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.
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,
