Chicago is something of an odd place, not just for the funny way they talk there but for this strange feeling that looms over the whole city. It’s a hard feeling to describe and a harder one to diagnose. You could say it’s the listlessness of a mob town now cleaned up, but isn’t every American metropolis some kind of mob town, past present or future? And besides, it’s a different feeling from the guilty blare of the Vegas or the self-denial of a Providence Italian restaurant. Instead there’s a mix of frustrated jitteriness and despondency to the whole place. You could attribute it to an inferiority complex but that feels lazy. I won’t be able to get to the bottom of it in this Substack post- Nelson Algren spent 80 or so pages trying to parse it out and only got about halfway there, stopping along the way to mourn the integrity of his beloved White Sox or the loss of his friendship with Richard Wright. It’s that kind of thing that makes him the definitive Chicago writer of the 20th century, if not the greatest.
I like Chicago because it feels the way I feel. But I don’t live there. Nelson Algren felt the same way as Chicago and it made him love and hate it at once. You could read his 1951 essay-as-monograph-as-city-symphony Chicago: City on the Make as a book of pure heartbreak and disillusionment but, like most interesting art, it’s more complicated than that. It’s the work of a man who had been turned away by the city he loved at every turn but never stopped loving it. It’s not the kind of romantic, melancholic, “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” style of maudlin urban ode one sometimes runs into. It’s a real heartbreak, battered and bruised. It’s real caring. If nothing else, Nelson Algren never didn’t care.
Algren was a better writer than me. He was a different kind of thinker. But I think in a lot of ways we feel the same way, and I like him because of that. He returns to the same ideas over and over in City on the Make: hustlers and squares and respectability. To him, the essence of Chicago lies in the blurred lines in the city between the shakedown man and the politician, between the worlds of the reputable and disreputable. There’s a hustle to the city that can only come organically- it lacks the buzz of a New York or a Los Angeles, maybe, but the energy is still there, all the way. It’s that energy that can birth a Bill Haywood or a Swede Risberg or a nameless street hustler. But to Algren that doesn’t make anyone the other side of the coin from anyone else. Instead, to him, the question isn’t whether or not you have that sometimes grim Chicago resolve in you, it’s what you put it towards.
There’s a line from Algren where he says that the responsibility of any writer, basically, to “bring the judge on the bench down into the dock.” It’s a good aphorism and a great call to action. I don’t know that Algren believed that writing could change society. I don’t know what he thought could, if anything. But he wrote anyway, which has to count for something.