LOWLIFE TANGO: Damon Runyon and Nelson Algren

What am I doing with the pit of the year? Guys and Dolls set up several wet/windy/cold afternoons; a present from Gertie to my parents in 1958, a Broadway romp like Dickens on rollerskates; I missed it already when I finished it, but thought about talky books in general, and lives a long way from mine, in particular, like a writer whose name I couldn't remember at first, but, having decided to go along the bookshelf starting with A, I soon found: Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side.

To read Nelson Algren you have to drop your pitch and raise your game. Instead of Broadway, you have box car, flophouse, areaways, a low tight focus, painful syncopation of day to day progress, or not. Instead of Spanish John and Nicely Nicely Jones, you have Kitty Twist and Dove Linkhorn and Big Stingaree, Out Front and Natural Bug. They mill around Perdido Street in New Orleans, the summer of 1931, country boys and daddy-o's, waifs and strays and halfies, old Europe and self-made panders, looking for the next quarter, tenspot, C-note, querying everything.

'Give me animals, at least they know what they're doing. Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

Do you know about elephants, how they come on?' she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

If you'd stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you're saying,' the wool-tie sport suggested.

Well', the girl explained, 'I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk 'n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn't be no elephants.

'So what?'

'Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they're doing.'

Dove Linkhorn is our guide, barefoot, letterless — he has only reached B by the time he reaches New Orleans. He has a moment with Kitty Twist, 17 year-old runaway, in a playground.

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

'Just let me know when you've had enough, Red. I got all day.'

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn't had nearly enough.

'Catch me when I come down!' he warned her from the top of a chute.

And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck.

After more than two hundred pages Dove Linkhorn is studying M and N, with the help of Hallie Breedlove, ex- of Legless Schmidt. Nelson Algren goes the distance; his language is what we read. Sounds obvious, but but never more so than here. By the time Dove Linkhorn, or Red, or Tex, is reading, and listening, we have learned his language, and can read as he does.

Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody's pappy got entirely drownded. Full fathom five Thy father lies.

So when, fully literate, he is smashed by halfy Legless Schmidt, we are aghast.

'I like to get up close to accidents' Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove's broken mouth, that was trying to speak through swallowing blood.

Blind, Dove Lindhorn goes back to his village in Texas. 

This afternoon all my roof windows are closed by snow. 

 

Nelson Algren, Tove Jansson, Ivor Cutler

Walk on the wild side by Nelson Algren was the bass line of this week's reading, with, the last day or two, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson on top.

I wouldn't have chosen to insert the funny, sensitive knowing child of The Summer Book into Nelson Algren's world of 1930s depressed, drifting America, but, after a day of biblical rain and in advance of talking to a bunch of transition year students who are coming tomorrow to scrutinise our land and its habitats, I need to enter the outdoor world.

When I first started Walk on the wild side the talk-heavy language beguiled but left me standing still. But, as Dove Linkhorn moves from East Texas to New Orleans, and tries, as he says, to make an honest living in a crooked sort of way, he learns to pimp and he learns to read and the language of the book changes. Less street talk. No one has the wearies any more. Shakespeare and Ecclesiastes are there like diary entries, ceremonial but natural. Nelson Algren on his own crusade. Dove Linkhorn comes clean.

The island of The Summer Book, way out in the Gulf of Finland, is in another key altogether. Taking possession of an island by looking at it, suffering and delighting in it, knowing it by living in it, idly, playing it, naming it, forgetting, reinventing by going further in and allowing the mind to wander, considerate, in a common sense way, of the needs of God and the place of ants in this life or the next.

Like the Ivor Cutler tale of the boy who planted himself in the garden till roots grew out of his feet, and then he could not be transplanted.

It is a story of planting or drifting.
Hoe your beans or walk on the wild side.
Or both.