Sancho
11-02-2010, 09:10 AM
So then, a couple of weeks ago I found a beat-up copy of this book at a used bookstore in Seattle. And I was drawn to it – maybe because of the street-savvy prose, or the down-and-out characters, or the gritty setting, or the social-protest undercurrents, or the non story-like story line. Or maybe it’s because I’d read another of Algren’s novels, A Walk on the Wild Side, a year or so ago and liked it. Whatever the case, The Man with the Golden Arm is definitely a worthwhile read – in my humble opinion.
The time is shortly after WWII and the place is a lower-class Polish neighborhood in Chicago: Division St and Milwaukee Ave or thereabouts. The main character is Francis Majcinek, known to everyone as Frankie Machine. Frankie is a card shark, hence, the man with the golden arm, but the metaphor is not that simple. Frankie has recently returned from the war, where despite serving a full tour of duty and receiving a Purple Heart, he was never promoted beyond the rank of private. He came home to Division St with a chunk of Nazi shrapnel in his liver and a thirty-pound monkey on his back, which is Frankie’s way of describing his addiction to morphine. The golden arm that Frankie uses to deal cards is also the arm he shoots-up with morphine. The metaphor doesn’t stop there; there are several other key events in the novel requiring a golden arm, but I won’t go into it here because it’d spoil the story for anybody intending to read it. Desperation is the main theme of the book, the desperation of addiction.
Here’s a sample of the prose and Frankie’s situation, all in one. He has gone to Louie “the fixer” Fomorowski for a hit:
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 Private McGantic’s terrible pit. [note: Private McGantic, or Sergeant McGantic, or Frantic McGantic are all euphemisms for his addiction]
He couldn’t feel Louie probing the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
“Sure I like to watch,” he was ready to acknowledge any time. “Man, their eyes when the 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. Herion got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.”
It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and slipped into a long warm bath with one orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.
There are 338 pages of prose almost that intense. Reading this book was exhausting. I had to read in small sections. The above passage gave me a sense of déjà-vu, and I’ve never taken a drug stronger than ibuprofen in my whole life, but I knew I’d seen it before, and then it came to me: Pulp Fiction. I am quite certain this scene influenced Quentin Tarantino when he created the scene with John Travolta and Eric Stoltz in the movie that won him an Oscar in 1995.
Speaking of awards, The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award in 1950, a year after it was published. Then it drifted into obscurity and out of print, but was resurrected in 1999 with a fiftieth anniversary edition – I think – that’s the copy I have anyway. Nelson Algren enjoyed a fairly short-lived fame after receiving the National Book Award from Eleanor Roosevelt and he too drifted into obscurity, at least as far as the NYC publishing community was concerned. In the American literary canon, he seems to be alone in the no-man’s land between the Hemingway/Steinbeck writers and the Kerouac/Mailer writers. His writing fell out of fashion during the “red scare” years in the United States and, reportedly, he was being watched by the FBI for communist leanings – probably much to his delight, and probably in part because he was the honorary cochairman of the Chicago chapter of the Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Committee. (Evidently, the committee’s work didn’t take. The Rosenberg’s fried in the electric chair at Sing Sing on July 19, 1953. They’d been convicted of espionage against the United States, specifically for passing A-bomb secrets to the Soviets.)
Hmmm, I got off track again. Anyway, if you’re interested in reading an uplifting book about addiction and recovery, or the ability of the human will to rise above the morass – then this is not the book for you. On the other hand, if you’re interested in reading a unsentimental book about that time and place, with all its rough edges, its sites and even smells, and a beautiful phonetic rendering of the street language, then this is your book.
The time is shortly after WWII and the place is a lower-class Polish neighborhood in Chicago: Division St and Milwaukee Ave or thereabouts. The main character is Francis Majcinek, known to everyone as Frankie Machine. Frankie is a card shark, hence, the man with the golden arm, but the metaphor is not that simple. Frankie has recently returned from the war, where despite serving a full tour of duty and receiving a Purple Heart, he was never promoted beyond the rank of private. He came home to Division St with a chunk of Nazi shrapnel in his liver and a thirty-pound monkey on his back, which is Frankie’s way of describing his addiction to morphine. The golden arm that Frankie uses to deal cards is also the arm he shoots-up with morphine. The metaphor doesn’t stop there; there are several other key events in the novel requiring a golden arm, but I won’t go into it here because it’d spoil the story for anybody intending to read it. Desperation is the main theme of the book, the desperation of addiction.
Here’s a sample of the prose and Frankie’s situation, all in one. He has gone to Louie “the fixer” Fomorowski for a hit:
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 Private McGantic’s terrible pit. [note: Private McGantic, or Sergeant McGantic, or Frantic McGantic are all euphemisms for his addiction]
He couldn’t feel Louie probing the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
“Sure I like to watch,” he was ready to acknowledge any time. “Man, their eyes when the 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. Herion got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.”
It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and slipped into a long warm bath with one orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.
There are 338 pages of prose almost that intense. Reading this book was exhausting. I had to read in small sections. The above passage gave me a sense of déjà-vu, and I’ve never taken a drug stronger than ibuprofen in my whole life, but I knew I’d seen it before, and then it came to me: Pulp Fiction. I am quite certain this scene influenced Quentin Tarantino when he created the scene with John Travolta and Eric Stoltz in the movie that won him an Oscar in 1995.
Speaking of awards, The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award in 1950, a year after it was published. Then it drifted into obscurity and out of print, but was resurrected in 1999 with a fiftieth anniversary edition – I think – that’s the copy I have anyway. Nelson Algren enjoyed a fairly short-lived fame after receiving the National Book Award from Eleanor Roosevelt and he too drifted into obscurity, at least as far as the NYC publishing community was concerned. In the American literary canon, he seems to be alone in the no-man’s land between the Hemingway/Steinbeck writers and the Kerouac/Mailer writers. His writing fell out of fashion during the “red scare” years in the United States and, reportedly, he was being watched by the FBI for communist leanings – probably much to his delight, and probably in part because he was the honorary cochairman of the Chicago chapter of the Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Committee. (Evidently, the committee’s work didn’t take. The Rosenberg’s fried in the electric chair at Sing Sing on July 19, 1953. They’d been convicted of espionage against the United States, specifically for passing A-bomb secrets to the Soviets.)
Hmmm, I got off track again. Anyway, if you’re interested in reading an uplifting book about addiction and recovery, or the ability of the human will to rise above the morass – then this is not the book for you. On the other hand, if you’re interested in reading a unsentimental book about that time and place, with all its rough edges, its sites and even smells, and a beautiful phonetic rendering of the street language, then this is your book.