Algren (14 page)

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.

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 being 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.