The way we were
HISTORY | Updated volume of 'Chicago's Nelson Algren' looks at author and the gritty edges of the city that have disappeared today
It's been the Year of Art Shay. First, in the spring, there were twin exhibits of the veteran photojournalist's best work at the Chicago History Museum and the Stephen Daiter Gallery. Now comes Chicago's Nelson Algren, a slightly expanded and updated version of his 1988 volume documenting Shay's years as the novelist's friend and chronicler from the late 1940s to the mid-'60s.
In photographs and text that veer from comedy to tragedy and back again, Shay takes us along with the author on his ramblings through the hardscrabble streets of the Near West Side, keeping company with prostitutes and panhandlers, drunks and drug addicts, ex-cons and con men, people who appeared in police lineups or sat on Skid Row sidewalks all day with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
I wish this new volume had been printed in larger format, on better-quality paper and with fewer copy-editing errors in the text. Still, it's an important addition to the literature on Algren, one of the great Chicago bards (a line that includes Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg and Studs Terkel), who enjoyed trolling through some of the city's seediest neighborhoods in search of -- what? Company? Like-minded souls? Material for his books? All of the above, if Shay's cumulative portrait is true. He repeatedly shows the writer mixing with people at the social margins -- from whom his own economic station was hardly distant, since he rarely had any money and, when he did, tended to throw it away on bad business deals, poker and the horses -- but still slightly apart, enclosed in the bubble of his thoughts.
If that sounds like an incomplete picture of the author, it is. There were facets of Algren's life to which Shay had only limited access -- including his passionate but ultimately doomed affair with Simone de Beauvoir, who nevertheless appears here, spectacularly, in the buff. (She liked to leave the bathroom door open.) Then again, one of Algren's main functions in these photographs is to serve as a guide -- playing Virgil to Shay's Dante, leading him deeper into the urban inferno. Chicago's Nelson Algren was originally titled Nelson Algren's Chicago, which was closer to the point.
Art Shay's Chicago would have been even better. He starts off following Algren but ends up stalking the city itself. Shay is always scrambling for position here, looking for the odd detail that turns a humdrum documentary photograph into an image that burns into your memory. Sometimes it's in the density of the streetscape, in which multiple scenarios (drunkenness, poverty, commerce of all kinds) play out in close proximity; sometimes it's in brutal juxtapositions, like a crowd making much of a cute little dog while ignoring a man passed out on the sidewalk nearby.
And sometimes it's in the cheery mid-century ad lingo that often floats in the background, mocking. "NEED CASH?" blares a billboard over the shoulders of a pair of beggars on Madison Street; "WELCOME DEMOCRATS" hovers over bayoneted National Guard troops in 1968. To some, Shay's use of signage for satiric purposes in some of the photographs is a weakness. To my mind, it's part of Shay's special edge. (If it was good enough for Margaret Bourke-White -- whose picture of a breadline in front of a billboard trumpeting "World's Highest Standard of Living" remains one of the Depression's most indelible images -- it's good enough for Shay, and me, too.) One man's cheap irony is another man's genius.
When he took these photographs, after all, Shay was still young and brash, a Daumier with a Leica, avid for the visual zinger -- hence his gimlet eye, his refusal to make myths or extol the nobility of the common man. (Leave that to Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange.) Shay's biting, salty, often hilarious texts -- which are presented next to the photographs they describe, a major improvement over the earlier version of this book -- are as unsentimental as his pictures. He admired Algren but never idolized him, seeing his faults along with his greatness. The same went for Chicago and its people, for whom Shay seems to have felt a sympathy that stopped well short of empathy.
In at least one case, he may have relented. In the original version of this book, Shay included a picture of a woman gracelessly falling, apparently drunk, to the sidewalk. In the new version, he has substituted a different frame shot just seconds later. We no longer see her face, which grants her a certain privacy and dignity, even a measure of universality; instead we see her from behind as she leans forward in position reminiscent of the figure in Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World." In the distance are some downtown skyscrapers, a hazy, glamorous vista she seems to be yearning for, maybe crawling toward. It's an illusion, a romantic story line we can invent to console ourselves in this grim landscape. Just this once, Shay lets us dream.
Kevin Nance is the Sun-Times' critic-at-large.
CHICAGO'S NELSON ALGREN
By Art Shay
Seven Stories Press, 167 pages, $19.95