Casey then goes out to recruit Lefty Bicek, a muscular seventeen-year-old pitcher on the neighborhood baseball team, for a strong-arm robbery. Lefty lives with his mother at her milk shop and day-old bakery, ignoring both her and the nosy bombazine-clad social worker while dreaming of being a champion boxer. His father is dead, and he grew up in the shadow of the El tracks, avoiding the sunlit places, playing cards and stealing apples with his friends, before they moved on to tougher things. His life was “a ceaseless series of lusts: for tobacco so good he could eat it like meat; for meat, for coffee, for bread, for sleep, for whiskey, for women, for dice games and ball games and personal triumphs in public places.” He has only an eighth-grade education, and his only straight job has been freight handling, which was irregular and did not pay for all the time spent. He loves his childhood friend, Steffi, in a vague, grasping way, but despises her, too—what good is she, after all, if she wants to be with someone as low as him? Lefty is a bundle of vague desires and insecurities that can lead to nothing but grief.
After the robbery, during which Casey beats a female gas station attendant, Lefty meets Steffi in her room above a pool hall and takes her virginity in a rough manner that, combined with Steffi’s passivity, makes it seem more like rape than love. He feels guilty and promises himself that he will make it up to her by taking her to the Riverview amusement park. There he uses his pitcher’s arm to win her a kewpie doll. A child of poverty, Steffi is delighted to have something of her own, but Bruno becomes disgusted by the phoniness of it and rips off its head. Steffi is horrified, and Bruno tries to explain to her that he is tired of artificial things, and he doesn’t want to see her hold a doll as if it were a child. They both have a moment of clarity, when they can imagine themselves as a couple, and Bruno decides that in winning Steffi’s confidence he has won something honestly for the first time in his life. He’s happy that she seems to understand him, and feels he finally has something real. It is a bright patch in a dark book—a moment of love and dancing and beer by the pavilion, while he tells her of his boxing dreams.
But this being an Algren book, such moments of tenderness pass quickly. From the top of a carnival ride, Bruno sees the city get small underneath him and everything seems phony again. Bruno then takes Steffi out of Riverview and into a warehouse under the sidewalk. They make love on a blanket, and this is followed by one of the most hideous scenes in American fiction. Catfoot, one of Bruno’s fellow gang members, comes into the warehouse insisting that Bruno should let them all rape Steffi. Bruno makes a weak protest that they should leave her alone, but Catfoot knows Bruno isn’t really tough, and he makes threats and promises about Bruno’s status in the gang. Bruno decides he needs to be straight with the boys—he needs to be “regular,” which is all he has been taught to value. Bruno slinks up the rickety wooden stairs, leaving Steffi to be assaulted by a long line of punks until she’s so traumatized she starts calling out, “Next!” Bruno objects only when he sees a Greek who’s not in their gang get into the line, and he releases all his anger at his situation by breaking the Greek’s neck. Steffi is later brought by members of the gang to Mama Tomek’s house to be made into a prostitute, becoming the special prize of Bonifacy, whose sexual desires are only stirred by helplessness.
Bruno never gets over his betrayal of Steffi, the one person he has ever loved. Like Cass McKay, who keeps remembering how he wounded his sister by telling her to go to a whorehouse, Bruno can’t stop thinking of Steffi hollering “Next!” He has destroyed his chance for love, the one green thing to come out of his gray life, and feels no punishment can be enough for him. When he’s taken by the police three weeks later for his part in rolling a drunk, and serves time in the state penitentiary, he regrets that the old man hadn’t died because then he could have been punished more.
