VONNEGUT, TERKEL DO THE HONORS

Two essays — one by Kurt Vonnegut, the other by Studs Terkel — appeared on
New Year’s day in The Guardian in London. They’re both about Nelson Algren, who was, it is no
exaggeration to say, one of the great American authors of the 20th century, and among the most
neglected. “Like James Joyce,” Vonnegut writes, “he had become an exile from his homeland after
writing that his neighbours were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to
think they were.”

I’ve always valued Vonnegut’s loyalty to Algren. Vonnegut not only promoted him whenever
he could in literary establishments that Algren spurned out of contempt and humiliation; he also
payed homage to Algren as his superior, which is no small thing.

Vonnegut’s essay is excerpted from a new British edition of Algren’s classic 1949 novel “The Man With
the Golden Arm.” I suspect it’s a re-issue of the 50th anniversary critical
edition published in this country by Seven Stories Press, with essays and appreciations by Mike
Royko, John Clellon Holmes, Maxwell Geismar and others, as well as Vonnegut’s and
Terkel’s.

Vonnegut tells how he intended to bring Salman Rushdie, who was visiting him in Sagaponack, Long Island, to a cocktail party that Algren had decided to throw. Rushdie was eager to meet Algren because, of all the American reviews of his debut novel, “Midnight’s Children,” Algren’s had struck him as the most insightful.

Vonnegut writes:

I said that Algren was bitter about how little he had been paid over the years
… and especially for the movie rights to what may be his masterpiece, The Man with the
Golden Arm, which made huge amounts of money as a Frank Sinatra film. Not a scrap of the
profits had come to him, and I heard him say one time, “I am the penny whistle of American
literature.”

When we got up from lunch, I went to the phone and dialled Algren’s number. A man
answered and said, “Sag Harbor Police Department.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Wrong number.”

“Who were you calling?” he said.

“Nelson Algren,” I said.

“This is his house,” he said, “but Mr Algren is dead.” A heart attack that morning had killed
Algren at the age of 72.

He is buried in Sag Harbor — without a widow or descendants, hundreds and hundreds of
miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and with whose underbelly he had
been so long identified.

A curious fact: When the phone rang that day — May 9, 1981 — I was standing in Nelson’s
rented saltbox house in Sag Harbor, L.I., commiserating with “Big Blue,” a hulking New York
City homicide detective by the name of Roy Finer, who had found Nelson dead on the bathroom
floor. Nelson had asked Roy and me, both friends of his, to come before the party was to begin.
It’s almost unimaginable to see a massive, 6-foot-6-inch NYC homicide cop shed tears. But Roy’s
eyes that day were red rimmed, and this time not from a hangover.

Of all Nelson’s friends, it’s Studs Terkel who probably understood Nelson best. He knew him
longest, shared his Chicago sensibility, and lent him money whenever he needed it. Studs recounts
how way back in 1956 he took Nelson along with him to an interview with Billie Holiday in a
cellar jazz club on Chicago’s South Side:

And when the conversation ended, as casually as it had begun, and the waiter
had brought her a tumbler of gin — “Lemon peel, baby” — she indicated the man in the shadows,
Nelson Algren. She had been aware of his presence from the beginning; there had been mumbled
introductions. Now she murmured inquiringly, “Who’s that man?” Algren explained that she and
he had the same publisher. The Man with the Golden Arm and Lady Sings the
Blues had both been put out by Doubleday.

“You’re all right,” she said to him.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“You’re wearin’ glasses.”

He laughed softly. “I know some people with glasses who got dollar signs for
eyes.”

Another curious fact: When Nelson died, Studs held his I.O.U. for $3,000. The heirs to the
estate, relatives whom Nelson had long ago disowned, put on their glasses to examine the I.O.U.
for a notary’s stamp, then refused to pay. That they’d inherited Nelson’s estate only because he’d
failed to leave a will, much less notarize an I.O.U., was the final Algrenian irony of Nelson’s sad,
funny, glorious, tragicomic life.