In time for what? He had all the night and all the day and countless nights and countless days before him—how could he get through them all?
As his heart stilled a little he felt a slow realization, after many such days and nights, of the place where all his years in the city had brought him. The tapping in the sink began sounding like some forgotten knocker at a distant door, tapping timidly, all night, at a room like this small room. Like this small room, which held nothing for any knocker, whether the door would be opened for him or shut forever in his face. It was all one, open or shut. There was no one, nothing in the place for any knocker, any night. Nothing to see and nothing to hold; nothing to claim and nothing to believe. No familiar human face to give fresh hope or final refuge. Neither love, nor peace, nor help for weariness. It would be better for any such knocker to stand waiting in an unlit hall all his days, believing vaguely in something a little, than to enter once and learn, in a single sinking moment, that he was no less lost within it.
Beneath the covers his wife’s hands groped blindly for his own, in sleep. Her fingers felt cold and friendless. Half rising, he studied her shut and dreaming eyes: she lay with lips half parted, as in wonder at some dream, like his own, that went careening through the troubled city of her mind. The eyes were shut and shadowed, the full breasts rose and fell. He drew away from her and lay back stiffly, trying not to waken her.
Lying stiffly on the flat of his back and staring straight up at the ceiling’s flickering reflections, he felt numbed by the night: it was as though, whether in sleep or waking, each night betrayed each day. As though every waking moment betrayed each separate dream. As all his dreams were, always, devilish deceptions of his daytime hopes. That his life, like all lives, whether lived in frame hotels or suburban mansions or on lonely country farms, was a betrayal repeated casually, without reason or malice, with each returning noon.
That the woman beside him, like any woman in any bed beside any man, betrayed him, casually, without reason or malice, with her every breath. Asleep, in fever or in waking. Walking the city’s cage-worked streets, window-shopping on any afternoon; or caught deep in the coils of any casual dream.
That no man, that no woman, had betrayed him more irretrievably, with less reason, with so little malice, than he had, from the beginning, betrayed himself.
That the sleeping infant slept on only to gather strength, through pointless pain endured through a thousand futile afternoons, in order to take its own mechanical turn at the business of betraying Katz. To gather strength: all things gathered strength, struggled and jostled and cheated and lied, all to achieve some such mechanical betrayal of someone near and dear; on some rainy midnight twenty or forty years away.
And yet—to no purpose, for no measurable gain. To satisfy no ire, appease no stronger will. Only, like a man tossing dice idly by himself, finding simple chance, that could as easily make him win as lose, turning the dice always toward defeat.
That no man, anywhere, in any far-off place or behind the nearest hired partition, could live a single day and be dealt with without hire. Should all others happen to pass Katz by, Katz reflected, in the business of betrayal—as being too small, too mean, and too humble to deceive—then he himself, as in the certain order of things, would undo himself utterly at last. As he had already undone himself. In all things, toward all others, utterly.
Katz’s fevered fingers touched his lips as though he were cautioning another to be still. The lips felt parched and bitten raw; he felt them moving soundlessly, without effort on his part. And followed their words falteringly with his fingers, like an aging blind man reading a young man’s lips; and heard.
There, manacled by night, he was trying, in the dark desperately, to curse: his own humanity.
III.
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1949)
The Man with the Golden Arm is Algren’s best known book and perhaps also, surprisingly, his most difficult novel, for the density of its poetic language and for the subtle ambiguities of its central characters. Published in 1949, and winner in March 1950 of the first National Book Award for fiction, which was handed to Algren at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, the novel catapulted Algren to the heights of literary celebrity. But with McCarthyism on the horizon, the author soon landed on J. Edgar Hoover’s public enemies’ list, his passport was denied, and a book-length essay on writing he’d completed under contract with Doubleday was cancelled by the publisher under government pressure, and so Algren didn’t have to breathe that thin air of literary success for long.
