Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  Though Frankie is the book’s main character, Sophie is the most interesting one. She is tormented before their marriage by Frankie’s careless womanizing, and afterward by his indifference. She manages to inspire only his guilt, and this she uses relentlessly against him. But though he is bound to her, he still does not really love her in the way she wants. She has destroyed herself in her pursuit of love, and still not found what she was seeking. She even despises the dog she coaxed Frankie to bring her.

  In her solitary musings, pushing herself back and forth in her wheelchair, Sophie sings to herself and imagines a golden past when everything was clear and measured, as the grocer measured the sugar. Now she has a vision of the whole city turning against her, and that everyone in it is crippled, and says to herself, “God has forgotten us all.” Sophie imagines the dealer Louie and his revolting henchman, Blind Pig, as the new Division Street gods. Her vigils are dark and terrible, filled with crazed dreaming and anthropomorphic shadows that gather like familiars: “There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the tenement’s long shadows moved all the way down from the fourth floor rear, slid silently under her door and drifted across her lap. To tremble one moment at still finding her there and then lie comforted and still.”

  The book also makes room for a comic relationship—a love triangle between Solly, Sophie’s friend Violet, and her impotent old husband, Stash, a naive immigrant who shares a nickname with Amanda’s stepfather. Stash wants nothing more in life than to pull off the next leaf on the calendar, and stick his head out the window to read the thermometer. He insists on eating old food, to save money. Whenever Violet is tired of him, she locks him in a cupboard, which he finds a relief. After a struggle between the three of them called the Great Sandwich Battle, Sparrow makes love to Violet with a salami string in his teeth, but she decides it is better than no love at all.

  Following this farcical love scene, Frankie and Molly share a tender one. Molly is a less well-developed character than Sophie, but she represents in the novel the possibility of redemption for Frankie, and the healing of his wounds. Molly is able to tell Frankie the truth about himself, that he is chasing fixes from Louie not to help with the pain his belly, but to deal with his own guilt over Sophie. She tells him not to fool himself that the accident was anything special, made in heaven. “It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whiskey glass ’n you better start pickin’ up the pieces ’n start livin’ again with what’s left over,” she tells him. Critic James Giles proposes that facing reality and being one’s true self are the challenges posed by existentialism—and Frankie’s problem is that he can’t meet them. He tries to escape consciousness of his existence through drugs and “literal or symbolic prisons.”

  With Molly, Frankie thinks it is possible to beat his addiction. As he does in all his novels, Algren offers love as a golden thread leading out of hell, a way to redemption, if someone can only hang on to it long enough. But no one ever does. Immediately after the scene with Molly, Frankie is taunted by Louie for his addiction, and Frankie in an unpremeditated rage breaks his neck, as Bruno had broken the neck of the Greek in Never Come Morning. Now Frankie will need the morphine more than ever, and he gets it from Blind Pig. He gets clean for a while after being caught stealing and sent to jail. After he gets out, he loses his job at Zero Schwiefka’s as a dealer, since he had become too shaky to handle the cards. Molly becomes a stripper in a black nightclub. In one of the most harrowing scenes in the book, Sparrow, in need of money, is tricked by Blind Pig and the police into delivering morphine to Frankie, and helping him get his fix. Before police come for both of them, Frankie tells Sparrow that through his addiction, he had rolled up all the worries of his life “into one big worry”—the monkey on his back, which shrinks and grows but never leaves him. He explains how the addiction protects him from awareness of his own reality, with his loneliness and guilt. “He weighs thirty-five pounds ’n he’s settin’ right here on my back usin’ all his weight ’cause he knows I got to carry him around so’s I don’t get lonesome for nobody no more.”

  After their arrest, Frankie is let out of jail quickly, but Sparrow, a repeat offender, is held and put under tough questioning to get him to accuse Frankie for the drug dealer’s death. Frankie is pursued by both the police and “McGantic,” and Sophie is sent to a mental hospital. Frankie finally finds a room in a men’s hotel and hangs himself from a light fixture with a piece of newspaper twine, wishing with his last breath that Sophie will have a good dream that she is dancing again.

