by Sol Yurick
Curiously, in our postmodern, poststructural, what have you, time, when the singularity, the absolutely untranslatable uniqueness, of each culture is stressed, I have to note that people—storytellers, poets, writers, memorializers of every kind—in every culture, from the most “primitive” to the most “sophisticated,” no matter how diverse from any other culture, employ the rhetorical arts. That is to say that the systems of significations, the came-befores, came-afters, is-likes (comparison making, image, simile, and metaphor) and stand-fors (symbol, emblem, synecdoche, etc.), may vary from culture to culture, yet all cultures employ the same methodologies as they attempt to represent their internal and external environments. Call this the Thesaurus syndrome because the thing-in-itself, the thing, the experience, the smell, etc., is indescribable and so is-likes are piled on top of is-likes.
If these modes of representation and comparison take place everywhere (and everywhen), are we in the presence of something biological? I believe that bio-chemical-electrical receptors process impulses (translated into need in our minds) that come to us from the outside and the inside. This is the way we read . . . no, we are made to read the environment. These impulses drive all people. One reads the environment directly or indirectly (in terms of geography and time) using a variety of prosthetic devices (such as, for instance, the writings and ancient relics of others) as if things and forces were very, very close. How, after all, are humans, who are for the most part distanced from direct contact with the nurturing environment, attempting to communicate or describe any “thing in itself,” an event or a sensation, a feeling—for instance a smell, or pain—to talk about anything other than in terms of something else, a comparison with some other event, word, thing, sensation, feeling, or sign (or someone else’s constructions of signals)?
But there are levels of sensitivity in human consciousness. Whereas most people take their world for granted, some writers, some poets, some language-spinners see certain relationships among people, things, events, or signs of people, things and/or events in a special way, a way that most others cannot or have not seen them.
When I saw the relevance of the two different “texts,” fighting gangs and the kid-mercenaries of The Anabasis, from two different times, in two different “languages” from two different cultures, to one another I think I saw something no one else had seen. This was not a natural given. So to some extent it had to be forced. This was the question of the choice of mediational ground, the ground of translation. Fundamentally, there are two kinds of mediational grounds; and intercultural (of course there are many more interacting levels). Intercultural “texts” should, according to the postmodernists, be exclusive, untranslatable, and inviolate (which doesn’t stop people from violating and translating). But by forcing incommensurables (referencing them, indexing them) onto the mediational ground of his or her choosing (influenced by the context of a received culture), the artist (or, for that matter, the social and psychological “scientist”) colonizes and conquers all “texts.” Intellectual imperialism? Of a sort. And, after all, isn’t the writer a kind of spy?
In retrospect I suppose that in my mind the immediate mediational ground upon which fighting gangs met The Anabasis was a publication of that time, Classic Comics. (The very publication of this periodical constituted an act of expropriation.) This periodical presented great works of literature such as The Iliad or the adventures of the Argonauts (but never The Anabasis, which was too esoteric, but would have made a great comic book). Somehow, in my imagination Classic Comics—possibly the only material gang members might have read—could have presented the Greek warriors as the kind of heroic cartoon figures with whom they might have identified.
To make my parallel fit, I invented a gang leader—Ismael Rivera (reference here to the rebellious and Young American critic hero of Moby-Dick, but taken a step further)—who envisioned the possibility of organizing all of the gangs of New York into one huge semirevolutionary army. Of course I “invented” nothing. There were, in fact, several gang leaders who not only had that vision but also had what one could call “native” organizational genius; they were “instinctive” theoreticians. My “hero” replicated the “Cyrus” of Xenephon’s history. He would send word to all corners of the city, summoning plenipotentiaries of all the city’s gangs for a grand, revolutionary meeting.
I chose to tell the major part of the story from the perspective of, first, a small, insignificant gang and then from the point of view of one of its members, Hinton (I had already invented him in a short story). This gang would make the journey up from the projects in Coney Island to the meeting ground in the Bronx (Van Courtlandt Park, or call it Babylon) and then back. The representatives, after the whole venture had been broken up by the police, would seek refuge in Woodlawn Cemetery (where, incidentally, Melville was buried) and then they would have to, like the Greek ten thousand, fight their way through hostile territories ruled by other gangs to their home grounds. The escape from the cemetery is of course a kind of resurrectionary move. Like the Greeks, they would finally reach the “Black Sea,” only, in this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island. Thus also the sea, considering the hero’s last position, curled up with his thumb in his mouth, to be a “return” to the womb, having gained much knowledge, and in the light shining on the sea, he has, indeed, returned to a grave again.
Since I had gone through the writing of Fertig, I was determined to construct a true reflection (!) of the real world through which my literary gangs would move, the world of New York City as it really is, with its streets and subways. Could they do it; could they assemble without being spotted? I decided that I had to actually traverse the distances via subways in order to time the journey (this included walking through the tunnel between 96th Street on the West Side and the next stop, 110th Street: scary).
