Realist Novels

"Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some final evening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all. / A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. [...] / She had begun the book with the Times photo of her own ‘fatal accident’ and had gone on to add to it all manner of lurid cries from the depths: of unwed mothers who plunged newborn infants down dumbwaiters in an oatmeal box or tossed them into a furnace in a cornflake carton because ‘God told me to.’ To announce, when a visitor remarked that the house seemed rather warm: ‘I know. I just put the baby in the stove.’ / [...] Best of all was the yellowing photo from the Times that proved to him, each day anew, that it had all been his fault. So much his fault that he could never leave her alone again."

"When he wakened he would see her in the corner where the light and darkness met, half her face in the fading shadows of Saturday night and half in Sunday morning's rain-washed light."

"The sign above the cash register of the Tug & Maul Bar indicated Antek the Owner's general attitude toward West : I'VE BEEN PUNCHED, KICKED, SCREWED, DEFRAUDED, KNOCKED DOWN, HELD UP, HELD DOWN, LIED ABOUT, CHEATED, DECEIVED, CONNED, LAUGHED AT, INSULTED, HIT ON THE HEAD AND MARRIED. SO GO AHEAD AND ASK FOR CREDIT I DON'T MIND SAYING NO."

"Pig wore a creamy, dreamy smirk to veil a long-standing grudge against everybody. He could smile like a chicken-fed tomcat while wishing everyone bad luck without exception."

"Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again. / ‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’ / A sievelike smile drained through Louie's teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn't come every day. [...] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit."

"‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits 'n goes tinglin' down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits 'n here they come out of it cryin' like a baby 'r laughin' like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there's not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’"

"‘I never run for streetcars,’ he'd had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What's the use? There's always another big red rollin' along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder 'n here comes another down the block pullin' up for a fast pickup.’ / ‘I just won't stand for that kind of talk,’ she'd told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be 'n dressed like you're goin' to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that's what I want.’ / ‘There's people in hell want ice water too,’ he'd grinned at her."

"If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I'd drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing."

"Frankie sat on the curb [...] wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry. / ‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie's reach. / ‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’ / Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don't have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He's as stiff as you are.’ / ‘He can fwisk you but he can't search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don't let him search you without a wawwant.’"

"[Zygmunt the Prospector] had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window-shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law-school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn't pass the bar he'd be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud."

"For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself."

"‘I've had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn't get glasses. / ‘It's not that kind of trouble. It's from flirtin', that kind of trouble. Me 'n my bedroom eyes.’ / That was Violet's idea of high humor and Sophie's idea of nothing at all."

"‘Lies are just a poor man's pennies,’ Violet told her."

"‘He was just so afraid he wasn't good enough for me, that's all his braggin' was,’ Violet explained. ‘He didn't think he was good enough for anybody, he was tryin' so hard to show he was somebody. So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself – that's the first thing a woman got to do for a man. 'N of course there's no sense tryin' to prove somethin' like that standin' up. The least a girl owes to herself is to be comfortable about it.’"

"Long lonesome shadows of the December tenements that fled the neon carnival below to turn each night toward her for rest. / This was the shadow-gatherers' hour: the hour for those all over the earth who had rest neither in sleep nor waking. Some gathered their shadows like memories; but she gathered hers like unborn children to her pale and secret eyes. / [...] They moved toward her then for warmth, they had been feeling unwanted all day. Like everyone else in the world for whom things had gone wrong. They knew that here they would come alive, for here they were loved and wanted at last. She alone knew how lost all shadows felt: it made them the dearer to her own unwanted heart. / To the heart weighed down by its own uselessness. What good is any unwanted heart?"

"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 satisfaction, 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."

"‘I just thought you'd like to see a dog that drinks beer,’ Frankie apologized [...]. Rumdum, at first listening only listlessly, picked up suddenly and hauled Frankie forward into the room. / ‘The smell of Budweiser makes him powerful,’ Frankie explained. Before she could get the saucer filled Rumdum had licked the saucer dry and Frankie had to clamp his snout with both hands, the great hound whimpering brokenheartedly, till she could get it filled again without losing a finger. / ‘He ain't had a drink all day,’ Frankie sympathized with all dry throats."

