SOURCE: "A Commentary on Algren's 'A Bottle of Milk for Mother,"' in The Short Story: Classic and Contemporary, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966, pp. 504-12.

[In the following essay, Lid discusses the primary conflicts in the short story "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" by examining Algren's use of detail, character, and symbolism.]

In "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," Bruno Lefty Bicek, the young pitcher of the Polish Warriors S.A.C., and an aspiring boxer, makes his descent, step by step, into hell. At the beginning of the story he stands, a shorn Samson (the Warriors have all had their heads shaved), in the query room of the Racine Street police station before his accusers—Milano and Comiskey, the arresting officers; Sergeant Adamovitch, the fatherly turnkey; and Captain Kozak, "eleven years on the force and brother to an alderman." A prim-faced reporter in a raccoon coat from the Dziennik Chicagoski is also present. Lefty has been caught robbing a drunk of his pay in a precinct captain's hallway. The bullet he fired into the floor to scare the "boobatch" accidentally hit the old man in the groin, and he is dead; but at the beginning of the story Lefty doesn't know this. It is only revealed to him in the course of the interrogation, which takes the form of an impersonally cruel cancelling out of every one of the boy's hopes and dreams, his defenses.

Algren's story is built around several related conflicts which only gradually emerge in the course of the action. On the simplest level, perhaps, is the conflict between Lefty Bicek and Captain Kozak. In the course of the interrogation the Captain tries to make the boy confess his role in the robbery of the old man and also to implicate various members of the Polish Warriors S.A.C. We watch the Captain persist until he has enough to convict the boy, if not the others.

On a more complex level, and partly revealed by the lines from Whitman which Algren has chosen as an epigraph for his story, is the conflict between the author and his society. It is clear that the indictment returned by Nelson Algren in "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" is not against Lefty Bicek but against a society which, failing to realize and accept the full measure of its responsibility, has turned its back on the boy and others like him. This is relatively easy to see from even a casual reading of the story, but to gather the full implication of what Algren is saying, and the full force of his art, we have to pay attention to his use of detail, character, and symbolic devices—as well as to the larger pattern of his fable.

As the interrogation of Lefty proceeds, and as it becomes more and more difficult for the youth to smile, the symbolic configuration of Algren's world emerges. For all the story's seeming realism, Algren uses reality as Dante did, and in some ways his effects are as startling as Dante's. Like Dante, Algren possesses an infernal vision.

Algren's figures, one should point out, are largely Roman Catholics, and the author uses Christian imagery to articulate the pattern of guilt which he sees behind the corruption of society. Social commentary and Christian motif are so interwoven in Algren's fiction as to be almost inseparable. This can be seen in the basic pattern which underlies "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," the symbolic reenactment of a portion of the Christ story, his denial and descent into hell. It is made explicit by the story's ending. His confession elicited and the questioning over, Lefty Bicek remains standing before the Captain's desk. The arresting officers have slipped out. The reporter, his notebook put away, is buttoning his coat. Captain Kozak is "studying the charge sheet as though Bruno Lefty Bicek were no longer in the room. Nor anywhere at all."

"I'm still here," the boy said wryly, his lip twisting into a dry and bitter grin.

Kozak looked up, his big, wind-beaten, impassive face looking suddenly to the boy like an autographed pitcher's mitt he had once owned. His glance went past the boy and no light of recognition came into his eyes. Lefty Bicek felt a panic rising in him: a desperate fear that they weren't going to press him about the rod, about the old man, about his feelings. "Don't look at me like I ain't nowheres," he asked. And his voice was struck flat by fear.

"'Your case is well disposed of,' Kozak said, and his eyes dropped to the charge sheet forever." Lefty Bicek's earthly life is over. He will be led out of the interrogation room, into the corridor, and through the open door to the winding steel staircase and the cells below. Algren's Christ-figure begins his spiral descent down into the tiers of hell.

Algren's hero is a figure of adolescent mind and limited emotional experience. His mind is a hodge podge of dreams, schemes, plans: a cluster of tawdry hopes and aspirations pulled from the rag bag of American culture. Even the possibility of escape is conceived by him in terms of a crude B-grade movie, with his friends appearing in front of the police station with a sub-machine gun in a cream-colored roadster, while he makes a melodramatic run for it, zigzagging through the building and down a fire escape three stories into the roadster below. "Like that George Raft did that time he was innocent at the Chopin " Throughout "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" Lefty's thoughts are cast in a similar vernacular, revealing the fantasy world in which he privately lives, particularly his yearnings for recognition as ball player and boxer. He is secretly gratified that Captain Kozak seems to know that he is the Warrior's first-string pitcher, and he wonders if the Captain saw him play the Sunday he finished his own game and then relieved Dropkick Kodadek in the sixth inning of the second game. "Why hadn't anyone called him 'Iron-Man Bicek' or 'Fireball Bruno' for that one?" If Lefty is reluctant to discuss his occasional boxing career, it is only because he is aware that Captain Kozak is trying to link his handler, Benkowski, with the hold-up. At various times in the course of the story he goes into a boxer's shuffle. Once he is on the verge of unbuttoning his shirt to show off his chest; Adamovitch puts one hand on his shoulder and slaps the boy's hand down. But Lefty's irrepressible ego cannot really be beaten down. At once boyish and inoffensive, it keeps breaking in upon the awareness of the officers and the Captain, who would much rather dismiss the boy out of mind than have to acknowledge his humanity. In a profoundly moving way Lefty is Algren's symbolic reminder of the sanctity of the individual; he represents Algren's affirmation of the inviolable human spirit.

