Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Beauvoir and Nelson went on the road then, with no set plans. They flew to Rome first, and then visited Naples and Porto d’Ischia.

  When they reached Tunis, a chauffeur named Hassine Ameur Djemail offered to drive them to an island called Djerba in a 1939 Citroen, and they accepted. When they arrived, they found an underground bar where the owner kept his beer—and his feet—cool by submerging them in a pool of water. They spent three days there; Nelson smoked a combination of hashish and tobacco the locals called “kif,” and he and Beauvoir ate dinner with Djemail, smoked, and talked about Islam and America.

  Algiers was next—then Fez, and Marrakesh. They stopped in Marseille so that Nelson could see the port he had looked down on while waiting to be sent home after the war, and they lost a bit of money in Monte Carlo. In Antibes, they visited friends of Beauvoir’s, and Nelson got drunk and danced with a chair to make everyone laugh.

  They returned to Paris in August, and for a month they lived the way they were always meant to—in the moment, and without undue pressure on either of them to be everything the other needed. They were happy to be together, and happy, too, because they were both ascendant. Beauvoir had just become one of the most famous writers in Europe, and Nelson was about to become one of the most renowned novelists in America. Several hundred thousand copies of Avon’s edition of Never Come Morning had already been printed. The Man with the Golden Arm was about to be released, and Harper’s magazine had just published an excerpt from it.

  Nelson and Beauvoir parted at Orly Airport in mid-September with less drama than usual. He was eager to begin promoting his novel back in Chicago, and she was not apprehensive about saying goodbye because she felt certain they would see each other again. But then, suddenly, she was not. “He went through the door to customs,” she wrote later. “[H]e disappeared; that in itself seemed so impossible that everything became possible, even or especially, that we might never meet again. I went back to Paris by taxi: the red lights on top of the pylons were all omens of some dreadful calamity.”

  * Nelson usually refers to morphine in his writing, but sometimes he says heroin, or dope, when describing the narcotics his friends were using. It’s likely they used whatever they could get their hands on, and he seems to use the terms interchangeably. “Heroin is essentially the same as morphine,” he said once.

  † The first feature story the Tribune published about heroin addiction appeared on September 5, 1948—about a year after Nelson realized Jack and his friends were using. It had the amazing title SHADY LADIES: DOOMED BY DRUGS. About a month later, the paper ran a piece with the equally dramatic headline BREAK UP RING SELLING DOPE TO ‘BE-BOP’ CROWD.

  ‡ Nelson wrote a fictionalized version of these events in an article called “Previous Days,” in which he refers to Bays as “Margo.” The article misrepresents the timing of Bays’s attempt to get clean, but is otherwise accurate. For a discussion of the article and the other evidence supporting the claim that Bays is “Margo,” see the source notes.

  § This is a cliché now, but it didn’t enter the lexicon until Nelson committed it to the page.

  ¶ A modified version of this bill received majority support in the House and Senate two years later, in 1950. President Truman vetoed it, saying that portions of the bill “move in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief. This would be a very dangerous course to take.” He was overruled, and the Internal Security Act became law in September 1950.

  # The insertion of these names into the book was no accident. In early drafts of the novel, Nelson used different names and slogans on these billboards.

  ** Most of these are in keeping with Nelson’s predilection for suggesting horrible titles, but some of his other ideas were even worse. He wanted to call his novel Bedbugs Don’t Bite Junkies at one point, and he also suggested The Weaker Sheep, The Monkey’s Other Paw, and The Deadlockers. No one has ever been good at everything.

