(applause)
- You begin.
- So, you knew, Russell you knew Algren
and of course Don Diollo did also,
but I never met him.
I began publishing him shortly after he,
a couple years after he died, Colin did.
So, I think we should start with that.
- Well I just could recite
my own personal experience
with Nelson, which Colin pointed to
in a section of the biography.
I was 22 years old, and I
was living in New Hampshire,
and working as a plumber at the time.
And I saw an ad in a magazine,
maybe it was the Atlantic,
for something called the
Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
I had no idea what a Writers Conference
was or a bread loaf for that matter,
but I saw that Nelson Algren was listed
was one of the faculty,
and I adored his work at that time.
I knew his work and was learning
what I could learn from it as
a neophyte, beginning writer.
And so I sent a manuscript
of a novel I had written
to Bread Loaf and they gave
me a little fellowship,
and I went up in my pickup
truck to Vermont, to Bread Loaf
and Algren was there,
and he had read my novel,
the first day they put
you with the writer who's
you've asked for as your mentor.
Algren took me aside and put me down by,
sat me down the base of a big maple tree,
and he leafed through the manuscript
of this first novel of mine.
And he got to about page 40,
and he said "Now this kid, right here kid,
"this is a pretty good
piece of description.
"This paragraph right here."
And then he leafed through
another 50 pages or so,
and he said "Now here's some nice dialog.
"I like this.
"This is good dialogue kid."
And he went to maybe another 50 pages,
and he did it again.
He said, "You set the
scene pretty nicely here,
"the way they come into
the room and everything."
And he said, "Now if you
could do a whole book
"like those three pieces,
then you will write
"a pretty good novel."
He said "But the truth of matter is kid,
"you got it," and it
was sort of the laying
on of the hands in a way.
And I had no connection to
a larger literary world.
This was the first time
and really in a way
the only time where I felt
the laying on of the hands
gave me permission then to go ahead
and out of the little
world that I was living in,
and the small substance
that I had to work with,
I could make myself into a writer.
So he gave me the privilege
of becoming a writer
in a way that no other human being could
or did just by that.
Now the story goes on a little bit,
and I think you got some
of that in the biography.
- I know the story about
when you invited him
to speak at a college you were attending.
- That was later, that was later,
now this was still, we
were still up at Bread Loaf
and John Ciardi was running
Bread Loaf at the time.
And he was an organizer
and sort of the captain
of the ship and Algren was
very unhappy being there.
He wasn't comfortable in an academic
or a workshop or writing
establishment situation.
And he knew I had wheels.
And so he said "What do you think kid?
"Let's go down to Middlebury.
"It's not very far and have a few beers."
And so we went to Middlebury
and we started drinking,
and I said "Anything you want Mr. Algren.
"I'm happy to go there and do it."
And then he said "You
know this is great kid.
"I hate that place.
"I have a friend who lives
not too far from here,
"maybe about four or five hours in Vermont
"named Paul Goodman.
"Would you like to go up
and visit Paul Goodman?"
And I said "Are you kidding?"
Paul Goodman was another
hero of mine at that time.
And so this was 1962 I think,
and so we drove up to Paul Goodman's
and we stayed there for a couple of days,
and then we visited another friend of his,
an Irish guy he knew, who
was also living in Vermont,
and then we circled
back to Bread Loaf about
now four days later and
Ciardi fired him immediately,
because he not met any of his classes,
he hadn't done anything
he was hired to do,
and he had run off with
his kid in a pickup truck.
And so I he said "I don't
know what to do kid.
"I got a plane ticket back from Boston,
"and it's like a week away."
And I said "Well you can
come with me to my apartment
"in Concord, New Hampshire
and we can hang out,
"because I don't want
to stay here either."
Ciardi didn't fire me but I
didn't want to stay there either
and so he said "That
sounds like a cool thing."
So I drove him to my little
apartment over a bookstore
in Concord, New Hampshire.
And he stayed there.
I went back to work and
came home in the afternoons
and we would sit up drinking and talking,
and he was still burned by
Simone de Beauvoir's exposure
of his relationship with her.
And so I was this kid
you have to imagine that,
who knew nothing about this larger world,
and I'm hearing stories
about Simone de Beauvoir
and what a great writer Truman Capote is,
and Miller what an asshole he's,
like "Yeah he's an asshole, he really is."
I could agree with everything he said,
whether I knew--
- You were not.
- I had no experience
to come back with it.
And so we became friends really in a way,
and the way he could at that
time befriend younger writers,
younger male writers
in particular I think,
and I know he had a similar
relationship with Barry Gifford
and a similar relationship
with Don DeLillo
and a couple of other writers
at that point in his life.
It was paternal.
It wasn't manipulative in the slightest.
It was protective and
very incredibly generous
I thought at that time.
- You must have been a good kid though.
I mean he must have really
seen something in you.
- Well yeah I guess so.
Well I was you know adoring.
I mean who doesn't like
that I suppose, but...
- You've never written that,
you've never turned that
into a Russell Banks story.
- Not really no.
I don't think I ever have.
I wrote a little brief
account of it for a book
about Bread Loaf Writers Conference once,
but I censored it somewhat.
I mean I didn't tell
everything about it, but...
- What a great story.
- It was my beginning relationship,
then we became, we stayed in touch.
