Rough Stuff

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (346 pp.)--Nelson Algren--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

One of the literary cliches that takes a long time dying is the notion that prostitutes have hearts of gold and that bums are somehow more steeped in humanity than people who work. No living U.S. writer has done more to keep the idea alive, and no one has done it with more literary authority than Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. His Man with the Golden Arm, 1949's best U.S. novel, dealt with a sordid world of petty crime and drug addiction that shocked many a queasy reader, but it was so firmly rimmed by compassion and understanding that no one could doubt its literary worth. His new one, A Walk on the Wild Side, reinforces his right to the title of poet laureate of Skid Row, but just as Novelist Algren had to find a new publisher to bring it out, so his old admirers have to reconsider their admiration. They may well wonder if his sympathy for the depraved and degraded has not carried him to the edge of nonsense.

A Walk on the Wild Side should carry a warning on the jacket: For Strong Stomachs Only. It is a picaresque story of the Depression, rich in shocking incident and rinsed in squalor that makes The Man with the Golden Arm seem like a novel of suburbia. Its hero is an illiterate, crafty boy of 16 whose talents are chiefly sexual, whose amorality would excite the envy of an alley cat. Yet he vaguely wants to better himself, and knows he can never do it in his Texas home town, where his father cleans cesspools and spouts drunken fundamentalism from the courthouse steps. So Dove Linkhorn rides the rods, just as Algren himself did during the Depression, and before long he winds up in New Orleans. Almost immediately he is caught up in a surrealist country of thieves, grifters, pimps and prostitutes. Here he thrives as naturally as a trout in clean running water. For a while he works in a contraceptive factory run by an ex-abortionist. And near the end he becomes the fancy boy of the prostitute with the biggest heart of all. Jailed, then brutally beaten into blindness by his woman's former lover, he goes back home to Texas and a Mexican woman who had once admired his sexual precocity.

Algren, an honest writer, has written scenes in A Walk whose brutality and sordidness can hardly be equaled in contemporary fiction. That he means the book to be a caress for the most degraded members of society and a protest against social injustice is obvious. But in supposing that human virtue flourishes best among degenerates, Novelist Algren has dressed his sense of compassion in the rags of vulgarity.

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