Algren (23 page)

Nelson headed home in the second week of September just as the reviews to
The Man with the Golden Arm
had begun to appear in the press. He finally had a hit.

Algren's best and most famous novel starts in the middle of the action—it is a year after the war, and Frankie “Machine” Majcinek
and his friend Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin are standing in the police lineup before Captain “Recordhead” Bednar, but they're not sure why they're there. Sparrow figures correctly that it is because Zero Schwiefka, the owner of the bar where they work running the poker game, was late in making his payoff to the cops. They aren't worried—they know Zero will get them out. Frankie had been wounded in the war and came home with a Purple Heart medal. He has gone back to dealing cards for a living, though he also aspired to play the drums in a jazz band like his hero and fellow Pole Gene Krupa. Sparrow is a fearful, bespectacled half-Jewish petty crook in a red baseball cap who is devoted to Frankie, and works steering gamblers into the poker games. His side jobs include being a finder of lost dogs, meaning that he steals dogs to sell, or for the reward. Bednar calls Sparrow a “moron,” though Frankie corrects him to say that Sparrow is a “moroff”—more off than on. Frankie expresses in his cell a blustery pride in his abilities: “It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch,” and shows off card tricks for Sparrow. But at night he dreams of a soldier in an army hospital ward with a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back; this represents his morphine addiction. In the morning Frankie sees men through the bars of his cell who are filled with guilt: “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.”

After Schwiefka comes to bail them out, Sparrow and Frankie discuss Nifty Louie, a sinister dealer in morphine, which is peddled by a blind bum named Piggy, who never takes a bath and uses his odor to take vengeance on those with sight. Frankie is using morphine, but still thinks he can control it. He goes home to see his wife, Sophie, but is afraid to meet her—she's in a wheelchair because of something he did. So Sparrow and Frankie go to a bar instead.

All of this exposition is contained in just twenty pages of tightly packed prose—Nelson establishes Frankie's weakness and fragile pride, his troubled marriage, the corruption of the local police, and the hopelessness of the people around him, while bringing an indictment on the materialist society that created their circumstances. Algren also introduces, with the character of Sparrow, a sense of humor and friendship that is mostly missing from his earlier novels. And while his southern dialect in
Somebody in Boots
and, later, in
Walk on the Wild Side
seems often cartoonish, in
Golden Arm
Algren catches the speech of immigrant Chicago—with its dropped
th
, double and triple negatives, and how someone would go “by” the store, rather than “to” it. He has mastered his craft.

After their short stint in jail, Frankie and Sparrow go to Antek's Tug & Maul bar at Milwaukee and Division, where they meet Molly, a pale, exhausted young woman, and her abusive partner Drunky John. She's the girl with a “heart-shaped face,” a description commonly used for Sylvia Sidney, the actress Algren had long admired. But Frankie must go home to Sophie, a girl he grew up with, who got him to marry her with a false pregnancy. Critic James Giles calls their relationship “one of the most destructive marriages in American literature.” After the atomic bomb is dropped on Japan, Sophie and Frankie go out drinking and dancing at Antek's, and afterward they get into a car accident. At first, not much seems to be wrong with Sophie, but she now believes she is crippled and tied to a wheelchair. She keeps a book of “fatal accidence” with news clippings of disasters, including her own, which she blesses because she knows it has tied Frankie to her closer than anything else could. Frank and Sophie argue constantly, in a circular style reminiscent of Nelson's parents, with Sophie nagging him for attention, for beer, for a pet dog—and always reminding him that it is his fault that she can't dance anymore. Listening to them fight, “Jailer” the landlord thinks that they could love each other, if only they knew how.

Though Frankie is the book's main character, Sophie is the most interesting one. She is tormented before their marriage by Frankie's careless womanizing, and afterward by his indifference. She manages to inspire only his guilt, and this she uses relentlessly against him. But though he is bound to her, he still does not really love her in the way she wants. She has destroyed herself in her pursuit of love, and still not found what she was seeking. She even despises the dog she coaxed Frankie to bring her.

In her solitary musings, pushing herself back and forth in her wheelchair, Sophie sings to herself and imagines a golden past when everything was clear and measured, as the grocer measured the sugar. Now she has a vision of the whole city turning against her, and that everyone in it is crippled, and says to herself, “God has forgotten us all.” Sophie imagines the dealer Louie and his revolting henchman, Blind Pig, as the new Division Street gods. Her vigils are dark and terrible, filled with crazed dreaming and anthropomorphic shadows that gather like familiars: “There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the tenement's long shadows moved all the way down from the fourth floor rear, slid silently under her door and drifted across her lap. To tremble one moment at still finding her there and then lie comforted and still.”

The book also makes room for a comic relationship—a love triangle between Solly, Sophie's friend Violet, and her impotent old husband, Stash, a naive immigrant who shares a nickname with Amanda's stepfather. Stash wants nothing more in life than to pull off the next leaf on the calendar, and stick his head out the window to read the thermometer. He insists on eating old food, to save money. Whenever Violet is tired of him, she locks him in a cupboard, which he finds a relief. After a struggle between the three of them called the Great Sandwich Battle, Sparrow makes love to Violet with a salami string in his teeth, but she decides it is better than no love at all.

Following this farcical love scene, Frankie and Molly share a tender one. Molly is a less well-developed character than Sophie, but she represents in the novel the possibility of redemption for Frankie, and the healing of his wounds. Molly is able to tell Frankie the truth about himself, that he is chasing fixes from Louie not to help with the pain his belly, but to deal with his own guilt over Sophie. She tells him not to fool himself that the accident was anything special, made in heaven. “It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whiskey glass 'n you better start pickin' up the pieces 'n start livin' again with what's left over,” she tells him. Critic James Giles proposes that facing reality and being one's true self are the challenges posed by existentialism—and Frankie's problem is that he can't meet them. He tries to escape consciousness of his existence through drugs and “literal or symbolic prisons.”