Like Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, Algren's Bruno "Lefty" Bicek is an essential innocent (it is surely the deliberate author who makes George Raft an innocent figure in the gangster film at the Chopin Theater), and like Gatsby he is caught up in the national dream, though in "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" its form is somewhat cruder and its underlying realities are given more explicit statement than in The Great Gatsby. Lefty dreams of success by the traditional routes open to the newly arrived and the poor and the ill-educated, the fight ring and the ball park. In Algren's version of the story there is no fetching symbol, no Daisy Buchanan, to embody the Dream; there is no green light at the end of the dock to beckon romantically in the dark, no cascade of expensive and "beautiful shirts" for a Daisy to sob over. The overriding symbol is Lefty's shriven head, ready to receive its crown of thorns, while the symbolic objects of Lefty's world are a worn and sleeveless blue work shirt too tight across the shoulders, a pair of square-toed boy's shoes laced with a buttonhook, a pair of trousers with ragged, turn-up cuffs, and a frayed greenish cap which once had bright checks and earlaps (the crown of thorns).

In the course of Algren's story Lefty Bicek seems only dimly aware of the difference between right and wrong; he seemingly has no sense of guilt. (At the end of the story Sergeant Adamovitch—the name is symbolic—locks the boy in his cell. He asks him in his most fatherly voice, "Feel all right, son?" In his mind he is thinking: "The kid don't feel guilty is the whole trouble. You got to make them feel guilty or they'll never go to church at all. A man who goes to church without feeling guilty for something is wasting his time, I say.") Lefty makes no overt comment, either to the men in the police station or in his mind, to indicate that he understands such distinctions. Like Gatsby, he seems lacking in rudimentary moral knowledge. But Lefty does have an essential if limited understanding of how society operates in his world. One catches a reflection of this in his account of what he told his victim in Polish when he strong-armed him in the precinct captain's hallway. "I told him polite-like, like a Polish-American citizen, this was Chiney-Eye-a-Friend-of-Mine's hallway. 'No more after this one,' I told him. 'This is your last time gettin' rolled, old man. After this I'm pertectin' you, I'm seein' to it nobody touches you. . . .'" The Captain exchanges glances with the reporter from the Chicagoski, who nervously turns to cleaning his glasses, which depend from a black ribbon (and which impress the naive Lefty). Both Kozak and the reporter understand what lies behind the boy's imitation of his elders.

The reporter is an important figure in Algren's world, not in himself, but for what he represents. A bored observer of the scene, he is the representative of the outside world, of all clean-living, right-thinking Poles. In the query room his major concern is his own comfort, particularly the chair he is sitting in, which he finds "a pretty comfy old chair for a dirty old police station." But the chair is too close to the wall radiator, the reporter is uncomfortably warm. He simply doesn't have the energy to move the heavy chair. Just how close he is to seeing the brinks of hell, he never realizes, and the true meaning of the events which transpire in the police station passes him by. He fails to appreciate the innocent nature of the bluff behind Lefty's refusal to involve his buddies. "I was singlin'. Lone-wolf stuff," the boy tells the Captain. At which the reporter, thinking out his news story in advance, writes in his mind: "This correspondent has never seen a colder gray than that in the eyes of the wanton killer who arrogantly styles himself the lone wolf of Potomac Street" The reporter's disavowal of Lefty, his dismissal of the boy as a human being, is all the more obvious for being implied rather than stated. It is this evasion of responsibility, the denial of the boy's humanity, that lies at the root of Algren's indictment of society.

Ultimately Lefty Bicek's defiance, his tough but faked exterior, his opposition to authority, is based on Algren's profound awareness of the complicity of society in the criminal act. It is also based on his radical vision of the nature of authority. Like Dante, who placed his simonists in the reaches of hell, he is aware of the corruption at the heart of authority. In the climactic scene in "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" this becomes increasingly clear. Lefty makes his final appeal.

"Captain, I ain't been in serious trouble like this before . . ." he acknowledged, and paused dramatically. He'd let them have it straight from the shoulder now: "So I'm mighty glad to be so close to the alderman. Even if he is indicted."

There. Now they knew. He'd told them.

"You talkin' about my brother, Bicek?"

The boy nodded solemnly. Now they knew who they had hold of at last.

Lefty's appeal, of course, is greeted with derision. Significantly it is Sergeant Adamovitch who leads in the mockery of the boy. (He has already denied him in his mind: "He didn't like this kid. This was a low-class Polak. He himself was a high-class Polak because his name was Adamovitch and not Adamowski.") Adamovitch guffaws.

The boy jerked toward the officer: Adamovitch was laughing openly at him. Then they were all laughing openly at him. He heard their derision, and a red rain danced one moment before his eyes; when the red rain was past, Kozak was sitting back easily, regarding him with the expression of a man who has just been swung at and missed and plans to use the provocation without undue haste.

Lefty then loses his composure, turns to the reporter ("Hey, Stingy-whiskers!") and yells: "Write down I plugged the old rumpot, write down Bicek carries a rod night 'n day 'n don't care where he points it. You, I go around slappin' the crap out of whoever I feel like—." He fails to provoke them, they all remain unmoved. The Captain resumes his questioning, but Lefty's mind has set against them all.

"A Bottle of Milk for Mother" ends with Lefty Bicek in his cell on his knees, his head a pious oval in the cell's gray light. Adamovitch thinks the boy is praying and he takes off his hat. Lefty responds: "This place'll rot down 'n mold over before Lefty Bicek starts prayin', boobatch. Prays, squeals, 'r bawls. So run along 'n I'll see you in hell with your back broke. I'm lookin' for my cap I dropped is all." Adamovitch watches Lefty grope for his cap, then leaves.

He did not stay to see the boy, still on his knees, put his hand across his mouth and stare at the shadowed wall.

Shadows were there within shadows.

"I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow," Lefty told himself softly at last.

In achieving something like tragic eloquence for his now muted hero, Algren suggests a knowledge of good and evil, of guilt and punishment, which transcends the complacent proscriptions of society.

It could be said that Algren writes in what he has called "the antilegalistic tradition toward society which . . . distinguished Chicago writers since the early years of the century." Both The American Tragedy and Native Son, Algren points out in Who Lost an American?, were written in that tradition.

Dreiser's method of challenging the legal apparatus and Wright's method were different, but the purpose of both was to demand that those economically empowered disprove their complicity in the crimes for which Clyde Griffiths and Bigger Thomas stood accused. Both writers made literature by demanding that the prosecuting attorney show his hands.

Yet neither this tradition, nor the broader one of American naturalism, in which his writing is usually placed, explains Algren's originality or the powerful effects he achieves with the sparsest of materials. The major source of his power lies elsewhere, as I have already suggested: in Algren's infernal vision and its radical use of the resources of Christian tradition. The epigraph to "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" is the lines from Whitman that run

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?

If the idiom is highly personal (as is Algren's), the thoughts are nevertheless those of basic Christianity. They echo the New Testament and the words of Barabbas's and Mary Magdalene's Christ—just as Algren's stories and novels embody Christian themes and rework in various patterns fragments of the Christ story. In the closing scene of "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," Algren's universal manchild, his suffering god, overtly suggests Christ in Gethsemane. I am not maintaining for a minute that Algren writes systematic allegory, but I am suggesting that the symmetry of pattern in Algren's fiction has its roots in a deeper cultural source than the traditional underdog bias of social realism.

Finally, there is the form of "A Bottle of Milk for Mother": a spiralling form, an intense tiering downward. This Dantesque spiralling is symbolically mirrored at the end of the story in Lefty Bicek's descent down the winding steel staircase to the cells below; but throughout the story something like this spiral has operated in the narrative, providing pattern and depth to the seemingly random interrogation in the police station query room. The questioning circles and circles around the circumstances of the shooting of the old man, driving the boy inward and downward, alienating him from those in the room, placing him solely on his own limited resources.

We watch Lefty as he first reacts to the prodding of Captain Kozak, who, his lips barely moving, remarks that Lefty will be held on open charge until he talks. "The boy licked his own lips, feeling a dryness coming into his throat and a tightening in his stomach." He begins to talk about seeing the old man cash his paycheck, stops as if he has finished his story, then resumes hurriedly as Kozak glances over the boy's shoulder at the arresting officer. Soon he realizes that his tongue is going faster than his brain, and he pauses. The Captain begins to question him about his friends, Benkowski and Nowogrodski and Idzikowski, with the obvious intention of making Lefty admit that one or more of them was in with him on the stickup. We become conscious of a small clock or a wrist watch somewhere in the room ticking away distinctly. Kozak tells the boy "to get ahead with your lyin' a little faster." Lefty then describes the scene in the hallway. The Captain asks him about the gun and Lefty feels "a single drop of sweat slide down his side from under his armpit. Stop and glide again down to the belt." A minute later and he is told that the old man is dead. Then the Captain returns relentlessly to the question of who was with him. Lefty replies that he was alone. But his voice has taken on "the first faint touch of fear." The questioning goes on, the Captain again probing for a way to make the boy admit that others were with him: Lefty feints and dodges, deflecting the questions as best he can, pretending he barely knows Benkowski, bluffing that he's not afraid of prison, yawning in their faces: each time more desperate, more naked, more empty inside—until the men in the query room are no longer interested in him. They have what they need to convict him, if not the others.

The questioning has swiftly carried the boy toward the pit from which there is no hope of deliverance. Lefty will never see his twenty-first birthday.