504
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
18th, 1948, when he was convicted on seventeen of eighteen
charges-nothing; June 25, 1948, when he was given two death
sentences-no mention of the case; July 3, 1948, when, at the
age of 27, he entered Death Row in San Quentin
prison~blankness
in the
Herald Tribune
on this matter. To the East at least, Chess–
man had been nonexistent as a criminal, as a case, as a doomed
young man. He had to bring himself forth from the void of
prison, from nothingness, from nonexistence. This condition of his
nothingness, his nonexistence, makes his remarkable articulation,
his tireless creation of himself as a fact, his nearly miraculous resur–
rection or birth-which it was we do not know-a powerfully
moving human drama. With extraordinary energy, Chessman
made, on the very edge of extinction, one of those startling efforts
of personal rehabilitation, salvation of the self. It was this energy
that brought him out of darkness to the notice of the Pope, Albert
Schweitzer, Mauriac, Dean Pike, Marlon Brando, Steve Allen,
rioting students in Lisbon (Lisbon!) -and, perhaps by creating
his life, Chessman had to lose it. The vigor of his creation aroused
fear, bewilderment, suspicion. In his brilliant accounts of his
fellow convicts on Death Row, it is usually the lost, the cringing,
the deteriorated who are finally reprieved. A man needs a measure
of true life in order to be worth execution.
People on the street, talking about the case, found Chessman's
energy, his articulation of his own tragic trap, his stubborn efforts
on his own behalf, truly alarming. These efforts were not mitigat–
ing; indeed they were condemning. He had trained himself to sleep
only a few hours a night so that he could write his books, study
law, work on his case. But suppose another condemned man
wanted his sleep, couldn't bother to work on his own destiny,
hadn't the strength or the talent to bring himself from darkness
to light-what then? Lest his very gifts save him, some people
wanted
him
executed in order to show the insignificance of per–
sonal vigor before the impersonal law. And, true, his energy is
very uncommon among habitual criminals. "Flabby, bald, lobot–
omized" Lepke; dreamy, paretic gangsters; depressed, deterio–
rated murderers; goofs putting bombs on planes. Chessman was a
young hoodlum who was able, in the last decade of his life, to
call upon strange reserves of strength. His early violence and his
