Nelson
Algren answered my knock with a low, tired groan.
“Hang
on,” he eventually instructed through a thick wooden door. “One minute.”
April
1977. The Chicago Novelist was visiting
the University of Pittsburgh to speak with young writing majors. I was one of them, and was Algren’s student
escort as well. I had been instructed
to do whatever it was that our honored guest desired, so I cooled my heels in
the hallway outside of his hotel room and practiced what I would say when he
came out the door.
Algren,
author of novels like A Walk on the Wild Side and Man with a Golden
Arm, winner of the 1950 National Book Award, had been called the best
contemporary author after William Faulkner.
Hemingway himself had said that, so I knew it had to be true. And Algren’s reputation extended beyond his
writing. He had made his name
chronicling the seamier sides of Chicago—the pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves,
con men. The homeless wanderers,
addicts, derelicts, cheats. Algren was
rumored, too, to be part of the action, a bit of a raconteur himself.
Maybe
we would search out Pittsburgh’s secret crap games and wily bookmakers, I
thought as I waited outside of his door that morning. Maybe we would place a few bets.
My plan was to stay quiet and put my money where Algren put his.
Or
perhaps, it occurred to me, we would simply screw the top off a pint of rye and
sit along the copper-colored Monongahela River. He would tell some stories, offer some advice.
Whatever
happened, I knew it would be something.
I
was all anticipation.
We
have always done this to writers and probably always will. We confuse authors with what they have
written. We imagine the imagined life
is not imagined at all, and that what seems so real on the page must be
real. It must be. It must.
I
have seen this mistake made by college students. I have seen this mistake made by the unsophisticated reader. I have seen it, just as surely, from the sophisticated
reader. And, yes, from other
writers—people who, if anyone should know better, should know better. The imagined life, if imagined well enough,
becomes somehow irresistible.
Take
James Dickey.
I’ve
just read Summer of Deliverance, Christopher Dickey’s memoir of growing
up the poet’s son. The younger Dickey
has constructed a potent memoir, one that is simultaneously angry, loving,
intimate, and odd. The book has many
threads—Christopher Dickey, to his credit, is not grinding an ax here, not trying
to settle a score by telling just his side of a story in a play for
sympathy. He is telling instead a
complex story, one with various sides.
A
side that interests me very much is how James Dickey’s imagined lives, those he
constructed on and off the page, were the seeds of tragedy. What we celebrate in Dickey the poet, Dickey
the novelist, Dickey the man of Hollywood, and Dickey the outrageous visiting
writer, was catastrophic for Dickey himself, and for his family.
Yet
he did it consciously, at times with calculation.
Well
before Dickey was any sort of a writer, before he taught himself the writers’
skills and the simple but requisite just-sit-in-the-chair-and-move-words-around
discipline, he embraced the notion that writers were somehow heightened
individuals, somehow more vibrant as people.
“Most of us are cut from the same pattern, and, with minor variation,
have practically the same interests and aims in life,” Dickey wrote in one of
his earliest surviving pieces of writing, an essay for a college composition
course. He was in the Army Air Corps at
the time, discovering himself to be not much of a pilot or soldier. The essay was ostensibly about Bix
Beiderbecke, the jazz cornetist, but in the passage quoted here, the young
Dickey was discussing Beethoven, Byron, Shelley as well, dissecting what he
thought could be found at the core of all great artists. “But there are some,” he wrote, “yes, many,
who by the very nature of their own being, and by their particular talents, are
destined to be singled out from the many and live brilliant but somehow
strangely distorted and out-of-focus lives.”
Dickey’s
college theme, sent off to his mother with the proud exclamation “I can write”
attached by letter, turned out to be a prophecy. Dickey’s own life would grow to be “strangely distorted and out
of focus” over the ensuing years, to a large extent because Dickey wished it to
be so. He was a brilliant man, a hard
worker, a great reader, but that was not enough—Dickey wanted a heightened
life, one worthy of the legend he planned to become.
After
the war, newly married, Dickey took his wife and young son to Cap d’Antibes,
France, to create that life. “Europe
then was a place for a writer—and a writer’s wife—to invent themselves in their
own minds,” Christopher Dickey writes in retrospect. “And that is what they did.”
