The Warriors

by Sol Yurick

  I think the elements for The Warriors began to come together sometimes during the ’50s. I was having a talk with a friend of mine, a writer whose mother and father had been successful Hollywood script writers. He was trying to explain to me what constituted a good idea (the “high concept”) for a script. Almost as a joke, I hit upon the notion of a story of a fighting gang based on, or paralleling, the course of The Anabasis. Once uttered, I dropped the idea. I thought the notion was ingenious, but not really serious. Yet I didn’t forget it.

  Again I pass over the years. I got married, quit working for the Department of Welfare. My wife, Adrienne, told me to quit work and go back to school or stay home and write. I decided to go to graduate school (1959–061), Brooklyn College, so that I could become a teacher while I continued to write. At this point I had completed two and a half novels . . . that would never be published.

  This is a diversion, yet to the point, for it entails how I moved away from the influence of my college readings. While I was going to graduate school, my first short story was published in a short-lived literary journal: The Noble Savage. Publication hardened my resolve to be a full-time writer rather than a teacher. I was given permission to write a novel as a master’s thesis. This became Fertig, which played a critical role in my development as a writer and, indirectly, in the formation of The Warriors.

  Originally, when I began to conceive the idea for Fertig, I was under the influence of the existentialists, particularly Camus. At first I had wanted to write a spare, perhaps puzzling, Camusian novel like The Stranger, with a touch of Kafka. This book attempts to picture a man not so much against his society as outside it (as I thought I was temperamentally). In part, what Camus had tried to do was to strip away the surrounding social and material conditions, isolating his character and his act from contaminating culture, time and place.

  When we first meet Meursault (the Stranger), his mother has just died. He seems emotionally unaffected. Then he commits what appears to be a random murder, a murder without understandable motives . . . in fact, seemingly without motive at all. He is condemned by a horrified court. The court partly bases its horror on Mersault’s “inhuman” disregard for his mother’s death. This disregard not only denies one of the fundamental tenets of bourgeois society but its Freudian variant. We, in this country, would ask if he was a psycho- and/or sociopath. Camus didn’t use any of these categories. (At that point in time, in the late ’40s and through the ’50s, the question of random and/or serial killers, whose psychology was, and still remains, a complete puzzle, had not yet been shown to be not uncommon.) I wanted my protagonist, Fertig, to commit such a crime.

  Now the insane person (or, these days, the one thought to be missing the proper responsibility-gene) is neither for or against the society in which he or she lives but is, nevertheless, a disturbance to it . . . a disturbance that must be accounted for. Our society, America in particular, has found it hard to deal with what appears to be the nonrational. What our thinkers resort to is to shift the inexplicable into one or another psychological and/or sociological categories, thus solving the problem of the irrational person, and so negating his or her act. However, what of the rational person who commits horrendous crimes (such as those who work for the State’s interrogation bureaus, and assassinators)? The actions of the intelligent, rationally antirational man may be the greatest danger.

  One could read Mersault’s motivation one of two ways—as a totally random act of a man without reason and/or as protest. . . but against what? The system, whatever it was? (Now it should be understood that while this “protest,” if that was what it was, against bourgeois life was neither politically left nor right in the usual sense. Nor was Mersault’s act criminal in the usual sense, which in most cases implies reason. So the question remains: protest against what? Camus never made that clear.

  But had Camus really succeeded in detaching himself from his background and its traditions? The place was Algiers, the time may or may not have been immediately before or after World War II. This culture, in which Camus had grown up, was French-colonized Algeria. (Camus was later to say, in the midst of the Algerian liberation struggle, that Algeria was his mother. What’s more, Mersault’s victim was an Arab. One can speculate; if Meursault had killed the Arab because of social, political, or class differences, the court might have understood. That is to say, if Meursault had socially shared motives for killing the Arab, he was not a threat to the social order. Conversely, if Mersault was sane, which is to say rational (rationality always defined in terms of what a society calls rational), and did this irrational act, then he was a threat to social order because who knew where and against whom he might strike next.

  (What has all this to do with The Warriors? Remember that gangs were thought to be an irrational manifestation.)

  What Camus was trying to get at was that there are empty interstices of understanding between one action and another action, a gap that is the ground of artistic, philosophic, and scientific creation.

  Further, even though Camus had tried to detach his hero from culture and tradition, I began to find, as I read more, disguised literary references—such as The Divine Comedy . . . particularly “Paradiso”—in The Stranger. What this said to me was that in spite of his attempt to escape the constraints of Western tradition into—what? pure anomie?—he was bound by it. That is to say that Camus’s subtext denied his philosophical endeavor. He could not imagine the mind of the truly random killer. All this is by way of saying that you cannot go from the pure universal to the particular because, whether you like it or not, you always construct the universal out of the particular, sabotaging the universal.

  Perhaps, for Camus the killing represented his unconscious reaction to the Algerian liberation forces. I was not aware of the subtext when I first read the book . . . until the ’60s.

