A Walk on the Wild Side (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Walk on the Wild Side is a 1956 novel by Nelson Algren, most often quoted as the source for Algren's "three rules of life": "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." Algren noted, "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives." The film directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced in 1962, had a star-studded cast, including Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda (in one of her first roles, age 24), Anne Baxter, and Barbara Stanwyck and was scripted by John Fante. Nonetheless, it was not well-received at the time. When it premiered, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it a "lurid, tawdry, and sleazy melodrama." In 1970, Lou Reed was approached about a project to turn "Walk on the Wild Side" into a musical. The project never materialized, but Reed used the title for a popular song, "Walk on the Wild Side", describing the lives of the transsexuals and transvestites he saw with Andy Warhol at The Factory.
Plot summary
Set in New Orleans, the story centers on a naive young man (Dove Linkhorn, played in the film by Laurence Harvey) who finds himself in a milieu of far more sophisticated women, including Hallie Gerard (played in the film by Capucine). Hallie is a prostitute. When Dove becomes aware of this, he decides it is his mission to "rescue" her.
Fitz Linkhorn barely managed to make a living pumping out cesspools, but his consuming vocation was preaching from the courthouse steps in Arroyo, a small town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. He denounced all sins except drinking, because he was drunk as often as possible. Fitz had two sons, Byron, who was weak and sickly, and Dove.
Dove had no education because his father had not wanted to send him to a school with a Catholic principal. Instead, he was supposed to see movies with Byron to learn about life, but Dove never got to go—his brother did not have the price of a ticket. Dove got his education from the hoboes who hung around the Santa Fe tracks, telling one another what towns, lawmen, jails, and railroad bulls to avoid.
Dove began hanging around the La Fe en Dios chili parlor in the ruins of the Hotel Crockett on the other side of town. The hotel was the place where Fitz had met the mother of his sons. The hotel was closed, but the café was run by Terasina Vidavarri, a wary woman who had been raped by a soldier and who ran a seldom-visited café. She continued Dove’s education by teaching him how to read from two books. One of the books was a children’s storybook; the other was about how to write business letters. Dove and Terasina eventually became lovers, and once Dove took Terasina by force outside by the clothesline.
Byron stole from the café, and Terasina mistakenly blamed the crime on Dove. She was so angered that she threw him out, and Dove left Arroyo on a freight train. Dove took up with a girl named Kitty Twist, a runaway from a children’s home, and saved her life when she was about to fall under the wheels of a train. When they attempted a burglary in Houston, Kitty was caught. Dove got away on a freight to New Orleans. One of the first things he saw in New Orleans was a man cutting the heads off turtles that were to be made into turtle soup and throwing the bodies into a pile. Even with the heads cut off, the bodies tried to climb to the top of the pile. One turtle was able to reach the top of the pile before it slid back to the bottom.
In the port city, with its many different influences and cultures, Dove experienced his most interesting adventures. He worked as a painter on a steamship (but did not paint anything), fooled a prostitute who was trying to rob him, sold coffeepots and “beauty certificates” (which supposedly entitled the bearer to a treatment at a beauty shop) while seducing the women to whom he was selling, and, in his most memorable escapade, worked in a condom factory. The condoms, which were called O-Daddies and bore interesting names and colors, were made in a house by a mom-and-pop firm, Velma and Rhino Gross.
Dove’s lengthiest stay was with the people who inhabited the twin worlds of Oliver Finnerty’s brothel and Doc Dockery’s speakeasy. In the brothel he found, in addition to his old friend Kitty Twist, who had become a prostitute, Hallie Breedlove, a onetime schoolteacher who was the star of Finnerty’s string of girls. Hallie was in love with Achilles Schmidt, a former circus strongman whose legs had been cut off by a train. Schmidt’s upper body was still powerful and every day he surged into Dockery’s bar with the air of one who could beat up anyone there—and he could. Dove’s main job at Finnerty’s was to couple with the girls in the place, who were pretending to be virgins being deflowered, while customers watched through peepholes. Hallie, who still retained vestiges of her former life as a teacher, was interested in Dove’s mind and helped him to continue to learn to read. Dove’s closeness to Hallie angered Achilles, who assaulted Dove in Dockery’s bar. Schmidt beat Dove until Dove was blind, and a gang of people then descended on Schmidt and killed him. Dove managed to make his way back to Texas and Terasina’s café.
