by Jeff McMahon

Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:19:10 -0600

I traveled to Copenhagen Dec. 8-20 to cover the UN Climate Change Conference for True/Slant. You can find an index of the 26 stories I posted from Copenhagen here: http://trueslant.com/jeffmcmahon/copenhagen

The Ninth Man Out: Nelson Algren at 100

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:18:45 -0500

By Jeff McMahon

This is the story of the broken heart of a man, the rusty heart of a city, and how they got all tangled up as one. Like a lot of us, he learned hope and heartbreak first from a baseball team, then from bruising bouts with love, then from the city in which he lived, but unlike a lot of us, he never learned to play along, never stopped seeing the way things are contrasted against the way things ought to be, never stopped championing the nobodies nobody knows—for there, he wrote, beats Chicago’s heart. He followed his own beat straight to the place where pride will lead you every time—to poverty and exile—while describing Chicago as no one had since Carl Sandburg and as no one has again. And save for the devotion of a peculiar few, the City of Big Shoulders shrugged him off.

Maybe that’s changing. This spring, in readings and screenings and lectures, Chicago is noticing the 100th birthday of Nelson Algren, the writer who cast its heart in prose. Young Chicago writers are reaching for the tails of his Salvation Army coat, and old New York writers are flying into O’Hare—some Californians, too—to help Chicago toast his awakening memory.

There’s a wave building: In 2003, a panel on Algren was attended by five panelists and one audience member—who had come hoping to learn something about Algren’s lover, Simone de Beauvoir. This February, a similar panel drew eleven. In March, a Columbia College tribute attracted 150. And hundreds are expected to fill the Steppenwolf Theater for a reading of his works April 6. Whenever these events occur, the panelists marvel at Algren’s early brilliance and wonder at his devastating decline—for he began as the poet of the slums and became merely a resident therein. Mostly, Chicago seems sorry it didn’t appreciate Algren more when he was here.

Fifty years ago, when Algren’s books could be found in all the great cities of Europe, they could not be found in the Chicago Public Library. Fifty years ago, when commies couldn’t get passports, Algren couldn’t visit his books in Europe either, and while J. Edgar Hoover had him roped, the leading critics jabbed his “proletarian” interest in the downtrodden and his “sentimental” politics.

Fifty years ago, when he was 50, Nelson Algren was peddling book reviews to buy his bread, but he had not quite renounced hope, for as the September sun flew by on the wind, the White Sox finished first in the American League. The Sox had not visited a World Series since 1919, when eight players allegedly took bribes to throw the series. Algren was 10 in 1919 and living near 71st Street and Cottage Grove, in the shadow of the high cross of St. Columbanus. The Black Sox lured young Algren in, then let him down deeper than where he started, establishing the pattern of hope and heartbreak that echoed through his life, with wives and girlfriends, with literary fortune, with the city of Chicago. For the whole town, he wrote, is a rigged ball game. Despite such convincing grounds for heartbreak, for a few days in October of 1959, he gave hope another chance. The White Sox were returning to the World Series hungry for redemption, and so was Nelson Algren.

Algren wrote a column on each of the three home games—a towering win and two losses—for the Chicago Sun-Times. He recast the columns as an essay for his 1973 book, “The Last Carousel,” but the essay reads like it was revised with scissors and Scotch tape. It lacks the sincerity of the columns, written on deadline as hope turned again to heartbreak. Like an image of the Virgin in a highway underpass, Algren’s life reveals itself in this small series of columns: moments of brilliance, moments of bitterness, an unerring eye for what it means to be Chicagoan.

“I sent a half-dollar down the line to the vendor, never expecting to see any change and only half expecting a beer. It came back full after passing through 14 pairs of hands, and I thought that either we are getting considerate of our fellow man in Chicago or else we’re going soft.”

Algren devotes a lot of ink to his fellow man in the bleachers—and to a few unlucky women. The Sun-Times had its whole staff on the games, plus a guest column by an expert—White Sox second baseman Nellie Fox—so Algren, the novelist, was there to supply meaning. He primes the canvas with his own boyish hope, spinning us back four decades to a day when the Black Sox were still the White Sox and Babe Ruth had come to town chasing the single-season homerun record:

“Outside Sox Park, mounted police were trying to keep a mob of locked-out fans from crashing the centerfield fence, which was then wooden. Inside, Eddie Cicotte was pitching to Ruth. The crush of the mob swept police, horses, and myself onto the field, and I scampered into the centerfield bleachers. I’ve been in the centerfield bleachers ever since. The papers described the incident as RIOT AT SOX PARK! Overnight I became the kid who not only had survived a riot but had seen Cicotte strike out Ruth.”

As he brings us back to 1959, Algren describes “a great rising feeling.” The White Sox take the lead in Game One, and that lead grows to 11-0 by the time Algren leaves the park, without explanation, midway through the seventh inning. Although a second game had yet to be played, he writes a strangely prescient sentence in his first column: “Then the big Chicago afternoon light came down like the light of no other city, and I knew I would not see the White Sox like this again.”

In fact, Chicago would not see another home victory in the World Series until October 22, 2005.

When the White Sox lose the series in Game Six, Algren keeps to his seat while the fans clear out. It begins to rain. And then he does what he does whenever Chicago lets him down—it’s what he does best: he evokes the silver-colored yesterday, which is not so much a past Chicago as a parallel Chicago, a Chicago where Cicotte always strikes out Ruth. Thirty years before “Field of Dreams,” Algren sees ghosts practicing on the infield:

“I have seen the hep-ghosts of the rain before. I know who they are. They are ghosts of old-time buskers and long-gone hustlers that have been left here and there around town for haunting of bars and ball parks, to play make-believe World Series there after the squares have gone home…. I have seen the ghosts of blue-moon hustlers leaping drunk below the all-night billboard lights. Yesterday evening, when the crowd was gone and I stood up at last to leave, I saw the shade of Shoeless Joe. He was walking toward the darkening stands, and he’d left his glove behind.”

Between hope and heartbreak, many innings, many strikes, many balls, but Algren has trouble concentrating. There’s a woman sitting near him at each game, saying something he can’t ignore. Married three times on paper and once in spirit, Algren was troubled by women at home, too—especially by Simone de Beauvoir.

In Game One, White Sox pitcher Early Wynn hits a double in the third, and a ball boy runs out to give him his jacket—a precaution to keep the pitcher’s arm from getting cold. Algren overhears a woman asking, “Aren’t they going to play it out?” She thought Wynn was dressing to go home. Later, the woman asks her husband the score, and he tells her it’s 11-0 in the fourth. Algren writes: “I actually heard her ask, ‘Does that mean it will be 22-0 in the eighth?’”

In Game Two, Senator John F. Kennedy is sitting beside the mayor in the Daley Family box, while in the bleachers a woman “just showing the first signs of mileage” sits beside Algren. She’s wearing blue corduroy. She doesn’t care much for baseball, but Algren tells her what’s going to happen before it happens: “I told Blue Corduroy, ‘He’s going to hit,’ and the crack of that bat came so solid I stood up to see if I could catch it.’” He offers her a beer; she declines. He tells her about Shoeless Joe Jackson, the great hitter for the Black Sox, and Eddie Gaedel, the midget who made one plate appearance for the St. Louis Browns. “Blue Corduroy responded by saying she would have the beer I had offered before, and I would hate to think now that she accepted just to make me shut up.”

