Algren

Algren

Over the years, Chicago has produced many a literary lion, but if asked to name the one who epitomized the city especially those parts and people best left out of tourist pamphlets it would be Nelson Algren. He was not excessively prolific: five novels and a few collections of short stories and nonfiction (several pieces were published posthumously in 1981). But what he did write continues to resonate with readers today. I might go so far as to call his 1951 essay “Chicago: City on the Make” with apologies to Mike Royko’s “Boss” the greatest piece of writing ever on the subject.

Unfortunately, that reputation has dimmed somewhat in recent decades. He is probably still most widely recognized as the author of “The Man With the Golden Arm,” his searing 1949 novel about heroin addiction that became a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra, which he intensely disliked for what he saw as its bowdlerization of his work (he also didn’t get along with director Otto Preminger, whom he felt held his characters in contempt rather than shared his own attempt at sympathy, and later filed and quickly dropped a lawsuit claiming ownership when Preminger credited it as “An Otto Preminger Film”).

Now we have “Algren,” a new documentary from Michael Caplan that seeks to revive interest among younger viewers in this writer’s accomplishments while reminding older ones just how significant they were.

His life could be called unique even without considering a single word written by or about him. You’d never know from reading Algren (or reading about Algren) that he came up middle class on Chicago’s South Side, attended the University of Illinois from 1929 to ’31 and planned on taking up journalism as a career. When nobody would hire him after graduation and he had nothing else to do, he went bumming around; eventually caught stealing a typewriter in Texas, he was sentenced to several months in jail, an experience that helped him gain insight into and affinity for those we might think of as the underclass: drifters, immigrants, junkies, criminals and other nonmembers of polite society who would become his subjects upon returning to Chicago.

Winning awards for some short stories and his first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), Algren caused his initial stir with Never Come Morning (1942). This second book led to such an outcry from Chicago’s Polish community that it was banned from the Chicago Public Library by Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly. (The city did name a street after Algren in 1981, after his death, but the Polish community’s response was so negative that it was soon rescinded.)

After serving in World War II, he returned to Chicago; published The Neon Wilderness (a collection of short stories) in 1947; and began a relationship with French intellectual and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (who was still with Jean-Paul Sartre at the time), which lasted several years, ended badly and later served as the basis for de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins (1954). (He then took an assignment to review her book for a newspaper and didn’t much like it.)

He followed that with The Man With the Golden Arm. The book became a best-seller and won the first National Book Award. His next success came with Walk on the Wild Side (1956); it too was made into an awful movie he hated. No more novels followed. He taught creative writing at the University of Iowa; went to South Vietnam to cover the war; wrote a piece on Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s trial. It wasn’t necessarily his work so much as it was that times had changed: He wrote about people who were barely hanging onto society’s lowest rungs, and readers no longer wanted to read those kinds of books.

Caplan tells Algren’s story through archival footage, interviews with friends, fans and fellow writers such as William Friedkin, Russell Banks, Phillip Kaufman (who cast him in a small role in one of his early directing efforts, Fearless Frank [1967]), and somewhat inexplicably Billy Corgan. There also are recordings of Algren reading his own work for the first time in decades, as well as a look at some of the elaborate photo collages he made over the years.

If nothing else, this movie, along with the recent “Live at Mister Kelly’s,” makes a pretty good case that Chicago was arguably the cultural center of the world for a minute there.

“Algren” is great if you don’t know much about him and his work. It’s not so great if you do; it follows the standard retrospective documentary template almost to a fault (a couple of talking heads dominate screen time). In other words, it doesn’t do anything with its form that reflects what Algren did with his prose (or anything particularly novelistic or unexpected).

But when it comes down to it, I think this movie just wants to get people who haven’t read Algren before to pick up one of his books. So if you’re new to him, “Algren” will be an excellent introduction and invitation into one writer’s world. And if that happens for you, then “Algernon” more than serves its purpose.

Watch Algren For Free On Gomovies.