Nelson Algren’s novel A Walk on the Wild Side (first published 1956) is one of those weird ones that you have a vague feeling of having read before. I get threads and hints to Steinbeck and Kerouac and the likes of those two gentlemen. It’s a case of having read the followers before reading the trailblazers. That happens sometimes and you just have to try and remind yourself that there is a linear flow to literature as well as a non-linear one.
The story is set in New Orleans, mostly on Perdido street in the French Quarter with the pimps and the working girls and the petty criminals – who are more petty than usual, considering that this is during the 1930s and the Depression is in full swing.
The protagonist is Dove Linkhorn, a young man with no formal education and a great deal of that naïve cruelty you expect from children. He isn’t being intentionally malicious, he just falls into bad company and tries to save his own hide and sometimes even when his intentions are good, things still go pear-shaped through no fault of his own. He’s a kind of annoying character to follow, though, for those reasons and because he simply doesn’t have that cause-and-effect thinking that you need to act like an adult.
The women in this story suffer a bit from the whore-and-Madonna complex, sometimes quite literally, but there is enough insight to their strengths along with their weaknesses for it to be bearable, even if it is a dated way of viewing the world. Some of the working girls, like Hallie, are actually portrayed as real complex characters with motive and drives and more to them than just the obvious.
Algren himself claims the book “asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why me 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 and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind”. Obviously, for the author there is an Odyssean quality to this story, what with the journey and the trials and the self-discovery.
I read it and see the many people Dove steps on to get where he’s going, not that he doesn’t get his come-uppance and all that, but still. He cheats, steals, lies, betrays, fornicates and well – just in general runs the gambit on the seven deadly. In the end he comes to a turning point and returns back home hoping for a shot at the love of a good woman. A woman, mind you, that he left behind in a less than dignified way.
It’s a good read. It has all the beautiful losers and interesting freaks and weird occurrences you could possibly want and the language alone is worth the time. The morals feel a little murky, but then again, murky can be good. I like murky.
Also you get the following little gem of advice from a character named Cross-Country Kline:
“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. Never let anybody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never cop another man’s plea”. (A Walk on the Wild Side)
It just goes to show that some advice is still good, no matter the passage of time.
Also, there is a connection to the Lou Read song. He was approached about a project to turn the book into a musical and wound up using the title for his “Walk on the Wild Side” describing the lives of transsexuals and transvestites at The Factory. I’m sure Algren would approve.
Mule
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – Violence to the cold extreme
January 3, 2010
Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian first published in 1985 is probably one of the most violent books I’ve ever read – and that’s saying something. Violence is sort of the theme here, and not in any way that makes you feel easy about the subject. This is not a moral parable that will give you easy outs by defining the areas of right and wrong through the use of dialectic morality. This is more the kind of tale that lays bare the most sordid aspects of human nature without giving you any handles and you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it.
See, now, the warlike nature of man – that is what we’re dealing with here and no matter how much we as a species propound that we want peace, we just never seem to get there, do we? That’s what this is all about.
It’s set along the borderland between the US and Mexico in 1849-1850 and we’re riding with the Glanton gang who are taking scalps and massacring Indians. This is not Manifest Destiny in any pretty Laura Ingalls kind of way. This is dirty and bloody and unnecessarily cruel in every single manner you can imagine. What makes it worse is the cool and detached way the author goes about his business.
The main protagonist is The Kid, a young man who leaves his home in Tennessee and gets signed up by Captain White to ride with the gang. He takes the bloodiness of the business in stride as far as we as readers can tell, and only ever runs contrary to expectations when his own physical safety is in question.
Set against all this is the Judge, a huge towering giant of a man with intellectual capital and a strain of mysticism and otherworldliness about him, not only in appearance, but in reasoning as well.
Here’s the logic of the thing, given the form of dialogue between The Judge and a man called Brown.
“What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled.” (Blood Meridian, p. 249)
This novel has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Actually, it probably has a lot in common with it. The Judge is like Kurtz, The Kid like Marlowe. And there is much, much more to it than that.
The language of it is beautiful and uses so many archaisms and rare words that you find yourself reading slowly to catch it all.
It also has the cool inexorable quality that I recognize from McCarthy’s The Road. It never lets up, not even for a second. Nothing comes to any good and even the end leaves you with a sickening reeling feeling in your stomach, being open enough that you can use your own imagination on the horror of it.
It gives violence in relentless and impartial detail and shows us everything we don’t want to see. It never judges, or offers a moral high ground. It also describes the landscape in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s just fascinating and deeply unsettling, every aspect of it – and like all the best books it makes you work hard for any understanding.
Mule
