I opened my Jan. 28 New Yorker to find that my nude picture of Nelson Algren's "Frenchy", Simone de Beauvoir, had "disrupted all of France". The last time I disrupted FRance was in 1944 when several of my B-24's bombs ( I was a Navigator in Jimmy Stewart's 445h Group) straddled their Nazi installation targets and hit the countryside. Or come to think of it, some hectares of Paris adjoining Goerings long black fighter repair hangars at Orly Airfield!
My French connection occurs at a fortuitous time in my long career, coming as it does a few months before a major exhibition of my work goes up in the Galerie Albert Loeb. Loeb has exhibited Picasso, Monet and Miro- but also Chicago's Robert Guinan, whose seven or so p[aintings eaqch year sell to European and Hollywood royalty hanging out in one end of Paris or the other. Huinan, incidentally, copied one of the Madison St. pictures in my Nelson Algren project, (with my permission and as an homage to me making up the title) and that work sold for more than $70,000. Or for a pittance in Euros depending on your financial orientation. I was delighted that The Reader sought me out yet again, having been very kind to me this year. First D. Isaacs did an article, then a fine review of my 60th book "Chicago's Nelson Algren" appeared . I was proud that it was given lead space ahead of Studs Terkel's fine new bio. I was especially happy to be recognized by The Reader becaus only the Sun-Times deigned to review it. The Trib did call it an "editor's choice" on an issue that featured their Nelson Algren short stopry winners- The very next issue kvelled over a pretty good book on midwestern grain elevatprs, and ran a nearly two page picture of a New York tugboat captain at work. Poor Nelson. Gone and still largely ignored by the Tribune, except as a name to inspire short stopry writers from the vasty elevator grain areas. ..Der Spiegel Magazine, German and Danish editions, an excitable magazine in taly, and a penurious chain of papers in Quebec, have all latched onto Simone's lovely hindquarters. The picture appears on page 159 of "Chicago's Nelson Algren", now selling more briskly than before the New Yorker's feuilleton. Paul Berlanga, in charge of sales at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, which sells my pictures, has decided to raise my prices in general based on my growing international acute.
The Albert Loeb Galerie on Boulevard des Beaux Arts, is already fielding a dozen requests for the picture at a thousand Euros each.

We had been expecting President Sarkosy and his curvaceous girl friend Carla Bruni at the opening, but as I mentioned to one of the French TV stations interviewing me last week, I've extended an invitation to the young lady to pose for me in her bathroom as Simone did in Chicago. It might give her a leg up over the PR shenanigans of Paris Hilton.

When I started out to do a simple favor for my friends Nelson and Frenchy I had no idea that the foible he warned me about- that she rarely closed the bathroom door- would a mere 56 years later would engender my disruption of France, as the New Yorker put it, and get me calumniated by two of DeBeauvoir's former lovers representing at least three of France's numerous sexes.

I'm sorry to hear that Nelson Algren has also been forgotten in Chicago on the occasion of Simone de Beauvoir's centenary. He certainly has been given short shrift in Paris as the program for the scholarly conference organized by Julia Kristeva shows. We have to be thankful, I suppose, that his books are back in print.

Algren's centenary falls next year. What will Chicago do about it? He and Bellow were the city's best novelists in the second half of the 20th century. The French go overboard, pro and con, for their writers. Chicagoans apparently forget theirs.

Mr. Byrne,

I'm sure that Nelson Algren's centenary will be properly observed once someone convinces Daley it would improve Chicago's Olympic bid.

After all, a city's gotta have priorities...

-- SCAM

There will be several articles on Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir in the February 11th release of Swans Commentary (Swans.com).

I share your correspondent's concern that Algren's centennial will be as unheralded as was his presence in his beloved Chicago. On the bright side , the Stephen Daiter Gallery is considering an exhibition of many of my Nelson Algren pictures and LookingGlass Theater is remounting the 2001 play they did on him that contains about 20 of my pictures of Nelson in his milieu. Ideally the Art Institute, Contemporary Museum or the Spertus Museum should consider a comprehensive show on one of our two greatest writers. I did my bit last year, using a dozen "Algrens" in my six month show at the Chicago History Museum.