Nelson Algren used to write books in and about Chicago. Though his name and reputation have diminished over the last decades, he lingers in the shadows. The Tribune has presented yearly literary awards for short stories in his name since 1981, though some of the winners have not read a word of Algren’s work. There is a yearly birthday celebration in his honor thrown by the Nelson Algren Committee since 1989, but it attracts only a few dozen devotees.
Death is never kind to artists, but it has been particularly harsh on Algren. But now he is back with a roar as loud as the “L,” which Algren once described as “the city’s rusty heart.” He is the subject of not one but two feature-length documentaries, quite different in tone and style but both visually stunning and both able to make arguments that Algren was, if not the “world figure” or “the Dostoevsky of American literature” — as a couple of talking heads in the movies say — certainly a great writer and surely a complex man.
In short, Algren was born in Detroit, bummed around the country after graduating college with a degree in journalism, was jailed for stealing a typewriter in Texas and wound up in Chicago. Between 1942 and 1956 he published “Never Come Morning,” “The Neon Wilderness,” “The Man with the Golden Arm” (winner of the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950, presented by Eleanor Roosevelt), “Chicago: City on the Make” and “A Walk on the Wild Side.” David Ulin, the book critic of the Los Angeles Times, called it “a run of five books … as good as anything any writer anywhere has ever done.” Algren’s work focused so firmly on society’s disenfranchised that his close friend Studs Terkel called him “the bard of losers.” But after 1956, that was about it. He never wrote another good book. He turned out stories, poems, essays and journalism, much of it collected in “The Last Carousel” in 1973 and posthumously in 2009’s “Entrapment.” He left Chicago in a huff in 1975.
And yet, two movies!
One is titled, simply, “Algren,” written and directed by Columbia College professor Michael Caplan, with a tremendous assist from Algren’s running buddy, photographer Art Shay, the most ardent and active keeper of the Algren flame since the author’s death in Sag Harbor on Long Island in 1981 at 72. Begun in 2008, it had its first public showing, its world premiere, on Tuesday at the Chicago International Film Festival and is set for two more CIFF screenings (12:15 p.m. Monday and 8p.m. Tuesday at AMC River East, 322 E. Illinois St.) before aiming for more festivals and perhaps a theatrical run.
The other is “Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All,” which had a private sneak preview this month here. Nearly 25 years in the works, it is directed and produced by Mark Blottner, Denis Mueller and Ilko Davidov, with a tremendous assist from Warren Leming, a writer/director/musician/actor who was one of the Algren Committee co-founders and a crucial on-screen presence. The filmmakers plan to hit the festival circuit in the spring.
Both films are compelling, exciting, enlightening … pick a positive adjective. But, still, a question: Is there a need for two Algren films, when the world is so far empty of films about such local literary contemporaries of his as Saul Bellow, Mike Royko or Terkel?
Terkel is a solid presence in both films, typically astute, observant and knowing. Others interviewed include some who knew Algren: Shay, of course, in person and in dozens of his photos, as well as Shay’s late wife, Florence; bookstore owner Stuart Brent; novelist Kurt Vonnegut; journalist Jan Herman; friend and poker buddy Dave Peltz; the late 5th Ward Ald. Leon Despres; former agent Clancy Sigal; filmmakers William Friedkin, John Sayles and Philip Kaufman; people who did not know him but are passionate admirers, such as teacher/writer Bill Savage and, surprisingly, rock star Billy Corgan. Algren biographer Bettina Drew speaks, as do many others.
We get great archival footage, discussions of Algren’s lousy poker-playing skills and perhaps even worse ability to bet the ponies, his misadventures with Hollywood. We get tales of his time in a cottage in the Miller Beach community of Gary and in a nearby psychiatric hospital. We hear in both films people (including the author himself) reading from Algren’s work, get disturbing details about the 1,000-page FBI surveillance report kept on him. We see his image on camera and hear soundtracks filled with haunting music. (You can get glimpses of the films and more information about them by going to bit.ly/nelsonalgren and algrenthemovie.com).
I appear on camera for a few sound bites in Caplan’s film, offering modest assessments of Algren the writer and the man. My participation is due largely to my parents’ close relationship with the author. He dedicated the second edition of the paperback version of “Chicago: City on the Make,” his love-hate prose poem that will likely be his most durable literary legacy, to my parents, Herman and Marilew Kogan, misspelling my mother’s name. He was a frequent guest at parties in our apartment, and I knew him as a kid and as a young man. And he slept with my aunt, my mother’s older sister, a delightful if damaged woman named Virginia who was not loath to share with me her opinion of the writer — “Nelson was not nice. He was a beast” — or her thoughts about the reasons for their brief affair, as in this chilling remark: “I think Nelson only slept with me because he couldn’t have your mother.”