"Violet had wheeled Sophie to Mass – [...]. Maybe if he went along some Sunday, suddenly right there by the altar rail Sophie would get up on her feet and tell him, ‘Nobody'll have to wheel me here no more, Frankie. Let's go dancin' by Guyman's Paradise t'night.’ / But Sunday morning was always pretty rugged for anything but sleep. All the miracles were performed on Saturday night, it seemed."

"She raised her arms elegantly, like a real lady in a deodorant ad, high over her head. ‘Anyhow it ain't red, it's just awe-burn. Would you like me wit' red hair all over?’ / ‘I like redheads of any color – [...]’"

"She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last. / For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard."

"‘I'm settin' here three days now waitin' for you, listenin' to s go by, countin' how many cars it sounds like. You don't know how lonely it gets, waitin' for El cars. Frankie, let's both quit stonin' ourselves.’ / He didn't know she was crying till her tears touched his lips."

"When Owner wanted to cry, he cried, and anything at all did for an excuse. What really mattered with Owner wasn't on the tongue but in the heart; since he had no words for his heart, he wept. / ‘I'm not cryin' for my own trouble, [...] I'm cryin' for everybody's.’ He took off his glasses to cry the better for everyone; for the lenses were so splashed with tears they were indistinguishable from the beads of sweat about his round bald brow. / ‘You're cryin' from the skull now, Owner,’ Frankie informed him. ‘When it starts comin' out of your ears it's time to use the handkerchief.’"

"There, across the hallway window, the Station's signal tower stood out clearly and abruptly, its red and green ornamentation glowing down the tracks like an iron caricature of the Christmas tree they had left behind in a half-lighted hall. / With his arm about her they paused to see the snow falling aslant the crosslights as far as the night would let them see. / To Frankie that quarter-moon sky looked darker and all the iron apparatus of taller than ever. The artificial tenement light seeping across the tracks made even the snow seem artificial, like snow off a dime-store counter. Only the rails seemed real and to move a bit with some terrible intent. ‘Your hands 'r so cold I can feel the ice t'rough my mittens,’ Sophie told him, thrusting her damp, mittened hand out of his in a child's sudden displeasure. / So cold, so cold, hands, wrists and hearts: the old quarter-moon of the tenements shone no colder tonight than the blood crying for warmth in his wrists."

"And though her eyes were still bloodshot from crying Sophie suddenly sang to him with a certain phony gaiety, ‘You're gonna miss your big fat mamma one of these days – you know why I like that song? 'Cause it reminds me of one I really like.’ / In the icy dark the street lamp's frosty glow lay like hoar across dresser and wheelchair and bed. The clock was beating out its heart on the wall in a freezing pain and the luminous Christ gleamed all around with an icy, creaking mystery."

"My wife only sleeps with her friends and she don't have a enmy in the world. Call her at Madison 1-6971 and have yourselfs one hell of a time. [...] Girls who would and girls who wouldn't. If they did they were no good and if they didn't what good were they?"

"But any one side of any jailhouse wall is never much different than any other side. There are only the same old threadbare variations on the same age-old warnings against all the well-tried ancestral foes: whisky and women, sin and cigarettes, marijuana and morphine, marked cards and capped cocaine, dirty laughter and easy tears, engineered dice and casual disease, bad luck and adultery, old age and shyster lawyers, quack doctors and ambitious cops, crooked priests and honest burglars, lack of money and hard work."

"[...] old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn't Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who'd left the deceased doc's shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur. / [...] He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie."

"For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain's darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. [...] He could not even tell the names of those who'd taken the rap for him. / To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others. / What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-sounding fraud meant by that? Why had several snickered then and not one had laughed out from the heart? Bednar hadn't understood then and could not let himself understand now. It had been too long since he himself had laughed from the heart. / Yet the words had left him with a secret and wishful envy of every man with a sentence hanging over his head like the very promise of salvation."

"Frankie studied the shivering punk. ‘Don't shake,’ he commanded. ‘When you get the shakes in my business you're through. Steady hand 'n steady eye is what does it. [...] Frankie Machine. That's me – the kid with the golden arm.’"

"The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups. ‘He's like me,’ Frankie explained, ‘never drinks. Unless he's alone or with somebody.’"

