The story-telling is immature in many ways. Though the monologue form is required perhaps because of the deposition frame and because it is useful for sustaining the character of the speaker, dialogue seems essential in some sections as the story develops; and its avoidance suggests the author's lack of technique or control. Sometimes, too, the almost breathless panoramic paragraphs are broad narratives that hurry the reader across seemingly unnecessary movements and incidents. "So Help Me," however, is a remarkable first story and a foretaste of much that is to become important in Algren's later fiction.

The story's overtone, its density of implication, its texture, and its solidity of detail are noteworthy. The recurrent phrase "so help me"—which appears at least twice at crucial moments during Homer's recounting of the events leading to the impulsive shooting, and again as the last line of the narrative—becomes both a desperate avowal of Homer's sincerity and a plea for assistance. From time to time, Homer unwittingly reveals that he is pathetically unaware of his own obsessions or twisted values, as when, after Homer tricks David into pawning the suitcase until money comes from Homer's mythical brother in Apalachicola, Homer refuses to let Fort accompany him to the pawnshop because his friend "has very deceptive ways sometimes." Moreover, Algren's use of the key phrase "We're cut apart—cut apart!", one which David screams in his walking nightmares, is particularly effective; for it gradually increases the tension until the outcry trips the trigger-finger of the unnerved Fort, and it serves as a recurrent thematic statement of the psychological and spiritual isolation of the characters themselves.

Between "So Help Me" and his collection of short stories, The Neon Wilderness, Algren had written his two earliest novels, Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning. The first novel was unsuccessful; the second, successful enough to be encouraging without being a bestseller. But, by the author's own admission, he had written both novels during a long period of random, youthful, and largely rootless wandering and army service. By 1945, convinced that, if his writing were to be taken seriously, he had to become serious about writing, he began work on his volume of short stories, only a few of which he had written previously. In his Preface to the American Century Series Edition of The Neon Wilderness (1960), he suggests that he was aware that he was herding his career into a new direction: "I made a U-turn in 1946 and ran down several memories I had been haunting before they could start haunting me." These memories were a composite of all his experiences—real, literary, and imaginary.

One of the first and most revealing lessons Algren learned was the difference between the ultra-conscious, the laboriously researched, the over-planned story, and the "accidental" product of his spontaneity and his already fully stocked warehouse of key-phrases, character traits, and informing motifs. Two of the stories in The Neon Wilderness, in particular, demonstrate the superiority of Algren's "accidental" story over the "self-conscious" one. "Design for Departure," the principal thematic story of the collection, emphasizes the jungle motif and contains the phrase "the neon wilderness" as part of its narrative. It was carefully researched and "self-conscious." The accidental story, which is one of the real triumphs in Algren's career, is "How the Devil Came Down Division Street."

No writer was ever more determined to make all the "standard" preparations for creating a short story masterpiece than was Algren from the moment he began planning "Design for Departure":

I had a very ambitious hope of writing a really great story, and I went about that in a very determined way. I slept in bum hotels and talked to prostitutes, and 1 knocked around State and Harrison Streets, tried to hear conversations going on in the next room—picked up, you know, bits of actual conversation. I worked very hard on that. I worked on it off and on for years. That was to be such a great story. Nobody wanted to publish it.

"Design for Departure," which was originally intended as the title for the whole collection, bears a marked resemblance to Stephen Crane's short novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). The similarity between the two stories is particularly remarkable in the early scenes of "Design for Departure" where the young girl, Mary, blossoms in an environment similar to that which spawned Crane's Maggie; and Mary blossoms there despite what Crane would have called "lurid altercations" between her drunken guardians—her real father, Sharkey, and his common-law wife, the "dead-picker" widow, who exist in avid mutual destructiveness. But, unlike her predecessor, Mary is not that "most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl," but a blemished one, for her face has a birthmark.

Though Mary's tenement world is not quite the purgatory of Maggie's, it has the more modern trappings of the same dungheap: "Kleenex, fifty-cent horse tickets, and cigarette snipes . . . stamped and trampled into the floor's ancient cracks," a subterranean cave like Crane's "dark region," where she "screamed in sleep without waking at all: as though the fear she felt in her dream was less than the fear she would know upon waking."

These similarities are not surprising since Algren has frequently acknowledged his debt to Crane, once saying "I know him so well I sometimes think I wrote him myself." Parallels with other Naturalist pioneers, particularly with Dreiser's Sister Carrie, would be easy to make; but such comparisons tend to diminish a talent whose strengths are more unique than derivative. The "work-monotony" syndrome of Naturalist fiction, for instance, could be traced to Emile Zola, but is a too unavoidable observation of life to charge authors with borrowing it from one another. The kindred monotonies of the sewing-machine jobs of Dreiser's Carrie and Crane's Maggie, the packing-house jobs of Upton Sinclair's Jurgis Rudkus in The Jungle, and the bacon-wrapping job of Algren's Mary are all manifestations of a universal condition more than of a literary convention.