From there he ended up
going out to Iowa later,
and he wrote me back and forth a lot.
I was in North Carolina
by then 1964 to '68
and I was instrumental in
bringing him to North Carolina
for that debacle there, where
the University put him up
at in a hotel he didn't like to stay,
and it was one of these
big southern hotels
with white columns on the front and so on,
and he was very uncomfortable there.
And so he said "Can I stay at your house?"
I had a little rented
house out in the country.
So, he came out and stayed at our house,
my wife and I and my daughter,
and he had a little laundry to do,
and we put him up and we had
food for him and so forth.
And then he billed the
university back for our charges.
I mean we didn't charge him of course,
but just in a kind of
aggressive Saboteur mentality,
he decided that the university
should have been taking care of him
but I was taking care of him.
So, he billed for laundry
and he billed for food,
back to the University,
and that became a huge event
as I think you recorded,
it hit the newspapers,
it hit WRAL Raleigh, television.
It was a big deal that Algren
is suing the university
for like $18.95 or something like that.
(all laughing)
- That one didn't make it into the book.
You make this point--
- This is the later Algren you know.
So, even 63, this is Algren who you know
he had been the most famous
writer in America 10 years
earlier but this is already
you know even you were a kid,
but this was already Algren later,
and then the other story even more later
when he got you know much sort of angrier,
and more bitter, but Colin--
- If I could pick up on
one thing you were saying,
you were talking about how in the 60s,
he attracted younger writers
and he had this sort of paternal
relationship with people
and that's absolutely true.
And as he wrote less, he did more of that,
but one of the more
pleasant discoveries I had
when I was writing the book is finding out
that he was actually incredibly
generous with other writers
throughout his career, which
is not some of you hear
very often about writers.
He has a novel in 35,
and then he doesn't write
another novel until 42.
And I found these letters from his editor,
"In the intervening years
what are you working on?"
And he would respond saying
"You should talk to this guy
and this guy and this guy.
"They're doing good stuff."
And he was constantly trying
to promote other people.
When editors from magazines
would solicit him,
he would often send on
other people's work.
- That's true, yeah.
And it wasn't ideological.
I mean sometimes writers
promote other writers,
younger writers if they can reinforce
their own aesthetic in some way.
And it's a little
ideological in that sense.
And he didn't I mean I certainly,
Barry Gifford, Don, I mean
the writers that I know
that he was in many
ways trying to help out,
we're not writers that necessarily
subscribe to his aesthetic.
I mean we might have
overlap and there were ways
in which we were certainly
sympathetic to it,
and he to ours, but we weren't part
of the Nelson Algren School.
There wasn't such a thing
as the Nelson Algren School,
which it may be one of
the reasons why his career
ended up being occluded so.
- Yeah I mean he promoted
Terry Southern hugely right
and who could be farther off
aesthetically from Algren.
One of my favorite stories
is sort of forgotten.
Actually it's a book
that you should reprint.
One of the writers that Algren
helped the most throughout
his career is this guy named James Blake.
This is a guy Algren met in a saloon
in Chicago in '47 or something.
Guy played honky-tonk piano for,
he played for some jazz acts and then for,
he played a bar before a
comedian would come on.
But this guy had a talent for writing.
No formal training whatsoever
and constantly in and out of prison.
For a period of more than 10 years,
any time this guy Blake was out of prison,
Algren would put him up at his house.
He would send him money,
so he could buy things in prison
and he collected all of his letters
and promoted them, had
them republished in France,
and then helped him
eventually edit a collection
of his letters that was
published as "The Joint" in 1973.
So, you know from '47 to '73, even '72,
he's taking this guy by the hand
and really without Algren's support
this book wouldn't exist.
And so again one of the
more pleasant discoveries
I made writing a book.
- You sent me a copy as a gift.
- Did I? Oh good, you should reprint it.
- I should say by the
way that Tom Mayer here,
who's in the audience side
is Colin's editor at Norton,
who was the handmaiden of this
difficult project, not me.
I tried to discourage Colin
from doing it years ago,
just why ruin his young career.
- He said it would take too
long, it'd to be too much work.
You weren't wrong Dan.
- So, but Colin why Algren?
- I mean for the simple
reason that I loved his work.
I mean I've told the story before.
Actually I wrote about
this for a blog, yeah,
but in sort of the depths
of the Great Recession,
I was feeling this need that
I wanted to find literature
that sort of spoke to the moment,
and I wasn't seeing a lot of it.
It's not that it didn't exist at all,
but you know, the bottom
seemed to be falling
out of capitalism, and you
could read The New Yorker
on any given week and find
no evidence of that really.
And so I was sort of hungry for something
and somebody put me onto the idea
that I should pick up Algren
and picked up one of
your books "Entrapment"
and it just felt breathtakingly prescient.
And that's the thing that I
always come back to with Algren.
I picked this book up, it's a
collection of short writings
that begins in about '33 I think.
Even stuff before--
- "Entrapment?"
- Yeah I think the first
pieces are even before.
- Yeah '31, '33, yeah.
- And then goes up to
his death in the '80s
and I started reading this book
actually driving through
the Rust Belt in '09,
and I'm flipping through it
and it's talking about foreclosures,
and it's talking about the prison system.
He doesn't use the term
mass incarceration,
but essentially talking
about mass incarceration.