  “OK, Kid, You Beat Dostoyevsky”

  (September 22, 1949–March 16, 1950)

  Nelson and Eleanor Roosevelt sharing a laugh after the presentation of the first National Book Awards. Ralph L. Rusk, who received that year’s award for nonfiction, is pictured to their left; William Carlos Williams, the recipient of that year’s award for poetry, is pictured to their right. Roosevelt was a finalist for the nonfiction award. Photo by Bettmann/Bettmann Collection/Getty Images

  When Nelson began signing copies of The Man with the Golden Arm in the Seven Stairs bookshop on September 22, the line of people waiting to see him stretched through the narrow main room, outside, down the steps, and along the sidewalk—and for the next three hours, it continued to replenish itself. Every time someone exited carrying a copy of the novel, another person took their place.

  Customers lined up in pairs and waited patiently, and when they made it through the front door, they were confronted by a chaotic scene. The shop’s owner, Stuart Brent, stood behind a counter and rang up sales, and newspaper photographers moved through the room, snapping pictures. Ken McCormick lugged books from the storeroom to the counter, and people clustered around a table where a barrel of beer and five large salamis had been set out. Jack Conroy mingled and told jokes in his basso baritone, and Nelson sat with his back to the rear wall, signing copies of his novel. He added lengthy inscriptions to every book that appeared in front of him, sometimes entire paragraphs, and when he made mistakes, he insisted that Brent provide a fresh copy.

  Four hundred and fifty people filed through Seven Stairs that afternoon, and almost two hundred bought the novel. The event was mentioned in the local papers several times, and over the next two weeks, the shop sold eight hundred more copies.*

  No one had expected the reception to be such a success—not Brent, not McCormick, and not Nelson. Early reviews of The Man with the Golden Arm were partly responsible for the turnout. The Tribune’s reviewer wrote, “I would crown him [Algren] the American Dostoevsky, were not such comparisons invidious and his place not assured.” The book dips into melodrama occasionally, the New York Times said, but its shortcomings “are far outweighed, in so far as the writing is concerned, by Algren’s acute ear for vernacular speech, his sure feeling for structure, and a smooth flow of prose which has nothing of the slick about it.” And Time said, “Readers with queasy stomachs may shrink from an environment in which the unbelievably sordid has become a way of life. They will also come away with some of Algren’s own tender concern for his wretched, confused and hopelessly degenerate cast of characters. In that, Writer Algren scores a true novelist’s triumph.”

  But the timing of the book’s release was also responsible for some of the excitement it created. For once, Nelson’s tortured process produced a book that was perfectly suited to the moment it reached the market. Golden Arm felt timely because its protagonist was a struggling veteran, and the war had ended only four years earlier. It felt important because morphine addiction—a non-concern when Nelson added it to his manuscript—had recently become a major issue. And it felt exciting and subversive because the Red Scare had already homogenized much of American culture, but it dared to assert the humanity of addicts, prisoners, prostitutes, and thieves.

  Captain Bednar is sitting behind a query room desk in the Saloon Street police station when The Man with the Golden Arm begins, feeling weary and “half drunken.” He lays his head on his arms and slips into a reverie. “Yet it wasn’t work that wearied him so,” Nelson wrote, “and his sleep was harassed by more than a smoke-colored rain. The city had filled him with the guilt of others; he was numbed by his charge sheet’s accusations.”

  Two minor hustlers are waiting when Bednar raises his head. One is a card dealer named Frankie “Machine” Macjinek. The other is a “loose bum” named Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin. Bednar knows both well.

  “Ain’t nothin’ on my record but drunk ’n fightin’,” Frankie offers without being asked. “All I do is deal, drink ’n fight.”

  The captain looks at Frankie closely—his fad
ed army-issue wool pants, his broken nose, and his combat boots.

  “What kind of discharge you get, Dealer?” he asks.

  “The right kind,” Frankie replies. “And the Purple Heart.”

  “Who do you fight with?” Bednar asks.

  “My wife, that’s all,” Frankie says.

  “Hell, that’s no crime,” Bednar allows.

  Sparrow Saltskin is a more complicated problem. He’s a pathetic creature—a peeping tom, a dog thief, a shoplifter, a clown—but he speaks with the authority of a respectable man, and his presumptuousness brings out the worst in people. Like a flea-ridden mongrel demanding affection, even gentle souls consider snapping a foot into his soft belly when he approaches.