And yet, since I wanted to fold in the mythic and ritual, to make this journey a rite of passage, I thought in terms of similar (anthropological and literary) rite-of-passage journeys. Yet, whatever I thought about rhetorical devices, parallels, literary references, I was determined to bury them in such a way that they would work subliminally on the minds of the literate reader. If you missed the references, then you had, I hoped, a good story.
I, through the intermediation of several friends who worked in probation and parole, contacted some gang members and began to interview them. My interviews didn’t go well. I began to feel that I was being told what the gang-members thought I wanted to hear; a common phenomenon anthropologists and social workers faced. I had to find some way to observe them without being observed myself; in short, to spy. (As I said above, all sociologists and anthropologists are spies.) My solution was to hire a small, beat-up panel truck, punch little holes in the sides, park the truck on the gangs’ turf during the early morning, get in the truck, and just watch and listen. I was trying to capture the jargon, the rhythms of speech, the body English (or is it ganglish?), and so forth, if I could. (Even as I was trying to practice what Keats called negative capability, the well-known and omnipresent Heisenberg effect was always operative; indeterminacy was part of mine and everyone’s mind.)
Gangs (of the time I was writing about) were quite different than the gangs of today. For one thing, automobiles were not available to them. For another, there were very few guns around. The gangs were neighborhood-bound and quite ignorant of the city outside their own territories; indeed, they were frightened of strange turf. Whatever contacts, alliances, conflicts, and permissions to travel through alien lands belonging to other gangs took place were conducted through their leaders. They practiced diplomacy from gang to gang, albeit in crude language, but, formally, just like the diplomacy conducted by nations. It’s fascinating to see these social forms spring up among the “ignorant” “lower” social strata; no readers of Kissinger they . . . and yet they had the same sophisticated understanding.
Economically the gangs of those times were totally marginal. They had just about no entreé into organized cr
ime. The very need to form gangs was a product of their irrelevance. This situation has changed enormously, fueled by the drug trade, which brings neighborhood localities into contact with the global economy, requiring new, sophisticated modes of understanding and operation. And, as with all trade conflicts over control of markets from time immemorial, disputes require heavy weaponry, which is easily available.
I read in the sketchy history of gangs (after all, they don’t leave records); they were a universal phenomenon; even ancient Athens had its youth gangs. Gangs bud off from the so-called main body of society. This, it seems to me, is an almost natural, even bioevolutionary happening, even now, in these days, as a protest, conscious or unconscious, against the homogenization of globalization. The structure of the street gangs tended to be like Latin American dictatorships in which the pragmatic and formal were melded into an amalgam of the military, tribal, and familial . . . a sort of organism. Many gangs rejected their own families and made their own. Since the laws of society around them did not apply in the streets, leadership was determined by force and/or cunning: any leader’s reign was always chancy. And yet these leadership maneuverings and fights were like the struggles for control on the national and international level. If one looks closely at any government structure, from the so-called democratic—as in our own country—to the so-called totalitarian, one sees constant internecine warfare, usually referred to as bureaucratic infighting. After all, how many routes to power are there? As it was and is with “legitimate” governments, so it was, and is, with the gangs. Violence was the final arbiter.
I decided to use my own variant of this tripartite structure in my book. I added something that, at first glance, seemed alien. I had been reading the classic Chinese novel called At Water Margin (incidentally, one of Mao’s favorite books, although I didn’t know that at the time). This novel tells the story of a band of heroes, some of whom are criminals, others revolutionary. They combine to overthrow the emperor. What interested me about the book was the combination of ritual language, the use of overpolite honorifics (this unworthy second son honors his elder brother, or uncle . . . etc.), as well as the horrific violence with which they did one another in. I made my subject gang use this familial mode of address.
When I had assembled my material, I had to decide on my structure. At first I laid out the story chronologically. Then I decided that it didn’t work. I then began on a note of suspense and puzzlement . . . the hook, so to speak. After the grand meeting—although the reader doesn’t know this yet—is broken up by the police, our subject gang has fled. We meet them huddled in Woodlawn Cemetery. We then flash back to the beginning and lead up to the events just before we meet our gang . . . and then proceed forward. My choice of order was the well-known and ancient in medias res strategy. In fact, every story in the world begins this way, including the folk tale of the cosmic Big Bang that putatively starts the universe. Something always comes before. And at some point in any story, the what-came-before is either taken for granted and understood by the audience, or must be explained. Let me note in passing that there is no problem with the flashback in literature but it causes trouble in films.
The meeting itself was modeled after the great, Lucifer-led council, the pandemonium—all demons—in Paradise Lost, about another failed revolt (the gangs in my book were given names from Milton’s epic . . . Thrones, Dominations, etc.). I was connecting Ismael Rivera to Lucifer, who also made his speech in the darkness of hell. What I meant to imply—the subtext, as it were—was that my gang, after its revolt against the “divine” order of things, has fallen to the lowest possible depths and must “ascend” to their homeland (think Divine Comedy or Zola’s Germinal). This reflected the traditional myth/ritual of the descent into hell and the ascent to a kind of heaven, which turns out to be miserable.