In "Design for Departure," the time comes when Mary moves away from Sharkey and from the widow's proud boast, "Sometimes I fall down. But I don't stagger." Alone in the dreadful, impersonal isolation of "one of those cheap caverns which are half way between a rooming house and a cheap hotel," Mary becomes an automaton at her bacon-wrapping job and otherwise occupies "a twilit land between sleep and waking"—always sleeping in the foetal position as an envelope against the void of her life. Into this vacuum comes deaf Christiano, the sweeper of halls, who waits in Mary's room to seduce her; and she succumbs with only a whimper. After she has become a partner in the badger game with Christy and Ryan, the proprietor of the Jungle Club, a victim calls the police, who take Christy, "the one human being who had been kind to her," away in handcuffs. During his imprisonment, Mary turns to prostitution and drug addiction, and becomes diseased. When Christy returns, she warns him away, performing in her disease and despair the inevitably appropriate act demanded by circumstance—the request that Christy give her the last, lethal dose of narcotics to ease them both from a life become irrevocably intolerable.

With the appearance of deaf Christiano the uniqueness of Algren's jungle world becomes unmistakable; it is no longer the same as Crane's or Dreiser's. Mary is not, like Maggie, "pounced upon by the first wolf in this jungle and seduced" [Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, Minneapolis, 1956]. Instead, both Mary and Christy are victims of psychological and spiritual starvation. She is seduced by a deeply flawed jungle humanoid whose very incompleteness helps to explain, within the only framework possible to those who must survive in a jungle metropolis, not only his capacity for true if primitive kindness but also his ultimate fidelity to her. And, by the same token, Mary's only resistance is the whimper of one who, knowing nothing but defeat, must accept her seduction as the established pattern of her existence.

But even in Algren's special universe of crime, prostitution, drunkenness, and drug addiction, Mary finds with Christy the only human rapport she has ever known—in its way a genuine love which exists independent of all that is otherwise sordid and degraded. With Christy's imprisonment, however, all hope disappears. In her narcotic degeneracy and disease, she counts it an act of Christian mercy that Christy will, on his return, perform the last narcotic ritual necessary to round out the "elaborate preparation for death" [George Bluestone, "Nelson Algren," Western Review, Vol. XXII, Autumn 1957] which has been her life.

With the infusion of human sensibility and Christian mythos into the jungle world, Algren achieves a trademark of his contribution to American Naturalistic fiction: deep compassion for the fallen and degraded. In this story, Algren makes his most obvious excursion into Christian allegory; for he makes Christy a half-brother to those pseudonyms of Christ produced by Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Hemingway. Though somewhat inverted, the allegory is plain not only in the names of Mary and Christy themselves but also in Mary's search for deliverance from a lost world through the sacrificial act of a mortal Christ. The Christian mythos, a symptom of unremitting seriousness in Algren's early work, is perhaps too weighty for the basic subject matter in "Design for Departure." Nonetheless, perceptive critics like George Bluestone have recognized it as one of the most admirable stories in the collection.

Part of the lesson which Algren learned from writing "Design for Departure" was that he could not immerse himself too early and too painstakingly in serious preparation without stifling life-giving properties which a greater reliance upon intuition could preserve. The value of the lesson has been proved by the continued popularity of a story which he wrote in one afternoon and revised only once, a basically serious study of Division Street life told with the bizarre lightness of much of his best work since that time. Needing some money in a hurry, Algren fictionized a Pole's account of a neighborhood family that was convinced that its house was haunted. The result was "How the Devil Came Down Division Street," a story which "is still brand new," though so often anthologized (even in foreign languages) that Algren now denies reprint permission since he fears its over-publication.

The narrative begins as a frame story in which Roman Orlov accepts a double-shot of whiskey from the narrator in return for an explanation of how he became the acknowledged prince of Division Street drunks. The immediate scene is the Polonia Bar on Division Street where Roman spends his life declaring that "The devil lives in a double-shot" and pleading with his friends to help him "drown the worm" which, though drowned each day, nonetheless gnaws incessantly. Long in the telling, broken by curses and sobs, Roman's tale is founded upon a narrative irony in which the miraculous saving of a totally derelict drunken father creates a totally derelict drunken son.

