MORRIS DICKSTEIN
71
Burnett and their ubiquitous Hollywood progeny. Stylistically, they all
came out of Hemingway's sleeve.
Malcolm Cowley boiled proletarian fiction down to a simple for–
mula by confining himself to a handful of works that fit that pattern. If
most o(the strike novels seem thin and ideological today, indeed barely
readable, there remains a grittier, tougher kind of 'proletarian' novel
than Cowley's; Fiction dealing with what Edward Dahlberg called the
"bottom dogs" of society, the
Ironweed-style
characters at the very base
of the social ladder. Reading Dahlberg's novel
Bottom Dogs
not long
before his death, D. H. Lawrence took note of the "mass of failure" that
underlay America's "huge success." He was horrified and fascinated by
what he took to be the latest wave of American primitivism, a brutal re–
duction of the human animal to "a willed minimum." "The next step,"
he prophesied, "is legal insanity, or just crime." Besides Dahlberg, this
raw, grim vein of writing includes books like Edward Anderson's
Hungry
Men
and Tom Kromer's Kafkaesque
Waiting For Nothing,
both repub–
lished and well received in the mid-1980s.
Nelson Algren was one of the best of these writers; Walter Rideout
described his first novel,
Somebody in Boots,
as "fascinatingly hideous."
It
foreshadowed the work of later hardboiled pulp writers like Jim
Thompson. But Algren was anything but to the manner born. Partly
Jewish, partly Scandinavian in origin, his real name was Nelson Algren
Abraham and he had been to both college and journalism school. For
him, as for many others, becoming a writer meant taking to the road to
see how the other half lived: riding boxcars, cadging meals, stopping in
hobo jungles and Salvation Army soup kitchens, and learning which
towns threw drifters in jail for vagrancy. Men and even children went on
the road simply because there were no jobs, or because their families
were disintegrating around them.
In later interviews Algren estimated that there were a million people
out on the road in the early thirties. Falling into their world made him
a writer. "The experience on the road gave me something to write
about," he told H . E . F. Donohue. "You do see what it's like, what a
man in shock who is dying looks like. He knows he's going to die, and
he's shocked by the idea that he's dying. Or you're waiting for a boxcar
and it seems to be going a little too fast and some kid makes a try for it
and then you get the smell of blood and you go over and you see it
sliced off his arm... . And all the tens of thousands of Americans literally
milling around at that time trying to survive."
The road, says Algren, not only gave the young writer something to
write about; it conditioned his attitude towards the larger society.