Talking about the opioid
epidemic after the war,
which of course is then
in the news in '09.
And I thought this guy is onto something.
This guy understands
something about America
that is just like ingrained,
it's just part of the country's DNA,
and this, this stuff 50 years old,
some of it older is
speaking to this current
historical moment better than
anything else I can find.
So, that's where the interest comes from
and after that book I read as many of his
as I could get my hands on,
and it just felt like a
story that had to be told.
It's not that Algren's
books weren't in print.
You keep them in print and he's out there,
you can find him, but
you got to look for him.
I felt like--
- But you know he's not
taught in the universities
or colleges in America.
He's not in the front of the
shelves in any bookstores.
You have to search for the
books in order to find them.
He has lapsed into a kind of obscurity
that's hard to imagine for a writer
who was so dominant a
presence in the late '50s,
into the middle and late '60s.
That rarely happens.
- He gives us a broader,
I mean I'm just actually,
this is your idea but
I want to say it again
because it's so good.
He gives us a broader idea
of what American literature
means and what it is to
be an American writer.
It's bigger than, it
keeps getting narrower,
and he reminds us how broad
it is and should be and yeah.
So, related to that, what do you think
Algren would be writing or
saying if he were alive today?
- I'm happy to go first.
I think he'd be writing
about the same things.
I mean like I said I think that you know
he does good work in '35
looking at the Great Depression.
He does good work in '42
writes a novel that's
largely in the naturalistic tradition,
but as I think we both agree,
he comes back after the war.
He sees America triumphant.
He sees what this is doing
to the American psyche.
He sees what capitalism is
going to do to the country
and our culture and he picks up on things
that are still relevant.
I mean I think you know
again he was talking
about mass incarceration in '49.
I think he'd be talking about it today.
I also think he would have a field day
with the administration.
You know he's not known mostly
for his political writings,
but he did a book about
the politics of literature
nonconformity, which you
guys obviously published
and which Dan edited, that is
also breathtakingly prescient,
where he takes you know the
whole sort of mid-century
political culture to task
and takes on McCarthy,
and I think that he would
be doing the same thing
with this administration.
I think he would love Michael Cohen.
That would be his muse,
this bizarre mix of ego
and self involvement
and conniving and so I
think if you're doing that,
I'd be interested to hear your
thoughts Russell about this.
I often find myself saying that
if he were writing today,
he might not be writing fiction,
and he might be writing
creative nonfiction.
I think that you know most of,
you know I think he'd
write random family maybe.
I think that a lot of the energy that goes
into covering the topics
he's interested in covering,
is in creative nonfiction
these days for better or worse.
- He would be a 105 years old,
so you have to keep that in mind.
And so we're making a guess here
about what he would be writing
if he were born much later
than in fact he was born and
so you have to push him back
I think and I'm not totally
rejecting the question,
but I am rejecting the question.
Because I prefer to think of Algren
really in his own time,
and his own sources in a
tradition in American writing,
which really is most
manifest in the 19th century
with Twain and then comes
forward with Stephen Crane
and comes into the 20th century with
Dreiser and Dos Passos,
their versions of modernism,
but Dos Passos more closely perhaps,
but it's a stream in American literature,
one of the main tributaries
feeding into American literature
that has been by and large
dammed up in recent years,
in recent decades.
I personally, I'm in grief over that,
because to me, it's one of
the two crucial tributaries
that feed the great stream
of American literature.
I'm sort of using Hemingway's
image in a way here,
but it all starts with Huckleberry Finn,
but yeah there's the
other one the Gothic one,
which comes down through
Hawthorne and Poe et cetera too
into the 20th century.
We're much more engaged
with that tradition today,
the ironist yeah and the
elegance of that kind of writing
than we are with socially
rooted, socially engaged writing.
I don't want to call it naturalism,
because one of the geniuses
I think of Algren's work
is that he refused to play
by the rules of naturalism,
and in fact crossed over into
a kind of expressionistic
writing that was very rare.
I can't think of anyone
else maybe who crossed over
that way except Dos Passos,
who was a modernist and
used modernist techniques
but brought a naturalist
sensibility to bear on that.
And Algren did something rather similar,
and so later did African-American writers
more often than not all
the way up I think to
and including Tony Morrison,
have that same crossover
between expressionistic,
lyrical love of language on the one hand
and a very political, activist mentality,
and critique they were
offering on the other,
and the merging of the two
to me is terribly important
aspect of American
literature, American history.
- I love this point.
I mean I think this gets lost a lot.
Algren in a lot of ways saw
himself as a traditionalist.
He is identifying himself
with the same stream
of American literature
you're talking about
and there's this point in the 50s,
where you can see this in his letters.
People are coming after him.
They're saying he's a radical.
He's defending miscreants et cetera.
He said what are you talking about?
We've been doing this for a 100 years,
like I'm Whitman.
And he often falls back
on this Whitman line
and identifies himself
with this tradition.
It says I'm not breaking the rules,
you're changing them.
And this is you know very crushing to him,
and I think people nowadays think of him
as purely a rebel right?
He just came out of nowhere and he--
- I guess so, yeah I don't
know how people think
about Algren's work generally
because he's not much written
about in the academic world
and he's not much taught,
so you don't know what context
that these are being placed
in a contemporary, literary environment.
I really don't know.
