American Novels

"‘Prove I'm nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don't they? 'N if I ain't nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don't have to bother with stinkin' squealas no more. It don't make me no difference. / Naw, I don't feel nuttin' good 'r bad. Good 'n bad is strictly for stinkin' squealas. [...] My old man? His one big trouble is he's always a pallbearer 'n never a corpse.’"

"The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn't own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man."

"The cons up there were either in bug cells or deadlock. They were the privates who went for stronger brew than applejack. These no longer cared: these were the truly unsaved. Over the hump for redemption and the hour for turning back lost forever: too late, forever too late. So they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness. / They talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars. ‘That was the year the aces had black Cadillacs with a bell on the side – or was that the year they had them speedy orange Fords?’"

"These were the ones who just wouldn't work. [...] They were the ones who had never learned to want. [...] They didn't even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right."

"He was only days from the chair if his last appeal were denied, yet slept and ate much as Frankie slept and ate. Therein lay a horror and a marvel for Frankie. [...] Little Lester's last appeal had been denied. [...] Such calmness seemed somehow more terrible to Frankie than if they'd said Lester was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare sweating out the hours. Instead he was sitting there killing the hours with cards just as Frankie had killed so many; while a clock had ticked away below a luminous crucifix. / There were no luminous Christs for Lester. Neither Christs nor clocks nor calendars."

"Umbrella Man came in to Schwiefka's every noon with the Times morning line crumpled in his pocket, the daily double checked off and fifty cents in his hand. He never won and never complained. He came in with a bottle on his hip, made his bets like a man paying a bill, and left with the relieved air of one who has settled a long-overdue debt. The only return he seemed to expect was the privilege of climbing the same stairs and trying again another day."

"So the men came on again: the ragged, crouching, slouching, buoyant, blinking, belligerent, nameless, useless supermen from nowhere. ‘For climbin' a telephone pole at t'ree A.M. wit' a peanuts machine on my back.’ ‘For makin' anon'mous phone calls to call my wife dirty names.’ [...] ‘Went upstairs with a girl 'n came down with a cop.’ [...] ‘Just throwed a rock at a wall 'n it happened to go through a window instead. So I followed through. But I didn't have no intent of stealing.’ / ‘You never have. But you're in and out like a fiddler's elbow all the same. What was the stretch in the Brushy Mountain pen for?’ / ‘I got the wrong number was all.’ / ‘I think you did. The wrong house number.’ / ‘That's right. The people were home. I was drinking pretty heavy.’"

"A girl in plaid slacks was being urged forward by a police matron. Casting her eyes downward, the black arrows of the girl's lashes became dipped in two great tears. / ‘Save it for the jury, Betty Lou,’ the captain counseled her and turned to the listeners. ‘This is the slickest little knockout broad in seventeen states. How come you always pick on married men, Betty Lou?’ / Betty Lou lifted the long damp lashes: the eyes held a wry and mocking light. / ‘They're the ones who don't sign complaints,’ she explained softly. And gave the audience a hard profile."

"The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said: / THINK / Read a good book / Which didn't at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn't say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con's brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con's and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts. / Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all."

"The time the clockmakers had locked into the stopped clocks of these corridors was a different kind of time, Frankie felt, than that they had put into the clocks outside. Just as there was a different sort of time for cripples than for junkies, and a different kind of time than either for dealers, there was a special kind of time for convicts too."

"A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time."

"[About Illinois's electric chair:] There was still one fugitive on Illinois's books that would die by the rope when he was caught. Down in the sheriff's basement [...] stood the gallows that waited, year in and year out, for Terrible Tommy O'Connor's return. [...] Though the building about it had long been demolished, the little brick room waited, in the middle of a parking lot, for Tommy to come back. The law forbade the room, as it forbade the gallows, to be demolished until O'Connor was hanged. It looked like a long wait. / For it well might be that the little room would be the great city's most immemorial monument, more lasting than the Art Institute lions on the boulevard, Bushman in his cage near the Lincoln Park Lagoon or Colonel McCormick in his bomb shelter below the river."