The ushers are passing out roses to women in the stands, and she gets one: “‘Two days here, it’s time I got one,’ she felt she had to explain to me, and said it in a way that made me feel she had been roseless for ever so long.” The Dodgers prevail, and the loss inspires Algren to poetry: “It was a day that began with rain, that bloomed brightly with base hits and roses and came at last to a melancholy end. But not for the woman in blue corduroy who got the rose so long overdue.”

In the final, fatal Game Six, the Dodgers plate six runs in the fourth, and “a dark eyed woman behind me began calling on God, ‘Let it rain. Let it rain.’” When that doesn’t work, she calls on White Sox manager Al Lopez to put Honey Romano in the game because he’s hitting .625. Algren knows Romano is hitting below .300, but he won’t argue with an Italian: “As a book reviewer with barely enough clout to squeeze into the upper right-field stands I didn’t feel qualified to dispute the point, and… I am not the kid to buck the Mafia.”

The women help Algren string readers from hope to heartbreak without writing play-by-play. By not knowing or not caring about baseball, they transcend the game’s concerns, and that’s precisely the use for women—as a deviant and inferior other—that Simone de Beauvoir deplores in “The Second Sex.”

Feminists wonder why Beauvoir accepted in Algren the very tools of oppression she exposed in mankind—research? tolerance? love? But in the 1940s, Beauvoir considered hostility as slavish as docility—“The praying mantis is the antithesis of the harem girl, but both depend on the male”—and she saw autonomy as the answer to oppression. When Algren grew bitter he mocked her, but when he was brilliant he gave her good advice—to use racial discrimination in America as a model for her book on women.

They met in 1947, when Beauvoir was drafting “The Second Sex” and Algren was drafting “The Man with the Golden Arm.” Hers became a foundational text of feminism. His won the first National Book Award. The gossip about their first date, often repeated, subverts recognition of another important Chicago writer. Algren may have been her guide, but her vision is her own, and her vision of Chicago is as apt as anything by Algren or Richard Wright or Carl Sandburg. In her novel, “The Mandarins,” Beauvoir describes a fictional cab ride from the Palmer House to 1523 West Wabansia to meet Algren for the first time. It was February:

“There were a great many streets and all of them looked alike; they were bordered by tired frame houses and scrubby little yards that tried to look like suburban gardens. We also went down straight bleak avenues; everywhere, it was cold…. The cab crossed bridges and tracks, passed by warehouses, went down streets in which all the shops were Italian. It finally stopped at the corner of an alley that smelled of burned paper, damp earth, poverty; the driver pointed to a wooden porch projecting from a brick wall. ‘That’s it.’ I walked alongside a fence. To my left, a saloon decorated with a red, unlit neon sign: ‘Schlitz’; to the right, on a large billboard, the ideal American family smilingly sniffing a bowl of hot cereal. A garbage pail was smoking at the foot of a wooden stairway. I climbed the stairs. On the porch, I found a windowed door on the inside of which hung a yellow shade; that was probably it. But suddenly I felt nervous. Wealth always has something public about it, but the life of the poor is an intimate thing; it somehow seemed indiscreet to knock at that windowpane. Hesitantly, I looked at the row of brick walls to which other stairways and other gray porches were monotonously tacked. Above the rooftops, I saw an immense red-and-white cylinder: a gas tank; at my feet, in the center of a naked square of earth, stood a black tree, and at its foot a little toy windmill with blue sails. In the distance, a train passed; the porch trembled. I knocked and there appeared at the door a rather tall, rather young man, his chest stiffened by a leather jacket. He looked at me in surprise.
‘You found the house?’
‘So it seems.’”

In “America, Day by Day,” Beauvoir describes Maxwell Street, West Madison Street, North Clark Street, the lakefront, the stockyards, the police lineup, with as sharp an eye for boss and worker, black and white, as Algren or Sandburg, but where they reach for a metaphor she unsheathes a shimmering thought. She notices in 1947 that America runs on optimism, for example, and that optimism leads us to blame our poor for their poverty. Anyone can succeed here, we must believe, so something must be wrong with those who don’t.

Her tour includes a White Sox game: “Vacantly, I watched the strangely dressed players who were running about on the aggressively green grass.”

Maybe Beauvoir killed the beast. That’s one theory that emerges when panelists ponder Algren’s collapse. Beauvoir was tolerant but would not be tamed. In 1951 he wrote to her, “The disappointment I felt three years ago, when I began to realize that your life belonged to Paris and to Sartre, is an old one now, and it’s become blunted by time. What I have tried to do since is take my life back from you.” But in 1960, granted a passport at last, he sailed to Paris. And came home alone.

Or it might have been the gambling. It might have been the critics. It might have been the McCarthy era that did Algren in. Unable to publish his views or muzzle them, Algren resorted to satire and was dismissed as a clown. So goes another theory.

There’s also the view, espoused by Algren’s friend Art Shay, that he just lost his stuff. “He was not a good caretaker of his talent,” Shay said at the Columbia College tribute last month. “He dried up to a certain extent.”

For a time, Algren had outperformed the best American writers. He wrote “The Neon Wilderness,” “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “Chicago, City on the Make” in the span of five years, and then he slipped into a decline so prolonged—thirty years, some reckon—that a reviewer criticized his biographer, Bettina Drew, for subjecting readers to it. But it’s hard to figure Algren without the decline, which dropped him through the membrane between the city and its literature, preserving him as a character in the myth of Chicago that he had helped to craft—a nobody, a ghost, the ninth man out.

In 1975, Algren left Chicago for good. Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Soll attended his moving sale in the third-floor flat at 1958 West Evergreen. His neighbors, Soll notices, don’t know who Algren is, but the press has noted his departure. “For the first time in my life, now that I’m leaving, Chicago is finally saying some nice things about me,” Algren told Soll. “You know, the kind of praise I wouldn’t be getting unless I had just died.”

Algren died six years later in New York. Long Island took his body. The Ohio State University took his archives. The City of Big Shoulders mostly shrugged him off. The famous symbol of indifference is Evergreen Avenue: the city changed its name to Nelson Algren Avenue, and when residents complained, changed it back. But over the years Algren’s light has flickered in the neon wilderness: awards were named for him, a fountain dedicated, a committee formed, a play staged. Mike Royko and Studs Terkel championed his work. His books, all out of print when he died, are all back in print, with two new volumes out this year. There are signs Chicago sees itself increasingly through Algren’s eyes as the city of hope (Obama) and the hustler (Blagojevich). It’s not just the cross of St. Columbanus that gazes down upon the gray streets anymore, but the uncompromising writer who demands, “What have you done for the nobodies nobody knows?”

“I submit that literature is made upon any occasion,” Algren wrote, “that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”

In 1986, Simone de Beauvoir, a conscience in touch with humanity, was buried beside Jean-Paul Sartre, wearing Nelson Algren’s ring. In 2005, the White Sox got their rings, touching the conscience of the vast humanity sprawled south of Roosevelt Road. And if you want to know where Nelson Algren is during all these soirees held in his honor, consider that hope still springs from the South Side, reaching all the way to the White House sometimes, and not a day goes by at 35th and Shields that Cicotte doesn’t strike out Ruth.

“The crush of the mob swept police, horses and myself onto the field, and I scampered into the centerfield bleachers,” echoes a voice from the silver-colored yesterday. “I’ve been in the centerfield bleachers ever since.”

