The Man with the Golden Arm

"The Jews recalled last year's losses and forgot this hand's winnings. The Poles played the game for its own sake, to kill the monotony of their lives. The Jews played to make the hours return to them of what other hours, in other cities, had robbed their fathers; their lives were less boring away from the board than at it. The Pole, even when playing on borrowed money and the rent overdue, still felt, somehow, that he could afford to lose all night because he was so sure to win everything in the end. The Jew knew that the moment he felt he could afford to lose he would begin losing till the bottom of the world fell through and he himself went through the hole. It was more fun being a Polish gambler; it was safer to be a Jewish one."

"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."

"A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room."

"When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark [...] shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb's slow swinging. / Then the wooden benches along the walls [...] would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent."

"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."

"‘You want to buy a dog?’ Implying that a dog, any dog, was the one certain solution, in an uncertain world, to any cabbie's troubles. / ‘I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat,’ the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation. / ‘I wouldn't sell you one with lices,’ Sparrow assured him lightly. ‘I take the lices off 'n sell them sep'rate.’"

"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."

"The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. [...] / An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly."

"What did it mean that all the guilty felt so certain of their own innocence while he felt so uncertain of his own? It was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry. As if those caged there had learned secretly that all men are innocent in a way no captain might ever understand."

"‘If there ain't nothin' in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they're keepin' it out so you'll get careless 'n walk into the chair for them.’ / Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain't no chair about it, Molly-O. It's manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’ / ‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin' one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky. / He grinned wryly. ‘Don't forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’ / ‘You couldn't behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’ / Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn't tell what was wisest."

"‘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.’"

"Sitting with one arm across the open window while the city rocked along below, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his cap and felt the sweat clear down to his socks. ‘I only hope they don't go too tough on Molly-O,’ and felt the old pang of conscience: something happened to everyone, it seemed, who came too close to the man with the golden arm."

"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."

"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."

"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.’"

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they've been – the ring of a city's awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."