The Man With the Golden Arm

338 Pages·1999·1.45 MB·English

by  Algren Nelson

The Man with the
Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
CONTENTS

The Man with the Golden Arm

Afterword: Glasses by Studs Terkel
Foreword
Algren as I knew him
Kurt Vonnegut
According to the diary of my wife Jill Krementz, the photographer, the young
British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie came to our house in Sagaponack, Long
Island, for lunch on May 9th, 1981. His excellent novel Midnight’s Children had
just been published in the United States, and he told us that the most intelligent
review had been written by Nelson Algren, a man he would like to meet. I
replied that we knew Algren some, since Jill had photographed him several
times and he and I had been teachers at the Writers’ Workshop of the University
of Iowa back in 1965, when we were both dead broke and I was forty-three and
he was fifty-six.
I said, too, that Algren was one of the few writers I knew who was really
funny in conversation. I offered as a sample what Algren said at the Workshop
after I introduced him to the Chilean novelist José Donoso: ‘I think it would be
nice to come from a country that long and narrow.’
Rushdie was really in luck, I went on, because Algren lived only a few miles
to the north, in Sag Harbor, where John Steinbeck had spent the last of his days,
and he was giving a cocktail party that very afternoon. I would call him and tell
him we were bringing Rushdie along, and Jill would take pictures of the two of
them together, both writers about people who were very poor. I suggested that
the party might be the only one that Algren had given himself in his entire life,
since, no matter how famous he became, he remained a poor man living among
the poor, and usually alone. He was living alone in Sag Harbor. He had had a
new wife in Iowa City, but that marriage lived about as long as a Junebug. His
enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a
married man.
I said that Algren was bitter about how little he had been paid over the years
for such important work, and especially for the movie rights to what may be his
masterpiece, The Man with the Golden Arm, which made huge amounts of
money as a Frank Sinatra film. Not a scrap of the profits had come to him, and I
heard him say one time, ‘I am the penny whistle of American literature.’
When we got up from lunch, I went to the phone and dialed Nelson Algren’s
number. A man answered and said, ‘Sag Harbor Police Department.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’
‘Who were you calling?’ he said.
‘Nelson Algren,’ I said.
‘This is his house,’ he said, ‘but Mr. Algren is dead.’ A heart attack that
morning had killed Algren at the age of seventy-two.
He is buried in Sag Harbor – without a widow or descendants, hundreds and
hundreds of miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and
with whose underbelly he had been so long identified. Like James Joyce, he had
become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps
not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were.
Only a few weeks before his death, he had been elected by his supposed peers,
myself among them, to membership in the American Academy of Arts and
Letters – a certification of respectability withheld from many wonderful writers,
incidentally, including James Jones and Irwin Shaw. This was surely not the first
significant honor ever accorded him. When he was at the peak of his powers and
fame in the middle of this century, he regularly won prizes for short stories and
was the first recipient of a National Book Award for Fiction, and so on. And only
a few years before his death the American Academy and Institute had given him
its Medal for Literature, without, however, making him a member. Among the
few persons to win this medal were the likes of William Faulkner and Ernest
Hemingway.
His response to the medal had been impudent. He was still living in Chicago,
and I myself talked to him on the telephone, begging him to come to New York
City to get it at a big ceremony, with all expenses paid. His final statement on the
subject to me was this: ‘I’m sorry, but I have to speak at a ladies’ garden club
that day.’