After his time in jail, Bruno becomes a steerer of johns to Mama Tomek’s whorehouse, where Steffi now works along with Chickadee, Chiney-eye, Fat Josie, and other aimless, hopeless girls. Still in love with Bruno, Steffi blames herself for her current situation and goes to St. John Cantius to make herself whole again through the rites of the church. She asks a priest to slap her, as he did at her confirmation, but though he does what she asks and offers some bland words of comfort, she doesn’t confide her troubles. The collection basket comes around, repeating the cycle of the poor always giving and the priests always taking. Later, Bonifacy accuses Steffi of helping Bruno cheat him at cards. Furious that she still loves the boxer, Bonifacy assaults and nearly kills her. As James Giles points out in a study of Algren’s novels, Confronting the Horror, it isn’t enough for Bonifacy to have Steffi sexually whenever he wants her—he needs her to love him, too. He needs her soul. Steffi saves herself from being killed by allowing Bonifacy to persuade her to get Bruno drunk before his big fight. But instead Bruno and Steffi reconcile, and he holds her in his arms and promises that they’ll marry after he wins his fight. He wins, leaving room for one last dream that the “modern Ketchel” could be world champion someday. But it is too late—Bruno has been betrayed by one of the Baldheads, and the police are waiting for him to take him for the murder of the Greek. “Knew I’d never get t’ be twenty-one anyhow,” Bruno says before being led away.
After The Man with the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning is the greatest of Algren’s novels, both poetic and terrifying. Bruno and Steffi are kids, just seventeen years old, growing up in brutal circumstances—Bruno’s mother doesn’t visit him in prison, and Steffi’s mother doesn’t try to find her when she disappears. Their story is a tragedy not because Bruno kills, or because Steffi becomes a prostitute, but because together they find love, the only thing that could redeem their lives, and Bruno destroys it because he cares more about his standing in his gang. The book creates an atmosphere of perpetual twilight, full of daydreams and nightmares. It is difficult at first to sympathize with Bruno, who seems to have no coherent inner life. He is a vicious, overgrown boy, writing naive letters to a boxing magazine from his prison cell, imagining winning fights, imagining he can rise in his gang. He doesn’t seem to feel anything about his murder of the Greek. Only his love for Steffi, and his guilt over his betrayal, makes him comprehensibly human. Steffi starts as a cipher, a pale-faced, passive girl who avoids doing any work for fear she’ll be asked to do more. But she becomes the book’s most subtle character. She’s the prophet who sees in a dream what she and Bruno and everyone else under Bonifacy and the police really are. They are the hunted, being pursued through the alleys, hiding and “forever in some degrading posture.” She knows that Bruno has “no guts” and threw her into the gutter, but she chooses him anyway at the end because she loves him and because she has no better choice.
The minor characters in the book are raw and clear, particularly Mama Tomek, her soft-headed Jewish dogsbody Snipes, and the other hookers. In a long monologue to Snipes, partly adapted from a WPA oral history of a prostitute, Tomek speaks for the other characters about the inevitability of her choices. “It’s just like if you try t’ walk straight down a crooked alley—you’ll bump your puss on a barn or fall over somethin’ for sure. That’s how ever’thin’ is, Snipey—ever’thin’s crooked so you got to walk crooked.” The book is more painful than Somebody in Boots, both because the writing is better and because the people matter more.
Dick Wright, who had advised Nelson on the book’s structure and recommended him to an editor, now wrote a soaring introduction to the novel, which came out in the spring of 1942. Wright said most twentieth-century Americans are “reluctant to admit the tragically low quality of experience of the broad American masses; feverish radio programs, super advertisements, streamlined skyscrapers, million-dollar movies, and mass production have somehow created the illusion in us that we are ‘rich’ in our emotional lives. To the greater understanding of our time, Never Come Morning shows what actually exists in the nerve, brain, and blood of our boys on the street, be they black, white, native, foreign-born…. The reality of the depths of our lives is bei
ng depicted.”
