A Walk on the Wild Side, by Nelson Algren
A Walk on the Wild Side, by Nelson Algren
Copyright 1956; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Hey, who doesn’t enjoy a novel about whores and pimps, convicts and con-men, druggies and alkies, hucksters and ne’re-do-wells, bums and white-trash? And who doesn’t enjoy a novel set in the gritty French Quarter of a Depression-era New Orleans?
I did. And I admit that those first two sentences of this review badly over-simplify the book. Algren himself best summarizes:
Quote:
The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.
The story follows Dove Linkhorn from his home in east Texas to New Orleans and then to…nah, on second thought I won’t give up the plot. But I will say that Dove is the kind of a guy who never got an even break in his life. He’s of Scotch-Irish descent and in the old country his people had been conned out of their crops by “unremembered kings,” and then upon finding their way to America, were “clamped fast into bondage of cropping on shares.” Dove is illiterate largely because his father, Fitz Linkhorn, “had kept him out of school by way of protesting the hiring of a Catholic principal.” Fitz is described as a man, “so contrary, if you throwed him in the river, he’d float upstream.”
Anyway that’s the Linkhorns, po’-white-trash in the 1930s in east Texas, and that’s where Algren left them in A Walk on the Wild Side. So here’s something kind of cool: Hunter S. Thompson picks up the story of the Linkhorns in his book, Hell’s Angels, and although it’s just a vignette he continues their western drift: “Freebooters, armed and drunk – a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight…” Of course in HST’s book, Linkhorns wind up as outlaw bikers in Oakland in the 1960s. I read Hell’s Angels first and that’s what turned me on to A Walk on the Wild Side.
Enough of that, this book speaks for itself so I’ll let it. Here’s Algren on the depression:
Quote:
In the cheery old summer of ’31 New Orleans offered almost unlimited opportunities to ambitious young men of neat appearance willing to begin at the bottom and work their way up the Latter of Success rung by rung. Those with better sense began at the top and worked their way down, that route being faster.
…
All that mahogany hadn’t helped anybody but brokers after all. Then the brokers began jumping off rooftops with no greater consideration for those passing below than they’d had when their luck was running. Emperors of industry snatched all the loose cash on which they could lay hand and made one fast last run. Lawyers sued one another just to keep in practice.
Here’s some of the best convict advice ever given between two book covers:
Quote:
But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never you cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ‘em all and I know. They don’t work.
Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.
And since I let the jailbirds speak, here’s the working girls:
Quote:
“Daddy, come in, we’ll have great fun” – but it wasn’t great fun for a woman accustomed to Northern comforts to wake up on Perdido Street with the kerosene lamp burned out in the night, feeling drained and doomed in a stall whose floor looked as if customers might start coming up through the planks. The bedbugs that clung in grape-like clusters to the springs, the cracked enamel basin, the old-fashioned bureau, the greasy portiere that served as a door; the drawling in the hallway and the mosquitoes wanting out, all agreed – “Baby, you’ve been had. Baby, you’ve been had.”
Finally, here’s Dove (or rather Algren on Dove):
Quote:
Dove Linkhorn could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection. But sometimes in the depths of a troubled sleep he had a fleeting feeling that a woman with red-gold hair had just touched his hand and fled beyond a curtained door.
It’s a good book.
