Algren

by Mary Wisniewski

  WPA work started to wind down in the early 1940s, as the United States was entering the war. Nelson’s repeated attempts to get a Guggenheim grant for a second novel were not successful, so to make enough money to live on, he and Jack found work on what they called the Syph Patrol for the city’s Board of Health. The job was to track down people suspected of having venereal disease and direct them to public facilities for treatment. Workers would take notes on what the subjects said and whether they would go. This job led Nelson into all his favorite places—to taverns, suspected brothels, and back porches—to talk to hookers, housewives, factory workers, mechanics, and cab drivers. He likely rode his bicycle to some of his assignments, a slim young man with a quiet manner who inspired confidences on his “one-man campaign” to fight venereal disease. Several subjects complained about how they had neither time to spare from work and family nor the streetcar fare to visit the clinic. The shots for the disease in those days before penicillin were painful and useless—a combination of arsenic and mercury. People rightly hated them, and distrusted the nurses and doctors who dispensed them. Jack did not care for the work—he had a gentle nature and troubles of his own, and did not like taking “poor, trembling, young black whores” to the health office at 56 West Hubbard, particularly when one of their knife-wielding pimps objected. In 1943 he took a safe desk job with an encyclopedia publisher. But Nelson mined the health department work for material, and he wrote up the complaints as matchbook-sized dramas on a rented typewriter back at his flat at 1907 West Evergreen. What he heard on the street on the Syph Patrol and with the WPA oral history projects was echoed in his fiction—in Chickadee’s knock against the public health nurse in Never Come Morning, or Violet’s complaints about Stash the old husband in The Man with the Golden Arm. They sound like Algren characters, which is a backward way of saying that Algren’s characters sound like life. Nelson said later that he did not consciously try to write poetic prose. “But so many people say things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could.”

  “These shots give me a chill,” said Irene R., in his Syph Patrol notes. “They make my leg so bad I can’t walk. When I tell her she say take a bath in hot water but that don’t do no good. Seems like it just don’t get no better…. She say if I don’t come up once a week she gonna put me in an institution …. She gets me scahed, the way she talk.”

  Another woman complained that she took over a dozen shots and bled so badly that she did not see the use. “My legs is numb right now. I never bothered with doctors my whole life, and I got good job now. When he wants me he’ll call me. It is against my belief to take shots. Let them work on some other poor person. It’s against my denomination. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Wilbur, a cab driver who worked nights and was in bed when he was interviewed, was worried the doctors wanted to give him a spinal puncture. “They won’t experiment on my body,” Wilbur insisted. “Maybe that’s all right for the niggers, but I’m not on relief no more.” Anton, an auto mechanic eating his lunch while sitting on a car’s running board at Twenty-Second and Trumbull, said he was not interested in treatment until he knew more about the woman who had informed on him. “I was waitin’ to see how she come out,” he said. A third man, John, did not trust the health department and could not pay for a private doctor. “I work six hours for three dollars and I give to doctor? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

  Mrs. Alice C. wondered how she could get such a sickness. “I never fool around, I’m home all the time and my husband, well, all he had was a strained back, they told him he was negative too, he didn’t have to take any treatments, so what should they want me for down there? I’ll come down, but if it turns out negative again and they keep sending men out, I’ll sue them, you’ll see?” But Nelson knew Alice’s husband had been infected and was being treated, and had hidden this from his wife. Another married lady said her husband had told her something, but she hadn’t known what he was talking about. “I don’t know what he’s sayin’ half the time anyhow. He’s no good.”

  Nelson also recorded a dialogue between a couple. The woman said she wasn’t sick—she was just a drunk. “There’s nothin’ wrong with me except I drink all the time,” she told Nelson.

  “She gets drunk ’n staggers ’n people think she’s sick,” the man said. She disagreed.

  “I may get drunk but I don’t stagger,” she said. “I fall down alright. But I don’t stagger.” Nelson gave these lines to the Widow in the Neon Wilderness story “Design for Departure.”

