1975, pp. 13, 15 and 26), Durocher gives substantially the same account and adds that in his early years his mother read his words in a newspaper and gave him hell. Algren probably got his version from the same newspaper story as Durocher’s mother.
38.
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In
Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
and
Selections from The House of the Dead
translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 129.
39. Soon after completing
Nonconformity
, Algren would begin his most ambitious novel ever, with a plot line that turns on characters closely linked to those invoked here. Called
Entrapment
, it tells the story of Baby, a country woman turned prostitute (modeled after Algren’s very close friend, a prostitute named Margo), and Daddy, her heroin-using husband. When Daddy gets busted, Baby robs from her tricks to get him out of jail. Algren never finished the book, although there exist several hundred manuscript pages.
40.
The Diary of a Writer
, by F. M. Dostoevsky, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol. (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 7. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Algren has chosen a passage early in
Diary of a Writer
in which Dostoevsky is actually quoting the Russian literary critic Belinsky. The section from which the passage is taken deals not only with the misery of those excluded from mainstream society, but goes on to discuss Dostoevsky’s near execution and four years of hard labor, which he later described as vitally important to his development as a writer, where his enforced contact with other convicts gave him knowledge of the Russian lower classes possessed by no other contemporary Russian author. See below.
41.
The Second Sex
, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952, renewed 1980. Vintage Books Edition, 1989), p. 713.
As noted by Algren’s biographer Bettina Drew, in the summer of 1953—which began with the June executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which horrified Algren, and while he still waited to hear from Doubleday on the publication plans for this essay—Algren claimed he read all 750 pages of de Beauvoir’s magnum opus. De Beauvoir, though still deeply bound to Algren, had by now distanced herself from him sufficiently to be deeply at work on
The Mandarins
, the novel that would recreate their love affair, and to have taken on a new lover in the future documentary filmmaker Claude
(Shoah)
Lanzmann. But Algren was still deeply inlove with de Beauvoir, even though more than a year had passed since he’d seen her, a period during which he’d reconciled with his first wife Amanda. And just as missing Simone must have been part of the experience of reading
The Second Sex
, so writing
Nonconformity
was also in part an attempt to prove to her that he was as worthy of her as Sartre was. The passage in question precedes by a few pages the conclusion to
The Second Sex
and comes as part of an argument whose polemical thrust is that, as she writes, “to explain her limitations it is woman’s situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence.” Both Algren and de Beauvoir extend the analogy beyond the specific context—from the condition of women to that of blacks, the French proletariat or the American underclass. See Afterword. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
42. Dostoevsky,
Diary of a Writer
, p. 16. At the peak of his career, during the period of his last years that produced
The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoevsky also produced this huge and unwieldy work of autobiographical journalism pieced together from a variety of sources in the form of a diary. Informal and colloquial in tone, dealing in large part with political questions of the day, the work has been compared to Rousseau’s
Confessions
or Goethe’s
Poetry and Truth
. See above.
43.
America Day by
38.
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In
Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
and
Selections from The House of the Dead
translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 129.
39. Soon after completing
Nonconformity
, Algren would begin his most ambitious novel ever, with a plot line that turns on characters closely linked to those invoked here. Called
Entrapment
, it tells the story of Baby, a country woman turned prostitute (modeled after Algren’s very close friend, a prostitute named Margo), and Daddy, her heroin-using husband. When Daddy gets busted, Baby robs from her tricks to get him out of jail. Algren never finished the book, although there exist several hundred manuscript pages.
40.
The Diary of a Writer
, by F. M. Dostoevsky, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol. (New York: George Braziller, 1954), p. 7. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Algren has chosen a passage early in
Diary of a Writer
in which Dostoevsky is actually quoting the Russian literary critic Belinsky. The section from which the passage is taken deals not only with the misery of those excluded from mainstream society, but goes on to discuss Dostoevsky’s near execution and four years of hard labor, which he later described as vitally important to his development as a writer, where his enforced contact with other convicts gave him knowledge of the Russian lower classes possessed by no other contemporary Russian author. See below.
41.
The Second Sex
, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952, renewed 1980. Vintage Books Edition, 1989), p. 713.
As noted by Algren’s biographer Bettina Drew, in the summer of 1953—which began with the June executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which horrified Algren, and while he still waited to hear from Doubleday on the publication plans for this essay—Algren claimed he read all 750 pages of de Beauvoir’s magnum opus. De Beauvoir, though still deeply bound to Algren, had by now distanced herself from him sufficiently to be deeply at work on
The Mandarins
, the novel that would recreate their love affair, and to have taken on a new lover in the future documentary filmmaker Claude
(Shoah)
Lanzmann. But Algren was still deeply inlove with de Beauvoir, even though more than a year had passed since he’d seen her, a period during which he’d reconciled with his first wife Amanda. And just as missing Simone must have been part of the experience of reading
The Second Sex
, so writing
Nonconformity
was also in part an attempt to prove to her that he was as worthy of her as Sartre was. The passage in question precedes by a few pages the conclusion to
The Second Sex
and comes as part of an argument whose polemical thrust is that, as she writes, “to explain her limitations it is woman’s situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence.” Both Algren and de Beauvoir extend the analogy beyond the specific context—from the condition of women to that of blacks, the French proletariat or the American underclass. See Afterword. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
42. Dostoevsky,
Diary of a Writer
, p. 16. At the peak of his career, during the period of his last years that produced
The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoevsky also produced this huge and unwieldy work of autobiographical journalism pieced together from a variety of sources in the form of a diary. Informal and colloquial in tone, dealing in large part with political questions of the day, the work has been compared to Rousseau’s
Confessions
or Goethe’s
Poetry and Truth
. See above.
43.
America Day by
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