  The captain is no different. He has booked Sparrow so many times, he no longer finds him amusing, or even tolerable. He begins questioning Sparrow haphazardly, but their repartee quickly turns dark.

  “I think you’re a moron,” the captain says. Then he addresses Frankie and Sparrow together. “You’re both a couple of loose bums livin’ off the weaker bums,” he says, and orders an officer to lock them up.

  As with the Russian novels Nelson most admired, the price of admission to The Man with the Golden Arm is high. The vernacular in its pages is thick and opaque at first, and the momentum created by the first scene slows drastically when Frankie and Sparrow reach their cell and Nelson begins describing their environment, and their friendship.

  World War II has been won by the time the novel begins, and victory has transformed America into a wealthy, conformist, and status-obsessed country, Nelson explains—a place where “ownership and virtue are one,” and the truest Americans receive their commandments from billboards and slick magazines. They drink “liquor that lends distinction” and “beer that gives that special glow of health,” and as a result, they’re able to “mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others.”

  But Frankie and Sparrow feel like foreigners in the world occupied by those “truer Americans.” They can see it in the distance and feel the warm glow of its wealth, but they’ve been denied access to it. The portions of the city available to them, in contrast, have begun to feel like “some sort of open-roofed jail with walls for all men and laughter for very few.” Like everyone else who has been written out of the narrative of the American Century, they “no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of the billboards.”

  Frankie and Sparrow live in the postwar world, but the Polish Triangle is their home, and older, simpler rules govern there. Little has changed in the neighborhood since the armistice, and no one expects much ever will. “For here,” Nelson wrote, “God and the ward super work hand in hand and neither moves without the other’s assent. God loans the super cunning and the super forwards a percentage of the grift on Sunday mornings. The super puts in the fix for all right-thinking hustlers and the Lord, in turn, puts in the fix for the super. For the super’s God is a hustler’s God; and as wise, in his way, as the God of the priests and the business men.”

  Disturbing that arrangement is the sin that landed Frankie and Sparrow in jail. They work for a man named Zero Schwiefka—Frankie deals cards for his backroom poker game, and Sparrow works the door and steers players to the table—and the police picked them up because Schwiefka declined to pay for protection that week.

  Schwiefka corrects that error the day after Frankie and Sparrow are arrested, and visits them in jail. He’s an ugly, ill-kempt man, and when he arrives, he stands outside their cell and rubs his “hamlike” hands together and apologizes.

  “Got here as soon as I could, Dealer,” he tells Frankie. “You’ll be out in half an hour.”

  The Man with the Golden Arm feels like a traditional naturalistic novel in its opening pages—a book created to highlight its characters’ poverty and elicit sympathy for them. But when Frankie and Sparrow return to their neighborhood and enter Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar, the book’s narrative focus tightens, and it becomes concerned almost entirely with its characters’ internal lives—their dreams and fears, the dignity they imbue themselves with, their ethics, and the existential worries that plague them.†

  The Tug & Maul Bar is the neighborhood’s living room, and it’s there that Nelson introduces most of his characters. Drunkie John and his wife Molly Novotny appear first. They’re sitting at the bar when Frankie and Sparrow first enter, and John is haranguing Molly for nothing—“The nuthouse is the best place for you,” he says cryptically. Sometimes, he beats her. On other occasions, he humiliates her or kicks her out of their apartment to assert his authority, but on this afternoon, he settles for knocking over a shot of whisky and splashing it down the front of her dress.

  “Have your own way then, have your own way,” she says with practiced submissiveness.

  John is a man near forty who hasn’t worked in years. He lives off the money Molly earns serving drinks at Club Safari, but never shows her any gratitude. He’s adrift in the world—just bobbing in the surf. “Some find themselves through joy,” Nelson wrote, “some through suffering and some through toil. Johnny had till now tried nothing but whisky. A process which left him feeling like somebody new every day.”