The machinery by which Algren achieves this switching of positions appears slight and perhaps too ingenious at first glance; but, viewed in environmental terms, it is ultimately defensible: one of the crucial conditions of the family's existence is sleeping accommodations which force one or another of the family to sleep under rather than in a bed. Papa Orlov, in whose head "many strange things went on," earns pennies at night by playing his accordion in Division Street taverns. By day, he sleeps in the tenement apartment, but never in Mama O's bed. It is as though, "having given himself all night to his accordion, he must remain true to it during the day." The apartment contains only two beds—one is for eleven-year-old Teresa and Mama Orlov, who "cooked in a Division Street restaurant by day and cooked in her own home at night"; the other bed is shared by thirteen-year-old Roman and the seven-year-old twins. Slumber is so precarious that "nobody encouraged Papa O. to come home at all"; but, when he does, he sleeps under Roman's bed until the children go to morning Mass.

The problem is a simple one of domestic geometry. And, since the solution works, there is no difficulty until the terms of the problem require substitutions. Trouble begins when the family is upset by a ghostly knocking at the door: first, on a Sunday with only Papa O. at home; again, that evening; again, in the middle of the night. A dream of a blood-spattered young man waiting in the hall convinces Mama O. that some change is coming; therefore, she is not surprised when Papa O. comes home inexplicably without his accordion. Implored for an explanation of the knocking and the dream, neighbors tell of the brutal murder there in which a young man crazed by drink had beaten to death his unwed mate and had then hanged himself in the closet. They had been buried together in unsanctified ground, and he is now returning in search of peace.

The priest proclaims it the "will of God that the Orlovs were chosen to redeem the young man through prayer and that Papa O. should have a wife instead of an accordion."' So, deprived of an accordion through God's will, Papa stays home, sleeps in his proper place beside Mama, and soon becomes the best janitor on Noble Street. As a result, the haunting ceases. By and large, this miracle saves the Orlov family; it brings from the landlord a surcease of rent and makes the previously retarded Teresa the most important person in her class. But for Roman, the miracle is only that of the change-ling; for, with Papa sleeping in Mama's bed, Teresa must take Roman's place beneath the bed. Unable to sleep there at night, Roman haunts Papa's well-worn paths to the taverns to drown the worm each night until that bitterest hour, dawn, when "he must go home though he has no home." That is why, as the biggest drunk on Division Street, Roman insists that the devil lives in a double-shot.

In "How the Devil Came Down Division Street" Algren added a dimension which characterizes most of his later work: the bizarre, flamboyant, and sometimes grim humor. And nowhere has he more successfully combined the elements of the modern gothic, the comic ghost story, and meaningful social commentary.

The charge most frequently leveled against Algren's short fiction is that it consists of sketches rather than of fully formed short stories. He concentrated upon what Bluestone calls moments of "frozen change before a death or final loss" which characterize passages in the early novels, especially in Never Come Morning. Most of Algren's short fiction substitutes for conventional rounding-out of action a deliberately static framework in which the very lack of action emphasizes the paralysis of characters who must be brought to the full realization of their paralysis, as in the last line of "A Bottle of Milk for Mother"—"I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow."

"A Bottle of Milk for Mother" is the most widely anthologized of three dramatized sketches which are among Algren's most effective contributions to modern short story craft: the "interrogation stories." Some of these are elaborate verbal exchanges drawn from official police "lineups"; others are more fully narrated adaptations of the "third degree." At some time between 1935 and 1941, in an attempt to recover a stolen wallet, Algren received a card admitting him to regular police line-ups. For years thereafter he haunted these ceremonials where he observed, absorbed, and learned to interpret stance, glance, gesture, facial and auditory inflection, and the dialectal thrust typical of reactions between accuser and accused.

The respect and popularity accorded "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" are the result of the directness and penetration with which Algren manages a verbal duel between a suspect and a police captain. The young Polish baseball-pitcher-turned-prize-fighter, Bruno "Lefty" Bicek, possesses slow-witted street cunning. The precinct police captain Kozak (called Tenczara in Never Come Morning) is an omniscient nemesis figure whose weary cynicism camouflages an intimate knowledge of the criminal mind and a solid expertise in the ploys of interrogative suggestion, innuendo, and snare. From the beginning, the game is hopeless for the cornered suspect; but in the long run, Captain Kozak proves himself even the better gambler.

The story opens in Captain Kozak's office into which Bruno, charged with the fatal robbery-shooting of an old man in a tenement hallway, is ushered by Sergeant Adamovitch. With dramatic irony, the opening sentence tells the reader something Bruno himself does not know: this is his "final difficulty" with the police. From the moment Bruno enters, he is subjected to the expert terrorizing of the official team composed of two sergeants, a plain-clothes man, and a reporter. The story is an advanced form of the deposition, but the unbroken monologue of "So Help Me" becomes in this story an elaborate pattern of move and countermove, one always controlled by the cynical though sphinx-like captain, and one always edging the suspect inexorably toward final revelations which he does not know he is making.

