Algren (15 page)

Every error has its excuse.

—P
OLISH PROVERB

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands

—T. S. E
LIOT
, “P
RELUDES
”

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 purchased,” 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.”

The reaction certainly did not scare Algren into changing his style; if anything, it hardened his convictions. In an essay called “Do It the Hard Way” published in the
Writer
magazine in March of 1943, Nelson advises aspiring writers to carry a camera to accurately record images, and to listen carefully to the way ordinary people really talk. “It is necessary only that you do not stop your ears with smugness or indifference or indolence,” he advises. He promises that if you listen long enough, the patter of the ballpark and the
dance hall, or the drugstore and the corner newsstand, will start to “ring like poetry.” As an example, he recounts hearing a girl confide her small troubles to the counter worker at a hamburger stand. “I hate t' see the Spring 'n Summer come so bad,” she told him. “I just don't seem so good as other people anymore.” It is a speech he gives later to the narrator of “Is Your Name Joe?” in
The Neon Wilderness
. Algren urges young writers not to stick with only safe subjects, and says that he believes that publishers will take books about any level of society as long as they're honest and written with conviction. It is the hard way, he warns, because this type of writing doesn't focus on plot contrivances like what the killer did with the body, but with one's own deepest feelings. He also expresses great faith in the average American reader, who is “a knowing sort of cuss, and he knows when a book is false or true.” It was a wildly optimistic essay—and a prophetic one for himself. Nelson kept doing it the hard way for his best writing, until the effort wore him out.

The Polonia controversy also failed to drive Nelson out of the neighborhood—he stayed at his apartment at 1907 West Evergreen, writing book reviews for newspapers and planning a book of short stories. He had the excitement of being robbed one day while on the South Side; this gave him a pass to see police lineups, providing him material for future stories like “The Captain Is a Card” and the opening of
The Man with the Golden Arm
. He used the wrinkled, pasted-up, eventually unreadable pass for seven years, telling suspicious cops that he was still looking for that guy who took his fourteen bucks. To watch the lineups, he traveled a few blocks south of the Loop to the grim, brick police headquarters at Eleventh and State, which rose like a devouring, thirteen-story giant above a cluster of flophouses. The recently arrested would be taken out of holding cells and paraded before a courtroom full of cops and victims. This show is still running in Chicago—every day at Twenty-Sixth and California. Nelson took notes on the exchanges:

“How did you get on stuff in the first place?” a judge asks a girl. “There was so many little troubles floatin' around,” the girl responded. “I figured why not roll them all up into one trouble?”

“What do you do all day?” the judge asks a boy.

“I just lean,” the boy answers. “Just lean 'n dream.”

Relations between Nelson and his estranged wife Amanda had warmed again in the early 1940s, and she moved in with him on Evergreen for a while, playing the part of the writer's wife by staying at work late to stay out of his way. But they could not get along well enough to live together, and in the spring of 1943, Amanda took a National Labor Bureau job in San Francisco. Martha Gell-horn Hemingway, who had visited the couple in Chicago, had liked Amanda and prodded Nelson on what he was doing wrong. She wondered if he was hard to get along with or just absentminded, a quality women can find infuriating. Though Nelson had initiated the break, he wrote Amanda that he was sad about it and missed her. Putting a recording of Carl Sandburg's “The People, Yes” on the phonograph in his lonely Evergreen apartment, he felt he could not enjoy it because she was not there. But he felt her odds of happiness were better without him—a hundred to one.

They made no move to divorce, perhaps due to indolence, or expense, or expectation of a future reunion. Marriage certainly would not have helped him stay out of the army. The War Manpower Commission had nearly doubled its conscription goals by the end of 1942, and able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were subject to the draft through a lottery system. Nelson's number came up, and he was inducted on July 16, 1943. Storing his belongings with his in-laws, the Piateks, he headed unhappily to Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, in early August, then to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and later to Camp Maxey, near Paris, Texas. He did not like Hitler, and he felt Germany must be defeated, but he also felt the war wouldn't solve America's racial or
other social problems, and he had no interest in serving his country's call. He had just started writing seriously again and hated the interruption. He always felt a strong need to be in the place he was writing about; how could he write stories about Chicago in a barracks in Texas?

Nelson was weighed, measured, and inspected—in the summer of 1943 he was a lean figure at 5 feet, 10 inches tall and 171 pounds, with a 34-inch waist, mild hemorrhoids, and terrible nearsightedness, for which he was issued eyeglasses. He listed no religious preference. Nelson then spent sixteen months in tedious stateside service, learning how to fire a howitzer, drilling, marching, running obstacle courses, practicing salutes, and pitching tents on campgrounds either flooded or so dry that the pegs would break and bruise his hands. Soldiers were told to take care of personal business like letter writing “in your free time—between two and four,” which did not mean the afternoon. In letters Nelson asked for reading material and news from his literary gang at home. Other than letters and about half a dozen book reviews, Nelson was not able to write much during his time in service. He had at first feared that he would be sent overseas, but after a year at Camp Maxey, he was terrified that he wouldn't. That was how the army made heroes, he reasoned later: by driving them so crazy from monotony in the States they could not wait to see combat.