The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
As though he was sending hints to Hollywood casting agents while writing, Nelson Algren peppered The Man With the Golden Arm with references to Frank Sinatra. In the late 1940s, while this book was being written, Sinatra was still seen as a light weight, though tremendously popular, crooner. In the next decade his work would take on heft as he recorded a series of desolate concept albums of songs for the “lonely.” This 1950s version of Sinatra was an apt choice to play Frankie Machine, the card dealing, smack-shooting Golden Arm possessor of the book’s title.
Nelson Algren’s National Book Award winning novel became a bestseller and Book of the Month Club pick due largely to the subject matter. Very few “literary” authors had yet so directly taken on the issue of heroin abuse–a social problem that was thought to be safely walled-off in the ghettos and Jazz clubs. Algren didn’t take the usual path of the “Problem Novel” and make his protagonist a wealthy WASP junkie. Rather, Frankie is a lower-class Polish American from Chicago–wounded in WWII. He deals cards in a gambling house and has pipe dreams of drumming in a Jazz band when he gets his Union card.
In 1947, Algren published a collection of stories The Neon Wilderness, that focused on the same sort of Windy City low-lifes. He takes pains to replicate the dialect and slang of cops and drug dealers, much as Richard Price would a half century later in Clockers.
Frankie’s destruction plays out in slow motion. Throughout the whole book you can see his death coming, but the author postpones it so he can try to clean himself up yet again, only to have the law swoop in. Frankie is in a doomed marriage to Zosh, who faked a pregnancy to snare him. While driving drunk, Frankie had a car accident which left Zosh wheelchair bound and Frankie unable to leave her due to his guilt. Zosh’s sanity leaves her as Frankie goes in and out of prison and takes up with a stripper named
Molly, who seems the only person who can help him get off the needle.
The novel’s central relationship is between Frankie and his sidekick, Sparrow, often referred to as “the Punk.” Sparrow is a dog stealer and low life who idolizes Frankie, but is the only witness when Frankie kills his drug dealer. The cops entrap Sparrow into snitching on his friend, which sends Frankie on the lam.
Scenes set in the police station (and reminiscent of Algren’s earlier short stories) are perhaps the finest pieces of writing here. The racial attitudes of the late 40’s are on display here–Frankie has his final break when he sees that Molly has begun dancing at an African American strip joint.
Algren is perhaps remembered best, if at all, these days as the author of the book that lent its title to a Lou Reed song (Walk on the Wild Side.) In the 1950s Beat writers would explore many of the same themes Algren was concerned with, and though their results were less interesting, they received greater lasting popularity.