Let tomorrow come

Description

An autobiographical novel recounting the author's experiences in a federal penitentiary. "A loosely related series of impressionistic sketches, often horrifying in content but compassionate in tone" (Rideout p. 112). Albert Barr was the secretary of the Tulsa, OK, IWW local when he and 26 other members were convicted of "conspiracy to bring about a revolutionary overthrow of the United States government" and 3 other charges in Dec. 1919. He later became a newspaperman. *** A. J. Barr's Let Tomorrow Come, which did not appear until the last year of the decade, is a novel only in the widest sense, being more precisely a loosely related series of impressionistic sketches, of ten horrifying in content but compassionate in tone, of life in, first, a jail and then a "Bighouse," or penitentiary. Although the inmates and the unnatural pressures on them are seen through the eyes of a "federal" prisoner — apparently the writer had been an I.W.W. member — the viewpoint is curiously apolitical. For all his sensitiveness the author reveals the nightmare passivity of one who can observe but no longer act, whether he describes in his oblique, imagistic prose a prisoner so crazed at the approach of each long night that he can only moan constantly, "Sundown — let tomorrow come," or a banker so overwhelmed by shame at his conviction for embezzlement that both body and personality slowly collapse into shapelessness, or a young social rebel who harangues his cellmates as though from a corner soapbox until an uncomprehending tough knocks him down with a blow on the mouth. The short concluding section of the book gives the clue to this passivity. An interior monologue subtitled, "You're Away from All That Now," this section indicates that the author has been released and has found employment as a newspaperman. He has only two wants now — to keep his job and to remember as little as possible of prison experience. The book, then, is an act of psychological catharsis, an attempt to exorcise even his bad dreams; and in sweeping away the past he has swept away also any desire toward that radicalism which brought upon him the personality-crippling imprisonment.