I'm not in that environment
myself too much,
and so it's hard to know,
but I do know that if
Algren were publishing,
were bringing his work,
the work which he published
in the 40s and 50s, today to publishers,
he would have a hard time finding access
to an audience for it.
- Did he marry Candida Donadio? No right?
- He did not marry Candida Donadio.
- Candida Donadio who was
his good friend and agent
and who really was a great agent for him,
she used to say two things.
One, she would say he
was a writer of the 40s,
and that he was really in a
sense a historian of the 40s.
And so you know it's similar,
you're similar in a sense
of having that same quality
that Algren had which is that historical,
that sensitivity to the historical moment
as you were talking about.
And then the other thing
she would say is that
he was sentimental, and that that's okay,
that that's, Algren makes a
strong case for sentimentality
that you need that and
Algren would say that.
He said "You know there's
a place for sentimentality.
"We need it."
So can you speak to that?
You know what I'm talking about.
- Which one? About sentimentality?
- Sentimentality, yeah that question.
- It's certainly not something
he would shy away from.
I'm gonna take this in a
slightly different direction
just because it's on my mind.
I got a lovely note recently from somebody
and maybe this is the point
about people being drawn to him.
A young woman emailed
me and said that she was
at a Writers Workshop with him.
I think I got this email two days ago,
and I would say '68 or '69
and has this indelible
memory of him holding
forth at a bar and
eventually raising his voice
and yelling to everybody,
"Do not let anybody take
your neuroses from you."
This is the thing that should
be driving your work right?
I think it speaks a little
bit to your point right?
This is forget the formalists,
forget anybody who's telling you that
you can't wallow a little bit,
and she says I crafted my
entire career around that idea,
that I just allowed my neurosis to take me
anywhere it would.
- I think maybe by sentimentality,
may be a better word lyricism,
it's like you need poetry.
I think what Algren said in conversations
is sentimentality is
that poetry, we need it.
We need that, we need that in our work
and we need that in our lives,
you know that kind of
weakness for humanity.
- Sentimentality really
describes false emotion
and that's why it's problematic.
- But not meaning that.
- Yeah and so I think you
know maybe Algren was using
the term a little loosely and defensively,
which he was inclined to do,
because I don't think of
him as a sentimental writer.
I think he was much too hard for that,
and he had never had inauthentic emotion
or inauthentic affection
for his characters.
He did not hide the flaws, the weaknesses,
the criminality, the
stupidity of his characters.
He loved them despite
that and in some ways
because of that and--
- That's I mean--
- That's not sentimental to me.
That's authentic, emotional
identification with people
whose inner lives are rarely respected
and he brought that to his work.
And to me that's not sentimental at all.
- What it is?
- That's authentic emotion
that is in many ways
the opposite of sentimentality.
- Yeah I mean I don't know how much use,
there is parsing that term too much,
but I agree I felt that
to pick up on this point
earlier about formalism or structure.
He would follow an emotional
thread through a story,
even if it got in the way of his plot,
even if it might end up in a dead end.
If he felt you needed to go there,
if you needed to follow
a character's neuroses,
he would do that.
Maybe this is what Candida
meant by sentimentality.
- Yeah, yeah I'm sorry I was
pushing back a little on that
because I don't think, I
never thought of Nelson
as a sentimental writer.
- I agree, but he did say
that and I wonder why?
I don't have a great answer for,
but he would say that about himself,
and he would say what sentimentality is.
- Yeah, yeah well as I say, it
was possibly being defensive
and which he was to us
in a self-destructive way
did throughout his life and
increasingly as he got older.
- But he wasn't saying
false emotion is important.
You know I think partly
it's a semantic difference.
He wasn't trivializing at all.
He was talking about this other thing,
which probably you wouldn't
want him to use that word but--
- I would argue with him about it,
but I think as he got older,
he tended to get a little
confused and increasingly defensive.
- This was earlier though.
- Yeah and insecure about his own approach
to his writing and he
self-sabotaged him often enough,
in his later years especially in this way.
- So, now this is a pet peeve of mine
but this is about, we
were talking a little bit
about it earlier, I insist,
you all can disagree, but I
insist that Algren's career
which went 50 years, you
know he first started
publishing these stories in early '30s,
and his last book, which
is a very good book,
"The Devil's Stocking."
It was published posthumously.
It was published in the early '80s
after Algren's death, but it's
the last book that he wrote,
so that's a hell of a career,
that's a 50-year career.
So, I mean my question is what was his key
to that kind of productivity
'cos it's four major novels,
it's a couple of great story collections,
it's a bunch of great nonfiction books.
It's a book of poetry
"Chicago: City on the Make,"
which is you know an important book
and so what was the key to his success,
and of course you know I'm
saying it by implicate,
just as a reminder that,
hey this guy wasn't a loser.
This guy wasn't, you know he wasn't just
the Pennywhistle of American literature
as he called himself.
It's also an incredibly
productive, rich career.
What was his secret?
- Well it's a secret to any career
that lasts half a century
and produces half a dozen
wonderful, memorable
and lasting works of art.
It takes enormous physical
energy, which he had.
I remember when he was in his 50s,
he worked out with the...
- Heavy bag.
- The heavy bag.
He was a little scary physically.
I mean he was very strong and
and he poured his physical
energy into his work.
And it took that, took a
great deal of mental energy.
