Читать книгу Compulsion - Meyer Levin - Страница 10

INTRODUCTION

TURNING FIFTY IN 1955, the same year in which he completed Compulsion, my father, in the voice of the novel’s narrator, Sid Silver, would speak early in the novel of having reached “that strange assessment point.” He was the same age, in effect, as Nathan Leopold, otherwise known as Judd Steiner in his novelized account of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb “thrill killing” of fourteen-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago. Three decades had passed since he had attended the University of Chicago, his own undergraduate years overlapping with those of Leopold and Loeb, where he had reported on the sensational trial as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News. In the intervening years he had written half a dozen novels, including his sweeping coming-of-age novel The Old Bunch, published in 1937, and The Citizens, which described the police shooting of ten steel-mill strikers from multiple points of view. Both novels were firmly set in the robust realist tradition of Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. But he had as well performed as a puppeteer, reported from Spain during the Spanish Civil War, worked as a film critic for Esquire, translated from the Yiddish a selection of classic Hassidic tales, written a screenplay, and filmed, against all odds, the illegal immigration across Europe of Jewish Holocaust survivors to the shores of Palestine. He had married, divorced, and remarried shortly after the end of World War II and in the late forties settled in Paris where he would work on his autobiography, In Search, which apart from describing growing up in the bloody Nineteenth Ward of Chicago and early jaunts to Europe and Palestine, dealt at length with his harrowing experiences entering the death camps as a war correspondent ahead of the American troops. In 1951, a year after he completed In Search, we would move back to the States, taking up residence in New York City, where soon thereafter my father began working on Compulsion.

It may not be exaggerated to say that my father belonged to a generation of writers who witnessed and drew upon the major, cataclysmic events of their times. One has only to think of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, William Golding, the younger William Styron, and Norman Mailer. So too Compulsion, though on the surface a psychological thriller, should be read as well as an extended meditation on the darker side of humanity in the wake of the Holocaust, the latter never quite loosening its hold on my father’s imagination (Compulsion was soon followed by Eva, a first-person novelized true account of one woman’s flight from the Nazis, capture, and survival in Auschwitz). Might not the incomprehensible barbarity of the war years be read backward, isolated, dissected—as in a laboratory experiment—analyzed, and encapsulated in the criminal actions of these two boys who had everything—wealth, brains, promise—and who nevertheless plotted and executed a gratuitous, random act of extreme violence?

That the crime itself weighed heavily on my father’s conscience for years is evident in his treatment of Leopold and Loeb in The Old Bunch, where several of the novel’s young protagonists, growing up in the poor Jewish Westside, discuss the murder with a mixture of disgust and fascination; the murderers, as well as the victim, were Jewish, but this did not blur the fact that in hailing from the affluent South Side of Chicago, Leopold and Loeb were perceived as belonging to a culturally alien, unapproachable class of Jews in light of their wealth and assimilated ways. Even in Chicago of the twenties the old-country distinctions between German and Eastern Jewry were preserved. Similar issues of identity are treated in In Search, written five years before Compulsion, though here my father will admit to a second crucial factor in his fascination with the case: namely his own complex, partial identification with the murderers. This had largely to do with their shared intellectual precociousness. Both my father and Leopold and Loeb had been admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of fourteen. “The murder stood before me as a personal lesson in morality, for both criminals were precocious students at the University of Chicago, like myself, and of my own age . . . . But it was inevitable that their ‘crime of decadence’ should appeal to me as a symbol. I, the West-Side boy, had turned my precocious energy into accomplishment; they, the rich south siders, turned the same qualities toward destruction.” And a little further down my father confesses, “In a confused and awed way, and in the momentary fashionableness of ‘lust for experience,’ I felt that I understood them, that I, particularly, being a young intellectual Jew, had a kinship with them.”

It is this wary kinship that would provide my father with the analytic and sympathetic tools in writing Compulsion and in particular in entering the mind of Judd Steiner, Artie Straus’s brilliant yet lonely, repressed, and socially awkward accomplice. Artie is all bluff, a wiseass. But we are made to feel for Judd, his conceitedness barely hiding his sexual insecurity and isolation in the world. And the primary conduit in our understanding of Judd is Ruth, cub reporter Sid Silver’s girl, who is drawn to Judd in the course of the first part of the novel, before the perpetrators of the crime are caught. That she is engaged in a flirtatious but searching relationship with Judd even as her boyfriend’s sleuthing will eventually lead to Judd and Artie’s arrest, is a particularly effective, film noir twist to the novel and acts as a source of slow-building suspense and revelation—one might almost say redemption—as Judd’s self-tormented psyche is laid bare. Might his welter of feelings toward Ruth, bordering on love, override and thwart Artie’s demonic, homoerotic hold on him? The crime has by now been committed, but will Judd’s soul be saved by virtue of his sudden, dimly acknowledged vulnerability and yearning for human affection?

