Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  And the hunter knew where she hid, where she always hid; he passed and repassed, in an arc lamp’s light, pretending to have no idea she was near. In order that the hunt might last till morning. Till the last arc lamp had faded and the last tavern had closed? Or because he knew, as she knew, that the night would be forever, the lamps would never fade, the taverns never close, morning would never come again; in order that, all night long and endlessly forever, he might be about to catch her at last.

  Aswell insisted that the book’s proper title was Never Come Morning after he read that passage, and he scheduled its release for April 1942. Richard Wright agreed to provide an introduction, and Nelson’s expectations grew. He thought his book had the potential to become a best seller and make headlines the way Native Son had, and no one who had read his manuscript thought those goals were unrealistic.

  But then the novel’s prospects diminished drastically. Eleven days after Edward Aswell accepted Never Come Morning for publication, the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. Congress declared war the following day, and thousands of people rushed to enlist in the service—but not Nelson. He had been working on his book for six years, and though the war was certain to overshadow its release, he wanted to see it arrive in stores and sit on shelves.

  Never Come Morning is the story of a neighborhood whose children survive by selling or risking their bodies, so it’s fitting that the novel’s opening scene is set inside an arena where a bloodthirsty and indifferent crowd is watching a lopsided boxing match. It begins:

  At the ten-second warning to the evening’s first preliminary, a newspaperman on the apron of the ring stood up to get his slicker off. He had the right arm out and was pulling at the left while watching a Mexican featherweight in the corner above his head. At the bell he left the sleeve dangling: to see a Pole with an army haircut come out of the opposite corner straight into the Mexican’s left hand. The army haircut went back on his heels, stopped dead, and glanced unbelievingly at the Mex; then kept coming in.

  The Polish fighter is Casimir “Casey” Benkowski. He has a rag for a mouthpiece, and there’s no bone left at the bridge of his nose because he had it removed. The Mexican fighter hits him solidly, and then lets a flurry of punches fly. Casey falls to the canvas, senseless. He twitches when the referee’s count reaches six, and regains his senses at eight, but he doesn’t rise because he accepted twenty dollars to throw the fight before entering the ring.

  Casey is sore and broke when he wakes the next morning. He gambled with the money he earned in the ring, and lost it all. He’s twenty-nine years old, he’s been boxing since he was thirteen, and he knows of only two ways to get money: fighting and stealing. In his neighborhood, a man named Bonifacy Konstantine controls both trades, so Casey goes looking for him.

  Konstantine is a barber, but he makes his living by running the Polish Triangle’s petty crime. He offers protection to a brothel, fixes fights, runs a card game, and trusts no one. He’s a paranoid, conniving man who works out of a cluttered and filthy shop and disdains all human company. When he’s alone, he deals himself five hands of poker to kill time, and even then, he’s plagued by the idea that someone’s cheating him. “When the thunder kills a devil,” he says cryptically, “then a devil kills a Jew.”

  Casey has to knock on the barber’s door several times before he’s allowed to enter. Once inside, he perches on a stool and begins pleading his case. I want another fight, he tells the barber. “All the time I’m perfectin’ the old technique,” he says, but the barber’s disinterest is plain, so Casey switches tacks and begs for a loan. The barber wants nothing to do with Casey, though, so he cuts him off. “No more fight,” he says. “No more borrow.”

  That interaction sets Morning’s plot in motion. Casey decides to steal a slot machine from a gambling joint outside the Triangle when he realizes the barber is finished with him, and he recruits Finger Idzikowski and Bruno “Lefty Biceps” Bicek—the novel’s protagonist—as his accomplices.

  Bruno is a fatherless seventeen-year-old who dresses in raggedy clothes distributed by relief workers. He can only imagine two potential futures for himself—pitching in the major leagues or boxing professionally—and the only measure of success he understands is the regard of his peers. He constantly scrutinizes their expressions and mannerisms for evidence of his standing, and he’s haunted by the fear that he’ll never be as tough as he imagines a man should be.