  In Golden Arm Nelson revisits the Christian imagery he explored in “Design for Departure,” but with more authority and to greater effect. A defrocked priest in the lineup tells the guilt-ridden Captain Bednar that “we are all members of one another,” a paraphrase of the apostle Paul. It is also a theme of Nelson’s work overall—that the lost and the broken belong to the whole body of mankind, and must be recognized. But the captain doesn’t get it—and feels along with other characters in the book that he is being crucified. He feels left out of the community of man and dehumanized—with “an iron heart, an iron life.” Sparrow, being questioned by police, says he’s being nailed to the cross. Sophie tells Frankie that if Jesus Christ treated her the way he did, “I’d drive in the nails myself.” Violet complains about how they all have their cross to bear. But it is really Frankie who represents Christ, constantly impaled with the needle and sacrificed for sins both real and imagined. Only two characters in the book find another kind of life—Violet’s old husband dies and she abandons Sparrow to marry Jailer the Landlord, achieving middle-class respectability.

  The reviews for The Man with the Golden Arm were almost universally rapturous. Time magazine called it one of the year’s finest novels and a “triumph.” The review saw what Nelson always was trying to do—burst through middle-class complacency and create compassion for the people of the “lower depths.” “Readers with queasy stomachs may shrink from an environment in which the unbelievably sordid has become a way of life,” Time wrote. “They will also come away with some of Algren’s own tender concern for his wretched, confused and hopelessly degenerate cast of characters.” Kelsey Guilfoil in the Tribune alerted Chicago readers that it was time they recognized they had a writer of the first rank in their midst, saying that “surely there is no writer of the present day who can so well approach Dostoyevsky in portraying the lowly, the disinherited, the miserable, and the damned; whose understanding eye sees so well beneath the filth and wretchedness the beating heart of humanity.” Other reviews compared Algren to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. The New Yorker fretted that the novel might be too much for some stomachs, but A. C. Spectorsky in the New York Times said readers who object to the starkness of the environment “will be missing much, for it has a kind of dedicated and comprehending honesty out of which a crucial truth emerges”—that the people of Division Street are products and victims of their surroundings. A rare negative review was in the Roman Catholic monthly Extension, which praised the writing but concluded that the characters’ goals were so “morbid, dirty and hopeless” that the book was “wholly objectionable.” And some Chicago Poles continued to have problems with their neighborhood’s portrayal in the book, as they had with Never Come Morning. “I didn’t know anybody like that,” said Mitchell Wisniewski, who lived in Polonia in the 1940s and 1950s. “Those people are bums.”

  Nelson was suddenly the toast of literary Chicago—Stuart Brent hosted a book-signing event that had people lined up along Clark Street, and the little shop nearly burst with the crush of buyers, well-wishers, and newspaper photographers. Jack Conroy was there to celebrate, his big, curly head and ears like jug handles looming above the crowd. Ken McCormick gleefully carried armloads of books from one room to another, shedding his jacket in the heat. Nelson started by signing long notes in each copy, driving Stuart crazy by asking for a new copy when he felt he hadn’t said something right�
��a nicety that cost Stuart three bucks a copy. Nelson got more efficient as the evening wore on. By the end of the night, a thousand copies were sold in just that one store. The novel stayed on the city’s best-seller list until the following spring, and there was interest from Hollywood in a movie version.

  Ernest Hemingway wrote Nelson to congratulate him, with the following quote to use for publicity: “Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and where that over-grown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow each day, Nelson Algren comes like a corvette…. Truman Capote fans grab your hats, if you have any, and go. 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.” McCormick was wary of using the quote in ads—because it insulted writers who would share Algren’s audience. But Hemingway also had told Nelson to send a copy of the letter to George Braziller, editor of the prestigious Book Find Club, which picked the novel as its December selection. Nelson was so thrilled with this praise from his hero that he taped the letter to the refrigerator he had finally acquired. He was a champion at last.

