Читать книгу Compulsion - Meyer Levin - Страница 9

PREFACE

SOME MAY ASK, why call up anew this gruesome crime of more than thirty years ago? Let time cover it, let it be forgotten.

Surely I would not recall it for the sake of sensation. I write of it in the hope of applying to it the increase of understanding of such crimes that has come, during these years, and in the hope of drawing from it some further increase in our comprehension of human behavior.

In using an actual case for my story, I follow in the great tradition of Stendhal with The Red and the Black, of Dostoevski with Crime and Punishment, of Dreiser with An American Tragedy.

Certain crimes seem to epitomize the thinking of their era. Thus Crime and Punishment had to arise out of the feverish soul-searching of the Russia of Dostoevski’s period, and An American Tragedy had to arise from the sociological thinking of Dreiser’s time in America. In our time, the psychoanalytical point of view has come to the fore.

If I have followed an actual case, are these, then, actual persons? Here I would avoid the modern novelist’s conventional disclaimer, which no one fully believes in any case. I follow known events. Some scenes are, however, total interpolations, and some of my personages have no correspondence to persons in the case in question. This will be recognized as the method of the historical novel. I suppose Compulsion may be called a contemporary historical novel or a documentary novel, as distinct from a roman à clef.

Though the action is taken from reality, it must be recognized that thoughts and emotions described in the characters come from within the author, as he imagines them to belong to the personages in the case he has chosen. For this reason I have not used names of those involved in this case, even though I have at times used direct quotations as reported in the press. The longest of these is the speech of the defense attorney, and there, for the sake of literary acknowledgment, I wish to pay my respects to the real author, Clarence Darrow.

While psychoanalysis is bringing into the light many areas heretofore shrouded, the essential mystery of human behavior still remains the concern of us all. Psychiatric testimony in this case was comprehensive, advanced, and often brilliant, yet with the passage of time a fuller explanation may be attempted. Whether my explanation is literally correct is impossible for me to know. But I hope that it is poetically valid, and that it may be of some help in widening the use of available knowledge in the aid of human failings.

I do not wholly follow the aphorism that to understand all is to forgive all. But surely we all believe in healing, more than in punishment.

M. L.