The reviews for Never Come Morning were strong, and the book went to second and third editions, though Nelson again wished that sales could have been better. The New York Times’ John Chamberlain compared him to James Farrell, but said he was no imitator. “Algren has his own acute ear for the language of pool room and police court, and his eye is as far-seeing as an eagle’s—or, since he is often dealing with human carrion, a buzzard’s.” He called the book “a bold scribbling on the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest.” Benjamin Appel in the Saturday Review of Literature called the book a “knockout. Like a flare of light, it illumines one of our big industries—the crime racket. But the illumination is in human terms, the method of Richard Wright, and not of W. R. Burnett or James Cain.” Even the much-reviled Farrell praised the book as “powerful and important,” telling Aswell that Algren wrote about the bottom of society with humanity and “genuine sympathy.” He concluded that Never Come Morning was “not merely one of the finest works of American literature that I have read in recent years: it is also a challenge, a true, and a telling social indictment.” For Nelson the sweetest reactions to the book may have come from Ernest and Martha Gellhorn Hemingway, who had been corresponding with him. Ernest was spreading the book around Cuba, and told his editor Maxwell Perkins that he believed the novel to be “as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago as James W. [sic] Farrell is flat, repetitious and worthless.” Martha wrote that the book “hasn’t a dull or useless sentence in it…. He has found his own wild and terrible country and he tells about it in his own amazing way.” The blows against the book would come not from literary giants or New York critics, but from Nelson’s neighbors.
6
POLONIA’S REVENGE, AND ALGREN IN THE ARMY
Every error has its excuse.
—POLISH PROVERB
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands
—T. S. ELIOT, “PRELUDES”
In mid-May 1942 the Honorable Mayor Edward J. Kelly received a three-page letter bristling with agitation, not about traffic, or garbage pickup, or Kelly’s lax attitude toward organized crime, but about a book.
For some weeks now the book market has been retailing a very distasteful and insulting, both, to the Polish-Americans and old-stock citizens of Chicago, book entitled “Never Come Morning.” … Its filth, unsavory description, and open insinuation at graft, corruption, assault, battery, burglary, prostitution, blasphemy, bribery, gambling, obscenity and drunkeness [sic] are offered by the author (one Nelson Algren) as portraying the manner of Polish life in the nieghborhood [sic] of some of Chicago’s finest churches, parishes, museums, organizations, and newspapers.
The letter was from the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, and it was just the opening salvo in a war against Nelson Algren from an outraged Polish American gentry that would color his views of the city for the rest of his life. The union demanded that the book be kept out of the Chicago Public Library. The outcry was echoed by other Chicago Polonia institutions. At a packed May 25, 1942, meeting at the Holy Trinity parish cafeteria on West Division, delegates of the Polish American Council passed a resolution with even stronger terms: they condemned the book as a “most vicious attack, baseless and unwarranted, upon loyal American citizens of Polish birth or extraction, calculated to tear off from all of them every last stitch of respectability.” The resolution went on to refer to the war and Poland’s place among the Allied nations, and said that Algren’s novel represented “insidious, fifth-column propaganda of the pro-Axis type.” Copies of the resolution, signed by President Leon T. Walkowicz, were sent to Harper & Brothers, the Chicago Public Library Board, Mayor Kelly, and the US Department of Justice. Hoover personally acknowledged receipt in a letter to Walkowicz and added the resolution to the bureau’s growing Algren file. Bernice Eichler, the society editor of the Dziennik Chicagoski newspaper also sent a letter to Carl Roden, head of the Chicago Public Library, asking that the “filthy book” Never Come Morning not be made available at any library, and mentioned that it had been withheld from general circulation.
“The book has solely the intentions of demoralizing the younger generations with the ugliest sexual details,” wrote Eichler. A. J. Lucaszewski wrote to Harper that Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s fiendish propaganda chief, could not have devised a worse book to degrade the Polish people. The letter further notes that Algren’s quote from Whitman at the front of the book about being “one of them” was an admission of Algren’s own guilt. Lucaszewski even insults the dedication to Bernice, who he sneeringly assumes is a female, but not a lady. Polish American groups and individuals lodged at least twenty complaints to the library, demanding the book be banned. As Aswell put it, the Poles were after Algren’s scalp.