  The Albany Park two-flat where Algren lived with his parents from the age of eleven until he went to college. The Abrahams lost the house during the Depression. MARY WISNIEWSKI

  Algren’s joke prediction for his future in his high school yearbook—he imagined himself staying in the tire repair business. THE LANTERN YEARBOOK, USED WITH PERMISSION FROM CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  Algren’s graduation picture from Roosevelt High School. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren on the shores of Lake Michigan with a few bathing beauties, 1935. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Nelson and Amanda Kontowicz, his first and second wife, together at a restaurant. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Amanda standing alone. She had labeled this photograph “Tired.” OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, AMANDA ALGREN COLLECTION

  Algren in uniform at Camp Maxey, Texas. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, AMANDA ALGREN COLLECTION

  Algren in a formal portrait in his army dress uniform. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren sitting beneath a viaduct in Chicago. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Simone de Beauvoir by a brick wall. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN BUT MAY BE ALGREN; OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Nelson Algren with Simone de Beauvoir. ART SHAY

  Simone de Beauvoir with Richard Wright in New York. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren aboard a ship, getting ready for a trip to Europe. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren receives the National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm in March 1950, accompanied by biographer Ralph L. Rusk, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and poet William Carlos Williams. Simone de Beauvoir teased him about his tuxedo. CORBIS IMAGES

  Nelson Algren with bookseller Stuart Brent, selling copies of The Man with the Golden Arm. ART SHAY

  Nelson Algren horsing around with his friend the French mime Marcel Marceau at a tavern. ART SHAY

  Algren used to like to autograph his books with an image of a cat. This cat was in a copy of The Last Carousel, signed for Andy Austin. MARY WISNIEWSKI, USED WITH PERMISSION OF ANDY AUSTIN COHEN

  Algren with his irascible mother, Goldie Abraham, at his home in Gary, Indiana. Goldie appears to be wearing the fur coat Nelson bought her in the winter of 1951–1952. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, AMANDA ALGREN COLLECTION

  Algren sitting in the grass by his home in Gary, Indiana. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, AMANDA ALGREN COLLECTION

  Algren’s home on Forrest in the Miller Beach neighborhood, Gary, Indiana, where he lived during the 1950s. MARY WISNIEWSKI

  Nelson Algren publicity photo. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren, waiting to answer questions about the movie made from The Man with the Golden Arm, at a 1958 event. CORBIS IMAGES

  Algren showing off the cluttered front room of his flat on Evergreen Street in Chicago. He has covered the walls with pictures. OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ALGREN ESTATE

  Algren at a party at the home of Andy Austin, in about 1975. ANDY AUSTIN COHEN, USED WITH HER PERMISSION

  Algren’s house in the old whaling community of Sag Harbor, New York, where he spent his last, happy months. MARY WISNIEWSKI

  Algren’s grave in the Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York. On the grave is a quotation from Willa Cather: “The end is nothing / The road is all.” MARY WISNIEWSKI

  9

  THE WALLS BEGIN TO CLOSE

  Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with these stoned speakers—but who dare not say so.

  —MARK TWAIN, THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES

  “Hooray for Hollywood”

  —TITLE OF A SONG BY RICHARD WHITING

  If Nelson Algren’s life were a roller coaster, the years 1949–1951 would be at the top of the Bobs at the old Riverview amusement park, with a grand view of the fairground. He had written one of the greatest novels in American literature, and was being recognized and celebrated for it in his own lifetime. He had a loving—if long-distance—relationship with one of the most remarkable women of the age. And he had enough money to buy what he had long been seeking—a home of his own. The years after 1951 saw a falloff personally and creatively—caused by things sometimes in his control, sometimes not. His troubles were brought on by a fearful government that had forgotten its own principles, Hollywood greed, and critics so dazzled by their own theories that they forgot to value what Joseph Conrad called “the things of the earth.” Nelson was also hurt by large measures of his own arrogance, insecurity, and foolishness, along with the fatigue that comes from a long struggle and plain bad luck. That doesn’t mean he did not write brilliant, prophetic social and literary criticism, or that he did not have romances and friendships in his next thirty years. He also wrote another good and influential novel, A Walk on the Wild Side. But by 1952 his best work was behind him.

