by Meyer Levin
Compulsion
Meyer Levin
The mid 1920s introduced Americans to a new type of murder: two immensely wealthy eighteen-year-old university graduates from Chicago randomly kidnapped and murdered a little boy, attempted to obliterate the identity and sex of the body before hiding it and then tried to collect the ransom – simply as an intellectual experiment. Levin attempts to discover the psychology of the two young men, to understand how the two of them, Leopold and Loeb, one of them handsome and popular, the other quiet and scholarly, were capable of an act so far beyond rational understanding. For drama, for horror, and for the deepest kind of compassion and comprehension, COMPULSION has rarely been equaled among contemporary psychological novels.
Meyer Levin
Compulsion
In memory of my mother and father
Goldie and Joseph Levin
Author's Note
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.
Book One: The Crime of the Century
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 fo
r 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.
Judd only wished Artie were here with him now, so they could share a quick wink, listening to McKinnon’s platitudes.
McKinnon was being what the fellows thought was brilliant. He was producing one of his sweeping summaries, casting his eye over the entire structure of the law.
From the early and primitive Hebrew concept of an eye for an eye, McKinnon said dryly, “Rather bloodthirsty, these Semitic tribes” – from that early concept to our law of today, was there really a great advance? Instead of an eye, it was the value of an eye, the value of a tooth, the value of a life, that was now exacted from the criminal. And in some cases the ancient primitive code remained intact, a life for a life.
Many of the fellows were making notes – especially those who were taking the Harvard Law entrance tomorrow. Directly in front of Judd, Milt Lewis was feverishly putting it all down, the hairs standing disgustingly on his fleshy, bent neck.
As the professor talked, Judd’s pen too became busy in his notebook. Over and over he drew a hawk. The hawk was streaking down, talons open… Where was Artie? Judd had passed Artie’s house, and driven past the frat, and he had looked around on campus. Surely nothing had gone wrong. Artie was purposely putting him on pins and needles… Judd drew a vulture. The page filled; he turned it and drew a huge, elaborate cross, with an unfurled inscription. In Sanskrit, he wrote, “In Memoriam”. At the base of the cross, in elaborate Old English capitals, he drew his initials: F.S.
Then he glanced through the mullioned window. Artie might pass. In any case, Artie had better be on hand after the ten-o’clock, as they had agreed. They had everything still to do.
McKinnon had come to a pause; he had lifted up the entire structure of human law and was holding it aloft for them to admire, perhaps not so much the structure itself as his Atlas feat in lifting it. Judd could not help, now, tickling the outstretched arm.
“But granted that the law applies to the ordinary person in society,” Judd said, “how would it apply in the case of the superman? The concept of an Übermensch in itself means that he must be above ordinary society. If he abided by ordinary laws he could never produce the actions that might in the end prove of the greatest benefit to humanity – not that even benefit to humanity should be a criterion.”
McKinnon smiled patronizingly. “By a superman I suppose you mean a powerful historical personality like Napoleon.”
Judd was going to interrupt, to debate Napoleon, for wasn’t Napoleon’s failure a proof per se that he was not a true superman? But Milt Lewis, always eager to hitch on to someone else’s idea, had filled in for McKinnon. “Didn’t many of the great American pioneers and industrialists consider themselves above the law?”
“Not exactly,” said McKinnon. “Often such a powerful figure, a conqueror or a revolutionist, considered that he was bringing law to the lawless, or adapting old laws to newer human ways. But always you will find such persons at pains to justify their actions in terms of law, rather than by pretending to be above the law.” And in the grand sweep of history, he pointed out, even these tremendous and commanding personalities were incorporated, for the general concept of right and wrong, of crime and punishment, remained organic with the social order, resisting individualistic innovations.
“In fact that’s a case in point – Crime and Punishment. The hero considered himself a kind of superman, and yet he broke down and yielded to the law,” parroted Milt Lewis, always ready to switch sides.
“But that’s no superman! That’s not the conception!” Judd cried. What was Raskolnikov after all but a weak sentimentalist, full of moral and religious drivel? What was his crime but a petty attempt at theft, motivated by abysmal poverty? Where was the superman conception? Raskolnikov’s was only a crime with a motive – his need for money. All he had done was to rationalize the murder by declaring that his need was greater than that of the miserly old female pawnbroker’s. To be above, beyond mundane conception, a crime had to be without need, without any of the emotional human drives of lust, hatred, greed. It had to be like some force beyond the reach of gravity itself. Then it became a pure action, the action of an absolutely free being – a superman.
Too dense to grasp a concept, they all began gabbling: How could there be such a person?… They didn’t get the concept at all; the whole idea was beyond them. Judd almost found himself yelling out the proof to them – “Look at Artie! Look at me!” But instead, he relished the situation inwardly. This was the true enjoyment. To see things from another area of knowledge, from a fourth dimension which none of them could enter.