"‘I can get in more trouble in two days of not tryin' than most people can get into in a lifetime of tryin' real hard – [...] It's 'cause I really like trouble, Frankie, that's my trouble. If it wasn't for trouble I'd be dead of the dirty monotony around this crummy neighborhood. When you're as ugly as I am you got to keep things movin' so's people don't get the time to make fun of you. That's how you keep from feelin' bad.’"

"‘It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch,’ Frankie was fond of boasting of his nerveless hands and steady eye. ‘I never get nowheres but I pay my own fare all the way.’ Frankie was regular."

"‘He ain't no moron,’ the veteran confided to Record Head, ‘he's a moroff. You know; more off than on.’"

"That was the way things were because that was how things had always been. Which was why they could never be any different. Neither God, war, nor the ward super work any deep change on West . For here God and the ward super work hand in hand and neither moves without the other's assent. [...] For the super's God is a hustler's God; and as wise, in his way, as the God of the priests and the businessmen. / The hustlers' Lord, too, protects His own: the super has been in office fourteen years without having a single bookie door nailed shut in his territory without his personal consent. No man can manage that without the help of heaven and the city's finest precinct captains."

"That night, while the little twenty-watt bulbs burned on in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier, Frankie Machine was touched by an old wound fever and dreamed, for the second time in his life, of the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back."

"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."

"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."

"‘I got nuttin' against Kvork. It's just him don't like me,’ the chinless wonder protested. ‘Fact is I respect Cousin for doin' his legal duty – every time he picks me up I get more respect. After all, everybody got to get arrested now 'n then, I'm no better'n anybody else. Only that one overdoes it, Captain. He can't get it t'rough his big muttonhead I'm unincapable, that's all.’"

"‘Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he'll come 'n tell me I got to come down 'n get arrested. I like gettin' locked up now 'n then, it's how a guy stays out of trouble. I'll grab a cab if you're in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime – I don't like bein' late when I got a chance of doin' thirty days for somethin' I never done.’"

"The man with the golden arm."

"Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-nine years. But any one of these looked as though all the others had beaten him all night with barrel staves. Faces bloody as raw pork ground slowly in the great city's grinder; faces like burst white bags, one with eyes like some dying hen's and one as bold as a cornered bulldog's; eyes with the small bright gleam of hysteria and eyes curtained by the dull half glaze of grief. These glanced, and spoke, and vaguely heard and vaguely made reply; yet looked all day within upon some ceaseless horror there: the twisted ruins of their own tortured, useless, lightless and loveless lives."

"The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one's future nor ever any place all his own."

"For my money, no book more elegantly describes the world of men and women whom the boom years were designed to pass by. [...] in 1949 Algren was nearly alone in reminding the country that having an upper class requires having a lower class. For the skill and elegance of its prose, its compassion, and its prescience, I'd rank Golden Arm among the very best books written in the twentieth century. Before Algren's fall from favor and the onset of his obscurity, many people agreed with that assessment. The book received glowing reviews from Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, even the New Yorker."

"It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the best novelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the "kill the messenger" syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's works brings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all like our own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for a long, long time. [...] In The Man With the Golden Arm, it's Chicago's back alleys and mean streets in the 1940's, derelicts and dopers, bitter castaways and undeserving castoffs."

"The Man With the Golden Arm, published in 1949, was the winner of the first National Book Award for fiction, and it may be the best book they ever gave it to."

"As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet. / 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."

"Great qualities of insight into people, a heart of pity, a gift of cadence and song, and often when you near heartbreak he throws in comic relief. The interwoven police, politicians, gamblers and thieves, fixers and hustlers, the jargons of the night-clubs and prisons, these are here in The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies and deaths, can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity."

"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.’"

"In 1949 came his first masterpiece, The Man with the Golden Arm. This story of a Chicago junkie trying to go straight was an immediate triumph. "OK, kid," Hemingway privately noted in his copy of the book, "you beat Dostoevsky.""

"‘I slugged him.’ The toughness was still in the grin if not in the biceps, the arms making a loose, outswinging gesture which she took to mean he'd first tried shoving that certain guy off. ‘Then his neck made a sort of dead sound 'n I knew that was it. [...] It's all in the wrists,’ he told her thinly, ‘I used to have the touch.’"