The crucial turns are often very delicate, as when Kozak virtually ignores the pathetically naive alibi that Bruno was only on an errand to get a bottle of milk for his mother, or when Bruno is rattled by Kozak's abrupt shift from the familiar "Lefty" to the austere and threatening "Bicek." Each time the suspect feels that he has managed to gloss his own portrait, he finds it looking more and more like a prison photo. Finally, on his knees in a cell in an accidental attitude of prayer as he looks for his pavement-colored cap, he mutters to impersonal walls, "I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow."

Captain One-Eye Tenczara of Never Come Morning is the first of Algren's weary, burdened, but sardonic and wily cops. After conducting the interrogation which is the basis of "A Bottle of Milk for Mother." Tenczara also presides over the first important line-up scene in Algren's stories, a scene which is the progenitor of "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," which in turn became the germinal idea for "The Captain Is Impaled." In this evolution lies one of the remarkable paradoxes in Algren's fiction: for a writer both celebrated and condemned for his sympathy with the underdog, the downbeaten, the oppressed and cornered, Algren has shown a surprising sympathy with the haunted and spiritually oppressed law officer.

The interrogation stories reveal the development of this broader recognition in Algren's writing. At first, with One-Eye Tenczara's interrogations, the focus is upon the criminal and the crime. The officer's function is largely that of a medium through which the reader can perceive the complexity of the sub-legal, sub-social, sometimes even subhuman activities which persist behind the city's respectable façades. But from story to story, as lost soul follows lost soul across a platform under spotlights, the focus shifts from the accused to the accuser. The guilt of the criminal becomes, at last, that of the oppressor also.

Together, the stories "The Captain Has Bad Dreams" and "The Captain Is Impaled" serve as the final stages in this evolution; but the difference lies chiefly in the greater intensity with which the later story shifts guilt to the interrogator. These veteran police captains with at least eleven years' service are jaded, disillusioned, hardened officers—ones as hard as the hardened criminals they interrogate interminably. Haunted by the creeping erosion of their Tightness and assurance, they become at last compassionate in their cynicism; identifiable with those they oppress, they are cognizant that they, too, are implicitly guilty of the wrongs they condemn eternally in others.

Both stories share the same subject, one that is perhaps best capsulized by Algren himself in a passage from "The Captain Is Impaled," in which he tells whom the "snickerers" are waiting in the darkened auditorium to identify: "the man who'd slugged the night watchman and the one who'd snatched the imported purse through the window of the Moving El; for him who'd chased somebody's sister down a dead-end alley or forged her daddy's signature; tapped a gas main or pulled a firebox; slit the janitor's throat in a coal-bin or performed a casual abortion on the landlord's wife in lieu of the rent." Others are also there, to be identified or charged not by the victimized public but by the police themselves. Like spirits in a latter-day Divine Comedy, these are malefactors who do violence not upon others but upon themselves—the drunks, hopheads, loiterers, attempted suicides.

The setting is minimal in "The Captain Has Bad Dreams": "They come off the streets for a night or a week and pause before the amplifier with a single light, like a vigil light, burning high overhead. Each pauses, one passing moment, to make his brief confessional." Though essentially the same, the setting is elaborated upon in "The Captain Is Impaled" in which the time is "that loneliest of all jailhouse hours, the hour between the evening chow-cart's passing and Lights On." The reader is with the prisoners in a jail cell, and the auditorium is "just the other side of that green steel door." Furthermore, the reader is painfully aware that those who lurk nightly in the dark auditorium are now coming in. These are the "snickerers," who come every night to point their fingers at the accused, even though the accused can admit no fear. Everybody is "in on a bad rap. So how could anyone get fingered?"

In "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," the identification of the accuser with the sufferers is vague. Some nights the captain "was all for hanging the lot of them at 11 P.M. On other evenings he advised them to take turns throwing themselves under the El, which roared regularly past." But at home he is plagued by dreams with mystic overtones—dreams in which "they passed and repassed him restlessly, their faces half averted, forever smiling uneasily as though sharing some secret and comforting knowledge of evil which he could never know." The lost ones have given him his own cross; and, like them, he is impaled upon it. The impalement image itself, when it first occurs in "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," applies not to the captain but to an addict who has given himself up voluntarily and stands against the lighted wall "as though impaled, an agonized Jesus in long-outgrown clothes."

By the time "The Captain Is Impaled" appeared, two years later, Algren had transfered the impalement from the tortured addict to the tortured captain. Though the story is only an episode in the career of Frankie Machine in The Man with the Golden Arm, it is a satisfactory short story which achieves fullest irony and mature thematic force. Understanding the indictment leveled at him by a defrocked priest, "We are all members of one another," the captain watches the "snickerers" leave the line-up room; but he stays behind with his prisoners "to follow each man to a cell all his own, there to confess the thousand sins he had committed in his heart . . . for there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain's darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart." He warns himself to come off his own cross, but he cannot, for "the Captain was impaled."

