AN EPIC OF SKID ROW
Poster, William S.
An Epic of Skid Row THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM. By Nelson Algren. Doubleday and Co. 343 pp. $3.06. Reviewed by WILLIAM POSTER THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM stays quite close to what is by now...
...As a "junkie" life is a very different affair for Frankie...
...So far as concerns what is past, here is the gist of her account...
...He comes out of the army with a Purple Heart, a Mauser and a much used hypodermic needle for souvenirs, to join his old friends and his psychotic wife...
...The tide of immigration is towards Israel the new land of hope, hope based on what...
...The Jews have Israel now...
...But labor union leaders, while more or less reserved in optimism, were better disposed toward trying the comJohn Daniels Is active In the cooperative movement He Is a frequent contributor te The New Lemder...
...Until recently America was their goat of libei ty, but even America has passed restrictive laws...
...Zosh, paralyzed by an accident for which Frankie blames himself...
...They are at a loss for an idea on which to build...
...The air is clamorous with fear...
...but more than once such complacency was shattered, his own adopted land invaded against his will Tby hordes of his own race fleeing persecution abroad...
...Despite their faults'arid weaknesses, they are, for Algren, essentially admirable figures, because they are "regalefV**** de aot directly and ooidiy exploit human weakness and they have not j—esirss their natural animal innocence as has the average citizen or worse still actively worked against it and therefore against all instinctive human bonds at has the forlorn "Record Head Bednar" who after a life of doing his "honest copper's duty" within the narrow limits of Chicago ward politics is wracked with guilt and realizes vaguely that his devotion to "justice tempered with mercy" conceals "nothing more than a hostility towards men and woman as men and women," Algren's exploration of the basic clash between law and instinct is a distinct advance over what has been done previously because more is present to his consciousness...
...dealing cards in the gambling establishment of Zero Schwiefka, drank but not enough to ruin his skill and was picked up by the police now and then but for nothing very serious...
...The wealth of nations is gone...
...Time after time the story repeats itself in Dr...
...The Jewish Publication Society of America...
...Algren's not too obvious aid, a continuously charming kind of colloquial poetry...
...In advisory ways connected with practical workaday means of reducing waste and speeding up war-plant production, the total contribution which the workers made through these committees was very substantial...
...PRANKIE AMD SPARROW are extremely real figures and emerge out William Poster has contributed te Pert/sea Review...
...No, it is going too far to say she actually predicts that labor-management centmittes will increase in number, progress in function beyond merely making recommendations to management, and become a potent force in advancing industrial teamwork and peace...
...Algren's version of the chase, the test of all narratives in this genre, the climax that brings out all the author has been able to drag up from the labyrinth of the human psyche about the eternal drama of the hunter and the hunted, lacks the tremendous bodily impact that characterizes some of the better works of Hemingway or Hammett and fails somewhat short of realizing its own potential of suspense but it does have a uniquely integrated poetry of milieu and an extra dimension of loneliness and terror added to it by the fact that Frankie is pursued not only by the police but by the grim necessity of his own habit...
...Algren's hero (and the author's admiration for him is sufficiently unequivocal for him to end the book with a poem about him in a somewhat pathetic, 1890's Frankie and Johnnie style) is a fairly typical resident of the district, a rather likeable reckless youngster, who before the war, got along by...
...Withal, "The Man with the Golden Arm" is one of the best American novels of recent years, a multifaceted and rich, if imperfectly focussed book...
...So most employers gave them such slight attention that they died of inanition...
...Political equality, economic equality again...
...By force they asserted their right to the land, and by force they will have to hold it, until a superior strength comes along, Russia, America...
...Not naturally a very tough guy or the kind that gets into really bad scrapes, Frankie blows up one night and in company with Sparrow, a rattle-brained, half-Jewish, half-Polish sneak thief with whom he has one of those Damon and Pythias, leader and derelict relationships lately so common in this genre, murders a drug peddler after a wisecracking quarrel at Schwiefka's poker table...
...168 pp...
...By Dorothea De Schweinitz...
...In many instance^ it was the naive faith in progress, in good triumphant over evil, the current bourgeois palliatives, that were at work...
...The horror rises to a crescendo with the approach of the second world war...
...Wischnitzer has provided us with tables of immigration year by year for each country in which Jews may be found...
...I therefore conclude this review by remarking that she certainly does not overstate what appears to some other observers, including myself, to be a decided trend toward more responsible and constructive labor-management cooperation...
...It is also somewhat more uncertain, less intuitively right and emotionally unified than for example, such a novel as "Studs Loaigee," the underlying theme of which » mot lee aiaeimiisr te saake a campsriaw unjustified, Mr...
...UNDER POWERFUL ECONOMIC blows from within or without, the standards of decency in a country collapse...
...This may have been due to the pervasive influence of the times, but he had gone so far as to assimilate himself into the life of his adopted country by religious conversion and by an eager perpetuation of tho mores of that country, as for example the smug, exclusive attitude of the middle class Jew in Germany towards others of his own kind before Hitler...
...Their old values, their middle class virtues have finally succumbed...
...mittees out...
...As holder of the Wertheim Research Fellowship In Harvard College, Miss De Schweinitz has turned out an excellent piece of work...
...The best results were obtained in unionized plants...
