Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

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.

NELSON ALGREN 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.