Algren's stories are highly homogeneous. As has been noted, his subjects are dope addiction, prostitution, incarceration, gambling, prize-fighting, horse racing, and army life, one or more of which predictably appears in most of his work. Nonetheless, certain stories have similarities which differentiate them from others. Three, for instance, are related to the interrogation group because they deal with conditions which drive suspects into police offices or line-ups and because they reflect the value-deterioration and the rationalizing of the confessionals.

"Poor Man's Pennies" is built almost entirely upon the "transparent alibi" typical of the line-up confessionals. Here the alibis help create a narrative that explores the reasons for a nice girl's involvement with a worthless fabricator. Gladys, understanding that Rudy's compulsive lies "are a poor man's pennies," manages to marry him to get him paroled to her; and she spends ten trouble-free years in probationary bliss. "Poor Man's Pennies" has moments of broad farce or even burlesque, and it ends in at least temporary salvation; but it is, nevertheless, "a saga of organized stumbling by born incompetents toward a palpably impossible end" [Chester E. Eisinger, "Nelson Algren: Naturalism as the Beat of the Iron Heart," Fiction of the Forties, Chicago, 1963].

The other two stories of this group, "A Lot You Got to Holler" and "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone," are more serious sagas of organized stumbling; both are told in first person as forms of the confessional. The first story is an indictment of a brutal, unfeeling father who deprives his son of his mother, marries the mother's sister, and punishes the boy indiscriminately for becoming an inveterate thief and con-boy. Searching for the lost warmth of his mother and adopting all forms of subterfuge because of his fear of his father, the boy finds himself in a fierce paternal feud. Like Huckleberry Finn, he ponders the morality of adult society; he finds its values so inverted that he concludes "I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me." The story is a handbook of petty thievery, short-change artistry, and con-methods through which the boy progresses until he is jailed and then paroled to his father, whom he baits until the old man is glad to be rid of him.

"Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone," a somewhat rambling story, begins at the moment when Rose, a prostitute who is arrested for murder, is ushered into the police wagon. As the crowd pulls back, she thinks, "My whole life it's the first time anyone made room for me. And now just look what for." Told in retrospect, the story ends at the same moment and with the same words.

Clearly related to the stealing, con-game, and interrogation stories is another three-tale cluster representing the legal retribution which society imposes upon the caught and convicted. These stories, identifiable as studies of incarceration and release, explore in turn early confinement in a juvenile detention home, adult confinement in a southern jail, and the disillusionment of release. "The Children" is a devastating treatment of the stupidity of professional "do-gooders" who smugly minister to budding hoods without the remotest perception of what is happening inside their heads. The detention home or "reformatory" does no reforming but serves as a centralized criminal-information exchange where the inmates' appearance of docility toward over-dressed women benefactors is their cover for an esoteric underworld education.

"El Presidente de Méjico," an adaptation of the Texas jailhouse episode in Somebody in Boots, is the most effective of the "tank stories." Though the title focuses attention upon Portillo the Mexican, a six-week bridegroom with a pregnant wife, the story really concerns the jailhouse world in which a young man learns the world's cruelties. Portillo, detained for questioning about the location of a still, is kept outside the cell-block to protect him from Jesse Gleason, the "bad-man" of the tank. Gleason, who had killed Mexicans on both sides of the border, had returned for justice to the American side where "he had more relatives than the sheriff and was confident of beating the rap." Without explanation, Portillo is released; but he is dragged back at nightfall with a great bullet hole in his stomach, a result of his having tried to run from the sheriff. Too nearly dead to be able to grant permission for surgery, he dies on the floor, never to know whether his unborn son becomes President of Mexico. Later, after Gleason is acquitted, he is endowed with Spanish boots and Portillo's sombrero.

Slight but poignant, "The Brother's House" probes into that overwhelming longing for release which all prisoners must outlast. David survives by dreaming of his return to the house where he had lived with his brothers. The beatings they gave him cannot be admitted into his dreams; he has nowhere else to go. Released, he trudges homeward for eighteen days, only to be met at the gate with the query, "What do you want?"

Two stories, "Stickman's Laughter" and "Katz," concern loss by gambling. In both stories, the losing-formula is classic and the same: a mounting pile of winnings, then suddenly—nothing. "Stickman's Laughter," however, has one of the few near-redemptive conclusions in all of Algren's fiction. Like the good husband he is, Banty Longobardi takes his pay home to an equally good wife who, though rarely away, has not returned from visiting her mother. Lonely and disappointed, Banty resorts to a crap game; wins forty dollars; and, even more bitterly disappointed when his wife is not yet home to share his good fortune, gets drunk and loses all his money at the same crap table. Ashamed and fearful, he goes home again and finds his wife willing to take blame for being away and even to sympathize with "poor Banty" for missing dinner and the movies. "So nothing important had been lost after all."