  While Nelson was taking his notes on Chicago’s poor on behalf of the government, other government workers were taking notes on him. In the years before the United States joined World War II, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had made himself a hero with his bureau’s highly publicized busts of bootleggers, had turned his focus to spies and antigovernment subversives. He had informants in the so-called workers’ schools, labor unions, and peace organizations, as well as the Communist Party. Former Justice Department prosecutor William Hundley later remarked that Hoover’s interest in Communist Party doings might have kept it a viable domestic force since his informants “were nearly the only ones who paid the party dues.”

  In October 1940 Hoover took a personal interest in Nelson Algren. “It is requested that you discreetly ascertain the present address of the above captioned individual who should be well known to informants of your office who are acquainted with leaders of the Communist Party,” Hoover wrote to the special agent in charge of the New York office. A New York agent wrote Hoover that December, describing Algren as a party member, “Scandinavian … blond, tall, thin—has slight accent but speaks very good English”—an odd remark about a third-generation American with a communications degree. Maybe the agent’s informant was flummoxed by Chicagoese. Much of Algren’s FBI file has this Keystone Cop quality; another report tells of agents combing through New York’s state motor vehicle department records, New York telephone directories, and the names of the thirty-eight thousand people who voted as Communist in the 1940 New York primary and not being able to find Algren, though it said on the original Somebody in Boots dust jacket that he lived in Chicago. A March 17, 1944, report indicates that Chicago agents could not figure out where Algren was either, though acquaintances told them he was in the army. It might have made Nelson laugh to see his file—if it hadn’t done so much to ruin his life in the decade to come.

  In the late summer of 1941, Nelson’s family suffered another blow—his father, Gerson, seventy-four, had contracted pneumonia and was dying in a hospital. Although he had shown contempt for Gerson’s simplicity and ignorance as a teen, Nelson was fond of his father. His affection when he writes about Gerson seems stronger and clearer than the more complicated feelings he held for Goldie, who shared more of Nelson’s less genial traits: his stubbornness, occasional coldness, and even, buried deep, his desire for nice things and status. Though he did not want a life of manual labor himself, Nelson had come to understand how important Gerson’s work had been to him. He suffered to have it taken away when he lost his house and business. Nelson recalled with sympathy how Gerson had had to stay first in a little apartment on Kedzie, and then as a charity case with his daughter and son-in-law, and this was made harder by Bernice’s untimely death. There was no more garage, no basement, no garden, no more things to fix. Nelson remembered seeing his father walking from room to room, picking up a newspaper and being unable to read it. “It’s hard to die,” Gerson muttered to himself. “It’s hard to die.” Nelson wrote of being with Goldie at Gerson’s deathbed, and Gerson’s not knowing that they were there:

  “They saw his right hand take the fingers of his left as though something had gone wrong with the fingers; and saw he was trying to fix the machinery of his left hand with the machinery of his right.

  “They saw him pass from life into death still trying to fix machinery.”

  Nelson remembered that Goldie did not weep for her husband of forty-two years, �
��so the son knew that, of all his fixing, the old man hadn’t fixed anything that mattered.” Nelson did not weep either, but he knew it was time to be the man in the family at last. His mother moved to an apartment back in their old Albany Park neighborhood at 2717 West Lawrence Avenue, and Nelson supported her for the rest of her long life.

  In working on what became his second novel, Nelson found he was having his usual trouble with plot. He was able to construct powerful scenes, dialogue, and characters—sometimes doing rough, crayon drawings of his fictional people to better imagine them. But he had difficulty stringing them together into the story he initially called “Harlots and Hunted.” Dick Wright, who read a 263-page draft in the late summer of 1940, cordially praised the writing but advised that “I think some plot would not hurt at all” and gave several suggestions on how to tie things together. Drafts show that Nelson seemed to follow the advice of both Dick and his eventual editor, Edward Aswell, and the novel evolved from loosely connected sketches about hoodlums and prostitutes to a story about Bruno “Lefty” Bicek’s short, hopeless life.