A Poor Man's Che

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:08:55 -0600

By Jeff McMahon

Less than three years after the U.S. Cavalry massacred the Sioux at Wounded Knee, Chicagoans could safely observe Sioux encampments at the World's Columbian Exposition, and the science of ethnography was born. So goes the story, and so it will go with socialists.

As soon as the last socialist dies - which might happen soon in Cuba - we will study them as curiosities, celebrate them as nostalgic objects, observe them through some modern version of a Columbian Exposition exhibit. It has already begun with Che Guevara: four years ago Gael García Bernal portrayed Che's formative years in The Motorycle Diaries, and soon we will be able to safely observe the revolutionary Che, played by Benicio Del Toro, in a 268-minute biopic by Steven Soderbergh. We can watch while wearing our Original Che Berets, on sale right now at the Che Store for only $24.99 - $5.00 off the regular price. I will celebrate Che as much as the next subject of capital, but when I think of socialism I will not think of Che. I will think of Lozandro Polanco.

To introduce Lozandro Polanco, to explain why he should be remembered, I must take you back to a hot, dusty, desperate dry season in Nicaragua in 1987, when the whole country ran out of beer. I should say more precisely that it ran out of bottles, which waiters watched the way cats watch goldfish. The ragged Sandinista economy had just enough bottles to deliver the people's beer to the people's bellies - as long as it shipped the bottles straight back to the brewery to fill them up again. The waiters watchdogged this fragile economy, but they could not watch the bottlers, and when the bottlers took two days off to honor the Virgin during Purisima, the whole country ran out of beer.

The drought stung all the more for the sublime quality of Nicaragua's two native brands, Toña lager and Victoria pilsner. A cold sip at the end of every hot, dry day broke sharply from the relentless tragedy that day had inevitably chronicled: the widows and orphans, the crippled veterans, the felled forests
and shelled towns.

With the dry season upon us, with the beer gone, you could feel the temperature rise. The few men who idled away hot afternoons in thatched outdoor bars sat in gloomy silence and stared blankly at the skinny dogs roaming Managua's dirt streets. The guards keeping watch at the Palacio Nacional - then the vacant centerpiece of a ruined downtown - barked at the boys playing stickball in the weedy plaza. There had always been soldiers in ill-fitting Cuban fatigues rushing to the front on the backs of flatbed trucks, but now they gripped their AK-47s with a new anxiety. They had left Managua without that final beer.

Even the American reporters who crowded into the bar at the Hotel Intercontinental (then Managua's only multi-story building) seemed unusually tense during the beer drought, despite the hotel's endless stocks of rum and cola. Their impatience leaked into the reports they filed on the deadly, dimwitted standoff between Ronald Reagan and the band of Ivy League-educated revolutionaries now running Nicaragua.

It was in this parched atmosphere that I was dispatched one afternoon to a press conference called by Interior Minister Tomás Borge at a new women's prison in Managua. The Sandinistas poured their pride into public institutions - schools, clinics, prisons - and it showed here. The inmates wore beige shirts and trousers with red collars and cuffs, like factory workers, and they bustled like workers, too, buzzing from workrooms to rec rooms across manicured lawns. There was no barbed wire atop the freshly painted walls.

But it was within these walls that the cracks showed in Sandinista ideology.

Already in 1987, Tomás Borge was the last living founder of the Sandinista movement. Daniel Ortega and the nuevos Sandinistas who ran the country called him ‘El General de la Revolución'. A stout, puggish man, Borge emerged into the courtyard smiling, the Sandinistas' red and black scarf knotted around his neck, a woman under each arm. He sucked all the power out of the prison yard and into his swelling chest. There was no question who, in this crowd, was the general.

Borge had been captured by the Somoza dictatorship in 1956, tortured and imprisoned for three years, nine months of which he spent with a black hood over his head. Somoza's men raped and murdered his wife. When the Sandinistas seized power in 1979, he confronted his torturers in court. When he was allowed to choose their punishment, Borge famously said to them: ‘My punishment is to forgive you.'

It was a good Catholic socialist revolution. Borge said a few words about this ideal new prison in the ideal new state, but the real story, subtler than the headlines, appeared when he finished his speech: workers wheeled two metal coolers into the yard, each the size of a small Soviet car, and opened the lids. Inside, nestled in an arctic sea of icewater, were hundreds of bottles of Victoria pilsner.

Everyone drank slowly.

It was like that in Nicaragua. In this poorest of nations, this most idealistic of revolutions everywhere showed signs of compromise. Sandinista leaders like Borge and Ortega lived in posh homes by Nicaraguan standards, captured from the fascists and capitalists they had deposed. Inside these homes one could find objects one found nowhere else in Nicaragua, like color televisions, teenage sons, beer. It was the socialist paradox: becoming one people and still taking a little plunder for yourself. The meager plunder of such revolutions will make a curious exhibit at the next Columbian Exposition. But there will be no artifacts belonging to Lozandro Polanco on display, for Lozandro Polanco owned nothing.

I first wrote about Polanco soon after I met him and soon after I met Borge, when I traveled to a resettlement camp near the northern front. The camp had a new school and a new clinic, but had probably never known a single bottle of beer. I wrote about him again a decade later, and now, two decades later. His story is still with me. This is how I usually tell it:

Lozandro Polanco paced the camp's dirt streets cradling a Kalashnikov rifle in his right arm and cradling a granddaughter, barefoot and wet-nosed in a pink dress, in his left. All the other men had left the camp in uniform and gone into the jungle, or into the earth. Even those too young to shave were old enough to march; but thin, toothless Polanco had too many years. So he remained among the women and babies, patrolling the streets in a drab olive uniform and cap. He kept the rifle's banana clip wedged in the waistband of his trousers. He wore black rubber boots, the kind worn by people who clean fish.

Polanco had lived in the border village of Comwapa until 1983, when Reagan's Contras attacked. They killed his brother and five-month-old niece. They kidnapped his daughter and some of her children. Polanco trailed them into Honduras before returning to Nicaragua alone and settling in the camp.

‘I would like to stay here and take care of what we have,' he told me.

Polanco led me on a tour of the camp, and then I followed him into his home, a shack assembled from sticks and palm fronds. The shadows inside were as dark and cool as the sun outside was bright and hot. Bare feet had polished the dirt floor smooth. Polanco owned nothing, nothing at all save for a clay stove, its belly full of gray ash, and a cloth pouch that hung from the ceiling. The pouch was wet, and a single drop of water fell from it when Polanco untied the strings that cinched it closed. His fingers slipped inside and pulled out two eggs. He handed them to us. They felt as cold as if they had been in a refrigerator.

‘Take them for your journey,' he said.

Lozandro Polanco's socialism was marked by two sentiments: ‘I would like to stay here and take care of what we have', and here, take everything we have for your journey.

The U.S. Cavalry massacred the Sioux at Wounded Knee to clear the Black Hills for farmers and miners, for American businessmen. Now the Cavalry has cleared all but the last of the socialists. Easily and often we remember the worst of them: Stalin and his purges, Pol Pot and his Killing Fields. But as we plunge into the blind night of unballasted capitalism, we should take for our journey some memento of socialism's immaterial best: Not just Che Guevara's original beret, not just Tomás Borge's forgiveness and beer, but Lozandro Polanco's selflessness, his courageous generosity in radical poverty, his stone cold huevos.