Here are two unpublished stories that Algren himself plucked from an early draft of the novel, titling each and identifying both in pen on the title page as “unpublished stor[ies] from ‘Man with the Golden Arm.’ ” They are fascinating examples of Algren’s art. As stories, they mingle comedy and tragedy in a way that beautifully demonstrates Algren’s range. For the curious or the industrious, go to this page–this page and to this page–this page of the published novel1 to see the extent to which Algren added to and reworked these completed sections in the novel. There is a vastly deeper richness of language, colloquial expression, and exactness of detail in the same passages in the novel—as well as greater complexity of situation—yet the kernel is here already, along with a perfect simplicity and rightness.
Algren liked to describe his writing process as one of accretion, likening the dozens of drafts to the slow geological layering that shapes mountains and whole continents over millennia: a strikingly original way of looking at the writing process, and one that fit his political outlook as a then-Communist who saw literary work as physical, in the same way other types of labor were. Here is how he describes it to Terry Southern and Alston Anderson in a 1955 Paris Review interview: “I’ve always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens—you know, until it finds its own plot—because you can’t outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it’s a slow way of working.”2
As Algren was later to remark, at the time he was writing The Man with the Golden Arm, he felt that a book could “make a dent.” Later, he would lose that faith in the power and influence of books. It is worth quoting him at length from H. E. F. “Shag” Donohue’s 1964 book, Conversations with Nelson Algren, in which Algren speaks candidly about what motivated him to write in the forties and fifties:
Well, I wrote the books I wrote because, because I was living in the middle of these books when, before they were books, when they were merely scenes in which human beings were involved in conflict, I was in the middle of them and simply recorded my own reactions and tried to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and the terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people had been forced into with no recognition that such a world existed. They lived in a world which is very plain, which anybody could see, which is lived in the streets of the city, but which the people who didn’t live in this world said, “It doesn’t exist, they aren’t there, we know that they aren’t there, and if they are there, it doesn’t matter, because we’re here and we don’t live in that sort of world.” And in this, although I was confident at the time of making a dent in this, by writing books about it, books which were accepted and spoken of in reviews and even honored one way or another—I thought I’d make a dent—I didn’t make the least dent, because there is no way of convincing or even making the slightest impression on the American middle class that there are people who have no alternative, that there are people who live in horror, that there are people whose lives are nightmares. This is not accepted. The world of the drug addict doesn’t exist. The world of the criminal doesn’t exist. The world of the murderer doesn’t exist. Nothing that does not touch the person individually exists […]
I thought that there was a certain sentience. I thought there was something you could reach. Now I don’t think it can be reached.3
&
nbsp; NOTES
1. Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm. 1949. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1990 (fourth printing).
2. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1959. 240.
3. H. E. F. Donohue. Conversations with Nelson Algren. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. 93–4.
LITTLE LESTER
A heavy snowfall came, and the year drew toward its close. It closed in a green half-twilight, like the half-twilight of the heart. In a green-gray jailhouse light, Frankie Machine remembered the green-gray streets of home.
Where the long arc-lamps were tethered, on wind-wet, snow-wet rainwet nights, between the Budweiser legends and the thousand-girdered el.
He lived beyond the arc-lamps’ gleam these nights. And by day was deafened with the ceaseless, clumping shuffle of a three-legged elephant: the Bridewell laundry’s sheet-rolling machine. And when he piled at last onto his narrow pad in the long prison dorm and turned his face to the whitewashed wall, the three-legged elephant of the sheet-roller followed, galumping mournfully, through green-gray dreams.
Upstairs, on the topmost tier, the unsaved dreamed of salvation: hustlers over the hump for redemption. For them it was too late for turning back; so they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness.
These were the ones who talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars: “That was the year they had the black Cadillacs with the bell on the side—no, it was when they had the yellow Buicks with the swivel-spot—or was it the year of the orange Fords?”
