “was clearly a major find. Algren’s only book-length work of nonfiction, a work from the period of his first writing.” But then he adds that “the essay was unpublishable as it stood: a mess of impossibly long quotes by others interrupted its flow; Algren’s own words often read too much like a notebook, too little like an essay.” Unfortunately, in its published form it still reads too much like a notebook, too little like an essay. To add to the confusion, there is the question of how much of the nine brief sections is Algren’s and how much comes from his favorite sources: Fitzgerald, Twain, Faulkner, Mr. Dooley, Henry Adams, Adlai Stevenson, Chekhov, Conrad, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, de Beauvoir, Kafka, Whitman, to name only the more important sources. After subtracting the afterword, the historical note, the appendix, the notes, and the many long quotations throughout the nine short sections, there are less than thirty-five pages of Algren’s credo, “a text about the responsibilities writers carry with them, about the unendingness, as it were, of the writer’s art” (editor’s afterword). Simon sees the real subject as the “debt owed by writers to the lives they write about.” However, Algren’s subject matter is too often “quite banal—himself, other writers, the writing art, the responsibility of the intellectual, the dangers of conformity for those who create.” I write this knowing that Algren is one of my favorite writers. He and Studs Terkel are to Chicago what Henry Mayhew and Dickens were to London. Like Dickens before him, Algren wrote passionately of the dank underbelly of the city he saw as being perpetually “on the make.” I wouldn’t trade “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” and the novel based on it, Never Come Morning, or The Man with the Golden Arm for all of Algren’s nonfiction. Having said that, what there is of Algren in this critical mélange is worth noting and preserving, for it is, apparently, all we have of Algren’s thinking about the state of literature. [Jack Byrne]

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