[ARETE] Josh Sopriaz review of Never Come Morning

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find attached and below Josh Sopriaz's review of Nelson Algren's
novel, *Never Come Morning*
Happy New Year
Duncan

*Never Come Morning** (2021 Edition) by Nelson Algren    *

*Reviewed by Josh Sopiarz, Governors State University*

*Never Come Morning *is Nelson Algren’s novel about a group of young Polish
street toughs who play against other teams of street gangs in an
unsanctioned baseball league on Chicago’s Northwest Side during the Great
Depression. The team’s star pitcher, Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, is also skilled
in the boxing ring. While baseball provides him with a team, camaraderie,
and even support and protection in a tough neighborhood, it is boxing, he
believes, that will grant him exit from the slums. If there is anything we
can learn from Gerald Gems’ recent book on sport and civic identity in
Chicago, it is that the city and its sports during the early and middle
twentieth century were severely segregated. This new edition brings that
point to bear, emphasizes others, and collects new features not seen in
previous iterations of the novel.

On April 19, 1942—between its initial publication and Algren’s deployment
to France—a review in the *Chicago Daily Tribune* described the characters
in his most recent and otherwise “poignant” novel, *Never Come Morning*, as
“completely without morals, completely without morale” who “personify only
brute force, brute will, and brute instinct” (17). Upon publication of the
book, the President of the Polish Roman Catholic Union petitioned to have
it banned as anti-Polish propaganda whose author was a “product of a
distorted mentality” (xi). These are, with the benefit of hindsight,
somewhat brutish assessments of Algren and his novel since, although it is
true the novel is mostly bereft of sentiment, its characters and its author
are not so inhuman as the *Tribune* and the Church would have readers
believe. This is evident in the novel’s opening epigraph comprised of lines
from Walt Whitman’s poem “You Felons on Trial in Courts” from *Leaves of
Grass*:

            I feel I am of them—
                        I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself—

            And henceforth I will not deny them—

            For how can I deny myself?



Algren’s characters may very well have been facsimiles of real people
trapped in the all-too-familiar and vicious cycle of poverty and violence
in urban America. And even if they are whole-cloth creations, their
struggles reflect those of the material world and Algren demonstrates that
just as expertly. Without question there is brutality here, but empathy
also lurks just beneath the city’s grit and corroded patina.

This edition adds noteworthy material not included in previous reprints to
the cleanly reproduced text of Algren’s novel. Richard Wright penned a
lengthy introduction to the novel that was “lost,” has since been
recovered, and is included in the new edition. Other material like Kurt
Vonnegut’s introduction from 1986, are reprinted, too. This is a novel that
Jean-Paul Sartre translated into French and, depending on the edition you
hold, the frontispiece brags that Ernest Hemingway called it either “the
greatest novel” or “the best book” to “come out of Chicago.” Hemingway
esteemed Algren, whom he dubbed the “Bard of the Stumblebum,” so maybe it
is true he called the work both. In any case, today, for the first time
since 1996, a new edition of the novel is available for readers to see for
themselves what the hullabaloo was, and still *is*, all about.

Given boxing’s relatively low standing in contemporary America and the
scant attention paid to the extant body of boxing fiction, it is a surprise
Algren’s *Never Come Morning *received yet another reissue at all. The
Richard Wright introduction is interesting and a beneficial addition most
notable for its contemporaneous Marxist critiques of pre-War America, but
it alone does not seem enough to merit a reprint eighty years after its
initial publication. Also, there is no explicit mention of this being an
anniversary printing even though its release coincides with such an
occasion. Between 2015 and 2017, it is true, Routledge published a series
of three “Lost Urban Classics” including *The Golden Vanity*, *Philadelphia:
Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950*, and Aben Kandel’s boxing novel from
1936, *City for Conquest*. *Never Come Morning* might seem a good candidate
for that series, but is instead republished here, without Routledge
affiliation, by Seven Stories Press which, according to its online mission
statement, publishes “works of the imagination and political titles by
voices of conscience.” Although this reissue owes in part to its politics,
its republication extends beyond the strictly political and stands as an
unheralded and superb example of the role of sport in mid-century American
culture. It is sure to pique the interest of any reader for whom that kind
of work is important.



Algren, Nelson. Never Come Morning. Seven Stories Press, 2021. Paperback,
$16.95.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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