  Fortunately, nobody knows his own future, and Nelson started the 1950s with optimism—he wanted to try his luck in Hollywood, and he wanted to buy his own place in the Indiana Dunes in Miller Beach, near his old neighbors from Bronzeville, Neal and Chris Rowland, and Dave Peltz from the WPA. The two quests were related—despite the strong sales for The Man with the Golden Arm and $1,500 from the Book Find Club, Nelson was not making much money because he had already been paid two years of advances from Doubleday, and he hoped the Hollywood money could buy him his house.

  Miller is a neighborhood of Gary, Indiana, and was a magnet for bohemian types and Chicago Jews looking for a lakeside escape from the city’s hot, humid summers. It was not a fancy lakeside suburb—Chicago’s wealthy had homes north of the city in Kenilworth and Winnetka, and went to lakefront resorts in the “Harbor Country” of southwestern Michigan. Miller was mostly middle class, with humble ranch houses set in widely spaced lots and a compromised view that combined blue lake with gray steel mills, their smokestacks shooting orange plumes of fire into the night sky. But it was affordable and convenient to the city by means of the South Shore electric train. Nelson’s plan was to keep the Wabansia flat for weekends in the city, but live in Miller during the week. Bernice’s lake house had been in the area, but had been given up during her illness and later destroyed when the steel mills expanded. Now Nelson hoped to re-create the peace he had found as a visitor at both Bernice’s cottage and as a guest of the Rowlands’—a quiet place where he could swim in the lake and take walks in the dunes when h
e was not reading and writing. He had motherly Chris Rowland look out for a place for him while he worked on a movie deal.

  In the fall of 1949, film noir producer Bob Roberts, who had formed an independent production company with actor John Garfield, reached out to Nelson about a movie version of Golden Arm. Like Algren, Garfield was an urban Jew who had spent time riding the rails and picking fruit during the early 1930s. Known for playing tough, working-class heroes, Garfield had been nominated for a best actor Oscar for the great 1947 boxing movie Body and Soul, which Roberts had produced. Roberts and Garfield also had worked together on Force of Evil in 1948, about a numbers racket. The unconventionally handsome realist actor seemed perfect for Frankie Machine, but Nelson wondered to Ken McCormick if he had enough money to buy him. There were some red flags about the Garfield-Roberts company—Garfield had backed out of a deal in late 1946 to base a movie on the life story of Chicago boxer Barney Ross once it came out that Ross had suffered from morphine addiction. The 1947 classic Body and Soul contained some of the features of Ross’s life, but without the drug problem. Ross sued, and the lawsuit eventually settled for $60,000. Simone supported putting Frankie on the big screen, but questioned Nelson’s business sense, and warned him to have a contract in hand before he went out to Los Angeles. Madeleine Brennan had found Nelson a West Coast agent named Irving Lazar, and wanted to get a deal that would give Nelson a cut of the box office receipts. By mid-November nothing was set, and Brennan and a lawyer had to disabuse Roberts of his mistaken notion that a sale had been made. So Nelson had no formal contract when he and a former drug user named Ken Acker, who was riding along as a technical assistant, escaped part of the bleak Chicago winter on the luxurious Super Chief train, riding through deserts and mountains. Nelson was told that no one else was bidding for the book at the time—the narcotics angle made it a tough sell. The Motion Picture Association of America’s production code specified that neither illegal drug traffic nor drug addiction could be shown on the screen.