At the cocktail party whose prospects may have killed him, I had hoped to ask
him if membership in the American Academy and Institute had pleased him
more that the medal. Other friends of his have since told me the membership had
moved him tremendously, and had probably given him the nerve to throw a
party. As to how the seeming insult of a medal without a membership had ever
taken shape: this was nothing but a clumsy clerical accident caused by the
awarders of prizes and memberships, writers as lazy and absentminded and
idiosyncratic in such matters as Algren himself.
God knows how it happened. But all’s well that ends well, as the poet said.
Another thing I heard from others, but never from Algren himself, was how
much he hoped to be remembered after he was gone. It was always women who
spoke so warmly of this. If it turned out that he head never mentioned the
possibility of his own immortality to any man, that would seem in character.
When I saw him with men, he behaved as though he wanted nothing more from
life than a night at the fights, a day at the track, or a table-stakes poker game.
This was a pose, of course, and perceived as such by one and all. It was also
perceived back in Iowa City that he was a steady and heavy loser at gambling,
and that his writing was not going well. He head already produced so much,
most of it in the mood of the Great Depression, which had become ancient
history. He appeared to want to modernize himself somehow. What was my
evidence? There he was, a master storyteller, blasted beyond all reason with
admiration for and envy of a moderately innovative crime story then appearing
in serial form in the New Yorker, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. For a while in
Iowa, he could talk of little else.
While he was only thirteen years my senior, so close to my own age that we
were enlisted men in Europe in the same World War, he was a pioneering
ancestor of mine in the compressed history of American literature. He broke new
ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance
and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite
permanently. Contrast, if you will, the poor people in this book with those in the
works of social reformers like Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and
particularly with those in Shaw’s Pygmalion, with their very promising wit and
resourcefulness and courage. Reporting on what he saw of dehumanized
Americans with his own eyes day after day, year after year, Algren said in effect,
‘Hey – an awful lot of these people your hearts are bleeding for are really mean
and stupid. That’s just a fact. Did you know that?’
And why didn’t he soften his stories, as most writers would have, with
characters with a little wisdom and power who did all they could to help the
dehumanized? His penchant for truth again shoved him in the direction of
unpopularity. Altruists in his experience were about as common as unicorns, and
especially in Chicago, which he once described to me as ‘the only major city in
the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.’
So – was there anything he expected to accomplish with so much dismaying
truthfulness? He gives the answer himself, I think, in his preface to another
novel, Never Come Morning. As I understand him, he would be satisfied were
we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be
respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways
unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.
It seems to me now that Algren’s pessimism about so much of earthly life was
Christian. Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the
hopeless; could not take his eyes off them, and could see little good news for
them in the future, given what they had become and what Caesar was like and so
on, unless beyond death there awaited something more humane.
The Man with the Golden Arm
PART ONE
Rumors of Evening
KUPRIN Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this –
that there is no horror!
The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season
between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes
feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the
leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his
head across his arms upon the query-room desk.
Yet it wasn’t work that wearied him so and his sleep was harassed by more
than a smoke-colored rain. The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he
was numbed by his charge sheet’s accusations. For twenty years, upon the same
scarred desk, he had been recording larceny and arson, sodomy and simony,
boosting, hijacking and shootings in sudden affray: blackmail and terrorism,
incest and pauperism, embezzlement and horse theft, tampering and procuring,
abduction and quackery, adultery and mackery. Till the finger of guilt, pointing
so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all
at last and turned, capriciously, to touch the fibers of the dark gray muscle
behind the captain’s light gray eyes. So that though by daylight he remained the
pursuer there had come nights, this windless first week of December, when he
had dreamed he was being pursued.
Long ago some station-house stray had nicknamed him Record Head, to honor
the retentiveness of his memory for forgotten misdemeanors. Now drawing close
to the pension years, he was referred to as Captain Bednar only officially.
The pair of strays standing before him had already been filed, beside their
prints, in both his records and his head.
‘Ain’t nothin’ on my record but drunk ’n fightin’,’ the smashnosed vet with the
buffalo-colored eyes was reminding the captain. ‘All I do is deal, drink ’n fight.’
The captain studied the faded suntans above the army brogans. ‘What kind of
discharge you get, Dealer?’
‘The right kind. And the Purple Heart.’
‘Who do you fight with?’
‘My wife, that’s all.’
‘Hell, that’s no crime.’
He turned from the wayward veteran to the wayward 4-F, the tortoise-shell
glasses separating the outthrust ears: ‘I ain’t seen you since the night you played
cowboy at old man Gold’s, misfit. How come you can’t get along with Sergeant
Kvorka? Don’t you like him?’ As if every small-time hustler in the district, other
than this strange exception before him, were half in love with good old Cousin