On the day Frankie finished his third week he caught the Susie-Q detail, with a veteran coneroo who called himself Bonarue Katz.
There wasn’t much to doing Susie-Q. Just to haul the Susie-Q wagon, with its load of buckets and mops, and wash down the fourth-floor tier. The fourth-floor hustlers couldn’t be trusted with buckets and mops. They could fashion wooden guns out of mop-handles and knives out of buckets: they could make cigarette lighters—though smoking was forbidden—out of a sliver of emery and a bootlegged Bull Durham sack.
Half of them were in deadlock, flaunting the red metal tag which indicated that status on the bars like a badge of honor. And none moved without a screw’s eyes following. They were the heroin-heads, the sullen torpedoes and the cunning heavies. Frankie Machine was ashamed to feel that he himself should be nothing more than a punk who’d hypped a piece of tin in a neighborhood department store; yet felt a sort of clandestine thrill at finding himself in the toughest tier of all.
Frankie and Bonarue Katz worked down the tier slowly, taking the jibes of the deadlocked without reply, dragging the little white wagon along behind them. Halfway down the block they parked it in front of Little Lester’s cell; Lester had a date with the chair.
“You guys want to change jobs?”
But both had been cautioned against talking up here.
“Hey!” the doomed youth demanded. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Little Lester the Money-Waster and Woman-Chaser! Look, you two marks—put down that Salvation Army deal ’n do like me—all I do is play solitaire ’n smoke sigerettes now—How’d you marks like a deal like that, marks?”
Neither of the marks wanted to play solitaire or smoke “sigerettes.”
“You the guys gonna slit my panties ’n shave my little head?” he inquired softly, trying a new tack.
“Don’t answer,” Bonarue cautioned Frankie in a side-of-the-mouth whisper, “he’s tryin’ to get us salty at him, he tries to get everybody salty at him. He got the screws so salty they made his mouthpiece tell him he got to lay off stonin’ ’em. He had their raw nerves jumpin’.”
Bonarue dummied up as two soft-clothesmen passed, escorting something in a tweed suit and a bandaged eye. Neither would hear what either the soft-clothes or the tweed suit said to Little Lester; but there was no trouble hearing Lester’s jeering reply.
“Sure, ya stinkin’ squeala, I’m the guy shot out ya eye. It was easy as eatin’ a ice-cream comb. So what? You think I’m gonna set in the chair twicet ’cause you got your dirty eye shot out?”
A short silence, then a reluctant admission:
“I don’t feel nothin’, good ’r bad. Good ’n bad is all for squares.”
Hovering behind the soft-clothesmen, a newspaper man, in a tan topcoat, edged to the bars and gave Lester a cigarette. Smoking as he spoke, with both hands locked about the bars, Little Lester answered the topcoat between puffs.
“Naw, I don’t smoke much. I chew t’ree packs of gum a day but I don’t smoke much. Smokin’ is against the rules is why I do it is all. I don’t even eat much. Naw, I don’t play no ball. Movies I like better ’n anything. Movies ’n bubble gum. Me ’n my gum—we stick together.
“What I really like though is mechanics. I don’t like readin’ about crime-stuff, I like readin’ about takin’ t’ings apart ’n puttin’ ’em together, like airplanes. I used to go out to the airport just to watch.
“But what I really like is gym-a-nastics, that’s what I took up in the neighborhood. I crooked four days from school a week, I was workin’ on the parallella bars.
“Say—you know what burned my hump?”—nodding toward the bandaged eye—“It wasn’t when his girl-friend scratched me, like you said it in the paper. What burned me was after I shot him, then he says ‘Don’t shoot me.’ After I done it, he says something like that. He got his dirty eye shot out ’n he says ‘Don’t shoot me.’ I would of let him have it for real then, only the dirty chamber was empty.
“Naw, girls are poison. Once when I was twelve I was in love with a girl, she was ’leven, we was like a couple grownup goofs.
