I had the opportunity to watch a new documentary film, "Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, the Road is All" in which one of the interviewees refers to Algren (1909 -- 1981) as the "poet of the lost". The film moved me to revisit Algren, a writer I don't know well, and to read his best-known novel, "The Man With The Golden Arm". Algren received the first National Book Award for this novel in 1950 -- an outstanding initial choice for a premiere literary award. In the novel, Algren tells the story of lost, lonely individuals. He writes with a harsh beauty amply justifying the film's reference to him as the "poet of the lost". The novelist Kurt Vonnegut who knew Algren refers to him near the end of the film as "the loneliest man I ever met", a description that would apply to many of the characters in Algren's award-winning novel.
The novel is set in the bars, cheap apartments, prisons, and streets frequented by the Chicago underclass in 1947- 1948. The novel's main character, who goes by the name of Frankie Machine, has acquired the nickname of the "man with the golden arm" due in part to his steadiness in dealing cards. Frankie aspires to put his steadiness of arm, wrist and hand to use by becoming a jazz drummer. Characters in this novel often are called by their roles, and Frankie is known as "Dealer". Frankie served in the Army in WW II, took a severe wound to the stomach, and became a morphine addict. Algren's novel is one of the first to explore seriously and realistically the use of drugs.
The novel is filled with low life, highly differentiated characters, including Frankie's friend Solly, a mildly-retarded petty thief who usually is called Sparrow, or "punk". Frankie is unhappily married to Sophie, called "Zosh" who is bitter and confined to a wheelchair after an accident with Frankie driving the car. Frankie has a mistress, Mollie, a stripper and bar maid; Sparrow has a mistress, Violet, whom he sees when her husband, the Old Man is asleep or in his cups. The book is replete with shady, colorful characters, including the bar owner, the keeper of the fixed card games that uses Frankie as the dealer, crooked lawyers, quack doctors, gamblers, drunks, petty criminals, and fixers.
The plot develops slowly and involves Frankie and Sparrow's relationship and the accidental killing of the fixer, Louis, which results in Frankie's attempt to evade the law. The novel is in two lengthy sections with most of the action and plot development taking place in the second section. Most of the book consists of a lengthy series of vignettes of varying lengths separated by paragraph breaks. These small sections each focus on a particular scene and a small group of individuals. They develop character and settings. Aspects of the story get foretold in each of the settings but dimly so with the overall focus of the story becoming clear only as it proceeds. The scenes are often not chronological and sometimes tend to run into each other with an almost surrealistic effect.
Much of the novel is in dialogue and full of the slang of the late 1940s. The book is replete with religious, racial, and national derogatory terms that would not meet contemporary standards The book is full of quotations from billboards, ads, and popular songs. The omniscient narrator's voice is, in contrast to the dialogue, poetic and rhythmical. With its lyricism, the novel concludes fittingly with a poem. Throughout the book, the narrator describes and comments on the characters and their actions with a mix of compassion and irony. In this passage early in the novel, the narrator comments on the American dream through Frankie's eyes.
"The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one's future nor ever any place all his own. Had failed before the radio commercials, by the street car plugs and by the standards of every self-respecting magazine. With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last, without enough sense of honor to climb off a West Madison Street Keep-Our-City-Clean box and not enough ambition to raise his eyes back to the billboards."
The following passage describes a nightly gathering of suspects in a local police station.
" Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, square johns and copper johns; lamisters and hallroom boys, ancient pious perverts and old blown parolees, rapoes and record-men; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned."
The novel starts slowly and with some rough edges gathers in force and conviction. The reader gradually gets drawn into the settings and develops a feeling for the characters and their struggles and failings without romanticizing them. "We are all members of one another" is a theme driven home in the work through all the stories of isolation, frustration and loneliness. "The Man With The Golden Arm" is slow and difficult; but it is an American masterwork. I am grateful to the documentary I saw for getting me to read this novel at last.
Robin Friedman
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