It also took a lot of
sacrificing of relationships.
He sacrificed familial and
domestic relationships,
professional relationships,
friendships and so forth
in order to keep working.
He risked all that.
He took all the risks that it takes
and paid all the prices
that you have to pay
in order to have a career of that sort.
So, he was able and willing to do it.
I don't think there was any secret to it,
to that part of it.
I mean that energy and
dedication and the rigor
that he brought to it,
and his belief in art
and the necessity for it.
That was all functioning a 100%.
Producing the work is one thing.
Success is another and
they're two subjects
when you're talking about Algren.
He did produce this work and
did over a half a century.
And we can evaluate it
and look at the early work
versus the late work and the
high points and so forth,
and so on, now historically in a way,
but then there is the
career, the success part,
and he had great success
in the middle years.
He was the first winner
of the National Book Award
in '48 alongside Eleanor Roosevelt,
I think who won the nonfiction prize.
Is that correct or not?
(all talking)
- I've seen the photographs.
- I think she was--
- She was nominated for it.
- She was nominated.
- But this was '48 and the
first National Book Award
winner and that was in
a way the high point.
It was when he put on a tuxedo
and get photographed in it.
And so he had that great arc.
Most of American writers go through that,
follow that kind of arc,
it is great if you're lucky,
and your career manages
to reach that point.
And then there's usually a
steady decline afterwards
in terms of your career, not necessarily
in terms of the work itself,
and I think that was the case with Algren.
It didn't necessarily fall off altogether,
it changed and so on,
but the arc descended,
declined after that.
And that was now, this is
something that your biography
brought up, which I wasn't so aware of.
And that was due to a lot of other forces
and simply the commercial market,
and the effect on him personally too
of this shadow that he wasn't even aware
was being cast over him
by the FBI and by Hoover.
And how that was blocking
his life from flowering
in certain ways.
It should have flowered
after '48 into the '50s
and it didn't.
It became increasingly constricted,
and he didn't know why.
He was restricted in terms of travel,
restricted in terms of
relationships and critics
and others and the media were
hedging their bets against him
and he had no idea why and what
your biography brought out,
which I had never seen before,
I kind of sensed it because
he used to complain about it
a little bit, but I thought
he was just being paranoid,
was that he was indeed
a target for how long?
25 years?
- Yeah I mean I can talk maybe
more about it in a second,
but quickly the FBI first
picks up on him in '40,
and then I think they finally
close his file in '73.
- Wow that's 35 years.
- Yeah.
- And it was a shadow hovering over him,
so he was walking in the
cold cast by the shadow.
He didn't know where the
shadow was coming from,
but it was blocking him
off and freezing him
in certain ways and there were really ways
that inhibited him as a writer,
inhibited his career certainly.
I was very grateful to your biography
for bringing that forward.
I think it was very important.
- To your question that I'm
happy to talk about the FBI
stuff I mean I think part
of is just that he never
gave himself an out.
He had to keep writing.
He could have had a university gig
if his disposition was a little different
or if he tamed himself a little bit,
and he never took one.
He would teach a semester
here, a semester there,
do a summer workshop, but
he put himself in a position
where he never had to have a full-time job
after 1942 or 43?
43 right before he was drafted.
So, from 1943 to 1981, when he dies,
he just has to write.
Maybe that's a more cynical answer
than you were looking for.
- It's a good answer.
I hadn't thought about it.
- He had offers to become faculty
and he just never took it.
He felt strongly that writers should write
and they should not teach and people still
debate this of course.
So, he never gave himself that out.
He always had to be working
and I also think he was just
a breathtakingly intelligent
and curious person.
He would get the sense of
something that he liked
and then that was his life right?
This is how he ends up moving
to Paterson, New Jersey
in the 1970s.
He gets interested in the case
of Rubin Hurricane Carter.
He thinks he's gonna write
a short article about it
and discovers, this is
before Carter was exonerated
or had even been given a second trial.
He just discovers there's a
mountain of information there.
So, he uproots his life and buries himself
in trial transcripts and
interviews for years.
But to the point about the FBI,
I mean their interest in
this ends up being a focus
of my book, because I was surprised by
quite a bit of what I found as well.
After Algren becomes famous or
reaches the peak of his fame
in about '49 or '50, he
buys this little house
in Miller Beach, in Gary, Indiana,
which is a lovely quaint little area.
I was just there and at about that time,
the FBI gets interested in him again.
I said they first got
a scent of him in 1940,
they investigate him on and off.
They pick up on him
because somebody snitched
on him around '50.
- Two people were snitching.
- Eventually yeah.
One first, then about
a year later another,
and then in '53 he applies for a passport,
and he's denied on the grounds that he
had once been a communist.
So, from that point forward
until about '56 or '57,
there's this sort of cat-and-mouse game,
where he's applying for passports,
but refusing to swear that
he had never been a communist
and they keep denying him.
I don't think it's necessarily malicious.
I don't think they're
baiting him necessarily,
but at the point which he
finally does sign on the line
that says I was never a communist,
their scrutiny really picks up,
and you know at this point he's living
in this little bungalow
on a dead-end street,
and the FBI is in touch with everybody.
They were talking to the people
who lived across from him,
the people who lived next to him,
the local postmaster, the local police,
the utilities company.
Who else?