Such a salvation is impossible for Katz, the young poker player whose name is the title of his story. With sixty-five dollars in his pocket, he runs the win-then-lose route until he has only eight quarters left. In a five-dollar-start game, he pretends to have more in a closed fist and calls that he has "threes" to make the dealer think he has three threes instead of two. He is caught and thrown down the stairs in disgrace. Unlike Banty, who gambles only from loneliness, Katz feels that money makes him important, invincible: "Katz believed in lucky bucks, fast money, and good women." His defeat is ignominious; his character makes it impossible for him to know the redeeming love to which Banty returns.

In both stories, much depends upon the ironic twists of the parrotlike cry of stickman and dealer, "Tell 'em where you got it and how easy it was." The cry has a literal meaning when Banty wins but an ironic one when he loses; it is ironic on one level when Katz loses the first time; but, as a sneering phrase directed at an inept cheater, it means something altogether different the second time.

As concrete and authoritative as the gambling tales but even more sordid and hopeless in outlook are several stories dealing with prostitution and drug addiction. The slightest of the group, "Is Your Name Joe?", is the half-demented monologue of a simple-minded prostitute to whom all men are "Joe" because "Joes" have been the only ones important enough in her life to drive her steadily into perdition. Two other stories, written in the late 1960's, return to the successful addiction-prostitution themes of the two major novels. 'Àll Through the Night" probes once more the faith which the prostitute has in the "Daddy" whose only real aim is to gain all he can from her. As a graphic revisitation to the addict world of The Man with the Golden Arm, the story is effective; but the use of names with biblical vibrations, Beth-Mary and Christian, is not as well integrated with the thematic values as in "Design for Departure."

In "Decline & Fall of Dingdong-Daddyland" (1969), Algren amplifies the kitchen condom-factory episode from A Walk on the Wild Side. Essentially a story of mutual entrapment in which an old ex-con provides the heroin for two addicted ex-hookers in return for their help in manufacturing garish condoms, Dingdong Daddies and their variations, it is a terrifying tale despite the gloss of broad humor with which it is told. These derelicts exist in hateful interdependence until the old man dies, leaving a hundred-thousand dollars worth of heroin in the brass bedposts, where it remains to this day safe and dry in some forgotten dump underneath an El.

Two stories in The Neon Wilderness are only peripherally prostitution stories. "Kingdom City to Cairo" is a first-person story told by a young hitch-hiker picked up by a former Seventh-Day Adventist minister. The minister has been deprived of his credentials for making a bawdy house of an historic hotel he owns in a neighboring town, where he also goes to pick up mail from his brother's wife with whom he is having an affair. He keeps telling the young man, "You see, I have a weakness"; but, even after the young man accepts a free bed and escapes an army of bed-bugs in the ancient bawdy house, he is still unsure "whether the Reverend's weakness was women, whisky, his single kidney, or practical joking."

A more substantial prostitution-prize-fighting tale, "Depend on Aunt Elly," is one of the most ironically bitter stories in The Neon Wilderness. In addition to developing the theme that a girl can never escape prostitution after she has adopted the profession, the story also successfully combines Algren's interest in official graft, entrapment, incarceration, and prize fighting. The title, lifted from the context, is biting in its implications: "Aunt" turns out to be a proprietary rather than a familial term, and Elly herself is truly dependable but only in collecting a monthly fee from Wilma, the small-time prostitute, whom she had bilked into spending all of her money to buy a furlough instead of the promised commutation from the prison farm. A part-Indian prize fighter, Baby Needles, rescues Wilma from a whorehouse, marries her unaware of her perpetual debt to Elly, derives from the marriage courage to develop his "bolo punch" into near-championship form, but then finds and reads one of Elly's dunning letters, loses heart, returns to liquor, and rejects his wife for not being honest with him. He is left alone with only Wilma's lucky-piece, a pathetic rabbit's foot, that is "clutched in his hand, the great knuckles showing white and helplessly through the copper skin." Altogether, the story is one of Algren's most effective efforts to depict the luckless, accidental fashion in which desperate people are deprived of mutually redeeming love.

Baby Needles is typical of the second- and third-rate prize fighters who appear in Algren's fiction; all of them yearn for fame and money, and sometimes they approach both, but they see them fade mirage-like. This syndrome reaches its lowest depths in The Neon Wilderness story "Million-Dollar Brainstorm" where the brainstorm is not the million-dollar one which the mountainous pug Tiny Zion dreams of, but his own literally scrambled brains. After bringing Tiny home from his last knockout and a messy binge, his manager knows by looking at his eyes that Tiny will be throwing his mother out the window next, "Or jumpin' outa it hisself."