“My old man? His one big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. How he’d look best is wit’ his head off five inches below the shoulders. You know what I told my old ma the time she called the cops on me for sellin’ the ice-box when she was downtown? I told her, ‘Mom, you been workin’ for me for nineteen years. Now go out ’n get a job for yourself.’ ”
Bonarue Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie looked at Bonarue. “Let’s get the detail done, dealer,” Bonarue suggested, and another week passed before Frankie saw Little Lester the Money-Waster and Woman-Chaser again.
For two hours, on the following Saturday afternoon, Frankie sat at the same table as Lester, where an assigned group was permitted to write letters or play cards. Thus it was that Lester sat across from Frankie with a soiled deck in his hand, trying to do the tricks that Frankie had sometimes lived by.
“It took me five years to learn this one,” Frankie explained, “pick a card.”
“Show me one that don’t take that long,” Lester asked politely, declining to pick one.
He was forty-nine days from the chair, Frankie kept thinking—yet he sat here playing casino, would eat the same food this night as himself. Saw the same corridors and the same yellowish light wadded about the night-lights, all night long; slept and wakened to the same muffled sounds: down the tier evening was beginning.
“How does it feel to play cards with a man waiting for the chair?” Lester asked, as if reading Frankie’s thoughts.
“I hope you don’t make it, kid,” Frankie assured him.
“I’m gettin’ a little practice at it Monday,” Lester told him wryly: “I’m settin’ in the dentist’s chair. They’re fixin’ a loose chopper so’s I won’t have to set in the chair downstairs with a toothache.”
Frankie’s eyes shifted to the floor, and he noticed that Lester was wearing tennis sneakers, with both bows neatly tied.
Frankie never forgot the neatly tied bows of the asphalt-colored tennis sneakers.
He saw them again on an afternoon when Lester was being taken into the yard for a twenty-minute workout. He was to be exercised, like a piece of stock out there, and the rumor of it had gone through the prison grapevine with hard laughter: “We’re all stock, in or out of County,” that laugh meant.
The yard was laid o
ut like a rock garden, with a duckless duck pond, a chicken house, and a pale blue bird house. Above and behind the bird-house ran a two-story high legend: PULASKI COAL MAKES WARM FRIENDS. And across from it was a counter-appeal to the inmates: BUY DELTA COAL.
Along the rows where, in summer, vegetables would grow, four cons stood under the eyes of four guards. Without uniformity they touched their toes with their fingertips, bending awkwardly from the waist. Three of them had to stand spread-legged to do so. Lester, Frankie saw with an odd, defiant pride, could do so without bending his knees at all. He touched the tips of the tennis sneakers’ neat bow-knots with the condemned fingers of his condemned wrists.
“A guy got somethin’ like that on his mind ’n still he ties his laces like he was entered in a track meet,” Frankie complained to Bonarue Katz.
Bonarue missed the point. “He just does caliskonectics is all,” he told Frankie. “Let’s go. They ain’t gonna let him climb no bars. He might get too good at it.”
“If it was me I’d tell ’em to let me skip the rope,” Frankie offered; but Bonarue didn’t think the offering was funny at all.
“What good would that do? You’d still have to beat the chair.”
“Just tryin’ to make a joke,” Frankie apologized.
“Quit listenin’ to the radio, you won’t make so many,” Bonarue told him sourly.
And the greenish-gray light wavered, with Frankie’s unwavering wonder, along the whitewashed, silent halls.
He couldn’t get over Little Lester’s composure. Like any punk, with less luck than most. A kid who had seen double-headers at Comiskey Park and shot six-no-count pool and watched a striptease act on North Clark and played nickel-and-dime poker in the back of a neighborhood bar and had crapped out on a twelve-dollar pass and had carried a pass to Sportsman’s Park in his wallet; one who’d worn bright new trunks to show off in front of the girls on the North Avenue Beach on a summer morning when summer was going to last forever.