Free Nonconformity by Nelson Algren Page B

up one day with Dostoevsky’s obscure, 1,100-page, autobiographical
The Diary of a Writer;
there, the next day, on this page , I found my quote. We spent untold hours rereading Shakespeare, among others, in an effort to place a suspicious rhyming couplet. We never found it anywhere and in the end I deleted it from the text, with some trepidation, but correctly I think.
    I had heard about a speech by the great jurist Learned Hand that had been reprinted in the
Saturday
Review
in November 1952, just when Algren would have been working on the essay. I went to the text of that speech, which was widely discussed at the time, and found the exact source of the long passage Algren quoted from Hand.
    As O’Brien and I began to find the quotes, one by one, we discovered that Algren was rarely letter perfect. Even his favorite quotes tended to be slight misquotes. As the passing months turned into years, I developed a pet theory. It is that Algren must have had an extremely good memory, nearly eidetic, or photographic, in fact. So many of his quotes were near perfect, but a little off here or there; it seemed that, at least in some cases, he must have been going from memory. Had he been copying from a text as he was looking at it, the errors would have been more of a typographical nature, whereas in fact his misquotes were more often creative rewrites. He had a peculiar way of making sure his sources came out speaking Algrenese.
    Part of our work entailed restoring the correct wording where possible. For example, Algren has F. Scott Fitzgerald asking, “Why was I identified with the very objects of my horror and compassion?” But this is more shorthand than quotation. Fitzgerald actually wrote, “I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.” I emended Algren’s version so that it nowreads, “I only wanted absolute quiet to think out … why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.” And the full text of the passage is given in an endnote. In our finished version there is, as I believe there should be, more of a mingling of distinct voices than there was in the manuscript, and only Algren now speaks pure Algrenese.
    There were, however, exceptions to this rule. The majority of the quotes we were able to track down were restored to their original form, as in the case of the Fitzgerald passage noted above. But sometimes I came across source material that seemed to carry the same idea as what Algren had put between quotes, but without Algren’s scent on it. A few of these I left in Algren’s words, in effect misquoting, and supplied the original text in an endnote, since in these passages, knowingly or unknowingly, Algren seemed to have made the text his own. In these cases I couldn’t simply restore the passage without taking something away from what he’d written. In one such example he quotes de Beauvoir this way: “It isn’t that young Americans don’t wish to do great things, but that they don’t know there are great things to be done.” She had written something along the same line, which in the English translation read: “Ambitions for greatness are often the source of many deceptions, and indicted by faults Americans do not Know.… In order to lose themselves in the pursuit of an object, they find themselves without an object at all.” Tohave restored her wording in this case would have been to change his meaning.
    If his near-perfect memory was a curse of sorts for us, another habit that became apparent was a blessing. I noticed that very often Algren would quote from either the beginning or the end of a book; in our research this was a tic of his for which we were grateful, since we could sometimes find what we were looking for soon after we’d located the right volume. I am sure