I got another lovely email from a woman,
who said she grew up in
Gary around the time.
Her father was a cop and used
to come home and complain,
because he was tasked with sitting outside
Algren's best friend's
house recording the license
plates of everybody who came and went.
There are more you know,
and then the FBI was in touch
with all of his publishers,
going back to Vanguard Press in '35,
and then in touch with Harper.
- Doubleday.
- And eventually with Doubleday as well.
- It canceled the book that
we eventually published
as non-conformity, but
they canceled this book
that was very important to Algren in '53.
- But as you say he was
never really fully aware.
I mean he would make comments to people
they're after me sort of.
I picked up this lovely
anecdote from somebody
who said Algren in the '50s
would pick up the phone
and not say anything
until he heard a voice,
because you want to make sure
it wasn't the FBI in the line.
One disturbing thing I
came across there was that
people were not at all
sympathetic to this paranoia.
They assumed it was simply paranoia.
So, there are these sort of stories--
- Including me, I mean
that's how I thought
of it at the time yeah.
- There were these sort of
stories that I would find
in old interviews that
I found recordings of
or transcriptions of people say,
"Well you know he was crazy."
"I saw him once waiting for
somebody to get off the train
"and he was hiding in the bushes."
Or you know "He's crazy,
I saw him once walking
"down the street in
Chicago and he was sweating
"and he couldn't stop
looking over his shoulder."
And that sounds a little off,
but then if you look at the
level of the FBI surveillance
during that same year, well three people
who lived on his block really were looking
through his window and then
reporting the FBI on it,
and the FBI was calling his mother
and asking her under the
pretense that they were friends,
when he was going to be over for dinner.
So, was it paranoid?
Sure it was paranoid and yet...
- He was slow as Delmore
Schwartz at Even Parenthood
at the end of his years.
- I think my favorite
thing about your book is
just that you have kind of found a way
to write like Algren
for this period of time.
You know you can hear
some of Algren's lyricism
and toughness in your writing style.
I think that's probably what
appealed to Tom initially.
- I deny it.
(all laughing)
I was, I mean thank you very much,
and you know I definitely
wanted the book to read
as well as I could make it read.
I was doing my best
not to try to mimic him
and embarrass myself.
- Mimicry but you channeled him a bit.
- I think he is ready.
- Are we getting to wrap it up?
- Shall we turn it up questions?
- [Participant] What was the premise that
the FBI was investigating
him under? (muffled speaking)
- Communist.
- At the time, oh yeah I
guess we didn't give much
of that background.
So, thank you for the question.
You know at the time there
wasn't much need for a premise.
They originally started
looking into him in 1940,
because he was at the time involved
in the Communist movement
and somebody gave testimony I
believe to Congress at first
saying that he was an enforcer
for the Communist Party.
I don't really know what that means but,
and it wasn't true, but
his name ended up in a--
(muffled speaking)
No, no he's very political.
(muffled speaking)
Well I said his political
writing isn't as well-known
as his other stuff.
He did definitely write politically.
He was deeply involved
in the Communist Movement
in the '30s.
He comes out of college in 1931.
Has this period where he thinks
he's gonna be sort of
traditionally successful,
ends up destitute, his family goes broke,
and like a lot of people
joins the Communist Party.
That association continues
until right before the war.
He starts breaking with the
party around Stalin's purges,
but that association hounds him.
They pick up his trail
because of that in '40, '42,
'43, his name comes up
because he wrote a book
that was very scandalous in Chicago,
"Never Come Morning" and people
in Chicago wrote to the FBI
saying you should look into this guy.
He's a troublemaker,
and then in the '50s,
when a lot of former
communists switched sides
or simply need to get
themselves out of trouble,
people began mentioning his name
and they pick up on him then.
He's famous at the time.
He's a good target.
One point that I try to
make in the book is that
I think arguably one of the
great tragedies in his life
is that they never really
went after him publicly.
So, he never was a martyr
and he, as Russell points
out, never really knew
why people were backing away from him
and nobody could ever,
he wasn't a cause right?
Nobody ever defended him.
People just traded stories
about how paranoid he seemed.
But it does all come back to
his political affiliations
in the 30s and then later the thing
that they hang the legal
case on is him denying
that he had ever been
a member of the party,
and they have evidence that he had been.
So, they begin preparing
charges for perjury and fraud
against the government in '55 or '56.
- But he was co-chairman
of the Save Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg Committee,
and that was prominent and of
course they asked him to do it
because he was so famous at the time,
but his idea wasn't even about whether
they were innocent or guilty.
It was that we and he
would say we not they,
so we shouldn't, after they were executed,
he said we shouldn't have executed them.
We all, like America shouldn't,
we all are partly responsible
and we shouldn't have executed them.
And so his kind of
humanism and his politics
kind of blended under some level.
- And during McCarthy
period he traveled around
giving anti McCarthy speeches.
This speech was later turned into a book,
which Dan published in '96.
It was originally--
(muffled speaking)
- Absolutely.
- Absolutely, yes.
- [Participant] It's very simple question.
I'm wondering how did he actually die?
- How did he die?
Oh heart attack.
- [Participant] There was
no conspiracy theory about,
he was assassinated?
- He was 72 years old
and he had had heart problems
that were documented for
at least the year so beforehand.
I like to try to make the point
I think he died very happy.
He was having a good time
at the end of his life.
