The Man With the Golden Arm (53 page)

Glasses. Once upon a time, they were the mark of the vulnerable. At least to me. Not the pince-nez of Woodrow Wilson; his was the emblem of the Sunday schoolmaster, the wrinkled prune, the bloodless. Nor the pince-nez of FDR, which, in its off-again, on-again behavior, became as insouciant a sign as his tilted cigarette holder. Nor the pince-nez of my mother, which, considering her tough credo, became as antic and outrageous as symbol as Bobby Clark’s painted-on glasses. No.

When Lee Meadows appeared on the pitching mound for the Pittsburgh Pirates, it was, for me, a revolutionary moment. He was the first major leaguer to wear glasses. And then came Carmen Hill. And George Torporcer. And when a slugger, Chick Hafey, decided to wear them, I knew that a corner had been turned. And when, some time later, another bespectacled slugger, Bull Connor, turned the hose on people, I no longer had to worry about the daily fate of ‘four-eyes’. Nor feel inordinately tender.

It was, apparently, not so for Billie Holiday. As recently as 1956, she was soft on those who wore specs. I had gone to see her at the Budland. It was a short-lived jazz club in a South Side Chicago cellar. I was in the process of working on a children’s jazz book. ‘Sure, baby. Come on,’ she said at the other end of the phone. Nelson Algren accompanied me. He was, at the time, wearing glasses.

Billie’s voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps fifteen, twenty patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang ‘Fine and Mellow’, you felt that way. And when she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me’, you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

After her performance, Algren and I shambled into her dressing room. Dressing room, did I say? It was a storeroom: whiskey cases stacked against the walls, cartons of paper napkins, piles of plastic utensils strewn about, this, that, and the other. It didn’t matter. She was there, with the gardenia in her hair. Lady, in the gracious manner of a lady, bade us be seated. Algren slouched into a chair against the far wall, in the semidarkness. He appeared a character out of one of his works: Bruno or Frankie or Sparrow or Dove.

Patiently, she answered questions that I’m sure had been put to her too many times before. About the white stoops of Baltimore, of the others for whom she scrubbed, about Miss Bessie, about her grandmother, about club owners, the honest and the venal. When there was trouble remembering, her eyes half-shut as in a slow blues, her hands posed in midair.
If, by chance, I hit upon the right name, her fingers snapped. That’s it, baby. No words were needed; the gesture said it.

And when the conversation ended, as casually as it had begun, and the waiter had brought her a tumbler of gin – ‘Lemon peel, baby’ – she indicated the man in the shadows, Nelson Algren. She had been aware of his presence from the beginning; there had been mumbled introductions. Now she murmured inquiringly, ‘Who’s that man?’ Algren explained that she and he had the same publisher.
The Man with the
Golden Arm
and
Lady Sings the Blues
had both been put out by Doubleday.

‘You’re all right,’ she said to him.

‘How do you know?’ he asked.

‘You’re wearin’ glasses.’

He laughed softly. ‘I know some people with glasses who got dollar signs for eyes.’

‘You’re kind.’

‘How can you tell?’ he persisted. How could she tell? He was half-hidden in the shadows.

‘Your glasses.’ She was persistent, too.

Nelson Algren no longer wears glasses, but he’s still a funny man. He may be the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may be the most serious. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public’s pocket are the order of the day – indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue – the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

Unlike Father William, Algren does not stand on his head. He just shuffles along. His appearance is that of a horse player, who, this moment, got the news: he had bet her across the board and she came in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his is not a mournful mien. He’s chuckling to himself. You’d think he was the blue-eyed winner rather than the brown-eyed loser. That’s what’s so funny about him. He
has
won. A
hunch: his writings may be read long after acclaimed works of other Academe’s darlings. To call on a Lillian Hellman phrase, he is not ‘the kid of the moment’. For in the spirit of a Zola or a Dreiser, he has captured a piece of that life behind the billboards. Some comic, that man.

At a time when our values are unprecedentedly upside-down – when Bob Hope, a humorless multimillionaire, is regarded as a funny man and a genuinely funny man (until his bad choice of lock-pickers) was regarded as our President – Algren is something of a Gavroche.

‘The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.’ It was something Algren wrote in 1961, as an added preface to his prose-poem,
Chicago: City on the Make.
The original work had been composed a decade earlier. It’s a responsibility to which he has been obstinately faithful. He’s openhearted to Molly-O and Steffi and Margo and Aunt Elly’s ‘girl’, who are forever up against it; who are forever in the pokey for turning a five-dollar trick with the wrong guy. (That fee is absurd today. You must remember his heroines subsisted long, long before inflation.) He’s mail-fisted to their judges, the Respectables, who turn a trick for no less than a hundred G’s. So, too, this piece of writing from the same essay:

What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they’ve been – the ring of a city’s awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet.

It was no accident that he wrote
The Man with the Golden Arm
so many centuries before posh suburban high schools fretted about junkies in their blue-eyed midst. The fate of Frankie Machine presaged adolescent hells to come.