  Molly is a woman in her early twenties, a “small girl with a heart-shaped face and eyes dark with exhaustion.” She’s generous, and had once been carefree, but she has learned resignation since marrying John. She takes his beatings and insults with a “sort of dull hopelessness” because she has no other options. She feels best about herself when caring for others, and it’s her tenderness that traps her. “She’s got too big a heart, that girl,” Antek Witwicki says. “A guy can walk into her heart with army boots on.”

  Frankie and Sparrow leave the Tug & Maul when Molly runs out and John chases after her, but they return regularly and Nelson continues to use the bar to introduce his most important characters.

  One is a blind man everyone calls Piggy-O. His sight first began to dim while he was watching a burlesque, and when he lost it altogether, he decided everyone still capable of seeing was allied against him. He coats his body with filth to keep the world at bay, but though people run when they catch a whiff of his stench, he never concedes that they have any reason to feel superior. “I got my kind of pride ’n you got yours,” he says. “I’m proud of bein’ how I am too.”

  Louie Fomorowski is another. He is an old-school hustler who knew some of Chicago’s most famous gangsters back in his day. He is past fifty when the novel begins, but still dealing morphine and dressing like a player—amber-toed two-tone shoes, a green fedora, and polo shirts. He has outlived most of his contemporaries and managed to remain in business by adjusting his code of conduct to reflect the ethics of the postwar world. “My business is everybody’s business,” he says proudly, “—informin’ is a racket like everythin’ else.”

  Drunkie John, Molly Novotny, Blind Piggy, and Louie Fomorowski all play important roles in the novel’s plot—and so do Antek Witwicki, Zero Schwiefka, Captain Bednar, and a beat cop named Kvorka—but Frankie, Sparrow, and Frankie’s wife, Sophie, are the book’s heart.

  Frankie and Sophie grew up in the Triangle and spent their childhoods chasing “malt-hop trucks” to catch malt drippings in tin cans, and carrying the Easter lamb into St. Stephen’s Church so Father Simon could bless it.‡ They have been sweethearts almost their entire lives, but Frankie has never taken Sophie’s affection seriously, and his indifference “tortured” her. He was, Nelson wrote, “as careless of her love as if it were something he could pick up in any old can just by following a malt-hop truck.”

  So Sophie secured his devotion. She faked a pregnancy to pressure him into marrying her, and then faked a miscarriage after they exchanged vows. They have been husband and wife ever since, but even that isn’t enough to keep him close. He went off to war, got injured by shrapnel, and came home as wild and indifferent to her as ever. On the night America dropped atomic bombs on N
agasaki and Hiroshima, Frankie got blind drunk and drove into a billboard on Ashland Avenue. Sophie was hurt in the accident, though not badly, but she has been pretending her legs are numb and useless ever since.

  She knows Frankie will stay with her as long as she is unable to care for herself, so she calls the crash “[t]he blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last.” They have been locked into an endless domestic battle ever since, and she finds her greatest pleasure in tormenting him. “What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery,” Nelson wrote. “He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.”

  Sparrow’s love for Frankie is more tender and familial. They met two years before Pearl Harbor, when Frankie found Sparrow huddled beneath newspapers in an alley. Frankie handed Sparrow a half dollar that night so he could afford to sleep inside, and Sparrow has loved and admired him since. He is the only person in the neighborhood who thinks Frankie is clever, tough, and important, and his devotion is often the only thing either can rely on.

  Sparrow has been a creature of the alleys his entire life, but he’s also a keen observer who occasionally plays the role of the nobleman’s fool by speaking truth more plainly than anyone else. Once a woman asks plaintively, “Ain’t nobody on my side?” And Sparrow answers, “You’re all on your own from here on out. Ain’t nobody on anybody’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side ’n I’m the oney one on mine.”