… is a museum for tourists that perpetuates clichés about him.
Nelson Algren [Sag Harbor, 1980]
Photo: Roswitha Hecke
To complete the selfie attraction, the museum will also have
a replica of Algren’s Chicago writing space with his desk, chair and the typewriter he used to write the classics “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “A Walk on the Wild Side.” There’s also a facsimile of the bicycle he rode around, including in Miller and took on the South Shore Line back to Chicago.
Ain’t that grand? Nelson, who died in 1981, must be doing back flips of joy.
Can’t help thinking of what he said, as reported in the New York Times, upon receiving the plaque that came with his 1950 National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm: “Clutching the plaque to his bosom, Mr. Algren assured the assembled multitude that when he had to pawn the plaque, he would do so in a first-class pawnshop.” The museum doesn’t appear to have the plaque or a facsimile. Which is tough luck for the selfie-takers.
Before I forget, it’s his birthday tomorrow. I’ll tip a glass to him. And, by the way, Nelson was not a beer-drinking boozehound, as the photo for the poster implies. His preferred drink was a dry martini.
As always, my mind goes spinning around in circles leading to pointless chicken scratch. If Algren really had a heart for the down-and-out, the disinherited, the lost — and I think he did — he might want to lend Gary a hand. The city is likely the worst example of urban neglect, destruction, abuse, and cultural decay in the USA. It has lost 55% of its population since 1960. Most of the city lies in ruins.
In the 90s it was known as the murder capital of the USA, though it has been pushed from that distinguished position by fine communities like Trenton. Also in the 90s, it had the highest ratio of African-Americans in the country for cities over 100,000. White flight left the disenfranchised with an abandoned economy already wasted by a post-industrial, financialized economy serving the rich. Rampant political corruption, racial violence, segregation, labor unrest, and industrial pollution complete the picture.
Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand would be proud to see the fruits of the anarcho-capitalism they promoted. For those who have some time, take a look at the documentary linked below about Gary. It’s basically a photgraphic study of its collapsed major public buildings. My understanding of Algren is probably wrong, but he might in some way be the patron saint of the place. If only there were people like him now writing about places like Gary. But alas, the American mind has been lobotomized. We look at cities that look like war zones and see nothing.
You’re right that Nelson was deeply committed to the down-and-out and the disiniherited and the lost. They were the subject of his books, almost exclusively. But I don’t think he would care much for what sounds to me like a kitschy bit of gentrification, which I doubt will lend much of a hand to Gary. I don’t think tourists will come flocking.
Besides, Nelson’s time in Gary was a haunted period for him. Living there during the height of the McCarthy witch hunt for Communists, he was hounded by the FBI for associations he’d had 20 years earlier. Agents came around. They questioned his neighbors, some of whom told tales about him. One winter he fell through the ice on the pond behind his cottage and had to be rescued. Friends of his thought it was a failed suicide attempt. He also had a mental breakdown at the time, and his friends hauled him off to a hospital ward. It was a rocky period, too, in his affair with Simone de Beauvoir and his relations with his wife Amanda. The details of all that have yet to be clarified. They weren’t by the two Algren biographies that have appeared so far. But I believe the one that’s coming from Colin Asher will tell us what really happened there, and why. In any case, I don’t think Nelson had any love for Gary by the time I knew him toward the end of his life, certainly not enough to help save it from the decay you cite.
Thanks for the interesting thoughts and information which help me understand. The ironies are complex. When writing about the lost in lost places, should one like the lost places? Should one be lost himself? Or herself? Should Algren disdain Gary? Should we see Chicago as a much more arty human dumping ground?
The ironies continue. Maybe a nice museum in Sag Harbor, where he lived as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and where he could look at pics of Frank Sinatra performing the movie based on one of his books. And where he could reminisce about lost souls like his French existentialist lady friend.
So I see the problems you are talking about, and the bitter ironies. On site memorial museums to artists are often pretty stupid and touristy. And there’s always an irony in writing about the lost while situated in the more comfortable world of the cultured intellectual, regardless of how they try to identify. But Algren might have appreciated the joke of being a tourist in Gary. And of course, he’s not doing any of that. As his books seem to suggest, when a person is dead, they’re just dead.
Jan, I am so sorry to hear your comments on the new Nelson Algren Museum of Miller Beach. I am one of the co-founders and have hoped you would one day visit and perhaps speak at an event. Art Shay, one of Algren’s oldest and closest friends, attended our opening and at the end of the event said, “Nelson would have liked this.”
Our mission is to celebrate the life and writings of Nelson Algren. The next time you visit Chicago we would love to show you our work in progress.
Nelson Algren was one of Art Shay’s great photo subjects, maybe his greatest. His Algren photos are probably more widely distributed than any because of Shay’s assiduous curation. But his assertion that Nelson would have liked the museum doesn’t make it true. I don’t think Nelson spoke to him for, at the least, the last two decades of Nelson’s life. I appreciate that the museum is a labor of love. All I can tell you, Sue, is that my impression — judging from my own relations with Nelson late in his life — is that he would have found that giant-size poster offensive and the museum itself of no importance to him. He had moved on.
A buddy of mine was saying to me only today that “when a writer is no more, his writings live — and it’s up to his friends and fans to be good foster parents to them.” He wasn’t talking about Algren, but he might as well have been. So yes, Michael, it’s a fine thing to put Nelson’s work out there to be read. But “anything” that keeps it out there is not necessarily “a good thing.” Being “good foster parents” is key. It seems to me that good foster parents would not let a larger-than-life-size poster of that Art Shay photo be used to publicize their museum. The photo looks to me like an image of some sort of feral boozehound making a getaway:
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Photo-used-for-the-Algren-poster-in-Gary.jpg
Which gives a false impression of the man.
Here’s another dry martini, Nelson Algren. And a flat beer to you, Lou Reed.
I mentioned your comment to Art Shay, long time friend of Nelson during the time he spent in Miller Beach. Art was at the opening on Sunday and Jan, he said your view of Nelson’ probable take on the museum is “absolutely wrong.”
Kudos to the efforts of the museum board to actually make a place honoring the winner of the first National Book Award. And all the power to Miller Beach & Gary for having the balls to do it, unlike Sag Harbor or Chicago.
Nelson’s writing is more important than ever and if this museum helps some of the new generation come to read his work, then Gary should be proud.
Please see my reply to Sue.
Nelson wrote his work to be read, so if Nelson’s inspires people to write books, make movies or open museums, then I say great. Hopefully, those creations will inspire other people to read his work and be inspired and moved. Anything that keeps Nelson’s name out in the world is a good thing. We don’t get to decide whether or not Nelson would have approved. Doesn’t matter. Artists and writers have no control over their work, once they are out in the world. Just saying.
Interesting posting. I guess if Gary, Indiana — the Frankie Machine of American cities — needs a culture figure to bring in tourists and raise property values, it might as well be Algren, arguably the most under-appreciated, harassed and critically abused writer of the 20th century. I root for Gary and I love Nelson, but this museum seems more about boosting Miller Beach property values than shedding light on an important novelist. If it were a ghost town in Arizona, it would be rattlesnakes preserved in formaldehyde. In Gary, it’s a beer-guzzling, vaguely notorious novelist. Whatever it takes.
Poor Nelson, to end as victim to real estate development masked as literary concern…–but then consider whats at the top of Capitalist pyramid just now– a man who doesn’t read- but can make a “deal.” Now thats true humiliation—-.” Never eat at a place called Ma’s; Never play cards with a man named Doc, and avoid Gary at all costs”