I had a nasty run-in with Algren over Virginia shortly before he left Chicago and am relieved that my aunt (and parents) go unmentioned in the films. But there is much about Algren’s relationships with other women, plenty of them. The local writer Denise DeClue is in both films, talking with kindness about their relationship. And we learn what many don’t remember or never knew: In 1937 Algren married a woman named Amanda Kontowicz; divorced her in 1946 and remarried her in 1953; divorced her again in 1955; and again married, in 1965 to actress Betty Bendyk, divorcing three years later.
But the woman who “stars” in the films is French existentialist/feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Algren had a lengthy, passionate and ultimately bitter love affair. Gary Houston, a fixture for decades on the local theater scene as actor and director, only met Algren once, introduced to him by the late film critic Roger Ebert. But he played Algren on stage, in the 2000 production of John Susman’s play “Nelson & Simone” at Live Bait Theatre opposite Rebecca Covey. He has seen both films and has this to say about …
“Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All”: “This is the best documentary of a writer’s life I have seen. It is so good it may be the thing that finally brings its subject the notice, whose elusion is always brought up when recounting his life and work. Two things at the end punctuated the film powerfully: The shot I had never seen before of Nelson sitting on the ground by broken sidewalk squares with a vacant lot of scrub and weed behind him and desolation everywhere else, the voice-over comparing him to Art Carney, whom some said he resembled, and a cat. The other was Vonnegut’s lament that Nelson had never really had a ‘gang.’ Though we know he did not lack for devotees and followers and cultists, I think by ‘gang’ Vonnegut means people who were close and familial, constant and materially ‘supportive.’ Maybe Algren’s (lack) of such a gang was self-imposed, which goes with the cat idea, and that cat image is pungent. The word similar to ‘cat’ — ‘cad’ — was used by Studs the last time I saw him after he’d come to see ‘Nelson & Simone.’ And what he says in the film about Nelson as someone you could only get to know, or get close to, up to a point goes with ‘cat,’ though I think Studs’ context was Nelson’s faithlessness with people, principally women, and thus we have Nelson the cad.”
On “Algren”: “This is a visual treasure, and its first three-fourths seems cued by the ‘scrapbook’ description of Algren’s apartment walls and transfers it to the style of the film itself, which allows a pastiche of images, labels and captions, usually in fast succession. I am glad the film took more time with the period after he figured his fiction days were over and, to earn a living, he did other kinds of writing: book reviews, opinion pieces, travel writings, recollections from his life. I did get a takeaway from the Sag Harbor section, because it informed me — or I’d forgotten — that before his fatal heart attack he actually did find a bit of happiness and community among other writers. It is known that he and Bellow had a mutual dislike, yet in Chicago he’d had Herman, Marilew, Studs, Shay, Brent, his neighbor Stuart McCarrell, DeClue, Royko, Ebert, his many women and lord knows who else, but somehow they hadn’t been enough to qualify as the missing ‘gang’ Vonnegut alludes to in the other film. Was it that their combined esteem could not compensate for the citywide ignorance of Algren’s importance, demonstrated by the libraries that did not care to carry his books? Was it that in Sag Harbor it no longer mattered if his books were selling, what mattered was the appreciation of people who formed a national pantheon of which he could at last be a part? I end with questions, and that’s fitting, because I think he will always be an enigmatic cat.”
That captures it — “enigmatic cat” — and I would argue that one needs to see both films. In so doing you’ll get as full a portrait as you can about the man/writer and will still come away with questions.
The filmmakers are proud of their works.
Caplan: “I haven’t seen the other film, but I would characterize mine as a biography of Nelson’s life and tribute to that life and his work. I think it’s great that there are two Algren documentaries. There’s room for all, and Nelson deserves it.”
Mueller: “I have only seen bits and pieces of the other film but enough to know that they are different. I do think our film is more of a biography about Algren and his life within a certain period of history, Algren and his times. It has what I think is a very film noir feel, this portrait of a tarnished angel.”
Earlier this year I sat down with Brooklyn-born and -raised 32-year-old writer Colin Asher. He was here to research a new Algren biography. Over drinks he told me, “Algren was a very complicated man.” Having watched both films and bathed in many personal memories, all I can say, or write, is this: “Tell me about it.”
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m.Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