- It was the eve of his induction
to the American Academy
of Arts and Letters
that have been put
forward by Kurt Vonnegut
and other writers for years,
and Algren who hated
institutions of that sort,
on the other hand was absolutely thrilled
to finally be invited
into that august entity.
And was throwing a
party for himself right?
- He died early in the morning on the day
of a party he was throwing for himself.
- Yeah so he went out with a kind of
a satisfied smile on his face, I hope.
- I believe so, I believe so.
In the last interview he ever gave,
he said you know Hemingway
said "The point is to last
"and I guess I'm still here."
(Russel laughing)
- [Participant] It's a question for Colin.
The New Yorker review ended
on this very affecting note
quoting from the
acknowledgments in your book,
where you wrote that your
son, who has not yet born
at the time, you started
the book was calling
the subject of your biography Uncle Nelson
since he was growing up.
And I'm just wondering if
you could talk a bit about
what is it like to I think
it's through seven years or so,
live with a biographical subject
and apparently have your family
with a biographical subject for that time?
- Yeah I mean I know there
are a lot of biographers
in the audience, I'm sure many
of them could speak on it,
but we were talking about this earlier.
I had no idea this project
would take so long.
- I told you.
- I asked my editor
for two and a half
years, yes Dan warned me
and I didn't believe him.
I think I asked for two and a half years
to write the book and originally actually
I thought it would be a
relatively brief thing.
There was this previous biography in '89
and I sort of thought that the
beams for the book were cut
and you know my big
contribution will be rereading
his work and trying to
place it in the canon.
And then as I began
writing it, I found out
there's just this incredible
sea of information
that hadn't been tapped.
Dozens of archives that
I didn't know existed.
I would say it was all-consuming
except I did have a
day job for most of it,
except for when the Levy
Center put me on the dole.
And I do have a family,
but it felt pretty damn all-consuming.
There was at least a year and a half
of just visiting archives
and writing to archives
and compiling my own
archive of every letter
that I could find that
he had written ever,
every interview I could find if anybody
who had known him ever.
And it was a huge gamble,
you know I wasn't a big name
when I got this contract.
Not that I'm a big name now,
but I was less of a name then,
and so this was you know
I was taking a big risk
and I figured I might as well go all-in.
And yeah, I was very surprised
by The New Yorker review
picking up on that.
I thought it was sweet and
my son liked to hear it,
but I was very surprised by it,
but it does speak to
the fact that this was
the topic of conversation at my house
at least for me for years.
Luckily my wife also has
a very demanding job.
So, she has her own piece,
but yes at dinner I would
always end up talking
about the book and as
a shorthand for my son,
he would say "What are you talking about?"
"Uncle Nelson don't worry."
- [Participant] Well I
didn't know anything about
Mr. Algren, but I looked him
up and I'm a bit of a student
that looks at people's
Jewish cultural background,
and how anti-Semitism affects their lives,
and how their Jewish cultural background
would be in their work.
I know you didn't, I looked
him up in the computer,
unless I'm wrong, my
understanding that he was Jewish,
and none of you mentioned that at all.
So, I was just curious, what
role his Jewish background
played in his writings or in his life?
If it had a negative effect especially,
maybe one of the reasons
behind why he was being pursued
by the FBI in such a shadowly intense way?
- His religious background
is a fascinating subject,
and I will try to be concise.
His grandfather converted to Judaism,
married a Jewish woman in Chicago,
was not a particularly good father,
and so Algren's father never
called himself an atheist,
but was basically an atheist.
So, as a matter of Jewish
law, Algren was Jewish.
He never went to temple,
had no religious upbringing whatsoever.
His name at birth was
Nelson Algren Abraham.
And he chose to drop the
Abraham at some point.
His grandfather's sort
of the side of the family
that he identifies most with was Swedish.
He would talk about being Swedish
more than he would talk
about being Jewish.
His mother was Jewish.
His mother was Jewish as well,
but also didn't grow up religious.
She grew up on Milwaukee
Avenue in Chicago,
but then didn't really bring
religion into the house
when he was a child.
The father as I say was
antagonistic to all religions.
Some people they have,
I have found articles
saying that he was sort
of a self-hating Jew,
because he didn't embrace
his Jewish identity.
I don't think that that's true.
I interviewed a number of people who said
he would sprinkle
Yiddishisms into his speech.
He allowed his work to be
collected in collections
of Jewish writers after the war,
but it definitely wasn't
the way he identified,
and he was himself an atheist.
That doesn't mean he wasn't also Jewish,
but he would identify as an atheist,
he would identify as a Swede.
He wouldn't particularly
identify as Jewish.
No not at all, not at all.
- [Participant] So I read this book.
- He edited this book.
- [Participant] So there's
a scene in the book
that most stuck with me,
which is this conference,
it's Nelson's first breakdown at the
Proletarian Literature Conference.
And I've been thinking about this,
thousands of people in New
York City for a conference
on politics and fiction
and politics and writing.
And I wonder if you three
could reflect on that today.
Could you imagine something
like that happening today?
- When was this?
- Just for some context,
this was Algren's sort of
first big public event in 1935.
The American Communist
Party through a front group
hosts this huge conference of writers.
And there's some international
writers involved,
dozens of domestic writers
and as Tom points out,
I don't remember the exact numbers,
but I think a couple thousand
people in the audience
all there to talk about how literature
is going to overthrow capitalism.
