Meyer Levin - Compulsion

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 behaviour.

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 defence 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 behaviour 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.

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. 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 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. 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 rôle 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 centre 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 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 moment of the deed itself, he had been a bit shaken. Artie had been superb.