Overview
The Man with the Golden Arm is one of the first post-WWII era novels to document the difficulties soldiers experienced when readjusting to civilian life. Nelson Algren, the author, himself served in WWII as a medical corpsan, and he intended to write novels about experiences he had on the battlefield. After coming back to Chicago and observing how his fellow soldiers had trouble integrating into a corporate careers, he grew upset at the narratives he saw promoted by government and media figures that depicted soldiers adjusting just fine to daily life. Rather than homes in the suburbs, many lived in poverty and fell into a cycle of substance use, whether it was drinking or heroin. Algren decided to explore the rough low-income neighborhoods himself to document, with as much accuracy as possible, the lives of those veterans caught in a cycle of drinking.
Commentary
The book has a sharp vaudeville wit to its banter that speaks to Algren’s dedication to capturing the authentic conversational styles and mannerisms of the 40s Chicago neighborhoods he explored. There’s a lot of playfulness under the dark humor and cynicism. I haven’t yet finished it, but I intend to update this once I do.
Notable Quotes
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“That night, while the little twenty-watt bulbs burned on in a single unwinking fury down the whitewashed tier, Frankie Machine was touched by an old wound fever and dreamed, for the second time in his life, of the man with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.”
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“Man, I wasn’t hooked, I was crucified. The monkey got so big he was carryin’ me. ‘Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first’n one mornin’ you wake up ‘n you’re feedin’ the habit.”
“A monkey on the back” is an English idiom that refers to a hard and stubborn problem or burden. Algren popularized the euphemism in the context of drugs as a habit that was hard to kick.
- “The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here has failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own.”
Algren was deeply skeptical of America’s orientation towards consumerist materialism as a value and marker of goodness. The postwar boom oversaw a shift in production towards household commodities, associating peace and victory with wealth and consumption under a Puritan moral-psychology. State, media, and corporate institutions were all running high on this prosperity narrative while the reality of many soldiers who served was abject poverty and a revolving door with criminal justice systems. Algren specifically calls out billboards as a transmission vector for this narrative, with an advertisement depicting success and victory that induced guilt if you didn’t have what was being sold. Were you not working hard enough to be prosperous enough to buy the American Dream?
Billboards grew in this era as more Americans adopted cars as a center of their lifestyle amidst the growth of the Interstate Highway System. Owning a Ford represents the progressive nature of this consumerist process; you drive down the road in a car that shows you all the other things you have yet to buy to achieve the Dream when you get to where you’re going. After that, you drive some more to find more things to buy at the next place you’re going. Eventually you buy a new Ford to replace the old one, and you keep going until you don’t.