Free Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren Page A

assuming you’re neither in solitary confinement nor a hermit, you’ll hear all the words of which people’s lives are constituted. And, if you listen long enough, the commonest speech will begin to ring like poetry.
    For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded, in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn’t tell you, though he try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop.
    I recall being caught recently by the language of a girl in an all-night hamburger joint. I didn’t have to eavesdrop. I was there for coffee, and there she was, an unprepossessing little thing in some small trouble all her own, confiding some of it to the counter-jumper:
    “I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come so bad,” she was telling him, “I just don’t seem so good as other people any more. Sometimes I’m that disgusted of myself I think: ‘Just one more dope, that’syou.’ I won’t set up there in that room another Spring alone, thinkin’ stuff like that. It just starts goin’ through my head as soon as I come in that door. Like someone who lives there I can’t see, somebody who knows better, tellin’ me: ‘Just one more dope, that’s you.’ I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come. So bad.”
    lf that isn’t poetry, Saroyan is a dentist. *
    Poetry it is, the best and the truest: the poetry of the ball-park and the dance hall, of the drugstore at noon, of the pool room and the corner newsstand, of the Montgomery-Ward salesgirls reminiscing on the nearest streetcar or bus.
    And it is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can’t give you the first syllable of reality, at any cost, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. There never was a time, a place, and a country like our own in which the opportunity to write truly of common men and women was so accessible—to those bold enough to seize the chance.
    Whitman himself never had the chance to write of Democracy as we have today, when a hundred nations, as one nation, pass before us every day. And Whitman could never take a camera along either.
    Which can be an asset even to writers not planning a picture book with captions. The simple selective process of snapping relevant aspects of the life of our streets assists the writer visually as fully as does listening to street talk. It doesn’t matter that the pictures turn out poorly—the business of going about looking and discriminating is the main idea.
    Then set your pictures, whether from the film or from your mind, on the typewriter, in your own good time, in your own way—the way it felt and looked when you snapped it. Then you’ll feel you’re writing something you
know
.
    You may find, in time, that doing it the hard way is the easiest way of all.
    * No deprecation intended: there never was another writer to take such simple pleasure out of spitting into Niagara, nor any other to do so so entertainingly.

HANK, THE FREE WHEELER
    Hank Lord was a man that wanted everything on wheels and moving about long before he owned an automobile factory. When he was still in his didies, he yelped till his poor old dad had to rollerskate the floor with him instead of walking to and fro like it’s always proper for dads to do.
    He fetched his lunch to the little red school house in a little red wagon and tried to make the cows learn to ride a bicycle so’s they’d make better time from the pasture when he called them up for milking. He traveled that fast he wore goggles around the barnyard before anybody ever heard of an automobile, and was called Speedrow in five states and twenty counties when the Indianapolis racing track was still a hayfield, a frogpuddle, and a couple of turnip patches. He was speed on wheels;