Free Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren

subject and not on his reader; so long as he isn’t trying to pull a Sweetness-and-Light in reverse. That is to say, so long as he isn’t aiming deliberately at a shocker with the identical venality employed by those who write to comfort the reader at all costs.
    For publishers are in business, and the American public, war or no war, still buys books that speak convincingly of reality. The average American reader is a knowing sort of cuss, and he knows when a book is false or true. Publishers aren’t afraid of the Americanreader. If the writer will speak boldly, he will find that the best publishers are bold enough to publish him, that the average American is bold enough to buy.
    There was, in pre-revolutionary Russia, a novelist who wrote of Russian prostitution. When asked why he had turned to such a subject, while his more successful contemporaries wrote of people in more pleasant circumstances, he explained himself:
    “With us, you see, they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones—and really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse and talent. But after all, these people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture … tinsel … gingerbread.…”
    What happens here in America, where there are a hundred gifted writers to every one of old Russia? Where the levelling processes of Democracy have given us, from all classes and all callings and all colors, legions of brilliant writers: writers of verse, of short stories, of biographies, of mysteries, of jingles and ghost stories and fairy tales, endlessly stylized novels of endlessly stylized clothes-horses. They, too, write with talent and finesse. Without conviction of feeling or thought, of a world that does not exist.
    How then does the serious writer go about putting down the world of reality? I fancy it is basically a matter of living and reacting. The chief thing should be to share, as fully as one is able, in the common experiences of common humanity. The incidental thing would be the recording on the typewriter of reactions obtained in this sharing process. For, to the creative writer, all experiences, whether noble or mean or sordid or simply pathetic, are the seeds from which his writing must grow. Which means that they must not only be planted, but that their growth must be unforced. That no studied effort at invention of literary images can ever replace the simplest sound of experienced reality.
    To write without haste, as the story grows within, regardless ofall social and moral ideas, regardless of whom your report may please or offend, regardless of whether the critics stand up and cheer for a month or take hammer and tongs after you, or simply ignore you—regardless of all forms, of all institutions, of all set ways of conduct and thought. Regardless, chiefly, of what the writer himself prefers to believe, know, hear, think or feel.
    And that aspect—the ability to
feel
your way into a story rather than to regard it from the sidelines by some formal outline—is the most encouraging aspect of this business of defying the grocer in order to write seriously. For practically everyone can
feel
. If you can’t do that, of course, you’re gone. You can’t go out and get a new set of emotions. But if it’s simply a matter of not knowing anything, that’s not so serious; because most writers don’t. But they do develop an ability to listen. To listen to people talk. And in the talk of people, especially of those on the streets, lies an endless wealth of story-stuff.
    Nor is it necessary to go about haunting street corners with a notebook in your pocket and an amplifier in your ear. It is necessary only that you do not stop your ears with smugness or indifference or indolence. Going about your workaday rounds,