"Now, as the moon of other nights mounted the arch of June, he felt the touch of other Junes along the bars. Remembered how the orange Blatz signs of Wolcott Street would be glowing now each night more softly as the brief month passed trailing smoke, and July came on in a haze. And every arc lamp's reflection along the rain-wet, moon-wet, sun-wet, and summer-dusted walks would burn more deeply as the days burned longer. / Frankie could tell himself at last that he had buried his monkey as deeply as the county had buried Little Lester."

"As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time. / Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain."

"[...] the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples; the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn't feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting. / Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, [...]; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned."

"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."

"His voice began drifting somewhere the other side of the room, the other side of the curtained window, the other side of the street and the other side of the world. ‘There's so many little worries floatin' around 'n floatin' around, why not roll 'em all up into one big worry? Just like goin' by the loan shark 'n gettin' enough to pay off all the little debts with one big one?’"

"By the glare of the great double-globed arc lamp filtering through the dark and battered shade he saw that Sophie had left the chair at last and in its place had left a doll, some sort of mangy-looking straw-stuffed monkey of the kind that is won at street carnivals. Over its eyes and below them some mimic had painted in shadows of a purple harlotry with lipstick or rouge: the eyes surveyed the room gravely through its livid yet somehow dignified little mask. Like those of a child whose face, seared by disease, accepts the horror it reads in the eyes of others as its rightful heritage."

"For these were the very walls men meant when they said of another that he had his back to the wall. [...] / Indeed your query room is your only house of true worship, for it is here that men are brought to their deepest confessions. The more false and farfetched their lies, the deeper and truer the final passion of their admission. / It was here that the truth, so calmly concealed from priest, mother, lawyer, doctor, friend and judge – from their very selves indeed – rose with such revealing fury at last to the tongue."

"‘The dealer's on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer [...] sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they'd make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine."

"He heard a girl's voice crying out a single question, she was being brought in off the street a full floor above him; but in a voice so agonized it seemed she spoke directly to himself: / ‘Ain't anybody on my side?’ [...] But no one, on the long streets above, off which both had been taken, cared one way or another. For up there each was the only one on his own side. Under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men."

"Standing on the open street with the empty in his hand, he hesitated to go to the left or to the right for the refund. It wasn't that he needed the dime that badly – though he knew he was going to need every dime he could trap soon – but rather that it just didn't seem right to be hunted by the police with a half-gallon empty in his hand. [...] / For what Frankie sought, in that hesitating moment, was the place that would return him a refund on his very life, fleeing headlong, down back street and alley, so fast and so far he didn't know whether he'd ever recapture it again."

"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?"

"She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child's face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse's compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown's. / And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief."

"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."

"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.’"

"‘What you cuffed for?’ Record Head longed to know. / ‘Took a cab home was all,’ Frankie heard Blood-Spots explain. / ‘That's no crime. Did you pay the driver?’ / ‘I couldn't.’ / ‘Why not?’ / ‘He wasn't in the cab.’ / ‘That's the chances you take. Next man.’"

"If Golden Arm had a purpose, it was to challenge the idea, then congealing into ideology, that an individual's social value is related to his or her wealth. Its message is that lives lived in the twilight hours, after swing shifts, in the shadows of newly erected towers, or beneath the tracks of , are as passionate, as meaningful, as funny and pointless, and as much a part of the American story as any. [...] In earlier books, Algren's criminals were proud, angry, dangerous young people. Now they are older, and know they are a threat to no one but themselves. They don't have words to name the ways their world has changed, and in place of rage they have self-pity."

"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."

"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."

"It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny's heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat. / It's like that for all hustlers' hearts: to pay the most and get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has that doesn't get stopped up is her purse. And that's as full of holes as a married man's promises. / [...] She had never understood why she had lived with a man like Drunkie John, for whom she had cared nothing at all, and found the answer now: when a woman feels useless she doesn't think anything of throwing herself away."

"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."

"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.’"

"‘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."

"They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn't the punk at all. / Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn't even get congratulated on his new socks. [...] And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all."

"In the corner, beneath a frosted bulb, Pig sat looking out upon that dark and wavering shore which only the eyeless may see and only the dead may wander."

"‘For two years I was off the booze, off the women, off the horses, off the dice. I even got engaged to get married in a church. All I done that whole time was run a freight elevator up 'n down, up 'n down. It scares me when I think of it now: I come near losin' everything. [...] All the good times I ever had in my life was what my little old new-rosis made me have. Them whole two years on the square I didn't have one good time. I like my little old new-rosis. It's all I got 'n I'm holdin' onto it hard. My advice to you is hold onto yours: lay off them psychos. Look out for the major. When guys like you 'n me get square we're dead.’"