“Well, it is an interesting speculation,” McKinnon was saying with his tight little smile; the hour was over. “As you put it, Steiner, it is a pure concept, something in the abstract. However” – he strove for his summarizing line – “a society of supermen would undoubtedly in turn evolve its own laws.”
“Superlaws!” Milt Lewis hawed.
In the corridor, Judd tried to dodge away from Lewis. He had almost got out of the Law building when he felt the thick paw on his arm. Always physically touchy, Judd over-reacted, wrenching away.
“Say, Junior, how about a little session, going over those notes?” Milton said.
“I never cram before an exam,” Judd stated. “My system is to go out and dissipate.”
Milton made some inane remark about geniuses.
Halfway across to Sleepy Hollow, Judd saw Artie – Artie stretched on his elbow on the grass amidst a group of coeds, who squatted with their legs folded under them. Myra was there and a stupid new little girl, Dorothea, who had a crush on Artie… Judd felt a surge of envy amounting almost to hatred. Judd raised his wrist, pointedly looking at his watch. Artie only rolled over, patting the ground for Judd to squat. This Dorothea was reading aloud from Jurgen, and all of them had on such knowing smirks, they tittered each time her pink tongue lingered on a reference to Jurgen’s sturdy “staff”, relishing the double meaning.
It was one of those moments when Artie looked so golden, so perfect, stretched in his powder-blue pullover, that Judd had an urge in front of all of them to call him Dorian. But he again restrained himself, saying, “Hey, Artie, we’re late.”
“Late for what?” Dorothea asked vapidly.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Artie said, rising to a sitting position.
Judd nearly giggled. If they knew!
“Don’t forget your staff!” Dorothea remarked daringly, rolling her eyes from her Jurgen to a silver Eversharp that had dropped from Artie’s jacket on to the grass.
“Thought you girls might want to use it,” Artie said, sending them all into a panic, even Myra smiling. Then Artie was coming along with him to the car. But that silly Dorothea jumped up, smoothing her swishing pleats, and came hurrying after them, calling to ask which way were they going…
“This is man stuff.” Artie gave her his dazzling grin, and they left her standing there, holding her Jurgen to her chest.
“Some little pest!” Artie lighted a cigarette, exhaled. Judd didn’t inquire how Artie felt. In a sense they were like two medical experimenters who have injected themselves with an untried drug. In himself, it had perhaps produced a slight quickening, but he was holding it well, Judd was sure. In Artie, there was not the slightest sign of an effect. But then, had not Artie secretly tried a dose once or twice before?
“Got the letters?” Artie asked in his voice of snappy action.
Judd tapped the pocket of his sports jacket. He had placed one letter on each side, to avoid any mistake. In the right-hand pocket was the letter telling the victim’s father to go to Hartmann’s drugstore and wait for a telephone call. In the left-hand pocket was the final letter that would tell him where to drop the ransom. Their job now was to prepare the treasure hunt, leading the father from place to place as he picked up these letters.
“You should have seen me shake your
friend Milt Lewis,” Judd said. “He wanted to come over tonight and study for the exam.”
“That jackass would be a perfect alibi!” Artie said. “You should have let him.”
“I thought we’d have something better to do.” Judd glanced at Artie, and they both snickered. Then Artie told him to take Ellis Avenue.
The Kessler house was only a block out of their way. Judd would not have driven past that house; in fact, he would have gone out of his way to avoid it. But it was in just such boldness that Artie had it all over him.
As they neared the big yellow brick-and-timber residence, Artie leaned halfway out of the car to get a good look. By now their first letter, the special delivery demanding the ransom, had surely arrived.
The street looked normal. You’d never imagine anything unusual had happened to anyone in that house. Thus, the flash idea came to Judd that fourth-dimensional activities could be taking place within and through all human activity, and leaving no trace.
Even as they coasted slowly past, the Kessler’s limousine turned the corner and pulled into the driveway. “Stop! Hold it!” Artie snapped, but Judd drove on, swearing under his breath, “You gone daffy!”
Artie squirmed around on the seat so he could watch behind. Mr. Kessler got hurriedly out of the limousine – he was carrying a swelling brief case, Artie glowingly declared-and right after him came a tall man whose head angled forward. Artie recognized him – old Judge Wagner – guessed he was the Kessler’s family lawyer.
“He’s just been to the bank and got the money!” Artie bounced around, laughing, and squeezed Judd’s knee. “He’s got Judge Wagner with him. Hey, I forgot to tell you, Jocko. Mums told me this morning. The two of them were tearing around the neighbourhood last night looking for Paulie. They even came to our tennis court – wanted to know if the kid had been playing with Billy!” Billy was Artie’s little brother, of the same age as the boy they had kidnapped. “Old man Kessler and the old Judge even dragged out Fathands Weismiller!” That was the gym teacher at the Twain School. “They had him bust into the building with them. I think Fats crawled through the window!” Artie leaned back and laughed at the image. “They thought maybe the kid got locked in taking a leak. I told Mums my theory is, Paulie’s run away from home.”