Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“We all had kid crushes like that,” I objected. “It didn’t make us all homosexual. Or did it?”

“A little bit, all of us. But we got out of it. The trouble for Judd was, with all the girl stuff in his childhood, he still didn’t know-what he was. So he got into it. And his conflict must have been worse than ever. Because don’t forget his nurse got him all tangled up when he was a kid, got him mixed up about sexual release, so that even if he didn’t know it he wanted it the way she showed him, the first way, the oral stage, or probably he was polymorphous perverse – the exploratory stage. He gets a fixation on Artie, and even when he tries sex with a girl, he sees her as Artie. But he must have been struggling all the time in himself to become a male. He’s in this adolescent period, the worst period, when his mother dies – the one real attachment, apparently, that he had.

“Then the scheme starts. The revenge on life. In Judd’s mind, it is a scheme to kill a girl. He kept pulling for it all the time, trying to convince Artie it ought to be a girl.”

“He had that mixed up with the war,” I reminded Willie.

“All right. That’s where he got the image. From a war poster. Man stuff. But that only added to the hatefulness of the world. And himself in it. And he was going to rid himself of all this by killing a girl. What girl?” Willie looked at me and said with finality, “The girl in himself. Judd had to kill the girl-part of himself, before he could become a man.”

It was really ingenious, I told him. He had built up a really clever theory. Perhaps it was a good thing the alienists had not brought such an idea into court, because Horn would have had a field day with it.

“Yah?” Willie’s voice became argumentative. “Now look at the act of murder. How were they going to accomplish it? They talked about it for weeks, they developed the details. There was the chisel, to knock the victim on the head – that was Artie’s part, we know that. And it was Artie who used it. But then they had all these other things they planned to use. There was the ether. They were going to put the victim to sleep. Judd saw it not as killing, but the sleep of death, the sleep before life, you could say. The ether was Judd’s idea, connected with the birds. But the ether wasn’t all. After that, the plan was to use a cord, strangling the victim with the cord, a silken cord they wanted, not a rope, each holding on to an end for equal participation.

“Isn’t this idea a birth in reverse? What were they reading at the time? Judd was full of Huysmans’ A Rebours . And the perversity, the inverted ideas of writers like Huysmans, the ideas like the Black Mass, the conception of doing everything backwards, by the substitution of opposites, black for white, girl for boy, death for life – the cord – you can’t discard that clue entirely.”

I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.

“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible connection I hadn’t thought of before. Judd was driving. And in his confession he says they went up a side road to a cemetery and waited there until it got dark – a couple of hours. Now, why the cemetery? Certainly because death was in his mind, by then, and Judd must have been as though calling for his mother, the way a kid does when everything has gone wrong and he is scared. This wasn’t the particular cemetery where his mother is buried, but he had been visiting his mother’s grave, he said, almost every week, and so the association was there, and he was drawn to a cemetery as to his mother; and that was where they waited, with the dead kid, until it got dark. Then they drove to the real burial place he had picked out in advance, and before they put the body into the cistern there was one more ritual, and this was Judd’s too. Remember, he was so queasy he couldn’t strike anyone, he couldn’t touch a dead body, yet this was a thing Judd did and not Artie: he took the can of hydrochloric acid that was intended to obliterate recognizable parts of the body – they imagined it would dissolve the flesh-” Willie glanced at me and his eyes emphasized again the birth in reverse. “Judd took this acid, and he said he poured it on the face, and he poured it on the penis.” He became silent.

“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”

“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.

“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”

“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the inner side of the leg, the brand that could sometime be removed.”

Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible connection?

“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cunning, that’s one thing we’ve learned, it is poetic and cunning. You don’t know how clever it can be, how the associations leap – I suppose because it’s all open, there’s nothing to block them; and how literal it can be, too.”

Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”

I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the annihilating acid – had he not been doing it? Killing the girl in himself? He had first sought to obliterate identity in the face, so that the child could be himself, and he had then sought to obliterate the male sex. The child, thus, could be representationally himself as a girl, and this child had been placed naked in a womb, returned to pre-birth. And the womb was a sewer – the way he had always thought of females.

If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.

And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cunning, an amazing poetic compression in this way of thinking. For here was the duality of nature symbolized – here was Judd’s conflicting wish to be a boy, to be a girl – expressed in the symbol that could be fitted in either direction!

And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.

We walked on silently.

Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”

Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”

Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”