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
Nothing ever ends. I had imagined that my part in the Paulie Kessler story was long ago ended, but now I am to go and talk to Judd Steiner, now that he has been thirty years in prison. I imagined that my involvement with Judd Steiner had ended when the trial was over and when he and Artie Straus were sentenced to life imprisonment plus additional terms longer than ordinary human life—ninety-nine years—as if in the wisdom of the law, too, there was this understanding that nothing ever ends, that it is a risk to suppose even that a prison sentence may end with the end of a life. And then as though to add more locks and barriers to exclude those two forever from human society, the judge recommended that they might permanently be barred from parole.
Walls and locks, sentences and decrees do not keep people out of your mind, and in my mind, as in the minds of many others, Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have not only stayed on but have lived with the same kind of interaction and extension that people engender in all human existence.
For years they seemed to sit quietly in my mind, as though waiting for me some day to turn my attention to them. Yes, I must someday try to understand what it was that made them do what they did. And once, in the war, I believed I understood. Perhaps that too was only what the psychiatrists call displacement; perhaps I was only putting upon them my own impulses and inner processes. But at that moment in the war—which I shall tell about in its place—those two, from their jail in my mind, and even though one of them had long been dead, rose up to influence an action of mine.
That was the last time, and I thought I was done with them, since Artie was gone and Judd too would eventually die in prison, doomed to his century beyond life. But now a governor has made Judd Steiner actually eligible for parole. He is to receive a hearing.
Somewhere in the chain of command of our news service an editor has remembered my particular role as a reporter on this story, and he has quite naturally conceived the idea that it would be interesting for me to interview Judd Steiner and to write my impression about his suitability to return to the world of men.
Now this is a dreadfully responsible assignment. For I am virtually the only one to confront Judd Steiner from the days of his crime. Not that we are old men; both he and I have only just passed that strange assessment point—the fiftieth birthday. But it was men older than ourselves who were principally active at the time of the trial—lawyers, psychiatrists, prosecutors, the judge—all then in their full maturity. The great Jonathan Wilk was seventy. All have since died.
I am an existing link to the actual event. What I write, it seems, may seriously affect Judd Steiner’s chances of release.
How can I accept such responsibility? Are any of the great questions of guilt, of free will and of compulsion, so burningly debated at the trial—are any of these questions resolved? Will they ever be resolved under human study? If I turn at all, with my scraps of knowledge and experience, to the case of the man who has been sitting in jail and in the jail of my mind, if I turn to him now in a full effort to comprehend him, will I do well or will I only add to confusion?
Much, much became known about Judd and Artie through psychiatric studies—advanced for that day—of their personalities. Intense publicity brought out every detail of their lives. And as it happened, I was, for a most personal reason, in the very center of the case. I partly identified myself with Judd, so that I
