Crime and Expiation
WINCELBERG, ANITA M.
WRITERS and WRITING Crime and Expiation Compulsion. Reviewed by Anita M. Wincelberg By Meyer Levin. Member, editorial board, "Jewish Horizon"; Simon & Schuster. 495 pp. $5. columnist, "National...
...Supreme Court ruled not too many years ago that when a newspaper inflames public opinion it may well be depriving a defendant of his Constitutional right of "due process...
...The troubling fact, especially in view of its announced intention, is that it tells us very little about Leopold's and Loeb's career in prison—Leopold's contributions to journals of sociology and criminology, his voluntary participation in a dangerous malaria research project, the virtually unpunished murder of Loeb, and the continuing persecution of Leopold by the Chicago press, which not only made it politically unhealthy for a Governor to retain a parole board likely to free him, but at earlier times had made it impossible for Leopold and Loeb even to continue working at such valuable pioneering projects as the first high-school correspondence courses for prison inmates...
...The judge was asked to show mercy (that is, give a life sentence) to a pair of admitted and seemingly unrepentant murderers, on the ground that the boys, while not "insane" in the legal sense, were nevertheless in the grip of influences and emotions which made them less than fully responsible for their acts...
...But, aside from the still unanswered question of whether psychiatric testimony in a court of law ought to be considered "scientific" enough to be non-partisan (the real contest was between two opposing schools of psychiatry...
...But it is possibly less than fair to Leopold the middle-aged man looking back on thirty years of what must surely be considered worthwhile contributions to society, who today believes himself to be a completely different person from the unstable boy genius who helped commit the "'crime of the century...
...I The L-L case received 228 columns of coverage in one Chicago newspaper alone—more, it is safe to assume, than was given to Presidential elections of that time...
...5. The petty harassment of convicted murderers who attempt to occupy their time in some useful scientific or literary activity (i.e., Caryl Chessman or Robert F. Stroud, "Birdman of Alcatraz...
...And, though his original prison sentence clearly left the door open to the possibility of parole, Leopold has so far failed to convince the state of Illinois that he has been "rehabilitated...
...Compulsion is a crime story without a villain...
...It was, for courtroom standards of the time, a hairline distinction, and Levin, without relying on Darrow to write his scenes for him, gets breathless suspense out of the adroitness with which the old advocate maintains this fine balance under the shrewd and angry batterings of the prosecution...
...Not that Levin has failed to give a deeply understanding and sympathetic portrait of the two adolescents...
...And, though the details of the case have of courso long been public knowledge, the book moves with all the urgency of a suspense story...
...2. Trial by newspaper, which in our country, unlike England, is still capable of exerting subtle and sometimes crude pressure upon prosecutors, juries or judges, though the U.S...
...Compulsion, then, may be quite fair to Leopold the youthful murderer in persuading us that he should not have been executed...
...This, in a way, is a tribute to Meyer Levin's skill in dramatizing the Leopold-Loeb case with such immediacy...
...We have, of course, seen in our own time how the "superman" mentality can express itself in the farcical as well as the unspeakable—in the boy who "flew" off a barn in imitation of his comic-strip hero, and in the nation so intoxicated bv "master race" notions as to start a world war...
...What has kept the case in our national consciousness, perhaps more even than the shocking circumstances of the crime, is the progressive line of defense taken by Darrow at the hearing in mitigation of punishment...
...If Levin suggests any villain at all, it is the philosophical heritage of Nietzsche: that is...
...Compulsion, then, is a skilful, perceptive and utterly readable dissection of the boys' minds and emotions, largely from their own (fictional, that is) point of view...
...Compulsion reminds us that a major crime often raises a number of tangential problems against which we seem to have made little headway in the past thirty years: 1. The entire theory of punishment, particularly capital punishment, as a necessary act of revenge, of catharsis as it were, without which society, and particularly the friends and relatives of a murder victim, might not be able to feel that the case is "closed...
...the men and societies which have read into Nietzsche a rationale for setting themselves above the laws of God and man...
...the boys pleaded guilty, to avoid leaving their legal "sanity" to be decided by a jury of laymen...
...But he does not carry out the stated intention of Sid Silver, the fictional narrator, with "Steiner" once again coming up for parole, to write something which, Silver's editor felt, "might have a good deal to do with whether or not he would be released...
...There was no trial...
...Leopold guessed, somewhat bitterly, that it would do him more harm than good...
...The point, in the words of the Midrash, seems to be: "Don't judge another until you have been in his shoes...
...We are left with a very clear picture of "Judd Steiner," the teenage murderer, but not of the man who has spent over thirty years in prison paying for his crime...
...Still, one cannot blame Leopold, in his cell at Joliet, for being unhappy about the book...
...3. The particular social repercussions when a major crime is committed by a Jew, or, perhaps worse, by an "intellectual...
...He relates an incident which demonstrates how easy it is for an average "law-abiding" person to bring himself to a point where he is capable of rape and murder, and how easily such a person's friend might go along with the deed, simply to avoid being thought a coward...
...et...
...the Leopold-Loch case remains with us as almost the prototypic al expression of the "superman" fixation...
...To Levin s further credit nun it he s:<id that, while he -ticks unflinchingly to all the harrowing detail- of the case, he not only show- remarkable taste in avoiding cheap -cn-ationalism but actually creates a narrative which has proved gripping enough to reach the top of the bestseller list and a Hollywood sale...
...In fact, he presents (just as Clarence Darrow did at the hearing) an intelligent and eloquent argument against the execution of two brilliant and tragically mixed-up boys...
...It is, in fact, perhaps one of the most successful uses of the psychoanalytic technique in modern American fiction...
...Levin's epilogue makes a fascinating point...
...columnist, "National Jewish Post" ON the sound journalistic principle that provocative questions make good news stories, Life recently asked Nathan Leopold how he thought this novel would affect his chances for parole...
...4. The overprivileged American adolescent who feels he can prove his maturity and masculinity only through acts of rebellion...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
