Mention the phrase ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ in the 21st century, and most people will think of a Lou Reed song – but the inspiration for that song, however, was the American novelist Nelson Algren, who was one of the most distinctive and powerful writers to emerge from the Chicago literary scene. His novel of that title was one of the key works of 20th-century American writing, describing the misadventures of a naïve young Texan trying to track down his lost love and finding her working in a brothel. The novel was both poetically written and unsparing, with a dynamism that positively leapt off the page. The same might be said of the author’s other signature novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, a powerful study of a musician’s fight with drug addiction, memorably filmed by Otto Preminger (with Frank Sinatra demonstrating his acting chops in a ‘cold turkey’ scene).Walk on the Wild Side, too, enjoyed a film adaptation, but that is much less fondly remembered, being a sanitised version of the unblushing original novel although its swaggering title sequence (created by Saul Bass) with a prowling cat — along with Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy main theme have granted it a sort of afterlife. Algren’s life was a colourful one, and included a long-term relationship with the writer de Beauvoir, even as she maintained her long-term affair with Jean-Paul Sartre. There have been a variety of studies of Algren’s turbulent life, but this latest contribution, subtitled His Life, Work and Colleagues, is a particularly valuable collection of critical essays which illuminate many heretofore hidden corners of Algren’s life, and is particularly penetrating on the writer’s relationship with de Beauvoir. The writer, Richard F Bales, may have made his money in the real estate business, but his legacy may be this fully achieved study, essential for anyone with the slightest interest in the work of Nelson Algren.
Nelson Algren by Richard F Bales is published by McFarland