Heywood Broun: The Writer We Need Now

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:41:50 -0500

Coffee rings on the cover testify that my 1935 copy of Heywood Broun’s It Seems to Me served for some of its life as a coaster. But when I found this collection a decade ago in a second-hand bookshop in California, the genie was still alive in its tawny pages, and he rolled up his sleeves and coached me to better writing. Now I use his writing to coach others. After a class last quarter at the University of Chicago, a promising undergraduate journalist said: ‘Thank you for assigning Heywood Broun. I’ve never read anything like it.’

Like what? Here’s Broun (pronounced broon) upon the death sentence of Sacco and Vanzetti, the shoemaker and the fish peddler executed by the state of Massachusetts in 1927 on dubious murder charges:

The men in Charlestown prison are shining spirits, and Vanzetti has spoken
with an eloquence not known elsewhere within our time. They are too bright,
we shield our eyes and kill them. We are the dead, and in us there is not feeling
nor imagination nor the terrible torment of lust for justice.

Broun wrote a column for The New York World, a more liberal newspaper than
anything in today’s illiberal media, but the World was not liberal enough for him.
After World editor Ralph Pulitzer spiked Broun’s column on Sacco and Vanzetti,
Broun published a commentary in The Nation calling the World cowardly, and was
soon without either column or job.

The World fired a journalist that the world has never replaced. No columnist
today compares in courage, compassion or eloquence. The closest we have may be
Nicholas Kristof, who has written on the prison at Guantánamo Bay – which, as an
obvious injustice perpetuated against likely innocents by a corrupt government
exploiting racism and fear, is the Sacco and Vanzetti of our time. But examine
Nicholas Kristof’s equivalent lines:

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an
Al-Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more
than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system. Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned
him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger
at the authorities holding him without trial. That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our
forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

Lovely that Kristof awoke to the cause, but his effort neither burns with passion
nor brims with eloquence; it fizzles with journalese – protest abuse, authorities
– and cliché – household name, sowing anger. I cannot imagine Broun having to
make a confession like this one by Kristof: ‘Most Americans, including myself,
originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the
inmates truly were the worst of the worst.’

Nor can I imagine Broun cloaking a confession by generalizing it to ‘most
Americans’. Kristof’s excuse: But all the kids were doing it! Broun chides all the kids
and alters the debate. He not only deplores the condemned men’s offenders, he
refocuses their defenders:

Already too much has been made of the personality of [Judge] Webster Thayer.
To sympathizers of Sacco & Vanzetti he has seemed a man with a cloven hoof.
But in no usual sense of the term is this man a villain. Although probably not
a great jurist, he is without doubt as capable and conscientious as the average
Massachusetts judge.

Notice the care taken by that middle sentence: in no usual sense of the term
is this man a villain. It absolves no one of villainy. Broun took the themes for his
Sacco and Vanzetti commentary – death, life, blindness, light – from an outburst
in the courtroom. When Judge Thayer read the sentence, a woman shouted: ‘It is
death condemning life!’ Regardless of theme Broun blends compassion and eloquence.
Often he sharpens them with wit and humor.

When a Brooklyn parson was crusading against a sex education pamphlet,
Broun chased him from the gates of Jerusalem to the walls of Elsinore with a
fusillade of punchlines:

Canon William Sheafe Chase is not the first pessimist to insist that nature
has tricked us all into a sorry mess and that sex is a fundamental blunder of
creation. In that case Hamlet was quite right in urging a nunnery upon Ophelia,
but the Canon is almost the first critic to insist that the melancholy Dane was
altogether normal.

When not tilting against the windmills of his time, Broun observes its quietest
poignancies. In ‘A Spring Sunday’ he sees a young couple kiss in a taxi, and their
relationship flashes before his eyes. In ‘Marry in Haste’ he punctures the notion
that young couples should go slow and think carefully before slipping on the ring:
‘Marriage must remain among the extra hazardous risks,’ he writes. ‘The best
chance is to take a short, sharp sprint before jumping.’ In ‘Marion the Cat’ Broun
admires the pluck of a feline companion who, lost for a week, finds her way back
to his Manhattan high-rise apartment … expecting.

She is a nuisance. My impending responsibility for new arrivals fills me with
terror, and yet if a cat selects this single apartment out of all New York as
just the proper influence for impressionable kittens I must admit that the
compliment is greatly received. A cat is nobody’s fool, and if Marion feels that
this place has prospects and that I am a promising young author you can’t
expect me to set her straight.

The promising young author published It Seems to Me at age forty-six. Five
years later he was dead of pneumonia. He had time to found the Newspaper Guild,
serve as its first president, and publish a few collections of commentary – now out
of print – that every columnist ought to read, because Broun would sooner lose
his column than lose his grip on justice.

Accused by Pulitzer of expressing ‘his personal opinion with the utmost
extravagance’, Broun replied: ‘I spoke only to the limit of my belief and passion.
This may be extravagance, but I see no wisdom in saving up indignation for a
rainy day. It was already raining. Besides, fighters who pull their punches lose
their fights.’

Broun coaches not just fighters, but writers, and we all ought to read him
whether we aspire to commentary or poetry or fiction. He sharpened his daggers
at the Algonquin with Dorothy Parker. Journalism couldn’t keep either of them
from writing literature.

I bought my coffee-stained copy of It Seems to Me for $8.50, ‘as is’. It previously
belonged to a Frank O’Connor, who had splashed his autograph across the inside
cover. It could have been any of many Frank O’Connors – probably not the Irish
playwright, who lived in Cork and Dublin; more likely the American actor, husband
of Ayn Rand, who lived, lke Broun, in New York. I imagine Frank reading It Seems to Me aloud to Ayn in bed at night, charging her thought battery with Broun’s compassion and eloquence before she drifts off to dream. But I imagine that scene as what might have been. How might Broun have elevated Rand’s dry libertarian prose? What if he had served as her coach instead of her coaster?

Poems for the Revolution

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:48:21 -0500

By Jeff McMahon

I discovered them in a bookshop on one of those pensive Sunday afternoons—maybe you know the type—when every hour droops under the weight of the work looming on Monday. The place smelled of that sweet must familiar to grandmother’s attics, mummies’ tombs, second-hand bookshops: places excused from time. I was studying all the colorful spines on the pine shelves, seeking escape from the death throes of Sunday, when I spied Ezra Pound in a slim paperback. I hadn’t read Pound and I knew I had to, in this life, and what easier entry than a Selected Poems? But nothing has been easy. As I took down the book I took up arms I would carry long after the revolution seemed lost.... Read this commentary at Contrary.

The Perils of Plenty

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:37:50 -0600

By Jeff McMahon

For a thousand years the rains rinsed the blood from the sod, the sea-winds swept the smoke from the ruins, and the Irish transformed hardship into poetry and song. But there’s a strange new stain too stubborn for the rains, a change in the air unmoved by the winds, and the poets scribbling all the long Irish night in cottages and pubs have little yet to show.... Read this commentary at Contrary

Vintage Prints

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:56:53 -0500

By Jeff McMahon

The shop window promised antique furniture and vintage prints, the sign said “open,” but the doorknob would not turn. The locked door should have clued me in — open shop, locked door — and someone was eyeballing me from the shadows inside. In a moment the lock clacked and buzzed, the door snapped open, I was admitted.