My
wait in that hallway extended far beyond the one minute Algren had
suggested. A grown man could have
shaved and dressed in the time I stood waiting.
Probably,
one did.
When
the heavy door eventually swung open, the man facing me looked far older than
the book jacket picture I had carefully scrutinized the evening before. Algren was 68 by this time. His green suit was worn, oversized, begging
for a dry cleaner. He wore white socks
with brown shoes. His face was pale,
his eyes slightly yellow, and he needed a haircut.
I’d
expected movie star good looks. Gold
watches and diamond pinkie rings. An
Italian suit at the very least. Sure I
was disappointed.
But
looks can be deceiving, I reminded myself.
Forgetting
in the moment my carefully prepared introductory speech, the one where I made
it clear to him that I was something special, not just some college kid escort
but a college kid escort who was going to be a real writer someday, I managed
to utter a mere: “Hello, Mr. Algren.”
Then:
“What would you like to do, Mr. Algren?”
My
voice was chirpy, I think, rather than authoritative. Though my goal was to appear both worldly and eager, I’m sure I
came off as simply silly.
But
I caught myself, remembered my purpose, and screwed up enough nerve to speak a
third time. I informed Algren that I
owned a car, and that we had the entire afternoon and early evening free.
Algren
reached down, pulled up the hand I had been too nervous to extend his way, and
shook it firmly.
“I
want to buy underwear,” he told me.
“Take me somewhere I can buy some shorts.”
For
a moment, I just didn’t respond. Was he
speaking in code? My mind tried to put
together underwear with something daring and incorrigible, something
more in keeping with the world of Algren’s books. Maybe the underwear would be ladies underwear, and still on the
ladies? Does shorts mean
something different in Chicago?
Eventually,
I managed a firm, “Excuse me?”
“I
need to go someplace and buy underwear.
I don’t have a single clean pair.”
“Underwear,
Mr. Algren?”
“Shorts.”
Dickey
was not the man many of us suppose.
“My
father’s ideas of nature, for all that he wrote about it, were mostly imagined
from movies safely watched in air-conditioned theatres or on living room
televisions,” Christopher Dickey writes of the Deliverance author, the
poet who authored “Springer Mountain.”
James
Dickey took his son camping once, and it was a sad comedy of blunders. He failed to bring the proper equipment, or
warm clothing, and either lost the eight-year-old at one point or got lost
himself. He later took up archery,
rather ineptly. The only time James
Dickey was in a canoe, as far as his son knows, ended with one of James
Dickey’s drinking buddies nearly killed, and the canoe busted on a stretch of
Coosawattee rapids.
I
make these points not because Dickey was a fraud, not because he had any
obligation to be anything like the character Burt Reynolds portrayed in the
movie, but because I was so taken off guard when I learned the truth. I’ll bet many who read Summer of
Deliverance were equally surprised.
A
writer lives off his or her imagination, and often the greatest activity of a
writer’s life occurs all above the neck.
Often, in fact, a writer’s life is a dreary life, alone in a room with
coffee, writer’s block, and insecurity, banging away at unresponsive keys,
stubborn sentences.
But
readers seem invariably to want a different image—to have our writers wrestling
sailfish off the coast of Cuba.
Algren
and I set off, on foot, for a Woolworth’s 5 & 10 that morning.
As
we ambled along Forbes Avenue, I tossed out a few facts about the campus
buildings we passed, but clearly he wasn’t interested. Algren walked at a steady clip for a man in
his late 60s. This surprised me, being
21 and ignorant.
“Are we close?” he asked after about
five minutes.
“Just
one more block.”
This
seemed to please him, and he smiled slightly the rest of the walk.
We
entered Woolworth’s, which was very much like entering the past. The store was on its last legs, dimly lit,
poorly staffed, an eager candidate for urban renewal. We stepped down three short steps to the retail area, and the
Famous American Novelist snatched the first package of men’s shorts he
saw. Three white boxers, about a 36
waist.
I
hung back, embarrassed, not wanting anyone to connect me with the old man.
“Now
take me home,” he said.
We
retraced our steps briskly, me holding in my disappointment and Algren hugging
his little bag of shorts. But along the
way, scanning the businesses lining Forbes, Algren spotted Frankie Gustine’s, a
smoky tavern named for a former Pirates infielder.