  So, as I was writing my book and as I thought I was drawn to this existentialist philosophy, perhaps because of my own psychological makeup and my commitment to reason—negated, of course, as it is for all creative writers, by my practice that favored quantum leaps of understanding and construction—and because of my experience as a social welfare worker, I began to be forced to begin looking for new ways to express the real world in my writing. That is to say, I sought, and had to invent a rational motive for my hero’s crime. At the same time this real (I don’t care what the postmodernist relativists have to say) world was more irrational and absurd than the existentialist philosophers—those meta-hyper-rationalists—could imagine. In order to try to understand how my hero would encounter this “real” world, and move through it, I began readings in practical and theoretical sociology, anthropology, and psychology (I rejected Freudian and Jungian thought, or any variant thereof. On the other hand, I found that behaviorism was mechanistically Laplacian). The sociologists who interested me the most were Weber and Durkheim, perhaps because of their interest in the “primitive” and the ancient (read prerational). For what were my clients, I must have thought, but prerational? And what were the fighting gangs but prerational? Slowly, even without knowing it, I thought I had begun to form aspects of a theory of writing based on my sociology.

  And yet, at the same time, as I hunted for the rational behind the mysterious apparent and irrational immediate surface, the ordinary, the non- or antiliterary, I began to discern that even behind that, negating the whole social and psychological quasi-scientific endeavor that sought to explain why humans did what they did, lurked the ever-recurrent presence of the ritualistic, ceremonial, and mythic (which meant to me the unresolved “primitive”) in everyday life. Why? As I observed life, ordinary people, in twentieth-century U.S.A., suddenly became as exotic and “primitive” to me as, say, Australian aborigines. And, reflexively, slowly I began to see that the mythic and metaphysical and something biological (the urge to form tribal/family-like/gang groups in any and every culture, so-called primitive or modern sophisticated so-called civilized in history) also played a role in the discipline of
sociology-aspiring-to-be-hard-science (as later I was to discover the haunting, left-over “background radiation” of metaphysics in science and mathematics). I came to see my mistake in being drawn to existentialist thought. To escape the spell of Camus’s creature, I reached back into the memories of my early life and found that I had distinct, rational, formable, statable grievances against the system of our country. I and my family had suffered what to me was perhaps the greatest nonphilosophical, nonpsychoanalytic, materialist, if you will, traumatic absurdity . . . the Depression of the ’30s. My parents were communists. Coming from a communist background and being a Jew added to my sense of alienation from American life. These social and economic traumas had become part of my unconscious. To me, being a writer was like being a rebel. I’ll show you what your world is really like, I must have thought. And what of the gangs? Theirs, too, was a form of revolt. Some gangs take to the streets; some gangs emerge in October 1917.

  And the more I thought about it, given our social system (even at that time), the more I saw the social forces as they “really” were. I couldn’t allow myself to present my stories in the kind of semidreamlike ways that Camus and Kafka used. To put it in a kind of old-fashioned quasi-Marxist terminology (which I would not have done when I was writing Fertig), the attempt to reconcile the multiple conflict of multiple interests (there are always 613 contradictions) was what constituted the concrete basis of irrationality in everyday life. I knew. I had, after all, been a bureaucrat. I had learned what went into the making of what appeared to outsiders as systemic absurdity in government; that if you went back into the making of every regulation and law, there was a kind of ancient craziness, a craziness embodied in the very flesh. And more, I knew, unlike the postmodernist, academic glossolalists, that difficult-to-understand writing is, in fact, a government and business strategy . . . in order how, as Dickens put it, not-to-do-it, or prevent it from being done as long as possible, or to do it before anyone understood what was being done.

  At the time I was writing Fertig, the emerging dominant psychosocial theory of the day had it that anyone who murdered was psychotic and so not responsible for their acts. (This theory didn’t, of course, take into account those who killed for gain—Mafia, for instance—or for reasons of state that involved soldiers and CIA operatives, state torturers, and so forth). The kinds of categories employed by Camus were never considered. Psychosis or the not-responsible approach was opposed bitterly by those who promoted the old-fashioned virtues, such as responsibility for one’s deeds; ignorance, irresistible impulse, and so forth, was no excuse. These kinds of unresolvable conflicts of moral systems required the production of generations of ethics rationalizers as, it seemed, people moved further and further away from religion (as they seem to be moving back again: well, these things come and go in waves).

  I ended with a completely un-Camus-like book, being led into astonishing directions and discovering that the world, the real world, was more absurd, crazier, more ding-an-sichtlich than any fiction writer, no matter how ingenious and imaginative, could conceive. And, at the same time, without being quite conscious of it, I was also discovering that the social “sciences” were in themselves partially forms of fiction.