A clerk welcomed me, then shadowed me. I studied chairs and lamps and clocks and so did this clerk, as if shopping in her own shop, always flanking me, always following. She watched my hands while I lifted price tags and dropped them quickly. She looked at my shoes.

She also furtively watched a couple studying a stack of old posters. The man fingered the tanned paper of the topmost poster and flipped it over to view the next. The hovering clerk rose on her toes, her calf muscles tightened under her black stockings, her hands knotted into little fists at her sides. The man flipped another poster. The clerk stepped forward.

"Would you like to see these prints, sir?" she said, the "sir" snapping like a twig. She spread her hands on the prints so he could not turn them, not without turning her.

"Yes thank you," he said, and I sensed — I don't know why — that he had just moved to Chicago too.

The clerk flipped the prints now. She flipped them no more carefully than the man had, but she flipped them with an air about her. They should be flipped with the knees slightly bent, you see, with the elbows just so, with the chin cocked thus, with just such a posture.

"Oh I like that one," said the woman of the couple.

"Mmm," said the print-flipping clerk. "It's a Verdoux. 1928, very rare. Don't you love the colors?"

"Yes," said the man, "How much is that one?"

"Forty-two hundred," the clerk said. "I love his use of red and green." Her nonchalance did not fit the number uttered. Forty-two hundred, she had said, as if it were forty-two cents.

"May we see a few more?" the man said, a new formality in his voice.

It was just that sort of a shop — you could stay and pretend you had the money, you could try to shift the shame back onto the clerk, you could fantasize about pulling a roll of Franklins from your jeans and peeling them off — thirty-nine, forty, forty-one... Forty-two hundred did you say?... or you could just get the hell out.

The door clanked behind me with the metallic certainty of a jail-cell door, and I found again the freedom of the wind and the drizzle. It was a cold rain but a light rain, like specks of sand against the face. Most diners left their umbrellas closed as they hurried from taxis to trattorias.

"Wells Street," one black overcoat said to another as they flew past me. "You should have seen it in the 70s. Lots of head shops and hippies and—."

On the corner — North and Wells — a woman keened into the wind, her long gray hair whipping behind her, the rain forming tears on her broad face. She was smiling. People passed her at right angles just like the cars: rushing, crossing, pausing at lights, rushing, crossing, pausing at lights. She stood among them like a rock in a river, smiling, searching their faces for an opportunity. She found my face.

"Hello," I said to her.

"I use to live in this neighborhood," she said, in an accent from long-ago deep Mexico. "I live here all my life. I went to school right over there."

She pointed, I looked, I saw a comedy club.

"Where did you go to school?" I asked.

"It’s gone now. They tear it down. I was a little girl here. But then, you know, we have to move away. I would like to show my children, but I never have any children."

The light changed. I crossed Wells remembering that David Hernandez poem about Old Town — Armitage Street:

Waiting for the elevated train during a pale afternoon
I looked down on Armitage Street full of quaint old buildings
Upscale stores and fashionable mothers
Pushing white-walled baby carriages on well-heeled sidewalks;
And to think it seems just like yesterday on Armitage Street
That Alfeodor and Chacha played hide and seek with Quinto the cop
While Cosmo and Aidita made love in the gangway...

People move in this city the way people move through history — in tribes — sometimes mixing like Anglo with Saxon, but more often pushing each other onward and outward, like Anglo-Saxon and American Indian. I know this from Wells Street, from the woman on the corner, from David Hernandez. I know it from my own people — grandparents who came from Ireland and Germany, made a home on the South Side, made thin progress in factories and speakeasies, made good money and lost it in the Depression and never got it back. I know from the parents who moved me out of the city – away from the tribes warring under the stockyard stench – moved me out to the suburbs, and then, when that wasn't far enough, moved me out of state, out West to the next promised land.

And I know it from myself.

Thirty years in the West was a life of strange loves, strange loves that only now made sense — the love of cobblestone alleys, for instance, the love of smokestacks, the love of street clocks, of cantilevered bridges, of fire escapes, of train tracks, the love of steam rising from manhole covers and of stone flowers vining up skyscrapers. Trees that drop their leaves, air that drips with mist, life that clings to crevices. Mossy concrete and rusty steel. Antique furniture and vintage prints. The love of things old and urban and Midwestern. The love of things strange to the deserts and beaches where I lived.

Why have I always thought universities should be gothic, have gargoyles, wear ivy? Why did I never find a museum in the West that was big enough, pillared enough, marble enough for me? Why have I always envied those who live in crowded apartments above busy stores on dark and peopled streets? Better still if those streets are slick with rain and reflection, or hemmed with dirty snow. It's all here in Chicago. Was I ever gone, was I ever tethered? Is that what home means? For Chicago, it seems to me, the question is not whether you can go home again, it's whether you ever really left.

So I pause on an opposite corner of North and Wells, turn into the stinging drizzle, smile like I just got home from a long trip. I search for a friendly face I can tell — "I used to live in this city. I've lived here all my life."

