CCLaP Journal #5

as mine. Both dead a long time now.”

So here we have a novel concerned with cultural inheritance, a story of a second generation hanging on under the weight of the “great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.” The world left for Francis Majcinek and Antek the Owner by their immigrant progenitors consists of a few gritty blocks, a card game, a couple of dirty bars, a rotating cast of colorful characters, and an alcoholic dog named Rumdum.

The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award in 1950 and was adapted into a 1955 movie starring Frank Sinatra. The novel cemented Nelson Algren’s status as one of the best known literary writers in America, and also set him on a career trajectory away from his early failures (his first novel failed to make much of an impact, and his second novel was misunderstood).

It’s fascinating to think that a writer whose 1942 novel Never Come Morning so offended Chicago’s Polish community that it was banned by the Chicago Public Library and Algren was denounced as a Nazi sympathizer, could eventually come to embody something essential about the Polish (or, more generally, the outsider, the down and outer, the hustler) experience in Chicago, so much so that in the years after Algren’s death there was a movement to rename the “Polish Downtown” section of Chicago—basically the neighborhood around the Division Street Blue Line stop stretching westward toward Ukranian Village and north toward Wicker Park—in his honor. Of course there is no Algrenville in Chicago. There is, however a Nelson Algren Fountain at Ashland and Division in the heart of Polonia Chicago, and there isn’t another Chicago author whose reputation has remained as consistently stratospheric as Algren’s in the last couple decades. The Man with the Golden Arm is the most important novel by one of Chicago’s greatest writers.

The novel’s hero is the aforementioned Francis Majcinek, although most people know him as Frankie Machine, or simply Dealer. Frankie makes his living dealing cards in a game run by the hustler Schwiefka. Dealing, Frankie says, like drumming, is all in the wrist. Frankie’s arm is golden because it earns him his living.

On one level, The Man with the Golden Arm is simply the story of Frankie trying to make ends meet in the rough and tumble Chicago neighborhood where he has lived his entire life. Frankie deals, drinks, steals, and whiles away the days with his best buddy, the punk Solly Saltskin, or Sparrow for short. The novel begins with Sparrow and Frankie incarcerated in the county jail, looked over by Record Head Bednar, brought in by Cousin Kvorka for no reason other than that Schwiefka is late making his payoff. Soon Frankie and Sparrow are released, but really their lives are just periods of freedom broken up by periods of incarceration. By the time the novel reaches its midway point, Frankie is jailed again, then eventually freed, then jailed, then freed, then runs from the law in the novel’s climax.

But this is also a novel about addiction. Frankie was introduced to morphine in the Army, and he slowly develops a habit through the course of the novel. Watching Frankie slowly transform into a junky can be a brutal and demoralizing reading experience. He kicks the habit during a prison stretch, only to pick it up again the minute he gets out. All of this culminates in a scene where Sparrow—who Frankie’s been on the outs with since Sparrow ran from the scene of a curling iron heist that he had put Frankie up to—ends up delivering drugs to the room where Frankie is staying. Sparrow doesn’t know that he’s delivering drugs to Frankie, and is surprised to arrive and find his old friend. The important thing about Sparrow and Frankie’s relationship up to this point is that Sparrow has always looked up to the Dealer.

They’ve been friends, but Sparrow has been riding Frankie’s coattails. Frankie has March 2014 | 59