Inspiring Older Readers
The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
American novelist Nelson Algren is often referred to as the chronicler of underworld urban America in the 1940s/50s and early 60s. His books are unflinching in engaging with the poor, the petty criminal and the socially excluded and his language reflects the street life he records. Born in 1909, Algren came from a Jewish working class background and although he eventually made his way to university he did so via the notoriously under-resourced American public school system ( public meaning public in the US and not private as in the UK) and so he lived and experienced the hardships he wrote about. Famously, Algren found himself in a complicated affair with the French feminist writer, Simone De Beauvoir but her continuing relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and his desire for a ‘conventional’ relationship meant the liaison was always doomed to end sooner rather than later.
The Man With The Golden Arm published in 1949 is generally held to be Algren’s most successful book – and along with A Walk on the Wild Side his most famous and publically recognised novel. The Man With… was also made into a successful film starring Frank Sinatra and this has doubtlessly added to its fame. I came to the book knowing it’s reputation and a little bit about the author but I didn’t really know what a powerful experience it would be.
To be fair, it takes a little while to get into the rhythms of the writing – Algren reproduces the cadences and lexicon of the North-West side of Chicago which are sometimes difficult to tune in to, especially for a British ear I suspect. The story centres on two years in the life of Francis Majcinek – or Frankie Machine as he’s better known – who is a young(ish) card sharp and minor hoodlum who has a desperate desire to escape the confines of his life and neighbourhood by becoming a jazz drummer. Frankie lives in a tiny apartment with his bitter, disabled wife Sophie – Zosh for short – who is wheelchair bound after a car accident caused by Frankie. Alongside all the other structural problems in his life Frankie has a figurative – but to him almost real - monkey on his back; an addiction to Morphine.
Algren gives us an up-close-and-personal view of Frankie’s depressing and fruitless life and the forlorn hopes and aspirations that keep him going. We are given a window through which to witness the incessant bickering with Zosh, an affair with Molly his ex-sweetheart, his constant attempts to kick the habit, a period in prison for shoplifting and his complex relationship with his pusher, the dreadful "Nifty Louie" Fomorowski.
From the very outset we know that Frankie’s life is only always one step from disaster and when he accidently kills Louie, Frankie has to rely on the loyal but socially inadequate Sparrow to help him cover up the deed. But inevitably the crime comes back to haunt him as the police, for political reasons, make it a priority to find the killer and it’s only a matter of time before Sparrow breaks and confesses the truth. Frankie goes on the run trying to find Molly again but in a mood of despair he hangs himself in the dosshouse he has taken up residence in. The date is April Fools Day.
The book was a great critical success when it was released and has been hugely influential on a generation of writers that followed. Kurt Vonnegut , for example, said of Algren :
"he was a pioneering ancestor of mine... 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."
There’s no doubt that this is both a wonderfully written but astonishing bleak book that leaves you feeling that you too have been inside these closed rooms, that you’ve shared Frankie’s desperate desire to have a life with meaning and understood the magnetic and destructive power of drug addiction. Don’t go to this book expecting a relaxing read but do go to it and be prepared to bleed.
Terry Potter
September 2016