Nonconformity Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bridewell 51 and come out with a bigger habit than they had going in.
    How do you think the Mills Brothers felt when Billy Williams came along?
    These are not the disinherited. For they have disinherited their selves. And don’t know where to find them.
    Down here where they’ve found one another, in lieu of themselves, to form a loose federation of the lost. Whether God, or Christ, will ever redeem them doesn’t matter any longer; because Man never will. Great things still happen from time to time so maybe something’ll happen to you. How do you think Vaughn Monroe felt when Frankie Laine came along?
    Unbereaved or unbereft, scoffing or debauched, the geared and the ungeared, they live out their lives like ghosts of some winter twilight when winter is nearly done.
    Knowing their own faces, strong or weak. Their own poor faces, gay or bleak. Knowing the phonies as well as the true sporty-ones who are just putting it on. Knowing their own hat size, cap or tam, each being loyal to a particular brand of cigarette or bar, yet knowing there is no difference worth mentioning between any. They need to be loyal to
something
, having lost all loyalty to their true selves. But that’s too big a job. They’ve lost their selves out there somewhere where Christ lost his shoes. How can anyone be loyal to someone you never got to know, for God’s sake?
    Strolling the broken stones beyond the ruins of the City of God, out where the rutted roads begin, it is rumored vaguely, here and there, that certain unnamed sub-dividers plan the City of Man. So between the old town and the new they go, inventing new gods along the way.
    “Junk is like God,” not-yet-twenty explains, “it makes a place in your heart you’ll never forget. You got to be punished for believing in it, but you go on believing all the same. It’s like being a martyr sort of.”
    Some people say that junkies lie. But it seems to me that some people who aren’t even on Stuff don’t tell the truth all the time either.
    How do you think Gene Krupa felt when Jackie Cooper came along?

H.
E. F. Donohue: I asked you to think about American literature. What did you decide? Algren: Well, you asked me what’s the matter with American literature and I think the trouble with American literature is it doesn’t know who it is. It thinks it’s Henry Miller writing to Lawrence Durrell, and then again it thinks it’s James Baldwin telephoning Norman Mailer, and then it thinks it’s Jack Kerouac, subsisting on Coca-Colas on a cross-country ride to nowhere—
    Donohue: What
is
it?
    Algren: Actually, American literature isn’t anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anybody on my side?” It’s also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” More recently I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair—my mother can watch me burn.” Even
more
recently, American literature is a seventeen-year-old kid picked up on a double murder charge, two killings in a boat, in a ship off Miami, who said he was
very glad it happened, he had absolutely no regrets, his only fear was that he might not get the electric chair. He had no vindictiveness toward those two people he killed. He said they were pretty good about it. They didn
’t
know, they had no idea, that he was going to come up with a knife. He had, in fact, a little bit of admiration for their coolness. One of them, finding himself stabbed, said, “Why?” He wanted to know. He said, “I can’
t
tell them why.” But I know he’s been trying to get out of it since he’s six years old. This is an honors student, you understand, this is a bright boy from a respectable home. He never remembers a time when he