The Hustler and the Square

Algren Scholar Bill Savage on Algren's Chicago

From The Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: John Musial

Much of the text of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and A Single Day comes from Algren's 1951 classic Chicago: City on the Make, his love poem to, and history lesson about, Chicago. The key to this history, and this love, is the way that Chicago is poised between things: between the lake and the prairie, between the natural world and the man-made city, between bright American ideals and grim American realities, between the Hustler and the Square.

Jazz made up no small part of this world, on the bandstands and jukeboxes of the bars where Algren met the down-and-outers who people his work. As he wrote in City on the Make, Chicago always kept one face "for King Oliver and Louie Armstrong improvising half an hour on end at the old Lincoln Gardens bandstand, for Baby Dodds and Dave Tough and all the other real-gone senders, sent-for-and-gone too soon, who brought jazz up the river from New Orleans, made it Chicago's music and then the world's." Jazz was the music of the African-American and other outsiders, the music of the city night, and his prose and poetry are infused with lyrics from jazz standards and the rhythms of the music. Chicago is also a city of sharp contrasts: the massive glacial weight of Lake Michigan brings the monumental skyline of Chicago's businessmen to a screeching halt at its edge. The skyscrapers tear up into the clouds, but most people live in a smaller Chicago, closer to the earth, in the far-flung neighborhoods, where the name on the doorbell matters more than the height of the building. This is the Chicago captured in film and music and performance in this play.

Bill Savage
Northwestern University