In planning, I employed a corporate management tool called PERT . . . Program Evaluation and Review Technique. Assembling a business enterprise or a story requires the same kind of planning. I made a grid. On the top of the grid, in each box, I placed the time plus each step of the plot. On the side of the grid I placed various things, which would serve as running, extended metaphors. I followed the progress of these things through the long night. . . such as the gradual disintegration of a shoe, the change in the weather, and so forth. These things also mirrored the psychic state of the characters as they were on their “long march” from the Bronx to Coney Island.
Now although this methodology seems very mechanical, very, how should I put it, anticreative (inspirational), at the same time I believed that one should prepare the ground carefully so as to always be ready to encounter the unexpected that is only revealed as the writing continues . . . much like an athlete practices in order to be ready for the contingent that is always part of life, as it is, if the writer is not too rigid, in the act of writing. Many times I have said to myself something like, “Oh, that’s what he, or she, is like.”
Since it was to be an attempted revolution, I chose that most patriotic of all days, July Fourth. Perhaps this choice of revolution and date reflected my relation to this country in which I was born . . . a fundamental hostility that is more than political, also part of my psychology. (And yet, at the time of the writing I was not consciously political because, in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, I became apolitical . . . until the later ’60s. My conscious involvement with politics came after writing The Warriors.
Fertig was still circulating and being rejected as I was writing my second book. However, unknown to me, there had been editors who had been in different publishing houses who had read it and wanted to take it on but didn’t have the clout to do so. As they changed jobs, they had come together at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, into a sort of critical mass. They read The Warriors and agreed to publish it. I was to work with one of them who was enthusiastic about my book.
Now that my book was to be published, perhaps my other book, Fertig—I thought of it as the more serious work—would be taken on, depending, of course, on the success of The Warriors. I was not alarmed when my editor said that he thought that a few editorial changes should be made. However, when I got the manuscript back, there were at least five to ten changes per page. Was this the book the editor liked so much? The fight began.
Consider my state of mind. I had been submitting works for years; my work had been praised but no editor had taken it on. If I resisted the changes, would I be jeopardizing publication? And yet I fought, page by page, even including the number of times the word “fuck” occurred. (The editing process took place in 1963–64, before the great linguistic, sexual, and political climacteric of the ’60s. Last Exit to Brooklyn had been shocking; publishing houses censored through the editorial process.)
In addition, we had a very big quarrel over the last chapter of the book. My protagonist, Hinton, comes home after a night of adventure and terror. As he walks through his apartment, he passes a bed where one of his half brothers is sleeping with one of his half sisters (from three fathers); the description was quite casual . . . almost, as it were, in passing; no big deal. My outraged editor asked how I could violate that great taboo, common to all societies, oh dreaded word and worse, act, incest (he forgot, of course, Egypt, and even Corinth—an aside; Oedipus was “from” Corinth—and other cultures)? I pointed out that in the first place, the couple was sleeping together, not fucking. Space was limited. But in the second place, incest was, in my experience, not unusual among my clients. (This was an elitist assumption on my part. I was wrong. Incest is also common in middle-class families, to say nothing of upper-class families.) I refused to change it. My editor kept saying, “Well, Sol, if you want to ruin your own book . . .” Very scary. I persisted. The editor did, in part, prevail; one “fuck” was excised. The book remained as I had submitted it.
My editor did serve one useful, indeed vital, function: he chose the introductory quotes from Xenephon. At the time I couldn’t realize how important these quotes were to the making of the re
putation of the book. Without these quotes, how would anyone know about its classical parallel. (If one didn’t know about the parallel between Ulysses and the Odyssey, would it have gotten on the college reading lists?)
Despite the fact that the printing was small, surprisingly The Warriors got national attention. What was more surprising was that so many people had even decided to review what might have been just another book about “juvenile delinquents.” The review in The Nation was favorable. The critic had one important reservation; he thought that the analogy to The Anabasis was perhaps a little too forced, even contemptuous of one of the Greek classics. After all, this was Greek civilization I was talking about. Well, at least the reviewer had not only heard about The Anabasis but had actually read it. What, I thought, were those mercenaries (kids, really) but the result of overpopulation whereas, in this country (this was before the escalation in Vietnam), there was no use for our indigenous poor young people. And after all, were the Greeks really so noble?
I determined that my next novel (actually the previous one, Fertig) would go to another publisher. I later found out that an important stockholder in Holt was so incensed by the book’s content that he wanted it removed from the market.
The Warriors was picked up and published in England and, of all places, Japan, which, of course, did not have these problems . . . or so I thought.