Free Nonconformity by Nelson Algren Page A

published.
    Nonconformity
is not like any other literary essay, and perhaps for that reason, even now, it is not an easy book to read. For the last ten years I’ve wrestled with it and tried to understand it. Since it is a very short book, people have occasionally asked me what’s taking so long, and I’ve said that researching Algren’s quotes takes time. But that is only partly true. The rest of the answer is that trying to understand what Algren means here takes time. What he means when he describes the particular responsibility of writers, or the addict’s “special grace,” or what he calls “the American disease”—our blindness to our own pathos—or national characteristics he thought were common to writers and criminals, including the need to get back at society. I believe
Nonconformity
to be Algren’s credo, and at the same time an expression of profound crisis within Algren. And I believe
Nonconformity
is one of the strangest, toughest and truest essays in the history of American letters, linking high and low as they have not been linked before or since, rendering a harmony to the whole that was new on this earth when Algren created it. I can think of no other literary work that resists and then yields its meanings so powerfully.
    Nonconformity
in manuscript form presented my associate C. S. O’Brien and me with a dilemma. It was clearly a major find: Algren’s only book-length work of nonfiction, a work from the period of his finest writing. On the otherhand, the essay was unpublishable as it stood: a mess of impossibly long quotes by others interrupted its flow; Algren’s own words often read too much like a notebook, too little like an essay; its passion itself also made it seem unlike an essay. To simply publish it in the form in which I’d found it would have been no service to Algren or his readers. To bring it into publishable shape would be difficult, but it was the only choice other than not to publish it at all.
    Given my conviction that
Nonconformity
represented a major effort on Algren’s part, I did not want to bring it out without verifying his quotes—a major stumbling block as none were referenced. In some cases he indicated his source, in some cases not. I could not publish it as a
fonds du tiroir
, a tidbit of no importance left behind in his desk drawer. If it were to be published at all, every possible quote and reference would have to be verified.
    That work, although time-consuming, turned out to be both possible and gratifying. Generally a quoted author could be identified, either because Algren indeed named him or her, or from the context of the quotation. In some cases our starting point was nothing more than a gut feeling that the source might be this writer or that one, because it sounded American, French or Russian, 20th century or 19th. Most often Algren chose from books popular at the time he was writing. Once a particular author was identified, O’Brien and I would check which books by thatauthor had been released between 1947 and 1953. In the case of Simone de Beauvoir, for example, that narrowed it down to two English translations of her work,
America Day by Day
, published in England in 1952, and
The Second Sex
, published in America in 1953. De Beauvoir never quite believed that Algren really read the whole 750-page
Second Sex
, as he told her he had, but we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We found several of the de Beauvoir quotes easily in
America Day by Day
, and one day, on my third or fourth assault, after nearly giving up, the last quote from
Nonconformity
stared back at me from near the end of
The Second Sex
.
    Of the ninety-odd endnotes we have appended to
Nonconformity
, nearly all were the product of investigations of various degrees of absurdity by myself or O’Brien. I’d reached the point of unquiet desperation after skimming all Dostoevsky’s major novels, again and again, without locating the long passage Algren quotes, when O’Brien showed