Algren’s Laws
Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never lie down with a woman who’s got more troubles than you.
Nelson Algren (1909-81), née Nelson Algren Abraham, tough-guy novelist from Chicago, repeated this credo with slight changes in wording in an essay ‘What Every Young Man Should Know’ in the novel A Walk on the Wild Side, and in many lectures. Mr. Algren did not live up to it however. He led a complicated, sometimes self-destructive life, often gambling too much, which included a long-running affair with Simone de Beauvoir. (He managed to confuse the FBI which was keeping tabs on him because of his left-wing views by changing his listing in the Chicago telephone directory in 1954 to ‘de Beauvoir Simon’.)
Nor did he invent the credo. H. E. F. Donohue reported in the foreword to Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964): “He shunts aside all rules regulations and dicta except for three laws he says a nice old Negro lady once taught him: Never play cards with any man named ‘Doc’. Never eat at any place called ‘Mom’s’. And never ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.”
Even ‘the nice old Negro lady’ may have been a fiction. A friend of Algren’s from the 1930s, Dave Peltz, told Ralph Keyes, author of a book about misquotations Nice Guys Finish Seventh, that he himself had devised the rules. Peltz said that he included them in a letter to Algren but attributed them to the black madam of a local whorehouse rather than to himself, knowing that the author would pay more attention to them if he thought they came from someone in the underclasses. “He always felt that people on the outside, people in the underground, were wiser than those of us in the mainstream who belonged in the middle class” said Mr. Peltz.
A number of variants of Algren’s Laws have been recorded e.g. Steiner’s Statements (”Never eat in a restaurant named Mom’s, play poker with a man named Doc, or buy a car from a man named Frenchy”) and Hartley’s Second Law (”Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself”) both of which were included by John Peers in his compilation of 1001 Logical Laws Accurate Axioms Profound Principles etc. (1980). Meanwhile, John Winokur attributed “Never bet with a man named ‘One-Iron’” to Tom Sharp in Friendly Advice (1990). The advice of Mr. Dooley (Finely Peter Dunn, 1867-1936) also is worth remembering in this connection: “Trust everybody but cut the cards.”
The rhythm of Algren’s Laws recalls Shakespeare’s advice in King Lear: “Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend.” Here ‘lenders’ books’ are the account books in which debts are recorded and a ‘placket’ is the slit at the top of a skirt or petticoat designed so that the garment could be easily put on and off but obviously opened occasionally for other not-so-innocent purposes.
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