And this did not seem like a
ridiculous premise at the time.
So, your question was?
(muffled speaking)
Yeah, yeah.
(muffled speaking)
- But you say he broke down.
They had take him off the
stage or something right?
- At some point he does have a breakdown,
but the question seems more to be just
about the role of politics
in fiction these days
and could we get 2000
people to sit around with
straight faces talking about
how their novels are gonna--
- No I think what we see instead
as the New Yorker festival
and we see the Pen Festival going on now,
which are pretty much celebrity
driven and publisher driven,
if you'll forgive the
expression and you (laughs).
And so the apotheosis of capitalism
as its expressed in publishing
has made something like that
pretty nearly unimaginable
I think, yeah, today.
- There've been references
to previous biographies
but I want to just add nuance to that,
which is there's a bad
biography for Algren,
which was published by a New York house,
and then there've been
a few little monograph,
some of them okay, academic
monograph type of biographies
but Algren really needed a real biography,
a full-length kind of deep
dive as Colin has done,
and none of the other
biographies come close
to anything attempting this
kind of major biography
that Algren deserves yeah.
- [Tom] One more question.
- [Participant] Just now
you said he was happy
and you made it sound like he
welcomed the acclaim you got
but the New Yorker review
implied that he was depressed
and that he intentionally
avoided any involvement.
That seems like a contradictory
image we are getting here.
- Well I said he died happy,
and I think he absolutely died happy.
When his career starts
falling apart in the '50s,
he's a puddle on the ground.
I mean he was crushed.
Again you know he had this feeling
like everybody's turned on me the rules,
the game have changed.
He's also being hounded
and doesn't quite know it.
So, there's this period
of deep, deep depression
and there's debate about whether or not
it was a real suicide attempt,
but he places his life at risk in '57
and then he is depressed and cynical
for a good period of time.
I like to read the last years of his life
as pretty happy ones.
- He was taken in at the
very end of the last years
out in Long Island by James Jones's widow
and daughter Kaylee and
briefly lived with them
before he set up his own household.
So, he had it, and Kurt Vonnegut out there
and a few other writers who
were his contemporaries,
embraced him and made him feel more secure
and protected I think
during that period and I agree with you,
I think the last year or
two of his life were eased
somewhat by the loyalty
and admiration and respect
that he got from his contemporaries
and his peers including
Vonnegut and Jones's widow
and others Peter Matheson and others,
who were living out there.
They knew who he was,
and what he had done,
and they gave him the respect
that he certainly deserved.
- I have to believe that he was,
that he had a lot of happiness,
that I believe he had a
lot of happiness in him
and there were times when
he was on top of the world
like 1950, he's seen
there smoking the cigar
with Eleanor Roosevelt.
He's just won the first
National Book Award for fiction.
I think you have to be happy
in some way to produce as
much good work as he did.
You can't be, I mean that's a kind of,
there's something hopeful
about being that productive.
You might complain a lot,
you might even be suicidal at
certain points in your life,
many people are, but I
think a lot of the idea
that Algren was somehow
unhappy most of the time
is I think a massive projection.
I don't believe it,
but I mean you know--
- I don't know.
- I mean you've just spent
the most time with him
than anybody has since he died,
but I believe that there
was a lot of happiness
and that he was unhappy
sometimes like most people,
but that he was largely didn't
get everything he wanted
but he had a lot of control over
how he spent his time and what he did
and that there was a
lot of happiness in him.
(muffled speaking)
Yes.
- Yes.
(muffled speaking)
- He was right.
- But he handled opposition
in an interesting way,
conformed with some of
what you're saying Dan,
I remember in 1968 I
think it was the year,
he taught at Iowa in the
Iowa Writers Workshop.
- '65 to '67.
- Then it was '67 I think
and he sent me a photograph of himself
with a note that said this
is me after a card game
with Donald Justice, the poet
who was a real card shark
and he's standing there
in a little motorcycle
that he go on, which
is lying on the ground,
looking wrecked and he's
standing there without a shirt.
So, he could kind of make
a joke out of the fact
that he'd gotten fleeced
in a card game by a poet,
at a game that he'd like to
think he had great skill at
but it seems over the
years I think I've heard
that he didn't have much
skill at all at cards,
but I like the way he could
approach this humiliation,
in a way and then advertise it
by sending a photograph of himself
out without his, you know
having lost his shirt.
- Yeah he was funny as hell.
And yes he had these dark moments
but you know I think
at the end of his life,
he had this feeling of completion
and maybe that's my own projection
but you know he had finished a book.
It seemed like it was
never gonna get published
as his last novel, but it
gets published in Germany.
There's foreign interest in
his work right at the end
and then he gets nominated to the Academy,
and that's all happening in
the last months of his life
and stories about him
from then are all about
just sort of being joyful,
he wasn't writing a lot.
He didn't have a big project
and I think there was a sense of relief.
I think you know I also think that
he could sense his own mortality.
Like I said he had had heart problems
for the last year so before his death,
and I think he was kind
of wrapping things up
and going out on a high note.
You live the dream right?
He didn't have a job after 1943.
(all laughing)
How many writers can say that?
- [Tom] Terrific, thank you very much.
Books on sale.
(audience applauding)
