There could have been no better person to write this book. Meyer Levin’s masterful skill as a writer and profound psychological insight into the characters of Nathan Leopold (transformed in the novel into Judd Steiner) and Richard Loeb (fictionalized as Artie Straus) produced a powerful, nuanced, and impressively credible depiction of two equally—but differently—disturbed minds.
It can be a failing in nonfiction novels for the writer, in the course of the research, to develop a kinship with the defendant that leads to a sentimental, romanticized picture. Not so here. At no point does Meyer Levin attempt to rationalize or justify the “poor little rich boys.” Rather, the author draws heavily on the detailed psychological testimony and reportage—familiar to him through his own experience as a journalist covering the case—to give us an unflinching portrait of the killers’ inner lives. When the author, through the voice of his alter ego, cub reporter Sid Silver, says he must imagine certain scenes or thoughts he could not personally witness, he is not merely taking artistic license to justify dramatic moments. Those scenes, those “imaginings,” are rather careful extrapolations based on actual expert psychiatric testimony.
For example, when Sid, the reporter, speaks of Judd’s homosexual attraction to Artie, and his fantasies of being a branded slave to Artie, his king, that is not just the author’s indulgence in artistic license. Those passages are based on the expert testimony in the case, which recounted statements made by both Leopold and Loeb during their psychiatric examinations. This kind of credibility, depth, and accuracy of insight is one of the many outstanding features of Compulsion.
But the most fascinating aspect of this story is the folie à deux that allowed this crime to happen in the first place. Alone, neither Leopold nor Loeb would likely have committed this murder. Even Loeb—who, it would be discovered, might have killed others before this crime, and who fits most clearly the present-day definition of a sociopath—would not have conceived of a crime as complex or bizarre without Leopold’s twisted input. And Leopold, though a darkly tortured soul, almost certainly would never have committed any crime at all—let alone murder—had he not met Loeb. This rare complementary coupling of damaged psyches that resulted in the commission of an atrocity neither one would likely have committed alone is captured beautifully by Meyer Levin.
In the second half of the book, which is devoted to the trial, the author distinguishes himself with his ability to draw courtroom scenes that are both dramatic and realistic. Ordinarily, courtroom scenes, in both fiction and nonfiction, are either irritatingly inaccurate or incredibly dull. These scenes can be exciting on the screen—and occasionally, though not often, in real life—but generally not on the page. As a consequence, authors too often take artistic license, sacrificing all semblance of credibility in the service of drama.
However, in Compulsion, the courtroom scenes are both riveting and unfailingly authentic. The bruising clashes of personality between Jonathan Wilk—the fictional name given to the legendary Clarence Darrow, who represented Leopold and Loeb (and later defended John Scopes in the Scopes “Monkey Trial”), the prosecutor, and the judge are so vivid, so real, that at times I felt as though I were listening to them arguing, rather than reading the words. And the author does a brilliant job of taking us behind the curtain to show the maneuvering and strategizing that began from the moment the defendants were charged.
This brings me to another aspect of Compulsion that explains its ongoing importance and makes it so much more than just an interesting crime story or period piece. Though this trial took place in 1924, the book raises issues pertaining to society and our justice system—such as popular biases, groupthink, and the inherent, perhaps unfixable, flaws in our legal system—that are as much in evidence today as they were back then.
Today, every practicing trial lawyer knows that the media holds sway over the court of public opinion. And the court of public opinion influences every aspect of the case. It affects how the lawyers strategize, how the judge rules, how the witnesses testify (or refuse to), and how the jury decides.
Compulsion shows us that this was every bit as true in 1924 as it is today. Meyer Levin graphically depicts how the pretrial publicity so tainted public opinion that it was a virtual certainty that any jury would vote to put the defendants to death. And so the lawyers went to great—and creative—lengths to have the case tried by a judge instead of a jury. But even that move did not keep public sentiment from infecting the proceedings. In the most shocking moment of the entire trial, the prosecutor effectively threatened the judge with mob reprisal if he dared to spare the defendants’ lives. For me, that moment, rendered in breathtakingly vivid detail, encapsulates the corrupting force of media coverage that to this day plagues our system of justice. In this way as in so many others, Compulsion raises profound issues that resonate today and will continue to do so for many years to come.
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.
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