“What is literature?” Jean-Paul Sartre once asked in a small volume bearing that title.
I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Now we all know.
When the city clerk of Terre Haute refused to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers in spite of his sworn duty to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers, and instead demanded of the Terre Haute police, “Why don’t you make war on people in high life instead of upon these penniless girls?” the little sport performed an act of literature.
“These men were put to death because they made you nervous,” an American poet summed up the case of Massachusetts vs. Sacco and Vanzetti better than the judge.
We are a people with too many nervous judges.
“Had I so interfered on behalf of any of that class, every man in the court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment,” John Brown explained his own assault upon a legal apparatus gone out of touch with humanity.
Old Brown of Osawatomie didn’t know that nobody was going to give him a banquet for pulling the judge off the bench down into the dock.
“I repeat that I am the enemy of the ‘order’ of today and I repeat that I shall combat it. I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!” was how a twenty-year-old once went to his death for practicing reckless politics in Chicago.
The history of American letters, in this strict view, is a record for apparently senseless assaults upon standard operating procedure, commonly by a single driven man. Followed, after the first shock of surprise, (conscience in any courtroom always coming as a surprise) by a counter-assault mounted by a judge using a gavel as a blackjack, a court-stenographer armed with a fingernail file and an editorialist equally intent on getting in a bit of gouging before cocktail time: each enthusiastically assisted by cops wielding pistol-butts and clergymen swinging two-by-fours nailed in the shape of crosses.
In less time than it takes to say “Emile Zola” everyone is standing around congratulating one another for having protected society, because if the stiff wasn’t guilty of something why was the stiff bleeding so hard? He must have been some kind of nut.
And the old earth sighs heigh-o, the wind and the rain, having made this scene before.
Ultimately it develops that Some-Kind-of-Nut was the only party in court in his rightmind. Whereupon everyone reveals thathe was secretly on Some-Kind-of-Nut’s side all along, especially the editorialist.
And the earth takes a few more heigh-ho spins.
Having made this scene before.
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. In Chicago, in our own curious span, we have seesawed between blind assault and blind counter-assault, hanging men in one decade for beliefs which, in another, we honor others.
And that there has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through The Chicago Palatinate, was an observation which, when somebody first made it, was still true. God help the poor joker who comes up through Old Seesaw Chicago today.
For we are now in a gavel-and-fingernail era. Punitive cats have the upper hand. The struggle is not to bring the judge into the dock, but to see who can get closest to him on the bench. For upon the bench is where the power is, and elbows are flying. Between TV poseurs, key-club operators and retarded Kilgallens in charge of columns, any writer whose thought is simply to report the sights and sounds of the city must be some kind of nut.
– Excerpted from Algren’s 1961 Afterword to Chicago: City on the Make
Posted on February 26, 2006