  On Dick’s advice Nelson sent the manuscript to Harper & Brothers’ Edward Aswell, a courtly Tennessee native who had a degree from Harvard but had also once sold shoes in Chicago. Aswell sent him a contract plus $100 for the first payment of the advance in October of 1940. Aswell was an encouraging and wise editor, and his letters were filled with both praise and tactful criticism. While he assured Nelson that the book had power and “great integrity,” he suggested toning down some of the language—replacing “rump” for “ass,” for example, and trimming a long scene in police court. Considering the controversial subject, he warned Nelson repeatedly against using any real names, and he suggested changing a hooker’s reference to the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, which could be dangerous, to Queen Marie of Romania, since Marie was safely dead. But Edward missed a spot—he let Nelson call Bruno’s girlfriend Steffi Rostenkowski; this was the last name of a prominent Polish Chicago politician, and it would later figure in local controversy over the book. Aswell also advised him to take out a section that was still set in East St. Louis and set it all in Chicago. Editor and author went back and forth on the title: Algren proposed White Hope, and then favored The Lost and the Lonely, but Aswell thought that was too sentimental. Aswell then hunted through the text for something better and suggested Never Come Morning, from Steffi’s dream that the “night would be forever, the lamps would never fade, the taverns never close, morning would never come again.”

  Nelson said that the book drew on the lives of men he had known growing up, and on newspaper reports of the trial of Bernard “Knifey” Sawicki, a nineteen-year-old who said, “I got it coming” before he was electrocuted in January of 1942 for killing four people. In a Time magazine account of the case, Knifey went on a crime spree in the summer of 1941 after getting out of a reform school in St. Charles, Illinois. He first killed the farmer who had gotten him locked up, then a reform school friend who refused to go along with a stickup, then a man who resisted a robbery. He ended the spree by shooting a cop, and returned home with a box of candy for his foster mother, Anna, under his arm. The police were waiting for him. “Snapping his bubble gum between his teeth, Knifey told the cops: ‘Sure, I killed ’em. I shot ‘em all. And I don’t feel one way or the other about it, good or bad.’” He also proclaimed that women were “poison,” and that a childhood sweetheart first led him to crime. At the coroner’s inquest, Knifey said, “I’d rather die in the chair than take a 99-year stretch. I never figured to live to be 21 anyhow.” Nelson used the last line in the short story “Biceps,” which was published in the Southern Review in 1941 and selected as an O. Henry Memorial Prize story. It is expanded in Never Come Morning, and reappears again as “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” in The Neon Wilderness.

  In her book Writing Chicago, Carla Cappetti makes a case that Never Come Morning was also influenced by sociological studies on urban life and crime, including the work of Robert Park, who helped develop the Chicago School of social thought and wrote the essay “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” in 1928; William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America in 1918; and Frederic Milton Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago in 1927. Nelson had a strong enough interest in sociology to consider going to graduate school, and was likely familiar with this work, though his art turns the authors’ cool analysis into something rich and emotional. For example, here are Thomas and Znaniecki explaining why some children of immigrants turn to crime: “Of course the second generation, unless brought in direct and continuous contact with better aspects of American life than those with which the immigrant community is usually acquainted, degenerates further still, both because the parents have less to give than they had received themselves in the line of social principles and emotions and because the children brought up in American cities have more freedom and less respect for their parents.”

  In Algren the same idea is expressed by Bruno’s widowed mother, who sees salvation in hard work and wonders why her only living son is running wild. She is bewildered that he thinks nothing of going to jail. “If they had stayed in the Old World, she felt, her son would have been a good son. There a boy had to behave himself or be put in the army.”