Though the prize fight stories always deprive the fighter of fighter's dreams, they sometimes allow him to settle for something else, or even for something more meaningful and permanent. Two progressive phases of such settlement appear in a 1968 Atlantic story, "Home to Shawneetown," and in "He Swung and He Missed," which was part of The Neon Wilderness. "Home to Shawneetown" is the saga of a better-than-average itinerant fighter who meets and beats good opposition all over the country but who sees clearly in time that a swab stick, a roll of gauze, and a vaseline jar are his total reward for getting his "face punched in for fourteen years." So he accepts his wife's long-standing suggestion that they open a diner, and with the first-night customers he contentedly watches a televised fight between two of his old opponents.

The last of the three prize fight stories, "He Swung and He Missed," reflects Algren's admiration for Hemingway's classic story "Fifty Grand." Though Young Rocco is not championship material, he gives everything to every fight and never considers taking a dive—until the last fight of his career, which he agrees to throw because he cannot stand seeing his wife without decent shoes. But he finds when in the ring that he cannot willingly lose; "his own pride" is "double-crossing him." Solly knocks him out, however—in a prolonged and graphic fight sequence as specific as the best blow-by-blow commentary. In the dressing room, his wife confronts him fearfully, saying she had bet all his advance on him and now they have nothing. But he is able to grin "a wide white grin," and "that was all she needed to know it was okay after all."

Since Algren had little rapport with the manufactured society of military life, his five army stories are not among his best. Though they have all the concreteness and specificity of his other works—intimate knowledge of the mystique behind hierarchies of rank, command of black-market angles, perception of the enlisted man's view of military punishment and reward—the characterizations seldom achieve the keenness of Algren's dope addicts, jailbirds, and prize fighters. In "That's the Way It's Always Been" and in "The Heroes," the real war is not with the Germans but with American officers, both commissioned and "numcum," including the chaplain. The commanding officer, a superb incompetent, devotes his energies to prolonging the war, to delivering marathon lectures, and, like the chaplain, to cornering expensive war souvenirs in the field and nurses in bed. To the plain soldier, even God is a grafter; for His vice-regent the chaplain preserves the profitable status quo with glib wisdom, "That's the way it's always been." The relentless war between enlisted man and commanding officer is a landlubber's Mr. Roberts in which a major victory is achieved when the medics have the Colonel himself as a pneumonia patient; and the Mexican-Osage Corporal Hardheart of "The Heroes" is a character not far removed from the half-insane aspect of the military establishment later chronicled by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. Many soldiers flee such insanity, as does the Negro soldier of "He Couldn't Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn," who holes up in Marseilles with a lovely Algerienne prostitute who promises to smuggle him into Africa as her Algerien. The story is interesting partly as an early Marseilles version of Chicago: City on the Make, for it penetrates the heart and spirit of the great French industrial metropolis: "a worker's city, a dirty dockside mechanic sprawling, in a drunken sleep, his feet trailing the littered sea."

In "No Man's Laughter," an air-force cousin of What Makes Sammy Run?, a young habitual delinquent, who develops into the best "wheelman" on Chicago's Near Northwest Side, becomes an air-force hero by diving his plane into an enemy cruiser because he cannot tolerate imaginary mocking laughter from the decks below. In "Pero Venceremos," a tale of reminiscence, a man wounded during the Spanish war relives the experience incessantly in bars and saloons and bores his friends and acquaintances, most of them veterans of World War II. The pathetic punch-line comes when, after remarking that "it's just like yesterday," the wounded veteran O'Connor shakes his head "like a man recalling an endless dream" and murmurs in self-contradiction, "It feels more like tomorrow."

Algren has produced only one short story which can be legitimately labeled a barroom story, "The Face on the Barroom Floor," one of the most convincing and hard-hitting pieces of fiction in The Neon Wilderness. Remarkable for its introduction of the early prototype of Schmidt, the awesome legless man of A Walk on the Wild Side, "The Face on the Barroom Floor" successfully communicates the pride and strength of the great torso on a wheeled platform, Railroad Shorty, who even on his wheels can beat anybody at anything. Venus Darling, the little peep-show peeler, boasts of his love-prowess and is offended at the bartender's joke, "Is that where he gets his money then?" Bound to refute the intolerable suggestion that he takes money from women, "Halfy" challenges young Fancy and, at the ghoulish urging of bar patrons, pounds his face "to a scarlet sponge" on the barroom floor, wheels away "like Jesus Christ ridin' his cross," and leaves Brother B. to close his bar forever. The fight is as senseless as the one in Crane's The Blue Hotel, but it is more bestial and is given point by the same kind of ironic signs, here NO CREDIT and NO SALE, which make all necessary comment.