"This freshly blooded race bred by the better advertising agencies looked down upon the barflies of the Tug & Maul, trying to understand how it was that these battered wrecks could look as though not one of them had ever seen a land of night-blue lakes with poolroom cues for trees. Nor any man's private library at all. They appeared not even to have discovered the public ones. / There were only boys with bad teeth, wives with faces still dented from last night's blows and girls whose hair was set so stiffly it looked metallic. There were only old drooling lushbums with faces like emptied goboons. There was only a long line of faces that had passed straight from the noseless embryo into the running nose of senility."

"As this night followed a thousand nights and these men followed a thousand hopers who had sat here before them to go down to their graves holding a four-card straight in one hand and would never be remembered at all. Their mouths were stuffed with race-track dust; and no one to remember at all. / Their sons had taken their places, passing the time, while waiting for death to deal one from the bottom, by drawing to aces and eights. Their hell was a full house that never won and their last hope of heaven a royal flush."

"One by one Schwiefka's shills would give place; as the winter night wore on, the stakes would grow higher as the air grew heavier and the marks grew lighter; to be replaced, one by one, like so many sausages into the same sure grinder. / [...] / Till Frankie would sit back wearily, sick of seeing them come on begging to be hustled, wondering where in the world they all came from and how in the world they all earned it and what in the world they told their wives and what, especially, they told themselves and why in the world they always, always, always, always came back for more. / [...] / ‘I hope I break even tonight,’ was the sucker's philosophy, ‘I need the money so bad.’"

"Now dealer and players alike united in an unspoken conspiracy to stave off morning forever. Each bet as if the loss of a hand meant death in prison or disease and when it was lost hurried the dealer on. ‘Cards, cards.’ For the cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away. / ‘Don't take it hard, your life don't go with it,’ was the philosophy of the suckers' hour. / But each knew in his heart, when he said that, that he lied: each knew that his life was reshuffled here with every hand."

"‘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."

"‘I'm a businessman,’ the punk explained with dignity. ‘I fulfill my obligations even if I have to rob a warehouse to do it. You think I want my credit to lapse? That's the difference between a businessman like me 'n a cheap hustler like you – you hustlers got no credit.’ / Frankie shuffled the deck slowly, stalling in the hope that the suckers might start knocking to get the night over and done and forgotten. ‘That's the trouble with the whole country, all you businessmen cheatin' the peoples so fast 'n hard there's nothin' left for an honest hustler to steal.’ / ‘I'll tell you what I think for true,’ Sparrow offered seriously, ‘I don't think there's any difference: a businessman is a hustler with the dough to hustle on the legit 'n a hustler is a businessman who's either gone broke or never had it. Back me up with five grand tonight 'n tomorrow mornin' I get a invitation to join the Chamber of Commerce 'n no questions asked.’"

"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 – [...]’"

"Early morning, everyone from the first floor to the fourth up to do an honest day's hustling and Louie doing the talking for everyone. ‘My business is everybody's business – informin' is a racket like everythin' else. Anythin' that pays ain't nothin' to be ashamed of, one racket's as good as the next. A man who's ashamed of his racket is a man who's ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein' broke.’"

"‘And what I really like about you is that if you had a hummingbird's brains you'd fly backerds,’ the punk forgave her for everything she'd done for him. / She'd kept him out of trouble then until he'd slipped on the ice one January night and that had been the worst rap of all. The sidewalk was like the dance floor at Guyman's Paradise, anyone could have fallen. And have one elbow go through a window. A jewelry-store window. In the dark a thing like that could happen to a Park District policeman."

"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?"

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

"‘I've seen a thing or two in my time,’ he still liked to boast, ‘that was how I found out the best place for wolfin' ain't the taverns. It ain't in dance halls 'r on North Clark on Saturday night. It's in the front row in Sunday school on Sunday mornin'. Oh yeh, I know a thing or two, I been around.’ / The punk knew a thing or two all right. He knew almost everything except how to stay out of jail. For jail was the one place he'd been most around."