painting of the month

Nuns on the Roof -- Marjorie Phillips, 1922 (The Phillips Collection)

northside algren

Chicago author Nelson Algren would have marked a 103rd birthday today, if he hadn't left our sphere in 1981 after suffering a heart attack. Though Algren was born in Detroit, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child and he would be emotionally and artistically linked with the city for the rest of his life. He did abandon Chicago for the East Coast in his later years, feeling that he wasn’t appreciated by his hometown despite the fame he had achieved through publication of such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning.  Apparently at the time he left you could barely find his books in the Chicago Public Library, though they are certainly there now.

Algren was streetwise yet poetic, turning blighted urban views into hauntingly beautiful scenes. He could also peer into the soul of a desperate man or woman and find a whole range of experiences and emotions -- and what had led them to turn to the needle or the bottle, or to a life of crime. He wasn’t much of a schmoozer and called things as he saw them, which often led to his disenfranchisement from the literati of his day. He had a long-time affair with French writer Simone de Beauvoir, but that ended with a bittersweet (generally more bitter than sweet) resentment, much like his departure from Chicago.

Reading Algren’s works is a great way to learn about the man and the Chicago neighborhood in which he found his writing “zone,” the then-predominantly Polish area called The Triangle. Algren probably wouldn’t recognize much of his gentrified, hipped-up Triangle now, but a fine way to go back in time beyond reading Algren’s fiction is to check out Call Northside 777, a film based on the real case of a Chicago man imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. It has an unusually low-key tone for a 1948 movie, with Jimmy Stewart playing a reporter unraveling errors of justice. Stewart's quest leads him to the Polish corners of the South side, but Call Northside 777 also hits the titled North side as well, offering a cinematic window into some of the bars, streets, and people of the Triangle area and truly bringing Algren’s words to life.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing ever since. -- Salvador Dali