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 sometimes felt I could see not only into the texture of events that had taken place without my presence but into his very thoughts.
Because of this identification, it sometimes becomes difficult to tell exactly where my imagination fills in what were gaps in the documents and in the personal revelations. In some instances, the question will arise: Is this true; did this actually happen? And my answer is that it needed to happen; it needed to happen in the way I tell it or in some similar way, or else nothing can be explained for me. In the last analysis I suppose it will have to be understood that what I tell is the reality for me. For particularly where emotions must be dealt with, there is no finite reality; our idea of actuality always has to come through someone, and this is the reality through me.
NOTHING EVER ENDS, and if we retrace every link in causation, it seems there is nowhere a beginning. But there was a day on which this story began to be known to the world. On that day Judd Steiner, slipping into class a moment late, took a back seat for McKinnon’s lecture in the development of law. Judd sat alone in the rear row, raised a step above the others, and this elevation fitted his inward sense of being beyond all of them.
There was still, from yesterday, a quivering elation, as when you catch your balance on a pitching deck. Not that he had ever for a moment felt in danger of being out of control. No. In the highest moment, the moment of the deed itself, he had been a bit shaken. Artie had been superb.
Judd only wished Artie were here with him now, so they could share a quick wink, listening to McKinnon’s platitudes. At some particularly banal remark he would touch his knee against Artie’s, and Artie would turn his face and wink.
McKinnon