But the very poignancy of the scenes between Ruth and Judd is further augmented by Sid Silver himself, my father’s fictionalized alter ego, who every so often will remind the reader that certain events described in retrospect are pure conjecture on his part. Sid Silver is painfully aware that in reconstructing the scenes between Ruth and Judd, he is also retracing the gradual unraveling of his own youthful first love: “So I torment myself with their little scene, with the certainty that while sophisticated words poured out, their fingers touched, and they reacted like any two kids made goofy at the contact; I imagine them dancing together, and smiling in intimate joy. I see them later in the car, sitting mooning by the lake, and Judd not even trying to pull her heavily to him, perhaps only their hands clasped on the seat between them.” Compulsion is then as much a story of thwarted love recalled in midlife, “that strange assessment point,” as it is a crime novel, and the rueful scene above is one of the many vignettes in which my father surpasses the limits of the thriller or crime genre by virtue of his own authorial mastery, his own sleights of hand lending credence to the novel’s shifting sense of narrated time and perspective; and it is undoubtedly here, in the novel’s underlying structure, that Compulsion rings true to the tenor of the self-reflective modern, twentieth-century novel, even as its diction and unadorned style remain loyal to a certain hardboiled realism of once-familiar gritty, cigar-smoke-filled newspaper rooms and overheated courthouses.

When Judd and Artie are finally apprehended, midpoint into the novel, we witness a wrenching moment of recognition, or rather of double recognition: Ruth will be shocked, confused, overtaken by revulsion and pity for Judd in whom she had sensed all along a deep hurt, “some inescapable world sorrow,” and, confronted by Sid’s news, she blurts out, “‘He did awaken some kind of love in me. Perhaps it was only pity. I knew he was suffering from something terrible he couldn’t tell me. He hides everything in himself. Perhaps’—her voice became small, choked—‘perhaps that’s even what made him do it.’” Sid, on his part, in imparting the news to his girlfriend, realizes that his own obsessive involvement as a reporter in the chase after the murderers has ruined his relationship with Ruth: “We stood near each other, we almost leaned to kiss, but then only grasped hands, and I knew it was gone.”

And so the concluding scenes of Book I, “The Crime of Our Century,” end in a note of bitter self-irony: Sid may have contributed to the solving of the case but in the process of doing so he has lost his girl. Ruth’s presence, however, will be felt as a source of longing and admonition, well into Book II, “The Trial of the Century,” in which we are introduced not only to the grand old figure of Jonathan Wilk—closely modeled on the legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose summation, with its majestic biblical cadences, is presented verbatim—but to a host of defense lawyers, prosecutors, and forensic psychiatrists (alienists, in the common parlance of the twenties). It is here that the documentary aspect of the novel—a form pioneered by my father—is most apparent, as the narrative turns into a deftly paced court drama where the legal versus the psychiatric (specifically, Freudian) delineations of insanity, and, at greater risk in its exposition, homosexuality, are brought into interplay.

As to the last, rereading Compulsion in the twenty-first century, more than fifty years after the novel was written and at a distance of close to a century from the Roaring Twenties when the crime took place, one cannot help being impressed by the candor with which homosexuality is treated. Indeed, one of the battles waged in court (if not the battle) between the state attorney and the defense lawyers lies precisely in the former’s vilification of homosexuality, repeatedly referring to the murderers as “perverts,” and the latters’ appeal to a broader understanding of psychopathology and, in the case of Judd and Artie, of homosexual love as a rare form of folie à deux. This may be a far cry from our own perceptions of homosexuality in the wake of the gay revolution, wherein gay and lesbian relations are no longer classified as pathological in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but the general display of tolerance evinced by the psychiatrists for the defense—and here again my father is relying on memory, documentation, and his own imagination as he records Sid Silver’s reaction to the trial—may very well have contributed to the first, tentative signs of normalization of gay relations in America in the mid-fifties when Compulsion appeared in print.

Just how World War II and the Holocaust link up with the crime committed by Judd and Artie I will leave for the reader to discover in the concluding pages of the novel. Hints are dropped along the way: on hearing of the crime for the first time, “On that day it was as though the crime had split open a small crack in the surface of the world, and we could see through into the evil that was yet to emerge”; on responding to Judd’s Nietzsche-inspired theories exempting superior man from ordinary laws, “It was hard to take their words and believe them, just as it was to be hard, only a decade later in our lives, to believe that an entire nation could seriously subscribe to this superman code”; on listening to the psychiatrist’s testimony, “And then I realized. Had we not seen massive demonstrations in our time of entire populations so infected with some mad leader’s delusions”; and again, responding to Wilk’s dramatic summation, “There in 1924, in the Chicago courtroom, far from the Munich where another Nietzschean began his march in 1924, the tocsin for the era was scarcely heard.” In all such cases Sid Silver thrusts the reader back into the present, reminding us, as he has in imagining certain scenes between Ruth and Judd, that the narrator is writing from the postwar perspective of the fifties. It is also in such cases that Sid Silver and my father become almost indistinguishable: “I went to Italy, I went to Germany. Something of the great malaise, the gathering sickness of Europe, began to be felt, and it was as though I had already known it; the taste of it was quite familiar to me from Chicago. Everything was as though expected. So the years passed.” My father set to work on his documentary novel soon after hearing that Leopold was to receive a parole hearing (Loeb was killed in prison in 1936). Feeling the burden of responsibility, he wrote, “If I turn to him now in a full effort to comprehend him, will I do well or will I only add to confusion?” Nathan Leopold was released on parole in 1958, two years after the publication of Compulsion.

GABRIEL LEVIN