Edward Aswell wrote mollifying letters. He told John J. Olejniczak, president of the Polish Roman Catholic Union, that he had “misjudged the intention of the book. Mr. Algren did not mean to malign or insult the Polish community in Chicago.” Aswell protested that the book could have been written about the Boston Irish, or the Jews or Italians in New York. He also tried to pacify Nelson, telling him that the Poles had obviously misread the novel and taken it personally. “On that score, the worst you can say of their reaction is that it isn’t very intelligent, but that in human terms it is understandable enough.”
Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga said the reaction was not at all surprising from societies representing the Polish middle and upper class—they had a chip on their shoulders from years of negative stereotypes, and had already felt insulted by The Jack-roller and works analyzing Polish American juvenile crime from the University of Chicago. “There was the sense that we can’t allow this kind of bad publicity. Polonia has to be protected,” said Pacyga. “Algren was insulting them.” Newspaper columnist and Algren friend Mike Royko, of Polish-Ukrainian extraction, wrote later that Polonia community leaders would have “preferred that he write a novel about a Polish dentist who changed his name and moved from the old neighborhood to a suburb as soon as he made enough money.” The fact that Algren was not Polish likely contributed to the controversy—Saul Bellow, writing later about lower-class Jews in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood in The Adventures of Augie March, was at least one of their own. On the other hand, some African Americans had been dismayed by Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
There also was the problem that in focusing only on desperate prostitutes and criminals, Nelson presented an exceedingly narrow view of Polish American life—a view that seemed to shut out any kind of light and goodness. Sitting in St. John Cantius, Steffi is so focused on her sorrow that she is unable to look around her and see the building, which is one of the most beautiful churches in a city rich with them. Even poor Cass McKay could see the lilac in his dusty yard. This claustrophobia was the effect Nelson wanted—but it is so complete it can seem like a distortion. “[Algren] depicted an entire Polish-American neighborhood as devoid of culture and education and values,” said Thomas Napierkowski, a Chicago-born literature professor who has written about the controversy. “The entire community was depicted in such a negative way, it seemed to belie his claims that he was there to lift up the downtrodden.” Literary depictions of Polish Americans were almost nonexistent in the 1940s, and someone who did not know anything else about the culture who read Never Come Morning or, later, A Streetcar Named Desire, might think all Poles were brutes, Napierkowski said. The Polish protesters were wrong to try to ban a book, but they had their reasons.
Algren was horrified by the negative response and talked about it for decades as an example of Chicago provincialism. He claimed that the library had banned the book. It certainly did not buy it in 1942. The library was spending cautiously in the years after the Depression and bought only about 20 percent of new fiction. “Roden’s philosophy tended to be that not all fiction was worth buying and that only fiction that would endure, or warrant the spending of public funds, should be purchas
ed,” said Morag Walsh, the library’s senior archival specialist. She said it is not clear from library records if Roden or the library held off on buying the book for moral or political grounds, or if it was not considered worthy yet. Among the books considered more worthy of purchase in 1942 were a trio of Hopalong Cassidy stories and many now-forgotten romances and historical novels. Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, about poor people living somewhere else, made the cut in 1942, ten years after it was published. Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children also was purchased in 1942, four years after it was published. The library did buy Never Come Morning in 1943, though Morag said it could have been available only on request because of sexual content. The library bought Algren’s other books in the years in which they were published.
Algren also had supporters in the Polish community—Dr. Eugene Jasinski of the Polish Trade Union Council, for example, came out strongly for the novel. Library union workers hosted a public forum for the book in June 1942. But Algren never stopped being furious at the Polonia Babbitskis, scoffing that in the eyes of the daily Zgoda, Shakespeare engaged in slander when he wrote in Hamlet, “He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.” He noted that the hostility died down when he was awarded a thousand dollars by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1947 in belated recognition of his work. As the Chicago saying goes, “If you’ve got the bread you walk.”
Algren Page 11