Nelson Algren is Still Alive

by Michael Antman

Imagine a modestly talented contemporary novelist undertaking the task of writing about a down-and-out morphine addict, small-time card dealer and amateur drummer who associates with similar urban lowlifes.  Flat, featureless present-tense writing and a fixation on the imitative fallacy being the dominant mode in contemporary fiction — and morphine addiction causing extreme lassitude, slowed breathing and a blissed-out retreat from the grit and grime of the world — one would expect this hypothetical novel itself to have a dreamy, distant and largely featureless prose style.

But Chicago novelist Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm, the winner of the first National Book Award for Fiction back in 1950, feels more like a shot of pure adrenaline.  This, the most famous of Algren’s novels, depicts a sort of hyper-realistic Chicago that is almost animistic in its aliveness.  Consider, for example, this passing description of a night-time scene:

“Just as the street lamps came on the streetcar paused and went dark half a block down. It had slipped its trolley and against the last light of evening the pole groped blindly for the wire overhead, found it at last and came on again, slowly, but with all self-confidence gone; yet bearing its precious load of light caught from that magic wire with a sort of tenderness.”

Postwar Chicago may have been a grey and grimy place — a city of sauerkraut and sausages, of cramped Mom and Pop groceries, dimly lit alleys and gangways, and crowded tenements — yet its denizens somehow seemed more fully alive, at least in Algren’s telling, than the clean-cut condo dwellers and conformist coffee shop baristas of today. 

The plot of The Man With a Golden Arm isn’t complicated.  It centers on one Francis Majcinek (nicknamed “Frankie Machine” — and when, by the way, did ordinary people stop having such colorful nicknames?) whose morphine addiction began when he was treated for shrapnel wounds in World War II.  He is described as a “tranquil, square-faced, shagheaded little buffalo-eyed blond.” 

His childlike wife, “Zosh,” (for some reason short for “Sophie”) has been confined to a wheelchair ever since an auto accident caused by Frankie, drunk on a cheap whisky concoction called “Antek’s A-Bomb Special,” though her paralysis seems more psychogenic than neurological.  (Frankie claims he never drinks unless he’s “alone or with somebody.”)

Zosh and Frankie bicker a lot; he accuses her of having a “repercussion,” and she says, “you mean a concussion, dummy,” to which he retorts, “no, I mean a repercussion.  Like you been bounced on your head twice.”

Mostly, though, Zosh just sits at her window all day and night, in the Polish neighborhood where they live, looking wistfully out at the city that’s going about its business without her:

“Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the color of the hustlers’ night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night…For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it. No one else was really any better off than herself, she reflected with a child's satisfac-tion, they had all been twisted about a bit whether they sat in a wheelchair or not. She could tell just by the way once familiar doorways had come to look menacing in the morning light, ready to be slammed in the face of anyone who knocked at all. Nobody was at home to anyone else any more.”

But Zosh, in her rueful and inarticulate way, still has needs, and in her crippled state is nonetheless still filled with piss and vinegar.  Here’s how she petitions Frankie for a dog:

"I got more brains in my butt than your whole scrumblebug fam’ly got in their heads — scrambled eggs is what your fam’ly got for brains. You gonna bring me a damned dawg ‘r ain't you gonna bring me no damned dawg?  That’s what I want to know…Where’s my pass-time then?  A dawg’d be my pass-time oney I don’t count.  I count for nuts.”

As this snippet would suggest, The Man With the Golden Arm is an exuberant masterpiece of Chicago slang, patois, arcana and argot.  The characters may be hectic, disturbed, depressed, crippled and inarticulate, but they are so bursting with energy and life force that they seem to leap off of the page.  Nobody in this novel is “important” — nobody, in the dreary, depressed post-war Chicago “counts for nuts.”  (One of Frankie’s friends looks “like a man who had never seen a cloud.”) But they are the kind of memorable “characters” (in both senses of the word) that have made this novel, and Algren’s work in general, still feel alive when so many of his literary contemporaries have passed from the scene.

Frankie eventually ends up having an affair with a young woman named “Molly-O,” whom he has known since they were children, and who helps him beat his morphine addiction.  But Frankie has other troubles, including a murder rap, and comes to a bad end at the end of a rope on April Fool’s Day, only a few short years after he’d managed to survive the war.

No one wants to go back to those difficult post-war years, at the end of one terrible conflict and the beginning of a decades-long Cold War.  But it would be nice to return to the days when poetic sensibilities such as Algren’s flourished, and made even the most mundane scenes seem like magic: 

“A short, cold spring. By morning a musk-colored murmuring drifted down from all the flats above and the amber afternoons passed with music-making: a snatch of rhythm by the door, shouts from porch to porch and laughter rocking down the stairs. Till all the weekday morning murmurs, all the back-porch calls and all the laughter on the stairs mounted to a single Saturday night shout, when the whole house shook with Negro roistering. To the din above his head Frankie would tap away on his practice board though hardly able to hear the radio's beat for the slap and slam, the shambling and the clattering of heavy feet, right overhead all night long.”

Readers encountering Algren for the first time may be tempted to start with his collection of short stories, The Neon Wilderness, rather than the pure, uncut rush of The Man With the Golden Arm, for in truth the latter, for all its vividness, can be dense and overwhelming at times, and not the sort of book one reads in a single sitting. 

Many of the stories cover the same territory as The Man With a Golden Arm, and the dialogue (as in this excerpt from the story “A Bottle of Milk For My Mother,”) will seem familiar:

“What’s Benkowski doin’ for a living these days, Lefty?

“Just nutsin’ around.”

“What’s Nowogrodski up to?”

“Goes wolfin’ on roller skates by Riverview.  The rink’s open all year round.”

“Does he have much luck?”

“Never turns up a hair. They go by too fast.”

Nobody talks like this any more.  And, for that matter, few writers write like this any more (Richard Price, whom I suspect was influenced by Algren, is an exception.)

Kudos, then, to Seven Stories Press for republishing both of these books in fine new editions and keeping Algren’s worldview and reputation alive.  They — events, books, life itself — all go by too fast, and it is a bracing pleasure to return for a few hours to a long-gone Chicago, and a long-lost literary sensibility. 

Michael Antman is the author of the novels Cherry Whip and Everything Solid Has a Shadow. He is a longtime book and theatre critic and was a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing.