[In the following excerpt, Lid provides an overview of Algren's career and critical reaction to his works. He also discusses the short story "A Bottle of Milk for Mother."]

It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.

—Melville to Hawthorne

It is not so long ago, as literary history goes, that it was convenient to speak of Nelson Algren as a literary naturalist. It gave us direction in reading his works, and provided rubrics by which to measure his achievements. In addition, Algren himself felt a kinship with such writers as Dreiser and Wright, and such personal identification made easy a view of his writings as belonging in the naturalistic tradition. No one questioned much what it meant precisely to see Algren in this light, or pondered the ways in which his writings were unique and different from those of others in the same tradition, because to speak of him as a naturalist was to speak honorifically.

There the matter pretty much rested. Algren was known as the author of Somebody in Boots (1935) and Never Come Morning (1942); also The Neon Wilderness (1947), a collection of short stories, and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which won him the National Book Award and brought him national prominence. In general he was thought of as an author who revealed great heart in his portrayal of the underdog in American society. More aptly, he wrote compassionately, honestly, and skillfully about a world of poverty and oppression, of social ills and injustices within American society that needed correction.

Not surprisingly, in the early 50's Algren was much in the public eye. He made good newspaper copy. There aren't many winners in American literature—and Algren looked for the moment a winner, perhaps even destined to join Faulkner and Hemingway in literary legend. Like them his personality appeared to be as much an extension of his work as his work was a replication of his character and temperament. He bore the same indelible mark of originality as they did.

To most who read about him he appeared to be a somewhat lonely and romantic figure. His personal turf was the near north side of Chicago, which included the Polish American neighborhood surrounding the triangle where Milwaukee Avenue and Ashland and Division Streets come together, and the Clark Street of honky-tonks and cheap bars. In this locale he deliberately chose to live, openly identifying with those he wrote about—the poor, the downtrodden, the losers in American society. He was insider to the mysteries of tenement life, of jails, prisons, whorehouses. He was the all-night poker player, the high roller, the nameless man on the bar stool nursing a beer. Alternately he appeared as tough guy and sentimentalist in remarks reporters picked up and quoted. Sometimes he was irrepressibly the clown, as if for the moment he had become a character from one of his own novels. But at all times he was the omnipresent participant-observer, a role the public gradually became conscious of and which was reinforced by his long essay of 1951, Chicago: City on the Make. It is only in retrospect that the public figure of Algren of these years appears to have been the alter ego of a man in serious trouble.

Algren's 1951 Whitmanesque essay on Chicago marked a turning point in his career. From this point on he was seemingly to be more and more on the outs with American society. Critics were to become chary of praising him, readers were to become skeptical of the value of what he had to tell them. He was to grow frustrated with both, and after he published A Walk on the Wild Side in 1956, he was to cease to write serious fiction. The novels and stories of his early years were replaced by travel books and collections of essays such as Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way. The Algren of Never Come Morning and The Man with the Golden Arm had opted out of American society. What continued to attract readers to his new works was a distinctive voice—one that revealed many of the features of the voice of the novels but was qualitatively different. It was more strident, more wise-cracking, more contentious, as if the speaker did not expect to be listened to seriously.

During these years Algren began a flamboyant quarrel with the critics, attacking well-known figures under such thinly disguised pseudonyms as Leslie Fleacure, Elvis Zircon, Lionel Thrillingly, and Justin Poddlespitz. They were the "new owners" of American literature, having arrived "directly from their respective campuses armed with blueprints to which the novel and short story would have to conform, were a passing grade to be awarded." They made criticism the focus of American writing, "and that," Algren remarks, "was a pretty shrewd move right there, as neither Elvis nor Leslie nor Justin could write fiction." In retrospect Algren's Chicago-style attack would appear merely ludicrous, if it weren't for the serious alienation of the author it reveals.

It is obvious that Algren felt some sort of conspiracy was going on in American letters in the late fifties and early sixties, though today it appears that what he was really commenting upon and sensitively reacting to was at least in part the growth of a college educated audience and the widening split in the reading public which accompanied it. In effect the literary critics moved in to fill what could be called a print gap. At the same time these critics represented a new force in literature as the universities they were so frequently part of underwent a curriculum revolution in literary study. More and more the scholarly pursuit in literature became a pursuit of the living author, the contemporary figure. For various reasons Algren did not appear to qualify as a subject for study.

Algren's open hostility to criticism could perhaps be viewed as in part responsible for the neglect he suffered during these years. Yet in the end this is not very plausible. Hemingway and Faulkner were just as hostile to criticism, and perhaps even more contemptuous. It is likely that Algren's identification by him self and by the critics with a seemingly dying literary tradition played a larger and more significant role. Perhaps for this reason George Bluestone, writing sympathetically about Algren in the late fifties, declared that "to read him in the naturalistic tradition is to misread him." Bluestone went on to try to define Algren's originality, but in doing so he ingeniously made him into an intellectual puzzle, finding, for example, inverted Christian symbolism in his use of traditional imagery. In the end Bluestone's attempt to redeem Algren in the eyes of the critics was unsuccessful.

To suggest as some have done that naturalism and Algren's reputation died together is a gross simplification as well as a misstatement of fact. Both seem well and assured of long life. Naturalism took a new direction, even as Philip Rahv announced its decline. As for Algren, his reputation can only rise as readers rediscover his works and come to find in them not merely the only serious literary voice that spoke with passion of the poor during a long, lonely decade but a prophetic voice: one that dealt with social issues which were to be important for the next two decades in American life: with drug addiction, of course, as in The Man with the Golden Arm, but also with the climate of poverty and the conditions of mind it breeds, with the responsibility of all of society for these conditions, with the culpability of the police and the denial of life represented by our penal institutions, by all our institutions.

Algren saw and felt and responded in literary works of magnitude and distinction to the cultural and social forces that aggravate poverty and lead to the denial of human rights long before such inequities created an awakened national conscience—a conscience which was to coalesce, first in SNCC and the civil rights march on Washington in 1963, then move through segments of American society in the form of student protests and sit-ins, demands for minority and ethnic studies within the universities, the Third World movements, anti-Vietnam peace marches, the Poor People's Freedom Train, the woman's liberation movement. While Algren may not share a belief in all the notions of these diverse groups, or the alternative life style some call for, his work derives from the same radical roots: from the call for justice and the demand for social change, from the belief that man's institutions are ill-equipped to meet the needs of man. To some our institutions seem perversely designed to prevent man from achieving his humanity—or, as Algren demonstrated through his moving story of Lefty Bicek, from even reaching manhood.

At the beginning of "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" Algren's adolescent hero stands 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 hero is a ghetto youth dressed in 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, turned-up cuffs, and a frayed cap which once had earlaps. His range of experience is severely limited by his environment and by the confinement it produces. He dreams, as all ghetto youth do, of escaping his surroundings, of sudden riches and overnight success. His mind is a hodge podge of schemes and plans: a cluster of tawdry hopes and aspirations pulled from the rag bag of American culture. Even the possibility of escape from the police is conceived by him in terms of a crude B-grade movie, with his friends appearing in front of the 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 yearning for recognition. A pitcher for the Polish Warriors S.A.C. and an aspiring boxer, 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. 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 represents Algren's affirmation of the inviolable human spirit.

Bruno Lefty Bicek is essentially an innocent (it is surely the deliberate author who makes George Raft an innocent figure in the gangster film at the Chopin Theater), even though in the course of Algren's story he seems only dimly aware of the difference between right and wrong and 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. 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 strongarmed 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 brink of hell, he never realizes, and the true meaning of the events which transpire in the police station pass him by. He fails to appreciate the innocent nature of the bluff behind Lefty's preposterous alibi: that he "was just walkin' down Chicago . . . to get a bottle of milk for mother." The reporter also fails to see the courage of Lefty's refusal to involve his buddies. "I was singlin'. Lonewolf 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, which Algren develops into a general indictment of society.