In
Never Come Morning
, Algren gave us Bruno, the doomed young jack-roller. How different is he, the desperate city ethnic, from the young black mugger? Law and Order is the cry today, as Algren so eloquently italicized in the old poet’s prophecy: ‘The slums will take their revenge.’ Call it ghetto, if you wish.

Yet, I’m thinking of Nelson Algren, the funny man. The antic sense is there, of course, in Dove Linkhorn, the innocent, of
A Walk on the Wild Side
. It’s there in Frankie’s colleague, Sparrow, the hapless shoplifter. It’s there in Some Fellow Willie, who always looked suspicious because he always suspected himself of one thing or another. It’s there in Lost Ball Stahouska of the Baldhead A. C.’ s. He was something, that one. Remember when his conscience bothered him because he shoved an in-play baseball in his pocket, though he was unperturbed when cracking a safe with the help of three Chicago cops? As to the latter caper, Stahouska explained, ‘Oh,
everybody
does that.’

Again, you have it. Turning a two-dollar trick is a sin and prickly to the conscience. Turning a hundred-thou trick, that’s something else again. Lost Ball, were he around today, could well appreciate the workings of ITT, Lockheed, Penn Central, and the late Howard Hughes. Recurring in all of Algren’s work – novel, short story, poem – is the theme of the rigged ball-game. Offered in his unique lyric style, they are memorable.

In his poetic evocation of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, he asks the ever-impertinent question: How is it that front office men never conspire? However do senators get so close to God? Or winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?

Though today’s literary mandarins treat the man with benign neglect – he has in the past twenty-five years become something of a non-person – he is highly regarded in unexpected quarters.

About two years ago, in the streets of London, I ran into a voluble Welshman. On learning I was an American – let along a Chicagoan – he bought me a whiskey. I had no idea Americans were so popular with the people from Rhondda Valley. But it wasn’t that at all. He could hardly wait to blurt out, ‘You’re an American, you must know of Nelson Algren.’ He proceeded to rattle off, in mellifluous tongue, all the titles of Algren’s novels and short stories. On discovering that I actually knew the man, he bought drink after drink after drink. And on miner’s pay, at that. How I got back to the hotel shall forever remain a mystery to me.

In New York, an old freight elevator man, a small battered Irishman, whose one claim to immortality was an encounter with Fiorello La Guardia, asked me, between floors, if I’d ever heard of a writer named Algren. He had read
The Neon Wilderness
. As far as I know, he owned no coffee table.

Recently, in a conversation with a woman on welfare, his name came up. It was she, not I, who introduced it. She had been reading one of his paperbacks and saw herself in it. She had also been having her troubles with the Welfare Department and neighborhood cops. As far as I know, she owned no coffee table.

Maybe Nelson Algren’s horses usually run out of the money. Maybe his luck at the poker table is not that good. Maybe he’ll never be endowed by a university; nor
be earnestly regarded by literary makers and shakers. But he has good reason to just shuffle along like a laughing winner. And he may be the funniest man around.

Praise for Nelson Algren

‘Powerful, grisly, antic, horrifying, poetic, compassionate … [there is] virtually nothing more that one could ask.’

New York Times Book Review

‘A thriller that packs more of a punch than
Pulp Fiction
and more grittiness than either Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett,
The Man with the Golden Arm
is incredibly lyrical, as poetic as it is dramatic, combining the brutal dialogue of guys and broads with dreamlike images, and puncturing the harrowing narrative with revelations that flesh out every tragic figure into a fully-realised, complex character.’

The Scotsman

‘Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo’s, an artist who ranks, with this novel, among our best American authors.’

Chicago Sun Times

‘A stirring hard-boiled read.’

Maxim

‘An extraordinary piece of fiction … If the Bridget Jones brigade somehow drifted Nelson Algren’s way the world would undoubtedly be a better place and Rebel Inc’s bottom line invisible without a telescope. Keep my dream alive and buy this book.’

The Crack

‘A true novelists triumph.’

Time

‘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 … Mr Algren, boy, you are good.’

Ernest Hemingway

‘The finest American novel published since the war.’

Washington Post Book World

‘I was going to write a war novel. But it turned out to be this
Golden Arm
thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came crawling along and that was it.’

Nelson Algren

‘Profound and richly atmospheric.’

The Guardian

N
ELSON
A
LGREN
was born in 1909 in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. He was the author of five novels, including
A Walk on the Wild Side
which inspired the Lou Reed song of the same name,
Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning.
He was also a prolific writer of short stories, essays, travelogues and poems. In 1949
The Man with the Golden Arm
earned him the first American National Book Award.

His life was a succession of compulsive gambling, disastrous marriages and wild extremes – ranging from Texas prisons and skid-row soup-kitchens to Hollywood parties and literary celebrations. He also had a passionate love affair with French feminist Simone de Beauvoir while she was living with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Algren died in 1981, shortly after being appointed as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.