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P.dRTISAN REVIEW
"rotting mass" in modern society, although here and there, under the
impact of some tremendous event, parts of this mass may be swept into
the proletarian movement. With this conception firmly in mind, Algren
has created the first complete portrait of the lumpenproletariat in Amer·
ican revolutionary literature.
Cass McKay, the central character of the book, is the living embodi–
ment of this conception. He is born on the West Texas prairie in a home
that "stood like a casual box on the border." His family had no place
in the world; his sister becomes a prostitute, his father a murderer. Cass
is never granted the opportunity to develop his human faculties, and
although from earliest childhood he has seen the blood of hoboes run
down "the gleaming yellow rail,-warm wet blood running black and
slow beneath the unpitying sun"-he finds no way of living save that
of joining the horde of wanderers. Thenceforward his life become a dark
journey of pain and evil. A boundless brutality, an unspeakable insane
violence pervades each episode in this narrative of men and women forever
mutilated, forever damend. A woman is delivered of her baby in a dark
and cold reefer; a Negro girl is raped in the woods by a band of bums,
and .Cass too "smelled the dark woman, her thighs and her womb,"
feeling a strong hand "pushing him from behind"; in the El Paso County
Jail he meets Nubby O'Neil, a pervert who terrorizes the prisoners through
a benevolent arrangement with the law, and when Cass comes out he
joins Nubby in a hold-up. Later, alone in Chicago, he meets the prostitute
Norah and makes her his partner in pursuing the trade Nubby taught him.
He is caught and sent to prison. Free again, he earns a precarious living
by peddling peanuts and candy in a burlesque house; but when he finds
that he cannot effect the return of Norah he rejoins Nubby to disappear in
the army of the homeless. Only for one fleeting moment is Cass brought
face to face with class organization, but his feeble mentality cannot com–
prehend the giant audacity of struggle, and aping on the lowest level the
prejudices and hatreds of his masters in the upper tiers, he finally sinks
into that stupor from which his love for Norah had once promised to
save him.
The other focal point of the novel is the special "appreciation," so to
speak, which it accords to the law, the railroad police, the bulls of all
denominations who practice legal violence on the defenceless tramps. The
pages fairly crackle with sinuous prose when the author evokes the image
of the bulls, advancing like jungle-cats--"as though on hips forged of
rock and rubber"-to pounce on their verminous prey. These carnivorous
creatures, sodden with bestiality, alive to nothing but food, drink and
blows, are a true incarnation of the system which is dependent on them
for its safety. And it is in suclt plastic, almost tactile particularizations
that the underworld of the hunted merges with the upper world of the
hunters, compelling the innate horror of contemporary civilization to flood
a close-up that will not fade.
Algren's prose is indigenous in every detail-in dialogue, the tonality
of structure; and the fabric of place-names cunningly! woven into the
narrative like a refrain in a bold voice. A book as authentically American
as this should be required reading for every eagle orator in American
letters.
PHILIP RAHV
