Meeting Algren

Remembering my one encounter with Nelson Algren. From “Chicago Sketches.” Today is his birthday. He was born on March 28, 1909.

aliteraryreeder

After a filling meal of pierogis and sauerkraut at the Busy Bee restaurant in Wicker Park, I crossed Damen and hurried through the park, past the smack heads and other lost souls, arriving at the party at about nine. When I walked into the cramped apartment on Evergreen, I recognized him immediately from the photo on the jacket of my copy of The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren was sitting restlessly on a chair in the kitchen talking to a tall blonde named Dottie. He took long drags on his Marlboro and was sipping from a glass filled with what looked like rye.

A guy that I knew, Bill Schmidt, an old beatnik who owned a hole-in-the-wall bookstore on Wells, sat nearby and asked me if I would like to meet the writer he called Lord Nelson. Of course I jumped at the opportunity, and Bill introduced me to…

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Borges and Joyce

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, wrote a wonderful poem about James Joyce. It is simply called James Joyce. Here it is in an English translation:

In one day of mankind all are the days

Of time, from that unimaginable

first day of time, when a formidable

God prearranged the days and agonies,

to that other day when the perpetual river

of earthly time flows round to its headwaters

the Eternal, and is extinguished in the present,

the future, the past, the passing—what is now

mine.

The story of the world is told from dawn

To darkness. From the depths of night I’ve seen

at my feet the wanderings of the Jews,

Carthage destroyed, Hell, and Heaven’s bliss.

Grant me, Lord, the courage and the joy

I need to scale the summit of this day.

Joyce and Borges had much in common. Each writer challenged the literary establishment with boldness and innovation. Both were plagued with progressive vision loss. They each spent many years in exile from their native lands. They both died and were buried in Switzerland.   

Aloysius The Great

Aloysius The Great (Propertius Press), the debut novel of John Maxwell O’Brien, is an utterly enjoyable and delightful read. It is an homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, with allusions to Joyce’s masterpiece sprinkled throughout the book. I found it to be a divine human comedy that blends the acerbic wit of Oscar Wilde with the madcap humor of Mel Brooks. It definitely is a novel out of the common groove. But it’s a groove where you will want to be.     

PM

Herman Roth, in Philip Roth’s novel,The Plot Against America, brought home with him, every afternoon after work, PM, the new left-wing New York tabloid that cost a nickel.” Its wonderful slogan was “PM is against people who push other people around.”

The main investor in PM, which began in 1940, was Marshall Field 111, who eventually became its publisher. It was a spunky, highly literate afternoon daily that had I.F. Stone as its Washington correspondent. Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) contributed more than 400 cartoons on the editorial page of PM. Among the contributing writers were Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, Malcolm Cowley, and Ernest Hemingway. Ben Hecht wrote for it an off and on-again column called 1001 Afternoons in New York. Walter Winchell, the highly popular columnist for The New York Mirror, wrote columns for PM under a pseudonym, criticizing 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie’s isolationist views after The Mirror had censored him from speaking out on the matter.

Unfortunately, PM, had to shut its presses down in 1948. It was unable to sustain financial sustainability in the highly competitive metropolitan New York City market.