Algren
suddenly wanted a drink. A martini, he
told me.
So
we went in.
I
asked for a beer.
“Bring
the boy a martini too,” Algren ordered the bartender.
“Excuse
me?” I asked again, but no one was listening, least of all the fellow behind
the bar, who seemed to sense immediately that this was not some old man with a
Woolworth’s bag full of boxers, but a man of some consequence and gravity.
When
the drinks came, in tall-stemmed, chilled glasses, Algren showed his first real
interest in me. “You had one of these
before?” he asked.
“No,”
I said.
He
seemed inordinately fascinated with this idea, the boy and his first martini,
and eyed me closely while I sipped, demanded to know my reaction immediately.
I
lied and said the drink was good, though in truth it tasted like vinegar and
urine. I regret to this day that I
didn’t tell him that. He might have
laughed.
We
had two martinis each, and Algren lectured me on why a martini was the proper
thing to drink. His reasoning had to do
with the seriousness of drinking. A
real drink was a real drink, while a beer was just water with a little bit of
booze mixed in. “You look like an
amateur,” he warned me.
I
was, and mostly we sat in silence, studying the back of the bar. There wasn’t much a man like Algren could
possibly want to know about a green college writer, and I, so disappointed,
could no longer imagine what questions I might ask him.
Dickey,
unlike some writers, was fully complicit in creating his own legend, almost
calculating at points. He posed for
bravado magazine photos, allowed, or encouraged, writers to exaggerate his
prowess at various sports. “THE STUFF
OF POETRY,” Playboy’s headline writers crowed in 1971, is “a little
guitar picking, fast-water canoeing, booze, archery, and weight lifting.” Somehow they left “a love of language and a
careful eye” off the list. They ignored
the countless hours Dickey spent hunched over a page.
James
Dickey coined the term “Barnstorming for Poetry” to describe his approach to
being a touring guest writer.
Christopher Dickey writes of his father’s nervousness and hesitation
early on when asked to read his own work, in front of an audience. The poet’s wife, mainly because the family
needed money, encouraged her husband: “Now, you go up there, Jim. Now you go up there and be yourself.” Dickey told his son many years later that he
had some trouble following his wife’s advice.
“Be myself. Yeah. But which one? I never did figure that out completely.”
What
Dickey did figure out was that audiences would love him all the more if he were
bombastic, barnstorming, outrageous. He
was macho if he thought the audience wanted a Poet as He-Man. He chased women if they wanted Poet as
Scamp. He drank way too much, to the
point where audiences seemed disappointed if he approached the lectern
sober.
Christopher
Dickey guesses that people wanted “to be in touch with Jim Dickey’s effusive,
effulgent, half-mad energy. They wanted
him to dare to do the things they would never do, and maybe make them dare a
little more, too. So they would drink
with him until he was falling down drunk, hoping he would say something brilliant,
or outrageous, knowing they could say to themselves and others that they’d
lifted a glass—a lot of glasses—with Big Jim Dickey. And they would watch him move in on a woman, any woman, in a
crowd, and wish they had the balls to do that.
Or wish that they were the woman.”
“They
seduced him,” Christopher Dickey writes, “with his own show.”
I
lifted a glass, two glasses, with Nelson Algren, but after that he said,
“Finished.”
So
we exited the bar and walked back toward his room, slightly drunk. I was slightly drunk, that is. I don’t know about Algren. His step had slowed some, he was still
quiet, but he was probably fine.
I
followed him into the Webster Hall lobby, up the elevator, then stood outside
the big wooden door again. He shook my
hand, assured me he would find his way to the student union that evening
entirely on his own.
I
was about to go, but he had some trouble with the key and the lock. My hand was steadier, so I opened the door
for him, watched his back as he ambled into the surprisingly small and shabby
room. I remember feeling embarrassed
that we had put him there. A remarkable
man like this deserves a nicer room.
And a better escort. And someone
with a better sense of what he might need.
He was not the man I had imagined he would be. He was just a writer of enormous talent.
After
the door was opened, Algren turned my way one last time. “Thanks,” he said, “I had a good time.”
He
was across the room, undressing for his nap, before I even shut the door.
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