Stuart McCarrell’s sitting in his office, shuffling through a sheaf of poems he’s written about his old pal Nelson Algren, when he produces an extraordinary document. It’s a letter from Algren, dated February 13, 1992, more than a decade after the writer supposedly died. McCarrell reads it out loud. The prose is gritty yet lyrical.
Such hoaxes no longer seem necessary: since cofounding the Nelson Algren Committee nine years ago, McCarrell has done more than anyone to keep the writer’s legacy alive, especially in Wicker Park, where the Detroit-born “poet of the Chicago slums,” as critic Malcolm Cowley dubbed Algren, lived for 35 years. It was here that Algren explored the seamy underside of urban America, writing his finest novels, including the saga of a cardsharp junkie, The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950. Algren hung out in the area’s taverns, poker dens, pool halls, and police stations, and he carried on a fabled love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist and existentialist, in an apartment on Wabansia.
“Some Poles aren’t exactly too happy with Nelson Algren,” says Jan Lorys, director of the Polish Museum of America. He thinks the writer’s portrayal of the Polish-American underclass was unduly harsh. Never Come Morning struck an especially raw nerve. Had it been published at another time, the book might have been ignored. “But not at the height of World War II,” Lorys explains. “Some Poles couldn’t help but ask, ‘Who’s paying this guy to write this stuff?’”
“Stu’s the last of the neighborhood’s great poet-playwright-raconteurs,” says musician and stage director Warren Leming, a longtime resident and Algren Committee founding member. “He’s a real renaissance guy.” Filmmaker Mark Blottner says McCarrell’s own writing “represents an everyday, blue-collar, common-man point of view,” though “he does an amazing amount of research–if you mention some point in history, he can call up tons of facts.”
“That’s a damn good question,” he says, quickly adding, “I really think he’s a great, great man, a very complex figure.” Not unlike McCarrell, Goethe was multitalented–a poet, dramatist, and scientist. And Goethe’s Faust, Part I was, says McCarrell, “the absolute perfection of dramatic form. We have epic theater some 150 years before Bert Brecht! It’s wild. And it’s just like my Faust. It’s got 18 songs, it’s a savage political satire, it’s a tender portrait of a tragic love story.” And then he launches into a monologue about Weimar royalty, Beethoven’s popularity, and the French Revolution.
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McCarrell’s just put the finishing touches on his most recent play, Nelson and Simone, which will be out in book form by the beginning of next year. Then he hopes to have it produced. He says it’s the work he was always meant to write–and it’s topical too, given that 300 of de Beauvoir’s letters to Algren have recently been published in a book called Transatlantic Love Affair, edited by her adopted daughter, Sylvie. There’s also a new BBC documentary about their relationship. “De Beauvoir may single-handedly resuscitate Algren’s career and make him an international player again,” says Warren Leming, who discusses Algren in the documentary.