With Molly, Frankie thinks it is possible to beat his addiction. As he does in all his novels, Algren offers love as a golden thread leading out of hell, a way to redemption, if someone can only hang on to it long enough. But no one ever does. Immediately after the scene with Molly, Frankie is taunted by Louie for his addiction, and Frankie in an unpremeditated rage breaks his neck, as Bruno had broken the neck of the Greek in
Never Come Morning
. Now Frankie will need the morphine more than ever, and he gets it from Blind Pig. He gets clean for a while after being caught stealing and sent to jail. After he gets out, he loses his job at Zero Schwiefka's as a dealer, since he had become too shaky to handle the cards. Molly becomes a stripper in a black nightclub. In one of the most harrowing scenes in the book, Sparrow, in need of money, is tricked by Blind Pig and the police into delivering morphine to Frankie, and helping him get his fix. Before police come for both of them, Frankie tells Sparrow that through his addiction, he had rolled up all the worries of his life “into one big worry”—the monkey on his back, which shrinks and grows but never leaves him. He explains how the addiction
protects him from awareness of his own reality, with his loneliness and guilt. “He weighs thirty-five pounds 'n he's settin' right here on my back usin' all his weight 'cause he knows I got to carry him around so's I don't get lonesome for nobody no more.”

After their arrest, Frankie is let out of jail quickly, but Sparrow, a repeat offender, is held and put under tough questioning to get him to accuse Frankie for the drug dealer's death. Frankie is pursued by both the police and “McGantic,” and Sophie is sent to a mental hospital. Frankie finally finds a room in a men's hotel and hangs himself from a light fixture with a piece of newspaper twine, wishing with his last breath that Sophie will have a good dream that she is dancing again.

In
Golden Arm
Nelson revisits the Christian imagery he explored in “Design for Departure,” but with more authority and to greater effect. A defrocked priest in the lineup tells the guilt-ridden Captain Bednar that “we are all members of one another,” a paraphrase of the apostle Paul. It is also a theme of Nelson's work overall—that the lost and the broken belong to the whole body of mankind, and must be recognized. But the captain doesn't get it—and feels along with other characters in the book that he is being crucified. He feels left out of the community of man and dehumanized—with “an iron heart, an iron life.” Sparrow, being questioned by police, says he's being nailed to the cross. Sophie tells Frankie that if Jesus Christ treated her the way he did, “I'd drive in the nails myself.” Violet complains about how they all have their cross to bear. But it is really Frankie who represents Christ, constantly impaled with the needle and sacrificed for sins both real and imagined. Only two characters in the book find another kind of life—Violet's old husband dies and she abandons Sparrow to marry Jailer the Landlord, achieving middle-class respectability.

The reviews for
The Man with the Golden Arm
were almost universally rapturous.
Time
magazine called it one of the year's finest
novels and a “triumph.” The review saw what Nelson always was trying to do—burst through middle-class complacency and create compassion for the people of the “lower depths.” “Readers with queasy stomachs may shrink from an environment in which the unbelievably sordid has become a way of life,”
Time
wrote. “They will also come away with some of Algren's own tender concern for his wretched, confused and hopelessly degenerate cast of characters.” Kelsey Guilfoil in the
Tribune
alerted Chicago readers that it was time they recognized they had a writer of the first rank in their midst, saying that “surely there is no writer of the present day who can so well approach Dostoyevsky in portraying the lowly, the disinherited, the miserable, and the damned; whose understanding eye sees so well beneath the filth and wretchedness the beating heart of humanity.” Other reviews compared Algren to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. The
New Yorker
fretted that the novel might be too much for some stomachs, but A. C. Spectorsky in the
New York Times
said readers who object to the starkness of the environment “will be missing much, for it has a kind of dedicated and comprehending honesty out of which a crucial truth emerges”—that the people of Division Street are products and victims of their surroundings. A rare negative review was in the Roman Catholic monthly
Extension
, which praised the writing but concluded that the characters' goals were so “morbid, dirty and hopeless” that the book was “wholly objectionable.” And some Chicago Poles continued to have problems with their neighborhood's portrayal in the book, as they had with
Never Come Morning.
“I didn't know anybody like that,” said Mitchell Wisniewski, who lived in Polonia in the 1940s and 1950s. “Those people are bums.”

Nelson was suddenly the toast of literary Chicago—Stuart Brent hosted a book-signing event that had people lined up along Clark Street, and the little shop nearly burst with the crush of buyers, well-wishers, and newspaper photographers. Jack Conroy was there
to celebrate, his big, curly head and ears like jug handles looming above the crowd. Ken McCormick gleefully carried armloads of books from one room to another, shedding his jacket in the heat. Nelson started by signing long notes in each copy, driving Stuart crazy by asking for a new copy when he felt he hadn't said something right—a nicety that cost Stuart three bucks a copy. Nelson got more efficient as the evening wore on. By the end of the night, a thousand copies were sold in just that one store. The novel stayed on the city's best-seller list until the following spring, and there was interest from Hollywood in a movie version.

Ernest Hemingway wrote Nelson to congratulate him, with the following quote to use for publicity: “Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and where that over-grown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow each day, Nelson Algren comes like a corvette…. Truman Capote fans grab your hats, if you have any, and go. This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.” McCormick was wary of using the quote in ads—because it insulted writers who would share Algren's audience. But Hemingway also had told Nelson to send a copy of the letter to George Braziller, editor of the prestigious Book Find Club, which picked the novel as its December selection. Nelson was so thrilled with this praise from his hero that he taped the letter to the refrigerator he had finally acquired. He was a champion at last.