...Political equality quickly falls under this dead weight...
...Commentary and the Nation of a very wide area of contemporary life, out of the great number of lowerclass adolescents who, talented beyond the average cannot, often because of the very nature of their talents, tear themselves from the purely instinctual patterns of youth and drift indolently down the moldy byways of Skid Row or into the haunted world within a 'wold of the dope addict...
...In a David Ignetew published a book of Peeeu In the summer ef IMS and is currently at work en a neveL frenzy they turn towards the darkest side of themselves, the superstitious and primitive, and thrash about, slaughtering...
...The main reason why they did not amount to more was because they were formed —at least on paper—from the top down undei- government pressure, and so hurriedly that haste made waste...
...Reviewed by DAVID IGNATOW THERE NEVER WAS SAFETY for long, and none shines forth now...
...There were individuals who had even taken an affirmative attitude towards their beliefs and acted upon them, such as the Baron de Hirsch who did not hesitate to pour out his millions for colonization in foreign lands...
...He is in an era demanding a human sacrifice for its terrible convulsions of spirit...
...Because this book is written in a frame of astute political and economic insight, several significant lessons rise from it...
...Only Hope Remains TO DWELL IN SAFETY...
...And the novel suffers from the diversity of its author's talents...
...A Healthy Trend LABOR AND MANAGEMENT IN A COMMON ENTERPRISE...
...his flak for the poetic occasionally carries him beyond the bounds of a versimilitude that is otherwise successfully maintained, and the very same laesesr/ 1m psychologic, inner-world portraiture that turns up the remarkable description of Zosh, Frankie's destructive and wilfully paralyzed wife, nearly mists the delineation of the gambler by an unnecessary and nebulous attempt te link his actions to some youthful misadventures...
...And Mr...
...his self-control and skill slowly go to pieces under the need for the drug, the physical stresses and the fear of discovery...
...All this has come to naught, and today the Jew knows that neither the power of money, nor political equality, .nor new settlements can guarantee his safety...
...even in Israel...
...Harvard University Press...
...The story is set in the environment Mr...
...Algren teds us a goad seal about his characters which their acttom (those of Bednar, 'for example) tend to belie...
...It takes quite a while before the law, in the person of "Record-Head Bednar," Algren's wisecracking, knowing and guilt-ridden police Captain, gets around to trying to nail Frankie for the crime but he is finally pushed into it more by the pressure of ward politics than moral necessity...
...188 pp...
...One may now read the whole story, in bitter hindsight, with a sense of tragedy rising to its Nazi climax, and ending as all tragedies must of necessity on a note of hope again, for there is nothing left of the shattered virtues but hope, and always hope in this breaking world...
...Wischnitzer's documentation, Germany in the 1840*8, Poland, Rumania, Austria, Hungary, Russia...
...Miss De Schweinitz tells in detail how the best ones worked, what they accomplished, and what is of value now from their experience...
...3.00...
...Reviewed by JOHN DANIELS THERE HAS BEEN NEED for a reliable book about the labormanagement or joint production committees which mushroomed during the Second World War under the drive of the War Production Board...
...This book fills that need in a competent, clear and comprehensive way...
...Mark Wischnitzer...
...Reviewed by WILLIAM POSTER THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM stays quite close to what is by now the classic line of the American crime story and has some of the classic characters...
...It was a fault shared by Jews in other parts of the world as well, for there were times, to this very day, when one class would not consider it a duty nor vital to its interests to lend aid to those persecuted in a strange land...
...Algren has advanced an uncertain step or two further into the complexities of guilt and innocence than anyone has ventured before...
...Another reason, running close to the first, was that by and large the employers —that Is, industrial management—were cither positively opposed to them or went along with them only perfunctorily, from fear that they would invade management prerogatives or at any rute be more bother than they were worth...
...Prankie Machine, Mr...
...Life in such an environment is never at rest but seems always to be moving in cycles from the depressive to the manic going through phases of garish humor, and casual violence on its way and also from the abnormally stupid to the abnormal cleverness produced by the complex circumstances in which the essentially simple-natured, but not simple-minded protagonists must function...
...There is no longer room for toleration...
...But she does get to the point where she implies that this is "possible...
...Algren has made familiar in his short stories, a Polish slum district in Chicago populated by hustlers and whores, drunks and drunk-rollers, deadbeats, cretins and small-time criminals of every variety, talking a rhythmic language of sophisticated underworld phrases and inflections crossed by naive, rich Polish dialect locutions in such a way as to compose, with Mr...
...The Jew has tended to put too much faith and dependence upon the principles of economic and political equality...
...Who knows in these feverish days...
...in a collapsing world...
...Then leaving the past behind she ventures somewhat into assessment and extremely cautious prediction...
...By Dr...
...Nominally, some Ave thousand of those committees were set up during the war — but not more than one thousand of them really got into operation, and only about three hundred were carried over from wartime into peacetime production...
...Men are in the grip of tormenting inferiorities...
...But whole classes of Jews all over the world had luiled themselves into believing otherwise...
...In addition, the history of the many aid societies and agencies since 1800, the personal stories of heroic and generous individuals may be read, interwoven inextricably with the pogroms and unbelievable sufferings in flight...
Vol. 33 • January 1950 • No. 1