  “Bruno Bicek from Potomac Street had his own cunning,” Nelson wrote. “He’d argue all day, with anyone, about anything, in daylight, and always end up feeling he’d won, that he’d been right all along. He’d refute himself, in daylight, for the mere sake of argument.

  “But at night, alone, he refuted no one, denied nothing. He saw himself close up and clearly then, too clear for any argument.”

  Casey can see Bruno for the meek creature he is, and understands recruiting him will cost no more than a few flattering words. He tells Bruno about his plan to steal the slot machine, and promises to get Bruno a paying fight at the City Garden afterward and make him the “president ’n treasurer” of their athletic club. Bruno, Casey, and Finger go through with the burglary, and as they drive away, Finger Idzikowski calms Bruno’s nerves by encouraging him to picture his impending fame. “LEFTY BICEPS MATCHED WITH BILLY CONN!” he incants. “POLISH WHITE HOPE WINS TITLE! LOUIS DECLINES RETURN BOUT!”

  The heist makes Bruno bold. He had never previously revealed any ambition outside the boxing ring or the baseball diamond, but when he realizes he isn’t likely to be arrested for the robbery, he begins asserting himself in the neighborhood. He brags, swaggers, and delivers edicts to the other boys in his gang, and as a result he becomes a target for the Triangle’s rougher characters.

  Bruno has a girlfriend named Steffi Rostenkowski—a widow’s daughter who lives above a pool hall. She and Bruno were born on the same block two months apart, and grew up sharing swings and praying in the same church. He trusts her enough to make a fool of himself for the price of one of her laughs, and she speaks to him tenderly and calls him Bunny. They see each other often, and a few weeks after the slot machine robbery, Bruno takes Steffi to a carnival, where they walk past a sideshow, see a parade, and drink. That night, they sneak into a shed hidden beneath the El tracks, where they have sex and then lay on a bedspring in postcoital repose and nod off to sleep.

  Then Catfoot Nowogrodski enters. He asks Bruno to step aside so he can have a turn with Steffi, but Bruno refuses. Fireball Kodadek appears next. He pulled a knife on Bruno once, and they’ve been rivals since. Bruno refuses to let Fireball enter as well, but doing so makes him nervous and fearful.

  Catfoot senses Bruno’s reluctance, and reminds him that the slot machine robbery put him in a dangerous position: “any time the barber wants he can put a finger on you fer the syndicate,” he says. Then Fireball taunts Bruno: “What’s eatin’ you, Left’—you in love?”

  And Bruno folds. He steps aside and allows Catfoot and Fireball to enter. He knows they intend to rape Steffi and doesn’t want to see it happen, so he leaves. When he steps outside the shack, he finds a group of neighborhood boys standing around. Ashamed that he failed to protect Steffi, Bruno pretends that he’s an accomplice to the attack. “This one’s on me, fellas,” he says. Then he leaves the scene.

  After wandering around the neighborhood, Bruno returns to the shack under the El tracks and finds a dozen boys waiting in line to assault Steffi. The sight sickens him, and he decides to conceal his shame with violence. He spots a Greek boy in the line, alone—an easy target—tells him to leave, and then insults him. “Beat it, Sheeny,” he says, “this is a white man’s party.”

  But the Greek doesn’t move. He looks around instead, and replies, “Make half those gorillas stay out of it ’n I’ll show you who the white man is.”

  The crowd forms a circle like a ring then. The Greek, moving casually, begins unbuttoning his coat. Bruno watches him with apprehen
sion. Then he hears Steffi’s voice. “Next!” she says. She can’t fight off her attackers, so she has decided to mock them. She has already been raped a half dozen times, but she keeps calling, “Next! Next!” and laughing “a laugh like a single drawn-out sob, hard as a man in handcuffs laughs.”

  Bruno loses control of himself when he hears Steffi, and advances on the Greek while the boy’s arms are trapped inside his sleeves. Bruno punches him square on the cheek, staggers him, and continues swinging until his opponent falls. He kicks the boy in the head then, and leaves his body beneath the El tracks a few feet from where Steffi is being attacked.

