Elizabeth Hardwick
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF
CARYL CHESSMAN
They rode together in harmony, Abraham and Isaac,
until they came to Mount Moriah. But Abraham prepared every–
thing for the sacrifice, calmly and quietly; but when he turned
and drew the knife, Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched
in despair, that a tremor passed through his body-but Abraham
drew the knife. Then they returned again home, and Sarah hastened
to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith. No word of this had
ever been spoken in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone
about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that any–
one had seen it.
Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling
The "abominable and voluptuous act known as
reading the
paper,"
Proust called it. In a bleary, addicted daze I followed the
last years in the life of Caryl Chessman and, with increasing in–
terest-<>r
consumption,
perhaps one should call the taking in of
the flesh and blood of a person through the daily press-his last
months. After the shock of his pointless execution, after his exit
from the front pages, Chessman still did not entirely remove
himself from public contemplation to make room for the young
criminals who seemed to spring from the earth just as his
bones were lowered into it. Even during the triumphal procession,
soon after his death, of Tony and Margaret-the short, little couple,
their hands raised as if in a benediction-the ghostly, beaky,
droopy, heart-shaped face remained, creating one of those acci–
dental juxtapositions whose significance is everything or nothing.
I wondered how Chessman had appeared in the newspapers
during his arrest and trial as "the red light bandit." I went back
to the files of the
New York H eraid Tribune
and looked up the
dates of his tragic history. January 23, 1948, when Chessman was
arrested in a stolen car and identified as the man who made
assaults on two women-there was nothing in the paper; May