  In a nutshell, the plot of Fertig runs this way: a man, Fertig (this means “finished” in German and Yiddish: I took the name of a college classmate, Howard Fertig, later to become a publisher—we used to jokingly call him Howard’s End), marries late in life. He and his wife, social failures with big dreams, are compromising, making the best of a disappointing, loveless life. They have a child, a son. This brings them closer together and, for the first time in their lives, they begin to understand love. One night, the child gets sick. Their doctor cannot be reached (remember that during the period when I was writing the book, doctor-patient relations were changing. Throughout the ’50s and early ’60s, doctors had been abandoning home visits); The Fertigs give the child aspirin. It doesn’t help. They rush their child to the emergency room of a hospital. (As part of my research, refusing to take the mythology of the caring doctor for granted, I went and sat in the emergency rooms of several hospitals to see what went on. I was shocked at the systemic neglect.) By this time the aspirin has taken effect: the child has begun to feel better. The Fertigs are told to take their child home. They decide to go to another hospital. On the way the child has a seizure and dies.

  The Fertigs’ marriage begins to fall apart. Fertig tries to decide who is responsible for his son’s death. Gradually it dawns on him that while there were “whos,” the three people, a petty-minded intake worker, a nurse, and a resident, there is a “not-who”; he is in the presence of a larger system of mutually shared responsibility (or, rather, guilt). He wants revenge. But how, after all, does any individual kill a system? He selects exemplary victims . . . seven people, the three who were in the emergency room and four directors of the hospital and decides to kill them and, because his life has fallen apart, he wants to be caught and to have his day in court, perhaps envisioning making a stirring speech..

  Further researching the project, I went into several hospitals and walked through them various times during daylight hours and at night to see if I could have access to the personnel so that I, like Fertig, might, if I wanted to, kill them. I found it was quite easy.

  But Fertig, naive, becomes a victim of his own illusions. He finds that the criminal justice system, as I found it really to be, and given the complex interaction of the media, is bizarre, surreal. He becomes the victim of half-senile and corrupt judges, ambitious journalists and lawyers, and mutually contradicting psychiatrists with certain stereotypical expectations.

  Of course Fertig could not be allowed to have his day in court. By definition, within the context of our society, he had to be a rational, malevolent criminal, possibly a left-wing crazy, or a seriously disturbed individual. If there was reason behind his motivation, it might be if not sympathized with, at least understood. But even to understand Fertig’s motivation was to point at the inhuman in society: his complaints about the system that killed his son might fall on receptive ears. Others might take the law into their own hands and do likewise. Juries might choose not to convict. He must be considered psychotic.

  Slowly but surely the process drives him insane as, ironically, his corrupt, opportunistic lawyer, to enhance his own reputation, using an insanity-defense plea, begins to regard Fertig—whom he at first considered as a maddened nebbish—as a rational and courageous hero. Fertig is remanded to an institution for the criminally insane. He never gets to make his great speech to the world.

  Now I have explained this process rationally. What I have not talked about was the way the work consumed me; I worked night and day. There were periods of leaps of insight and periods of slow growth of understanding. I was gradually transformed as I wrote. My view of the world changed yet again.

  Fertig was to be rejected twenty-seven times before being published. I went through a period of despair. I began to doubt myself. I wondered . . . is it me or is it them, the editors? I knew, or thought I knew, what made a good book. I began to notice, as I read the various rejection letters, a peculiar phenomenon. If I compiled those parts of the rejection letters in which the editors were critical, or dismissive, my book was completely terrible; if I added up the parts of my book the editors liked, my book was a work of genius.

  I decided that, in the meantime, while submitting my book, I would go ahead and write another novel, which was to become The Warriors. Now in part the process of knowing that an idea is good is completely irrational. No matter how complicated and sophisticated our communication machinery gets, there can be no program that decides on the rightness of a creative idea. And mystery of mysteries, the idea of The Warriors had lingered in my mind for about fifteen years!

  Whereas it had taken more than a year to write Fertig, it took me three weeks of intense work, after research, to write The Warriors. I could not have done it the way I did without having gone through the growth
process in the writing of Fertig.

  There were a number of steps in the preparation for writing this book. I’m not sure in what order they took place, sequentially or simultaneously. The creative process is a mystery. I conceived the whole plot in one glowing moment. Well, in fact the plot—or rather the motif—had been lying around for thousands of years: the hero journey through adversities, mental or material or both. And the plot of this journey was waiting for me for some twenty-four hundred years.

  Originally, when the idea had struck me with force years before, I didn’t think carefully about the parallels between the ten thousand mercenary Greek soldiers supporting a succession-to-the-throne struggle, a coup (or even call it a revolution), and a potential “army” of social outcasts in our time. I never thought, at the time, to ask myself what made the idea so right. I had learned the value of certain immediate and “unmotivated,” what shall I call them, inspirations, which seemed to come out of nowhere. But, at some point, perhaps at that time, perhaps later on, I did begin to wonder if the comparison worked “naturally” or if I was forcing it.

  The writer should know when something—the choosing of an image, a simile, the making of a metaphor—is right. But in order to justify the sudden and perfect insight—whether in science, mathematics, or literature—you go back and construct the mental pathway that originally led up to the illumination that seems to have come out of nowhere (in other words, first the effect, which seems to come suddenly out of nowhere, and then the cause). So the question for me, years later, when I was “recollecting in tranquillity,” became: What did I see at that particular time in the notion of fighting gangs of the ’50s that was in any sense similar to the fate of those Xenephon-led ten thousand ancient Greek mercenary soldiers? I don’t know.