Back of the Boulevards

At first glance one might assume that Nelson Algren has approached Chicago as E B White looked at New York a couple of years ago. Indeed, the superficial comparisons are obvious as soon as White's. "This is New York" and the Algren work are placed side by side.

Both are short less than 100 pages--and the same size and shape. Further, both works are in essay form and appeared in magazines prior to publication as volumes. But they are as different as the two cities they deal with. Where White was soft, Algren is hard; where the former wrote quietly, lightly, and as a New Yorker, Algren speaks loudly and unhappily, and beneath his smooth flow of prose there is violent opinion.

Readers may remember the author's widely read "Man With the Golden Arm." It depicted carefully and correctly the Chicago of bums, rummies, winoes, the world of the Near North Side. Algren has this Chicago heavily on his mind in his latest work: the city of Hinky Dink Kenna, the Capone gang, and the Black Sox. His poetic description of the town and his reactions to it hangs largely about the wrong side of Michigan Boulevard.

It is little wonder that he finds it a town of "hustlers," "still an outlaw's capital." He has tied his own feelings about the city, a number of interesting anecdotes, and his violent emotional approach into a very readable, even fascinating essay with the string of brilliant and sharp description. He has paced his essay at high speed, with an intense, perceptible rhythm some may find too metallic.

Someone who knows nothing at all about Chicago will still find that Algren's ability to produce visual image in every paragraph makes this an interesting work. At the same time that reader will find parts of the book completely unintelligible; he will not know who Algren is talking about, what incidents are involved, or even when it all took place. For Algren has criss-crossed his pages with symbols, quick references and innuendo about things only a resident of Chicago and reader of its newspapers could really appreciate.

Almost anyone can enjoy fully the section on the Black Box scandal but very few will understand the relevance of Mayor Ed Kelley's quoted statement, "I'll do any damned thing you boys want me to do."

Algren is depressed at what he sees in his Chicago: "Out of the Twisted Twenties flowered the promise of Chicago as a homeland and heartland of an American renaissance...Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara...The giants cannot come again." And he jams a good deal of depression into this short work.

But one may disagree with the author's opinion of Chicago and still enjoy the hour or so required to read this essay