Gibson’s Apology

Thu, 4 Aug 2005 17:04:28 -0500

By Jeff McMahon
There has been much dying lately, writers of novels, princes of nations, captains of industry, but to my eyes the world seems most crippled by the loss of one perpetually penniless, marginally homeless, progressively toothless, absolutely irreplaceable San Luis Obispo philosopher.
Cayucos Creek was his cup of hemlock.
Even in dying Chris Gibson poses a Socratic question, for how are we to regard the death of a man who tells us so often that he wishes to die? As tragedy, or as the end of tragedy?
“I want to die,” he wrote to me in an email in 2003.
It was an alarming declaration to those of us who loved him, but Chris would not be Chris without alarming declarations. He was the one man I’ve known who never shrank from hard truth. My challenge was to meet his claims with equal weight, with opposing truth, and not with some platitude,
“Don’t die yet,” I feebly replied. “I'm waiting for the sequel to ‘Wages of Insomnia’ (an essay Chris had sent to a magazine I edit). You're the next Emile Cioran, but you could do better. How's Piglet? How's Minnie? Who interests you these days in SLO Town?”
“Piggy’s fine,” Chris replied, “but I still want to die.”
Now that he has died, these are difficult words in which to find solace for mourning. But they are Chris Gibson’s words, as reliable as any ever spoken. If we give him a sugar-coated eulogy, he’ll walk out on his own funeral.
Chris Gibson’s gift and his bane was a fearsome intolerance for the substance of culture that can only be described by the technical term “bullshit.” Possessed with a brilliant mind, he would subvert it to no bullshit, and since bullshit lubricates our society, that simple refusal excluded him from homes, from jobs, from schools, from fraternity, from security, from recognition.
Faced with the compromises that make such luxuries accessible, Chris just said, like Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” And this made him, for reasons I hope to be able to explain, an invaluable citizen among us.
Like many Slopokes, I talked with Chris for hours in Barnes and Noble, on the sidewalks around the Downtown Centre, or at the disabled yellow pickup on Toro Street that he occupied with Piglet, his little black dog. We talked about philosophy, women, war, his violently interrupted childhood.
He launched into riveting stories of child molesters, drug addicts, guns, and fires, or frenetic lectures on Wittgenstein, Bach, and nuclear physics in which, at the end, Wittgenstein, Bach, and nuclear physics would magnificently converge.
At first I didn’t believe Chris Gibson could be true. He described outlandish facts about writers I had never heard of, and I’d go look them up. But everything he said checked out. Always.
After I moved to Chicago, I learned from his emails that he was an equally gifted writer. I had studied at the best schools and worked as a reporter for 15 years, but I could not put thoughts to ink with the eloquence and complexity of Chris Gibson, whose formal education fizzled out at Coast Union High School.
“Just finished reading ‘Ulysses’ for the sixth time,” he wrote to me in 2003, “and have been spending more time shuffling the deck (dog-eared) of Wittgenstein cards between my ears, and I like that ‘rifffffing’ sound. I find the whirring of select memories, the footprints of that genius’ walking, must be what the rocks along the greatest river of all hear as they inevitably descend the periodic table from mediocre stone to dull brown dust. It’s what you hear and let your head and heart feel that makes your dust settle better. All my unwashed best, C.”
Back at the Barnes and Noble, I would often find Chris in the clutch of hip young Slohemians, who would occasionally try to adopt the grizzled street philosopher as a banner of their coolness. As the talk drifted inevitably toward bullshit, Chris might unleash a torrent of obscenity, his blue eyes smiling, until his admirers fled in embarrassment. More often than not, he regained his solitude.
Sometimes he excused himself from bullshit more gently.
When Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin were a hot Hollywood item, the star-studded couple often stayed at Josh’s SLO ranch and visited the very Barnes and Noble that served as Chris Gibson’s study.
Like every human who met Chris’s dog, Minnie fell in love with Piglet. The starlet would rush toward Piglet, arms outstretched, bathing us all in an aura of celebrity. That is to say, bathing us all in an aura of bullshit.
While Minnie fawned over Piglet, and we fawned over Minnie, Chris just walked away.
I take pride in separating myself from perverse society, but next to Chris I am a tepid conformist. With his battle-weary wisdom, though, Chris let me know that was okay. When I landed a teaching position at the University of Chicago, he gave his blessing:
“You’re in better straits now and you may heed my advice to remain within the ‘fold.’”
I heeded his advice, but I envied his courage to evade any fold. I did not envy, however, the suffering it brought him – the insomnia, the loneliness, the anger, the physical pain in his back and his feet and his teeth.
I hoped that someday we might notice what his suffering offered us.
There are public figures who tell us more about ourselves than mayors and police chiefs and other smiling faces of officialdom. If Chris could not become a part of our society, he became its barometer. His existence in San Luis Obispo measured San Luis Obispo’s existence.
How much around us is real, we might ask ourselves in light of Chris’s life, and how much is bullshit? How much of our own lives belongs to us, and how much do we travel the ruts of some cheerfully decorated track that delivers us most quietly from the cradle to the grave?
Where the soles of Chris’s shoes met the street, there was no docility, there was no compromise, that spot was real.
“ I find myself tired more than usual,” he wrote in 2004, when he turned 50. “I notice more shadows and fewer rays of sun. I’m sadder and more angry, but so are lots of folks. Yet I have a fuller perception of what are now clearly the habits of the world as ‘I’ know them to be. I find myself almost saying out loud, ‘Ah, Bartleby… Ah, Humanity.’”
Chris carried whole books in his head, novels by Joyce, poems by Pessoa, scripts by Pekinpah, and unwritten books by Chris Gibson. “I am rigid with a desire to shoot forth like a green thing,” he once wrote. But his thoughts were so integral to himself that he could no more write them, he said, than he could turn his anatomy inside out.
So his philosophy was written on his life. And it was hard philosophy. It made him want to die, but it kept him alive:
“I find myself reading Wittgenstein and Frege again. I haven’t pursued that stuff, made it my ‘material’ in nine long years, so it’s enervating to have it reach into me with the marvelous fingers I always yearningly remembered in my better dreams. In fact, I was sitting on the toilet (this is only six days ago) and suddenly I could clearly see the sense of W’s famous Private Language Argument! This was the first time where I found myself saying, ‘It IS good to be alive.’”
I don’t know what happens next. Maybe the world discovers a cache of Chris Gibson’s writings. Maybe the world acknowledges his brilliance.
But the world invariably would get it wrong. Chris Gibson would become a celebrity, and the true Chris Gibson would walk away.
And there will be detractors working against his memory, all those who stand at the opposite end of bridges he burned to regain solitude.
What to do? I’ll just carry on, I think. I’ll live as Gibsonian a life as I can muster without ending up homeless or face down in a creek.
And I’ll wait for the next email he promised to send:
“I’ll fondle electrons again when I have flowered some particularly rare slap in the face aimed at this place here where I am and always will be like in the end of “The Shining” when the camera pulls back and you see Jacky Boy standing smiling in the photograph of the New Year’s bash except the time frame I’m trapped in will be Mardi Gras three years ago and the camera recedes and there’s me and my dog sitting on the planter wall in front of B.N. scowling and obviously unwashed.”
And that is how I will remember you, my brother, sitting on the planter wall in front of Barnes and Noble, scowling and obviously unwashed, with Piglet snorting at the end of her leash. I wish I were brave enough to live my life with half of your integrity. ∆

Sensuous Chicago: A Sense of Place

Tue, 5 Aug 2003 17:10:36 -0500

By Jeff McMahon
I have a tiny radio that magically describes events as I come upon them.
It started two summers ago. I had just returned to Chicago after some lost decades in the sunkissed West. I was walking on North Clark Street with the earphones in, sampling the local frequencies between blasts of static: salsa, sports talk, weather reports, when I chanced upon a resonant voice:
"It's a high fly ball to deep left field--"
The voice seemed oddly stereophonic until I realized it came not only from my earphones, but also from the open window of a nearby taxi, the open door of a market:
"It's back, way back--home run!"
Then the cheers that began in my earphones exploded from the city around me, bounded out of the ballpark and rolled like thunder across the brickscape.
This is no surprise, I realize, to anyone who's been to Wrigleyville during a Cubs game. The neighborhood occasionally bursts into applause. But when I first heard it, the little hairs went stiff on the back of my neck.
After lost decades in the sunkissed West, in one-taxi towns with neither baseball nor crowds, I had come upon an entirely different sense of place. This was the moment when, if I were Dorothy, I would inform Toto that we're no longer in Kansas.
To a Sox fan like me, a Cubs home run is just another form of white-collar crime, but the South Side had its own essential moment waiting for me and my radio.
It happened just days ago, not far from the park once known as Comiskey. I was bicycling through Bridgeport when I chanced upon a gaggle of cops and men-in-black raking dirt beside a grassy knoll at 33rd and Stewart.
As I arrived, my radio began to explain:
"Acting on a tip, FBI agents are digging up an embankment at the edge of a White Sox parking lot, looking for the remains of a mob-hit victim from the 1970s."
Veteran Chicagoans may be accustomed to having their radios narrate their urban adventures, but I have come to suspect that mine taps into some other frequency, a kind of city ESP.
Its signals have grown menacing since that harmless home run. I've found myself at Clark and Division while my radio recalled the riots of 1969, at 24th and Michigan the morning after the E2 nightclub stampede, on Wrightwood the day of the porch collapse.
Chicago has plenty of events that I'd rather not stumble upon. My radio loves to dwell on gang shootouts, dog attacks, car crashes, strong-arm robberies, molestations... so sometimes I turn my radio off.
With the radio off, this city is far from silent. Its engines growl and its jets whine above the measured clatter of the sleepless El, while the rusty wings of pigeons squeak as they flock toward secret lofts.
To this music moves a remarkable people. Rebounding from every tragedy described by their radios, they invest new hope in every fly ball.

