This essay is taken from the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Man With the Golden Arm, complete with commentary, from Seven Stories Press.

The lead actor in another Algren drama, the novel Never Come Morning, says at one point, in response to a sure death sentence, "Knew I'd never get t'be twenty-one anyhow." And what takes our breath away is precisely the spectacle of someone observing his own demise, coolly and with a hearty and humorous appreciation of the irony his life embodies. And so, the pounding the reader hears in his ears throughout The Man With the Golden Arm is only partly the expiring, exhausted breathing of Frankie Machine, victim, and partly the pulsing of the attentive hearts of Sparrow, Record Head, Molly-O, Frankie himself, Algren himself, alert, listening, watching--witnesses.

Whose identity is at stake here? (Sparrow's? Frankie's? Algren's? The reader's?) And how much responsibility rightfully belongs on the witnesses' shoulders, anyway? This more than any other may be Algren's question, the one he had to ask of himself, and of the rest of us. It would have concerned him, as a soldier who had only a few years earlier served in a world war that was already the second of this century. And, as it would other writers of conscience, it would come to haunt him, as a writer who only a few years hence would have his passport application denied and the publication of a book of his hurriedly refused by his publisher because of his political affiliations (he was honorary co-chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Committee). He, and we, similarly, could speak of a century in which we have come to know so much and seem to be able to do comparatively little, a century in which genocide has been followed by the words "Never again," and then more genocide, and in which the fight against totalitarianism is routinely used to justify totalitarianism. And it is in this context that the question of the witness, Algren's question, keeps returning, demanding an answer. We all know we are bystanders of horror. Is there something about the nature of standing by and watching that Algren teaches? It is a question each of his readers will ask, and every reader will answer a little differently.

Since Algren's novel is a work of identity, not action, the reader experiences it on several planes, only one of which is narrative, and thus only one of which is hopeless. Whatever happens, there are residues of personality, of humor, of grace, that outlast and outshine the botched beginnings and miserable ends. It is almost as if Algren's novels were written in several literary genres simultaneously, as if at the end of The Man With the Golden Arm, the novel were superseded by a parallel work, a drama, and what resonates most strongly is an irreducible lyric quality, what Algren would have called poetry. And as if confirming this notion of multiple and parallel works within the novel, Algren in fact gives us three separate endings to the book, the first set in the hotel room where Frankie has holed up, fading in and out of consciousness and leaving the reader also without a sure grip on reality, followed by the police report, which is as it were absolutely narrative, followed by the poem with which Algren closes the book, letting go of the novelist persona, stripped naked. He calls the poem "Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm," and in its last stanza he poses this question: "Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot/Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?"

It was Algren's friend and agent Candida Donadio who first suggested to me that Algren was sentimental. I had to think about that. I'm still thinking about it. She was asking me to see sentimentality as a positive attribute, since Candida wasn't criticizing Algren when she said it--just describing him. We usually think of sentimentality as the distortion of a true emotion. It can also be a bridge there.

In the early sixties, about twelve or thirteen years after he'd completed the writing of The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson himself spoke on the subject to H.E.F. Donohue, for the book Conversations with Nelson Algren:

[Sentimentality] is an indulgence in emotion. You want men and women to be good to each other and you're very stubborn in thinking that they want to be. Sentimentality is a kind of indulgence in this hope. I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing.... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it.

As the soul-grinding narrative of The Man With the Golden Arm is nearly completed toward the end of the novel, there is a scene in which Sparrow watches Frankie shoot up:

"It kills me in the heart, how you are now," Sparrow couldn't keep from saying. "It just ain't like bein' Frankie no more." "That's the hardest thing of all for me to be, Solly," Frankie told him with a strange gentleness. "I'm gettin' farther away from myself all the time. It's why I have to have a charge so bad, so I can come back 'n be myself a little while again. But it's a longer way to go every time...."

As the scene continues, Frankie pelts Sparrow with questions: "You know who I am? You know who you are? You know who anybody is any more?" Sparrow says he doesn't know. And then, abruptly, Frankie asks: "Then tell me just this--why do some cats swing like this?" Sparrow doesn't know that either. But for a moment, as happens at key points throughout the book, the different planes of the novel speak in harmony. The scene is heavy with plot, propelled by Bednar setting Sparrow up to deliver Frankie his morphine, which allows Bednar to put the heat on Sparrow to rat on Frankie about Louie's murder. The dramatic plane is present in Frankie's own awareness of his dead-end position. And the poetic plane comes through in Frankie's words. Action expresses alienation from being; being itself marks a diminishing trail; and in the end it is in their self-awareness--self-deprecating, often funny and bought at a steep price--that Algren's characters find their unearthly power.

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