Pondering immortality for Motley ‘brothers’ who weren’t really brothers. Willard and Archibald went from Englewood to artistic fame.

The conversation took place late at night early into this new year inside a tavern that has existed for decades and was once a lively meeting place for all sorts of creative types.

This conversation concerned the nature of fame and the often-flimsy concept of immortality. Eventually it came around to two artists long gone. They were, one of the people at the tavern argued, brothers, but she was wrong. Though Archibald and Willard Motley grew up in the safe, middle-class prosperous Englewood neighborhood of the first decades of the 20th century, they were not brothers.

Willard was born to a single mother. His mother moved away after his birth, and he grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents. The person he thought was his “older brother,” Archibald, was actually his uncle. He would eventually learned the biological truth and Archibald, nearly 20 years older, would become a huge influence on the youngster who, at 10 years old, announced to the family that he wanted to be a writer and went about the arduous business of eventually becoming one.

Most of the six people at the tavern had never heard of Willard Motley. They did know of Archibald, who became an acclaimed and admired visual artist, a painter of world renown.

Those who had heard of Willard knew him only by 10 words he had written: “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.” That came from a fictional character named Nick Romano in Motley’s 1947 first novel, “Knock on Any Door,” and from actor John Derek in the 1949 film of the same name. The movie also starred Humphrey Bogart in the story of a former altar boy gone homicidally wrong.

In his review of the book in the Tribune, critic Horace Clayton wrote, “Chicago has produced many great writers .... But of all of them ... only Motley has dealt in such detail with the nuances of feeling — the delicate balance between love and hate, cruelty and kindness — which exists in the human personality.”

He would write a few more books, among them “We Fished All Night,” about the impact of World War II on three young Chicago men and 1958′s “Let No Man Write My Epitaph,” which picked up the lives of some of the “Knock on Any Door” characters and also became a film.

Willard died in Mexico in 1965, where he had moved to escape the hounding from the IRS. He lived there in near-poverty, adopted a son and wrote his final novel, “Let Noon Be Fair,” published the year after his death.

It is not very good, but the others are. And through the years, a few people have come to Willard’s defense, tried to give him a bit of justifiable praise. Newspaperman and novelist Bill Granger did so in this paper in 1994, writing, “Motley wrote of the city and its people with exquisite sympathy. There are sections of ‘Knock on Any Door’ that might move you to tears and other parts that will move you to anger.”

One reason perhaps that Motley has not been held in such high regard is that, though he focused on such issues as poverty, crime and injustice, the matter of race was rarely if ever addressed. Whenever asked about this he often replied, “My race is the human race.” And so, he was never placed in the company of such other Black Chicago writers as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks.

That’s how Nelson Algren felt, writing that Motley “never became involved in Black politics. He wrote about white people for white people.” That is from a harsh review of the 1979 book, “The Diaries of Willard Motley.” The Tribune headline called Motley an “‘invisible man’ among Black writers.”

The Motleys were last together, so to speak, at a 2015 exhibition of Archibald’s work at the Chicago Cultural Center, “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist.” As my then-colleague Howard Reich wrote, “Though not all of Motley’s paintings concern music … it’s the jazz life that animates his world and this exhibition.”

You can, of course, be the judge of the Motleys. It’s relatively internet easy to find and ogle the works of Archibald, who died in 1981. None of Willard’s books are in print but old, well-thumbed copies can be found. A couple of people at the tavern said they would seek out one of Motley’s books and then another tried to give him a bit of immortality by telling a story.

She told of how at 13 years old, prodded by Archibald, Willard sent a short story to the Chicago Defender newspaper. It was printed and the editors were so impressed that they offered him a weekly column, and thus did he become the first of many to write under the byline of Bud Billiken, a mythical figure created by the newspaper to tell children’s stories and a figure celebrated for decades in the eponymous South Side parade that takes place every August and is the oldest and largest African-American parade in the country.

That is something, I suppose, but it should be noted, for comparative value, that Algren has had a fine and lively “life” since his death in 1981. There is the Algren Committee keeping the flame and a Nelson Algren museum in Northwest Indiana. There is “Nelson Algren Live,” which captures a live 2009 Steppenwolf Theatre reading featuring Willem Dafoe, Barry Gifford, me, the late Martha Lavey, and many others.

There are also two feature length documentaries are out there: “Algren,” written and directed by Columbia College professor Michael Caplan, and “Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All.” The former has just finished a three-month theatrical release and Tuesday becomes available on Apple, iTunes and Vimeo On Demand.

kkogan@chicagotribune.com