Intellectual as Ape Man

WHO LOST AN AMERICAN? (337 pp.)--Nelson Algren--Macm/7/an ($5.95).

One way or another, American intellectuals are apt to complain about being lost. Nelson Algren is the lost American of his own story, but it cannot be that no one knows where he is; the uproar he creates is deafening.

The author of The Man with the Golden Arm seems determined to prove that it was written by a man with brass lungs and a tin ear. Who Lost an American? sounds like a bellowing recitative by a carnival barker who stops at nothing but to laugh at his own jokes. It takes Algren to foreign parts like New York, Paris, Barcelona, Dublin, Istanbul, Crete, and back, of course, to dear old untouchable Chicago. Through it all, Algren (complaining about Americans who complain about the lack of ham and eggs for breakfast) remains about the most militantly ham-and-eggs American traveler since the innocents went abroad in Mark Twain's generation. The book is dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir, doyenne of French existentialists--a gesture of some generosity in the face of Algren's appearance as a non-hero in De Beauvoir's last novel.

Branch of Fisticuffs. Technically, this is a work of belles-lettres, in which Algren appears in the ambiguous role of the anti-intellectual intellectual. The spectacle of a literary man proving that he is hairier than a Rotarian is sadly familiar in the history of American letters, most notably in the person of Ernest Hemingway, who was prone to discuss literature as if it were a branch of fisticuffs. Algren goes the old master one worse by writing about books and boxing as if both were rackets.

"I had come to know two New York crowds," writes Algren, dead serious for once. "One that took its cut off the traffic in horses and fighters around St. Nick's Arena, and the other that took its cut off the traffic in books. Plungers and chiselers alike, I'd found, were less corrupt than Definitive Authorities on D. H. Lawrence. The corruption of the sporting crowd was that of trying to get two tens for a five off you, but the corruption of the throngs of the cocktail Kazins went deeper." For the non-inside dopester, Alfred Kazin is an able and dedicated critic guilty of nothing much worse than occupational attacks of solemnity.

For a man who despises corrupt literary cocktail parties, Algren seems to have survived a lot of them without letting his hosts or fellow guests suspect his feeling. The "throngs" that saw him off on his temporary emigration were as corrupt a crew of notable names as ever were dropped. His acquaintance included Bennett Surface, a characteristic Algren joke-name notable for being an even dimmer joke than any pulled by the original. And the pansy routine Algren sets going between a literary character named Norman Manlifellow and a "deeply tanned" writer named Giovanni is good for a yak, even though the material might be thought a bit crude by a Catskill M.C. for an Elks Club stag night.

False Sentimentality. To use a phrase from current teenage slang, Algren has gone ape, real ape. The pity of all this is that the wheedling, folksy tone of the huckster ("I've learned a few tricks of the trade myself, such as adding an 's' when you want to show there is more than one of something") comes from the mouth of a man who once had a real gold watch to sell and not a brass turnip.

The best thing in the book is naturally about Chicago -- and about his own boyhood, when "somebody was always excommunicating" him. It is essentially about the tough streets where he once sold papers, and the bitter time when a child discovers the ironies involved in the goodness of God and the cruelty of man. But Algren spoils it from evident fear of falling into false sentimentality. He falls right into another kind of falsity. Says the boy Algren: "I want to see the face of Gawd." Facetious spelling gets the adult Algren off no theological or esthetic hook and simply suggests that the child who fathered the man Algren (and who believed in God, not Gawd) was wiser than his wisecracking offspring.

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