Free Nonconformity by Nelson Algren

the right to reprint the article, as did other publications.” 81
    A Chicago publisher offered to bring it out as a book. Then Doubleday, which had published Algren’s last novel,
The Man with the Golden Arm
, insisted on publishing the essay. At that point, in Bradley’s account, Algren “began to rewrite, enlarging the essay with fresh thoughts and with extracts from a lecture he had given at the University of Missouri.” 82
    In early March 1953, as recounted in Drew’s biography, Algren’s passport application was denied. “It has been alleged that you were a Communist,” he was informed by the passport office. In April, as part of an ongoing FBI investigation, two informants “of known reliability” gave evidence that Algren had been a Party member in the late thirties. In June another informant produced a 1937 letter from Algren allegedly proving that he’d been a Communist. 83 In earlyJune Doubleday was still preparing to publish the book, and Algren sent them the reworked manuscript with their preferred title, “The State of Literature.” In addition to Bradley’s prefatory note, they had commissioned an introduction from the esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar, who had done the best scholarly writing on Algren to date. On June 3, 1953, Geismar wrote to Algren, “This will be one of the first books they will burn: congratulations.” 84
    That month Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted, affecting Algren deeply. His letters to de Beauvoir become importunate, including descriptions of the horror of marriage without love. He plowed through the English translation of her
The Second Sex
and listed his phone in her name. By August, Doubleday had decided the book needed further changes and sent an editor all the way from New York to assist Algren at his home. “Polishing is a polite phrase you may have run [into],” Algren wrote to Geismar, “and it means polishing a passage until it is polished away. Well, we polished here and we polished there, and every time we polished one into oblivion I had a fresh rough-hewn zircon to insert.” 85
    In September Doubleday indeed refused to publish and forfeited the small sum of money ($1,500) they had paid in advance. As Bradley tells it, Doubleday “decided NOT to publish the book (which deals with nonconformity), and I accused them of being afraid of McCarthy (Senator Joe) and others of his ilk; Doubleday deniedThis.…” Algren wrote to Geismar, “I put too much work in it not to feel disappointed as hell. But I’m still in the land of the living at least, and that’s a little something.” 86 He sent it on to his agent at the time, Madeleine Brennan, with the understanding that she would seek another publisher for it. She either lost it or never received it. There Algren let the matter rest, in an act of resignation reminiscent of Mark Twain who, after writing his anti-war manifesto,
The War Prayer
, said, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” 87
    Bradley’s prefatory note (written at Doubleday’s request in 1953, while Algren was still working on the original essay), Algren’s two-sentence
envoi
from that May of 1956, along with Bradley’s memo on the whole affair, various copies of the shorter adaptations published in the
Chicago Daily News, The Nation
and elsewhere, and the carbon of the essay itself—all found their way into the Algren archive at the Ohio State University Library in Columbus a few years later, where they lay untouched for another quarter-century. 88 In November 1986 I found them at OSU among Algren’s other papers. I was not the only one to notice them. Bettina Drew, Algren’s biographer, came across the essay a few months before I did; others may have noticed it too. I felt strongly, as I read it for the first time that November, that even a generation later than originally planned, it still demanded to be