  Bruno recedes into the Triangle after that. He becomes Casey’s sidekick, and they rob, steal, and get caught. Bruno goes to jail eventually, but never stops dreaming of becoming a boxing champion and making amends to Steffi. Steffi winds up in Mama T.’s brothel and the barber’s bed, but never stops hoping Bruno will rescue her.

  The lyricism of Morning’s prose and the flow of its narrative are the first elements of the book that stand out. Nelson structured his sentences to match the cadence of his characters’ idiomatic language, so the book moves with the feel of a well-written speech—conceived for the mind, but punctuated for the ear. He also suppressed his authorial voice, and used the physical spaces his characters travel through as extensions of their inner lives, so the book reads like the story of a single complex organism, not a drama with a sprawling cast of characters.

  The depth and detail of the reporting that went into the book’s composition are also remarkable. Nelson conducted research like a sociologist, and brought his story to life by inserting observations, overheard dialogue, and physical details he spent years gathering. The padding doesn’t reach the ceiling on the walls of the cell the officers of the Potomac Street Station use when they plan to beat a suspect, Nelson reports. It ends at head level, and Louis Anderson reached up there and scratched his name and the date of his imprisonment into the paint with a fingernail on three separate occasions. The northern fork of the Chicago River is bound on either side by “great mounds of trash and garbage,” Nelson explains, “and in the valleys between each mound sunflowers [crowd], slender and bent; their petals glinting, in the dull copper light, like petals of wetted metal.” And confinement, he makes clear, warps both the jailer and the jailed. “The more humbly a man looked out at [Officer] Comisky,” he wrote, “the worse Comisky wanted to treat him.”

  But the most compelling element of Morning is its novelty. The book could be described as a coming-of-age story, a treatise on urban poverty, a boxing novel, or a memoir about a place, but Nelson’s curiosity ranges so widely that those designations obscure more than they reveal. The book makes no concessions to genre, and when it evokes clichés, it does so only to subvert them. Its locale suggests it will be a naturalistic novel, but its narrative voice is tender and personal instead of distant and coldly observed. The prostitutes in Mama T.’s brothel are self-assured and calculating. Bruno is a hard man who hungers for fame, but also a boy who longs “for the warmth and security of the womb”—and no one rescues the damsel in distress.

  The book ends in an arena, just the way it began, but this time Bruno is fighting. He enters the ring wearing tennis shoes and a blue robe, and he faces a man named Honeyboy Tucker. The stakes are high for both fighters. Tucker is a former state champion who can’t afford to lose another match, and Bruno needs the prize money at stake to buy Steffi’s freedom.

  “All I demand is a clean fight,” the referee announces when the fighters meet. “Is that askin’ too much?” he asks.

  It is. Bruno and Tucker feel each other out for less than a round before they begin trading body blows. Tucker, the savvier fighter, retreats behind his gloves, then reappears and catches Bruno with an uppercut that sends one of his teeth flying in “an arc through the light into the blue-gray fog about the ring.” Bruno begins swinging wildly then, and Tucker responds by thumbing his eye. They battle to the point of exhaustion, and then beyond, but Tucker is the more disciplined fighter, so he gains the upper hand eventually. He saved some of his strength, so when he feels Bruno weaken in the eighth round, he slams him with a right—and then does it again and again.

  Bruno falls, swinging blindly on his way down. “That was all,” Nelson wrote. “He knew it was all. Tucker could come and get him now. He had nothing left to throw and nothing left to try.” But Tucker doesn’t come. He thinks Bruno is unconscious, so he walks along the ropes and smiles at the newspapermen seated along the apron of the ring. Bruno rises while Tucker is busy collecting his praise, advances, and uses the last bit of strength in his body to strike Tucker from behind. His right fist connects with Tucker’s jaw two minutes and forty-eight seconds into the eighth round. The better man falls forward until his chin catches on the second rope, and then he hangs there, “smiling vacantly.”

  Bruno is declared the winner, but the glory of his ignoble victory fades quickly. He leaves the ring thinking about Steffi and dreaming of all the victories he has yet to claim. He makes it all the way to the changing room in that hopeful state, but before he can remove his trunks, a plainclothes officer enters. Bruno crossed the barber before the fight, and afterward, two witnesses provided the police with evidence that Bruno is a murderer.

