Nelson Algren's New Orleans

An itinerant preacher, Fitz raises two sons, Byron and Dove; Dove is a pure, moral idiot, as devoid of meanness as he is of any sense of right or wrong. He "could not remember a time, a place, nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection." The Linkhorns live in Arroyo, a town modeled after Rio Hondo, their shanty made of "upended green-pine clapboard so dried and shrunk it left chinks for rain and wind, made a kind of slum Alamo right in the middle of Mexican-town  Davey Crockett was gone for good." They were, says Algren, "backwoodsmen with no backwoods." With nothing to hold him to his desolate border home, Dove hits the rails, and after misadventures with a traveling carnie and a teenage Texas hooker named Kitty Twist (whom he will meet again), Dove arrives in Depression New Orleans:

"The town that always seems to be rocking. Rocked by its rivers, then by its trains, between boat bell and train bell go its see-saw hours. The town of the poor-boy sandwich and chicory coffee, where garlic hangs on strings and truckers sleep in their trucks, where mailmen wore pitch helmets and the people burned red candles all night in long old-fashioned lamps."

The New Orleans Dove finds is centered on Perdido Street in the French Quarter of the 1930s, a couple of decades before the tourists began to descend en masse. Walker Percy's Binx Bolling, in "The Moviegoer," who lived in the middle-class suburb Gentilly, and who loathed the old-world atmosphere of the Quarter, could have lived in the same city at the same time for decades without encountering anyone from Dove's world. Because so much of lost New Orleans always seemed suspended in the Depression, some of it still could be seen by college students in the 1970s and 1980s who were in town for, say, a Rolling Stones concert and slept in the Quarter's huge, gloomy old rooming houses with "long green walls and those long spook-halls that are shadowed by fixtures of another day. That damp dull green the very hue of distrust, where every bed you rent makes you accessory to somebody else's shady past." Shady, shades, shadows; New Orleans appeared to the outsider to be a city composed of shadows. What Nabokov said of Andre Biely's St. Petersburg might also be said of Algren's New Orleans: The writer examined "the biology of the shadow."

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."

Dove, of course, takes no one's advice, blithely wading through a gumbo of misfits and malcontents, stumbling into a career as a stud in a peep show. Innocence, however, can only protect Dove for so long. Requital arrives in the form of a monster, Legless Schmidt, a former circus strongman from Alabama "with an IBM brain in the body of a honeyfed bear." Schmidt earned his nickname by falling asleep on a railroad track; his monstrous arms propel his massive torso around on a dolly. Dove steals a hooker Legless is in love with; Schmidt takes his revenge by beating Dove bloody, leaving him blind. And then, in a twist that would have even Brecht's jaw dropping, the barflies who goaded Legless into his frenzy dump his dolly down a hill, where he crashes to his death. His wings singed, Dove, sightless but optimistic and oblivious as ever, returns to Texas from the inferno purified, and finds his life's calling as a preacher, a benevolent version of his father.

"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.")

I doubt if any of Algren's books will ever be required reading for college English, especially his best novel, despite a ringing and heartfelt endorsement from Ernest Hemingway. The stuffed-shirt literary humanist establishment point of view was expressed in 1956 in the New York Times by Alfred Kazin, who was offended by "the plainly contrived quality of this pretended feeling about characters who Mr. Algren writes about not because they are 'lost,' but because they are freaks" (Kazin had not a notion that such people passed for average in Algren's New Orleans). And in the New Yorker Norman Podhoretz haughtily dismissed the book with "Mr. Algren's purpose is not well served by laughs out of 'Tobacco Road'." In the introduction to the paperback reissue, Russell Banks, with a stronger stomach for cayenne peppers than Kazin and Podhoretz, called "A Walk on the Wild Side" "An American classic  to be read alongside 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'The Red Badge of Courage,' and 'Native Son'" -- that last comparison being right on target. Banks sees Algren as "Driven by a permanent democrat's righteous wrath and injustice, informed by unsentimental respect and unabashed affection for the powerless, in language colored throughout by the pain of some unnamed, deeply personal wound whose nature we can only intuit." Time has brought us no closer to naming that pain or easing the sense of dread it gave birth to.

Maybe it's for the best that "A Walk on the Wild Side" will never be respectable, that it seems as horrific (and unfilmable) as it did half a century ago. And perhaps because of that it continues to reverberate in pop culture while most respectable books of its time are now unread. In 1976, the Tubes dedicated the song "Pimp" off the album "Young and Rich" to Algren, and a couple of years ago the Minnesota band Dillinger Four recorded "Doublewhiskeycokenoice," in which "Nelson Algren came to me and said; celebrate the ugly things cause the beat up side of what they call pride could be the measure of these days." And then, of course, there's Lou Reed, who discussed the Algren influence in the 2001 documentary "Classic Albums: Lou Reed: Transformer." In 1972, Reed had been hired to write the music for a stage production of Algren's novel -- about as improbable a project as Off-Off-Off Broadway could have envisioned -- and finally quit, but not before appropriating Algren's title and his sensibility and transferring them to his own New York neighborhood bohos.

Every Dove, Lou Reed seems to be saying, will find his wild side.

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