dogmatika
New Orleans, Algren style
07 September 2006
"Something irreplaceable is gone. Look for the old New Orleans now only in books, and start with an underground American classic that was published 50 years ago this summer, Nelson Algren's A Walk on the Wild Side."
Salon re-read Algren's classic:
The New Orleans of "A Walk on the Wild Side" is inhabited by thieves, con artists, barflies, pool sharks, pimps and hookers: "Every time an operator padlocked a mine or a mill in West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or Southern Illinois, a fresh flock of chicks would hit town and start turning tricks for the price of a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of Dr. Pepper's." People such as a petty criminal called Cross-Country Kline with "a face that looked as if it had been lined into the grandstand and lined right back," who offers Dove advice like, "Blow wise to this, buddy: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
[..]
"A Walk on the Wild Side" was never the book that literary folk in New Orleans suggested you read if you wanted to know the "real" New Orleans, probably because it lifted a rock to reveal a city they didn't want to admit had ever existed. (You could visit New Orleans several times without anyone ever telling you that the city was home to America's original slave market.) You usually had to find out about "A Walk on the Wild Side" from the weirdest kid in your class, the one who had also read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and perhaps even François Villon (who, come to think of it, were probably three of Algren's leading influences).
It took a Swedish-German-Jewish leftie from Chicago to create a marriage of Protestant hellfire and Catholic decadence -- as American a vision as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. Something about New Orleans inspired, enraged and finally liberated Algren's imagination in a way that Chicago never quite did. "A Walk on the Wild Side," from cover to cover, is written in a prose that is, alternately, incandescent and hallucinatory, with long choruslike passages of description punctuated with short staccato jazz riffs of dialogue -- a rhythm ideally attuned to the birthplace of jazz. (Michael Swindle, a New Orleans poet, calls Algren "The Man With the Golden Ear.")
[..]
"A Walk on the Wild Side" was never the book that literary folk in New Orleans suggested you read if you wanted to know the "real" New Orleans, probably because it lifted a rock to reveal a city they didn't want to admit had ever existed. (You could visit New Orleans several times without anyone ever telling you that the city was home to America's original slave market.) You usually had to find out about "A Walk on the Wild Side" from the weirdest kid in your class, the one who had also read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and perhaps even François Villon (who, come to think of it, were probably three of Algren's leading influences).
It took a Swedish-German-Jewish leftie from Chicago to create a marriage of Protestant hellfire and Catholic decadence -- as American a vision as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. Something about New Orleans inspired, enraged and finally liberated Algren's imagination in a way that Chicago never quite did. "A Walk on the Wild Side," from cover to cover, is written in a prose that is, alternately, incandescent and hallucinatory, with long choruslike passages of description punctuated with short staccato jazz riffs of dialogue -- a rhythm ideally attuned to the birthplace of jazz. (Michael Swindle, a New Orleans poet, calls Algren "The Man With the Golden Ear.")
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