  “Got you for the Greek, Lefthander,” an officer says. He offers to take Bruno into custody without shackling him, but Bruno declines. He extends his wrists instead, and after the handcuffs have been secured, he says, with practiced nonchalance, “Knew I’d never get t’ be twenty-one anyhow.”

  Never Come Morning struck Nelson’s doubters like a well-executed hook—they never saw it coming, and after it found purchase, they never felt quite so sure of themselves again. James T. Farrell, who hadn’t been on speaking terms with Nelson since 1935, wrote to say, “I consider Never Come Morning one of the most important American novels that I have read in many years.” Bud Fallon stopped teasing Nelson, and critics heaped on praise.

  The Providence Journal called Morning a “novel of deep social significance,” and the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser said it was “[b]rutal, sordid, tragic . . . splendidly-written.” The Oakland Tribune went even further: “It is not too much to say that Algren shows every promise of taking on Steinbeck’s cudgel, of continuing the Hemingway tradition or performing the great deeds of a Zola or a Dickens.”

  The New York Times reviewed Morning twice. This is “an unusual book and a brilliant book,” one writer claimed. The other went deeper. “Mr. Algren blends the staccato rhythms of his characters with his own sentences to create as harmonious a style as recent American fiction can show,” he said. Behind his “air of complete objectivity there lurks a moralist, a writer of parables.”

  Malcolm Cowley even used Morning as evidence that a new “Chicago school” of fiction had emerged. He placed it next to Native Son, where Nelson thought it belonged, and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. He said Nelson beat both authors on some accounts, and reached into the past to find an analogue for his literary sensibility. Nelson is “not by instinct a novelist,” he said. “He is a poet of the Chicago slums, and he might well be [Carl] Sandburg’s successor.”

  But then the critics moved on to newer releases, and a backlash to Nelson’s book took shape in Chicago.

  Nelson later said that he wrote Morning because he 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.” But the Polish Roman Catholic Union suspected he had a darker purpose. The group discussed the book at one of their meetings, decided they had been slandered, and started a letter-writing campaign that was promoted by the Polish press. They asked people to send complaints about the book to Harper’s, and they began pressuring the Chicago Public Library to keep Morning off their shelves.

  “I protest strongly against any further publishing of this book for it fosters nothing but racial enmity, religi
ous intolerance and national disunity, and in trying times such as the present, should have no place in our libraries and homes,” one letter said.

  “It is contemptible in every respect,” another said, “and can be suspected at aiming at but one thing: to discredit a nationality group.”

  “Herr Goebbels’s devilishly cunning mind,” a third letter claimed, “could not have published a more rotten propaganda volume to discredit and degrade the Polish people.”

  Aswell defended the book aggressively, and so did Nelson. He wrote pleading letters to his antagonists, insisting he was no bigot and asserting his goodwill, but conceding that the timing of the book’s release was unfortunate. He had been working on Morning for years, he explained, and had no way of knowing Germany would invade Poland before he finished.

  Neither Aswell’s support nor Nelson’s explanations did any good though. One of Nelson’s correspondents hardened his stance as their dialogue continued, and became threatening. “You might care to know that probably my information regarding your person is somewhat deeper than you suspect,” he wrote. Then the Chicago Public Library bowed to the union’s demands. The library board held a meeting to discuss the book, and decided not to include it in their collection—it wasn’t removed from the shelves, just never placed on them.

  Nelson was broke and dispirited by July. When Morning was released, the Writers’ Project fired him again because the book’s publication counted as outside employment. He had been hoping that royalties would support him for a time, but they never materialized. The war suppressed the book’s sales, and so did the Polish community’s protest.

  Bud Fallon heard about Nelson’s plight, and wrote to offer a solution. He said Nelson could live with him for the summer and work as a welder’s assistant in East St. Louis. It was a rare act of generosity on Fallon’s part, and Nelson accepted and began packing.