During the 1960's, Algren, a lifelong horseplayer, worked somewhat desultorily on a "racetrack novel." This material supplied a few short stories, such as "The Moon of the Arfy Darfy" and "A Ticket on Skoronski" which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964 and 1966, respectively. "The Moon of the Arfy Darfy" is the first-person account of Floweree, an unlucky jockey who, at the suggestion of a bar proprietor, impersonates the famous jockey Willie Hartack so that a "big-hand, big-belly, big-laugh, old jolly-boy" from Omaha can bribe him to throw a race. With the real Hartack riding, the horse wins as expected; and "It looked like a rainy day in Omaha." Only partly a racing story, "A Ticket on Skoronski" uses a racing dream as extra-sensory prognosticator and mood builder.

Through the 1960's, Algren's short pieces attracted the attention of men's magazines like Playboy and Dude, a market which has been receptive not only to fiction but also to mood and occasional pieces, adventure, autobiography, and the highly personal essay. Much of Algren's later work falls into these categories, and "God Bless the Lonesome Gas Man" is typical of these later works. Drawing rather lightly upon the army-prize-fighting-barroom materials of previous stories, it is the slight but ingenious tale of Chester, who becomes a "smeller" for the "mighty utility," Some People's Gas. His nose was so often broken during an army boxing career that a necessary operation had given him the olfactory sensitivity of a bloodhound. Night or day he is on call to smell for gas leaks in endless miles of tubing. He is so good at his job that he predicts an explosion where the company has no records of gas lines. But the smell of gas gets into his skin; his cherished wife and his best friends cannot be near him; "he wasn't wanted anywhere but where gas was leaking." He goes to seed and loses weight, but he cannot quit his job because he will get his pension in twenty years.

Among these later efforts are also mood pieces like "The Unacknowledged Champion of Everything" (Noble Savage, 1960), autobiographical studies like "The Father and Son Cigar" (The Playboy Reader), and several reprints of adaptations of sections from Who Lost an American?—"Down with All Hands" (Atlantic [Dec, 1960]), "The Peseta with the Hole in the Middle" (Kenyon Review, Part I [Autumn, 1961]; Part II [Winter, 1962]), and "They're Hiding the Ham on the Pinball King, or, Some Came Stumbling" (Contact [Sept., 1961]).

Altogether, the published short stories of Algren are a considerable achievement. Though somewhat uneven, "a curious amalgam" [as stated by Bluestone], the stories of The Neon Wilderness have elicited unexpected discipline from an author so often charged with looseness and with over-rhapsodizing in his novels. Catherine Meredith Brown justifiably says of the short stories what has rarely if ever been claimed for the novels: "the staccato precision of the writing must be read, remembered, and admired" ["Chicago without Tears or Dreams," Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXX, Feb. 8, 1947]. In contending that Algren "is almost at his best" in the short stories, Maxwell Geismar may have been nearer the truth than many other critics have recognized.

In the short stories, where Algren "can suggest the whole contour of human life in a few terse pages," he has demonstrated the complete range of his literary attainments. In them was born his distinctive comic sense—the light irony of "How the Devil Came Down Division Street," the satire against mock-respectability in "Kingdom City to Cairo," the broadside against stumbling incompetence in the army stories, and the almost slapstick but sympathetic comedy of "Poor Man's Pennies"—all a prelude to the "Rabelaisian humor" of A Walk on the Wild Side, all early evolutionary stages of a comic sense which has dominated Algren's later work.

Nowhere outside the short stories has Algren been so free to exercise his ability to construct a tale from the single, self-revelatory catch-phrase which often becomes the essence of theme: "So help me"; "Sometimes I stagger. But I don't fall down"; "The devil lives in a double-shot"; "I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow"; "We are all members of one another"; "Lies are a poor man's pennies"; "Tell 'em where you got it and how easy it was"; "I'm the girl that men forget." Nowhere else has he controlled so stringently his tendency to blend the sordid and the poetic; as a result, the short stories have largely escaped the adverse reaction which such a controversial mixture has brought against the novels.

Otherwise, however, the short stories are almost indistinguishable from the novels. In each genre are the same twilit shadow-world of alley, bar, brothel, jail, cave-like tenement, and flea-bag hotel room; the same maudlin and monotonous juke-box tunes punctuated by the rattling of the El above its thousand columns; the same hopheads, drunks, mackers, outworn prostitutes, sharpies, and general losers; the same grotesqueries of tone and situation; the same concrete and specific insights; the same entrapments, vague unrest, and futile striving. Above all, these stories, despite their shortcomings, are a monument to the honesty, directness, and authority of a writer who has depicted a nightmare society which its parent world would rather disown but which Algren knows too well to let it endure unsung.