WHAT NELSON ALGREN KNEW

So everybody's suddenly catching up with our remarks a week ago about Harold Bloom's fit of horror over Stephen King's elevation into the ranks of the "distinguished" by the National Book Foundation. Here's Steve Almond on the subject, yesterday in Mobylives. And here's Our Girl in Chicago, filling in for fellow Arts Journal blogger Terry Teachout, today in "About Last Night."

What nobody seems to have picked up on, however, is the salient point that the National Book Foundation is being taken much too seriously. Everybody has overlooked my lovely little anecdote about Nelson Algren, who won the foundation's highest honor, the National Book Award, and discovered when he tried to hock the medal it came with that he couldn't get five bucks for it.

It seems to me Algren's perspective is the one to take. I realize of course that the tale sounds too good to be true and that Algren was not above embroidering the truth at times to make a point. But I checked with an old friend of Algren's, Roger Groening, and he assured me Algren also told him that story. And while Groening had no way of knowing whether it was accurate, it was a story Algren told with the sort of relish that made him believe it, too.

September 30, 2003 9:51 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on September 30, 2003 9:51 AM.

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