  Another book that was likely an influence for the character of Bruno, and possibly Cass, is Clifford Shaw’s The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story, published in 1930. It tells the story of Stanley, a Polish American boy from the Back of the Yards neighborhood who started shoplifting when he was eight. Stanley describes his life in crime as being like a morphine habit, something that creates a trap. “Life is just that way, a lot of entanglements, that hold you in their grasp and carry you deeper and deeper, until you become indifferent and don’t care.” He and his pals look out for drunks to rob, the same crime that brings Bruno into jail. Like Stanley, he marks time in jail reading magazines and taking advice from an older and more experienced prisoner. And like Stanley, he is pressured by the police into ratting out his friends, and he is beaten for his failure to cooperate.

  But Nelson gives Lefty Bicek a trait that distinguishes him from the common variety of punk—he has actual talent for both baseball and boxing, and this makes him aspire to something beyond the neighborhood. In the twenty-first century, boxing has become a niche sport, overshadowed by the multibillion-dollar business of professional football. But in the middle part of the twentieth century, boxing was king, and many children of the poor saw it as a faster, clearer path out of their circumstances than education. As David Remnick explains in his Muhammad Ali biography, King of the World, “It is a game for the poor, the lottery player, the all-or-nothing-at-all young men who risk their health for the infinitesimally small chances of riches and glory.” Boxing was the dominant theme of 1930s and ’40s sports movies—and the characters of the shady manager, the dumb-but-lovable working-class fighter, the suffering girlfriend, and the mobster who wants him to throw the fight were part of the popular imagination. Ernest Hemingway also liked to write about boxing—his 1933 short story “The Light of the World” references the Polish American fighter Stanley Ketchel, Bruno’s idol in Never Come Morning. In Chicago boxers were trained and promoted by private gyms. The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and the Chicago Park District also supported boxing. Marigold Gardens in the North Side Lakeview neighborhood—referred to as “City Garden” in the novel—was the site of a big professional fight every Monday night, played in cigar smoke so thick the fighters could barely be seen from the back rows. Among the local heroes were Jewish middleweight champion Barney Ross, born Beryl Rosofsky, a juvenile delinquent from the Maxwell Street ghetto who picked up a morphine habit after serving in World War II that took years to cure. After seeing Ross fight in the summer of 1927, Algren was so impressed that he had a pair of boxing gloves tattooed on his arm. Another local contender was Tony Zale, born Zaleski, who became Nelson’s friend. Nelson himself liked to work off nerves after a morning
of writing by punching the light and heavy bags at the Division Street YMCA. Like poker and horseracing, boxing was one of the manly pastimes that Nelson loved but was not as sharp about as he liked to imagine. His friend Stephen Deutch said that Nelson would tell him with absolute conviction to bet on one boxer over another, and he’d always be wrong. But Nelson knew enough to make Bruno a believable contender, and at any rate Never Come Morning was not intended as a fight book, but a book about society’s outsiders. As Nelson explained in a preface for the 1963 edition, “I felt that if we did not understand what was happening to men and women who shared all the horrors but none of the privileges of our civilization, then we did not know what was happening to ourselves.”

  Never Come Morning doesn’t open slowly with scenes of childhood innocence like Somebody in Boots; Nelson has grown beyond that as a storyteller. The book starts cinematically, with action—a boxing match that is lost by Casey Benkowski, already washed up at twenty-nine. After the fight, Benkowski goes to meet his manager, an evil immigrant named Bonifacy “the Barber” Konstantine, who runs the neighborhood gang and a house of prostitution. Shrewd, greedy, and violent, Bonifacy is one of Algren’s two great villains, the other being Louis in The Man with the Golden Arm. Bonifacy is a grotesque with a left leg twisted by childhood measles who keeps a squawking parrot and cages full of canaries—the last detail is one Nelson had pulled from the shop of an actual neighborhood barber. Bonifacy is “too old to understand any need that was not the need for money,” and feels, like Stub McKay, that someone is always trying to cheat him. He sees that Casey is no longer any good as a fighter and hits on a new scheme to make money: he requires all the boys in the local gang to get army haircuts so they can be the “Baldheads.” But all the cuts must come from Bonifacy himself.