Nelson Algren’s Secret Muse

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 17:20:33 -0600

It isn't hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home. — From Nelson Algren's "Chicago: City on the Make"

by Jeff McMahon
When a rising young novelist named Nelson Algren turned his pen to his own city in 1951, he seemed to plunge his fist into Chicago's chest and show the big-shouldered burg its own bloody beating heart. In "Chicago: City on the Make," he crosses the boulevard but lingers in the alley, notices the shining tower but dwells on the seething slum, nods to the self-made billionaire but nestles all the long icy night with the gin-soaked stewbum.
He paints a picture of two Chicagos, and Chicagoans have seen double ever since.
"Hustlertown, USA," he calls it, and Algren's take on the city echoes back today from Broadway musicals and PBS documentaries, gets nominated every year for One Book, One Chicago, and still turns up, half a century later, on the local bestsellers list (#9 on Amazon's ranking of Chicago favorites).
Studs Terkel called it "the best book about Chicago." Mike Royko praised its author for "capturing" Chicago. Scholars from Hyde Park to Evanston have cheered its embrace of Chicago's unique character.
"We read Algren today," says Bill Savage of Northwestern University, "because no one captured the spirit of Chicago better than he did in `Chicago: City on the Make.'"
So Chicagoans may be surprised to learn that the best book about Chicago has been keeping a secret for half a century: Algren adapted some of his most important descriptions of Chicago from a New Yorker's description of New York.

I found Nelson Algren's secret muse on a reel of faded microfilm shelved in the catacombs of the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library. I had a hunch Algren consorted with poets. No one writes such poetic prose without books of poetry lying spines-down on his desk, without reading poets while writing, without hearing poets in his head.
Why bother hunting down those poets? To figure out how a guy writes a book that defines a city for fifty years. But how could I determine which poets sat whispering on Algren's desk? By bird-dogging every word he wrote--novels, stories, articles, letters--for every quote, every mention, every subliminal echo.
The microfilm spins backward through 1947, sticking now and then on a fragment of history-Yeager Breaks Sound Barrier... India Celebrates Independence from Britain... Appling Caps Sox Rally-and stops on July 20, 1947.
Buried at the bottom of the second page of the Chicago Sun Book Week squats an article, just a little thing, one-fifth the size of the article you're reading now: "Two Poems Show How Chicago Has Changed."
By Nelson Algren.
The article is a perfect little microcosm of "City on the Make." In 500 words Algren lays out the argument of the 13,000-word book he would undertake three years later. He opens with two lines from Carl Sandburg's tribute to the City of Big Shoulders:
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle.
Then Algren declares Sandburg's "Chicago" obsolete: "Chicago's laughter has grown metallic and its smile has deteriorated into a complacent smirk."
No, Algren argues, Chicago's no laughing fighter anymore. Instead, Chicago looks more like this:
"The young return--but cold, with skin-tight mask,/Seeing the city honors the most false:/
Where the painter hangs for sale beside his work;/The critic, the peddler, and the smiling acrobat;/Toady and plagiarist for the price of one;/And a masked surgeon offering jars of happiness."
When I first see these strange lines, I hear already the echoes from "City on the Make": the artist hanging for sale beside his work, the city that honors the most false. But who wrote these lines? Algren keeps the name to himself, calling the poet only, "another contributor to Poetry."
The University of Chicago's Regenstein Library is a massive concrete tomb: cold, imposing, as gray and grave as December sky. But the Special Collections Research Center is its pharaoh's chamber, with mahogany trim, maroon carpet, and glass-walled rooms that hold, among other treasures, the archives of Poetry magazine.
The librarians here stand sentinel to stuff that makes book lovers quiver--like Ezra Pound's note to Harriet Monroe recommending an unpublished poet named T.S. Eliot. What's more, these librarians know everything. If anyone can help me find the author of those lines...
But the look on the reference librarian's face shoots me down. He doesn't even have to say it: There is no electronic archive for Poetry. Just an old-fashioned index, on paper, organized by poet's name, title, or first line. Armed with an anonymous middle stanza, I have only one option: to thumb through 35 years of Poetry magazine, page by page.
Instead I return to the stacks, the intellectual morgue, and sitting on the concrete floor under the faintly buzzing fluorescents I flip through the dog-eared volumes of Algren on the sheet-metal shelf. It's a hard, cold, lonely place, and I start speaking out loud to Chicago's literary patron saint.
"Oh Nelson, who were you reading?"
Algren's practically kin, after all. He's from the same South Side neighborhood where I was born. Walked the same Englewood streets as my folks. And like any Sox fan, he walked those streets with a sense of injustice trailing him like a hungry dog, and it inspired a cantankerous music in him, and he poured it out on paper.
So I don't care who overhears.
"Come on, Nelson," I say to the tomes, "gimme somethin'."
He does. I find it in "The Neon Wilderness," a collection of short stories Algren published earlier in 1947. He quotes a different stanza, but the style is unmistakable, and the mystery poet now has a name: David Wolff.
I return to the Poetry index equipped with the name, and I find the poem itself leading off the January, 1940 issue--"The City"--162 vivid apocalyptic lines that begin as the sleeping narrator awakens to an acute awareness of the city around him:
"Children of the cold sun and the broken horizon,/ 0 secret faces, multitudes, eyes of inscrutable grief,/ great breath of millions, in unknown crowds or alone,/ rooms of dreamers above the cement abyss, --and I,/who all night restive in the unsleeping rain,/ awoke and saw the windows covered with tears."
It goes on:
"I heard, like the noise of melting rivers, the concourse of the living/ all hours mingled, violent, murmuring, or bright:/the cheers; the radio; the metal shriek of the accident;/ the whisper of hired affection, hit of the week,/applause; gunfire on the screen; and at night the tragic houses/ issuing like voluble flame the outcries of the city...."
The narrator wanders outside, with senses that penetrate walls, and witnesses the birth of the discolored twins who double for you and me, the city's children. He trails them into life, registering the city's impact upon them.
The twins discover the "double wilderness" of desire and pursue it eagerly until the city punishes them. They turn inward then and develop two faces--an inner open face and an outer false face.
I have to stop reading this poem, at this moment, as comparisons begin to echo against my temples.
Algren owes more to this poet than a few good lines. He owes him his controlling metaphor. He owes him the two Chicagos, the two-faced city, the city on the make. In "Chicago: City on the Make," Algren famously declares that Chicago "forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares. One for the open-eyed children of the thousand-windowed office buildings. And one for the shuttered hours." He goes on like that for fifty lines.
Algren's admirers always praise his grasp of Chicago's duality. The University of Chicago Press called it "the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city's breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence." That's what makes "City on the Make" the best book about Chicago.
And here it is, Chicago's "essential dilemma," in a poem about New York.
Writing from Wolff's city of two-faced twins, Algren filled his Chicago with twos. Algren's Chicago is not just two-faced, it's a "two-timing bridegroom." And Lake Michigan? "A secondhand sea." While Wolff's twins explore the "double wilderness" of desire, the streets of Algren's Chicago lead to the "double-walled dead-end" of tavern and church.
I turn back to "The City," and there's more:
Wearing the skin-tight mask of their outer faces, the twins discover that "the city honors most the most false." The city thrives on false commerce--lies, flattery, alluring neon and porcelain smiles, empty promises and miracle products. Falseness invades the home as well, where families dine together in daily hatred.
An "immense, proud fraudulence," this poet's city is the original city on the make.
But who is this poet?
Poetry's editors awarded David Wolff the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize in 1940. I've heard of most Monroe winners--Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Robert Lowell--but never David Wolff.
The Regenstein's grumpy and capricious electronic catalog feels charitable today:
"Wolff, David," it says, "See also Maddow, Ben."

