Nonconformity by Nelson Algren

that Algren read novels he liked from cover to cover, but I have come to believe that when it came to works of nonfiction, his mind was so sure of itself, his curiosity so absorbed in the things of the real world and his own perception of them, that he rarely read non-fiction books to the end, with the possible exception of de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
, where his broken heart may have forced the issue.
    Algren was a novelist with training as a journalist, not a scholar or essayist, and he wasn’t adept at weaving quotes into the stream of his own thought. And yet the abundant quotes in
Nonconformity
were well chosen and are essential to the effectiveness of the essay; they served, and served well, as a kind of chorus of assenting voices speaking to an historical moment, when elsewhere the loudest noise-makers, like Senator Joe McCarthy, were drowning out such voices. I had neither the desire nor the right to edit them out, but could not in good conscience simply leave them in either. I chose to resolve the issue by dividing the essay into sections, into which it fell naturally and to goodeffect, to reduce within each section any unacceptably long quotes, and then to present between the sections the full and accurate quote in its entirety. In this way the body of the essay could be professionally edited as it would have been were Algren still alive, and the quotes could be saved as interludes intersplicing his text.
    In two cases, the new format required long quotations where Algren had none, and I chose passages that would not have been appropriate had the essay been published in 1953, as Algren had intended. One is de Beauvoir’s description of her first meeting Algren in 1947, the second is Algren’s answer to the question “What is American literature?” taken from H. E. F. Donohue’s
Conversations with Nelson Algren
. Since the essay is seeing its first publication only now, nearly half a century later, I believe both these additions are fitting.
    The archive held two slightly variant typescripts of almost the same length, which were largely identical. They must have been roughly contemporaneous, and the discrepancy was probably the result of final retyping in June 1953. There was no way of telling which of the two came later, and even had I been able to tell, this alone would not have been decisive; the later version might well have reflected Algren’s deflated mood at the time, his increasing doubts about Doubleday’s commitment, and displayed more second-guessing than improvement. In the end I followed one of the two almost in its entirety, introducingversions of less than identical passages from the other in only a few places where there seemed to be something worth saving that did not appear in both.
    Since Algren eventually borrowed his own original title,
A Walk on the Wild Side
, for his 1956 novel, the essay needed to be renamed. I didn’t much like Doubleday’s choice, “The State of Literature,” and neither had Algren. Other titles he came up with over the years tended to be self-mocking, reflecting, I think, his frustration and bitterness over the fact that the book was never published. I chose
Nonconformity
because it was the word by which Algren most often referred to the book, in conversation and in writing, because I like it, and because it hasn’t become any less provocative over the years.
    With thanks to Robert A. Tibbetts, former Curator of Special Collections at Ohio State University, Columbus, which, along with the Newberry Library in Chicago, holds Algren’s papers. Mr. Tibbetts received me warmly when I visited, and with humor and great warmth left me to my devices. Thanks to Stephen Deutch, for his marvelous pictures and who introduced me to Algren’s old neighborhood, the first time he had returned there since his friend’s death; to Bettina Drew, for keeping the facts of Algren’s life and work alive; to James Giles for keeping us thinking about Algren in new ways; to Art