By Jordan Marsh
While researching The Great Fire, he came across Chicago: City on the Make, Algren’s bittersweet ode to his hometown originally published in 1951 as an article in Holiday magazine. City on the Make detailed the writer’s profoundly ambivalent relationship with the city that “grew up too arrogant, too gullible, too swift to mockery and too slow to love.” He acknowledged his emotional investment in the place, writing that Chicago divided his heart, “Leaving you loving the joint for keeps / Yet knowing it can never love you.”
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Algren was dubbed “the poet of the Chicago slums” by Malcolm Cowley, who believed the writer would one day “rank among our best American novelists.” This was just after the 1949 publication of The Man With the Golden Arm, the story of a heroin addict set around Damen and Division. The Man With the Golden Arm went on to win the first National Book Award in 1950, but it marked the zenith of Algren’s career. He was soon dismissed by the literary establishment and had difficulty getting book contracts. He increasingly relied on writing magazine articles, mainly book reviews, for money. Algren died in 1981 in Sag Harbor, New York, a bitter refugee from the city that once inspired his art.
When Algren began writing in the 1930s, says Savage, a writer could be overtly political and still be considered an artist worthy of critical consideration. Then suddenly, he says, “Left-wing politics got you ousted. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t decide to suddenly be a bad writer and be obscure. They changed the rules on him and he wasn’t willing to adapt to the new rules.”
Musial says he wants to explore what made Algren love the city in spite of its many faults. “I’m interested in telling stories that are about the identity of Chicago, about who we are and why we’re in this particular place.” By combining excerpts from Algren’s writings with music and film, Musial says he’s approaching the material “like a jazz piece, where the rules are to generally state the phrase, discover what you can in the phrase, play back and forth with what the people who you are playing with are giving you, and have a discussion in a musical vocabulary. The Algren piece is going to be similar in that we’ll have the film, and sometimes it’ll just be the film and the music talking. Sometimes it will be just the music and the actor talking. Sometimes it will just be the music that will take a solo. Sometimes the films will take a solo. And we’ll be able to change it every night as we see fit.”