Born in New Jersey in 1909--the same year Nelson Algren was born in Detroit--Ben Maddow worked for the city of New York as a social-welfare investigator during the Depression. By day he visited the grim homes of New York's poorest; by night he wrote poetry.
"He felt when he was writing his poetry, and then he got into film, that he shouldn't use his real name because he was working for the city," says his widow, Freda Flier Maddow, a former Martha Graham dancer who lives in Los Angeles.
Maddow mistranslated his last name, which comes from a Russian word for "bear," and conjured up the pseudonym David Wolff. Maddow published three poems in Poetry as David Wolff, but Wolff vanished after World War II when Maddow found success using own name as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
Maddow wrote the film adaptation of William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust," and he co-authored "The Asphalt Jungle" with John Huston, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
Meanwhile, "The City" slept in the yellowing pages of Poetry's archives, living largely through writers who admired it, including Allen Ginsberg, who praised "its ongoing inspired or unobstructed breath," and Nelson Algren, who transformed its double vision of urbanity into the prevailing cultural identity of the city of Chicago.
Algren's Chicago everywhere reflects Maddow's "immense, proud fraudulence," but Maddow himself may never have known of his own influence in Chicago.
"I don't think Ben knew about that because he never mentioned it to me," Freda Maddow says. "And we were married then. Maybe he never knew about it."
Algren and Maddow met at least once, in 1955, when Algren came to Hollywood to work on Otto Preminger's film adaptation of his novel, "The Man with the Golden Arm."
"I know we went to hear jazz with Nelson Algren, and he was very nice and Ben liked him, but I can't think of how they met."
Freda believes Maddow would not have minded Algren's tacit but devoted sampling. Something similar happened once before, after Maddow told Ray Bradbury a funny story at a party.
"Later Ray Bradbury wrote the story," Freda says, "and he didn't say Ben told it to him. Well, Ben didn't really care because he said he wasn't going to write it himself."
Northwestern's Bill Savage edited the latest edition of "City on the Make." He calls the discovery of Maddow's influence "extraordinarily valuable," but he appreciates Algren no less because of it.
"I don't think that Algren's use of Maddow's ideas and imagery is a problem. There are different standards for what constitutes plagiarism in creative work vs. scholarly or historical or journalistic writing. It's plagiarism if there's an attempt to deceive. In 'The Neon Wilderness,' Algren directly quotes from Maddow's poem as an epigraph, and such a nod, to me, constitutes admission not of plagiarism, but of influence."
Algren does name Wolff in "The Neon Wilderness," where the poet has little influence, but why conceal his identity in the Chicago Sun Book Week, where Algren first applies his poem to Chicago? And why conceal him in "City on the Make," where Algren builds a literary Chicago upon Maddow's model?
Algren, who died in 1981, could not be reached for comment. But Savage stole a line himself to sum the matter up:
"Another line I've heard attributed to several writers: Mediocrity plagiarizes, genius steals.
"What distinguishes Algren's work about Chicago is the way that he takes images--which clearly he got from Maddow's work--and transforms them by linking them with specifics from Chicago's history and its particular urban spaces."
Is that what it means to capture Chicago?
Even if we forgive Algren for selling us an occasional piece of Manhattan as locally grown fare, we've got to wonder about the town we've been seeing through his eyes for fifty-two years. If another town once wore Chicago's two faces, if Algren picked up Chicago's "essential dilemma" in a Greenwich Village lounge, doesn't Chicago lose a little piece of itself?
"Ben was really writing about New York in the poem `The City,'" Freda Maddow says. "I don't think he was writing about Chicago, but it was about the city, you know. It could be any city."

Commentaries from the 1990s

Fri, 31 Dec 1999 18:27:40 -0600

“RIPPLES ON OUR LIVES”
New Times, 1999
“We should build a memorial to our disappeared women.”
• Winner of the 2000 Golden Quill, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors

“A STALKER AMONG US”
New Times, 1998
“Who among us has crossed paths with the attacker?”
• Winner of the 1999 Golden Quill, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, and first place, column writing, from the California Newspaper Publishers Association

“SAN SIMEON’S SHADOW”
New Times, 1998
“How does a dead gull bob in a still lagoon?”
• Winner of first place, column writing, California Newspaper Publishers Association, and a Golden Dozen award, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors

“THE IMPOSSIBLE VALENTINE”
New Times, 1997
“How do lovers know their love is real?”
• A Tribute to New York World Columnist Heywood Broun

“THY FATHER’S SPIRIT”
New Times, 1997
“Death is a changing, not an ending.”
• Winner of first place, column writing, from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and a Golden Dozen award from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors

“FREEDOM ON FIRE”
New Times, 1995
“Of course they burned it down.”
• Winner of first place, column writing, from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

“SLUGGARDS OF THE WORLD UNITE”
New Times, 1995
“The cold gray dawn is no time for mirth and laughter.”
• Winner of first place, column writing, from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

“AMERICAN APARTHEID”
New Times, 1994
“We should have free elections in America first.”
• Winner of a Democracy Award from the National Newspaper Association, and second place awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

Awards

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• Golden Quill Award for best commentary in an English-language weekly newspaper, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 2000

• Golden Quill Award for best commentary in an English-language weekly newspaper, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 1999

• First Place, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Competition, 1996

• First Place, column writing, California Newspaper Publisher’s Association, 1999

• First Place, environmental reporting, National Newspaper Association, 1995

• First Place, environmental reporting, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1994

• First Place, spot news reporting, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1995

• First Place, business and economic reporting, National Newspaper Association, 1990

• First Place, food writing, Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, 1998.

• First Place, coverage of health-related issues, National Newspaper Association, 1998

• Second Place, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Competition, 1995

• Second Place, column writing, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1995

• Second Place, column writing, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1994

• Second Place, Democracy Award, National Newspaper Association, 1995

• Second Place, special issue, California Newspaper Publisher’s Association, 1999

• Second Place, environmental reporting, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1999

• Second Place, coverage of energy, National Newspaper Association, 1997

• Second Place, agricultural reporting, Brock Center for Agricultural Communications, 1995

• Third Place, environmental reporting, National Newspaper Association, 1998

• Golden Dozen award, editorial writing, Int’l Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 1999

• Golden Dozen award, editorial writing, Int’l Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 1998

• Bill of Rights Award for coverage of civil liberties, American Civil Liberties Union of San Luis Obispo County, 1997

• Honorable Mentions, National Newspaper Association: business reporting, 1998; environmental reporting, freedom of information, and writing, 1996; column writing, 1995

• Mark Finley Gold Pen Award for Newswriting, University of Arizona Journalism Department, 1985

• Catherine Ham Memorial Award for Outstanding Critical Thesis, University of Chicago, 2002