THE CHESSMAN CASE
505
late effort at personal integration seem to have come from the
same mysterious source. Life is haunted by one so peculiarly
instructive, a history so full of fearful symbolism.
Cell
2455,
Death Row,
Chessman's autobiography, is a work
of genuine and poignant interest. (Its faults as literature are those
almost inevitably found in naturalistic first novels by young men
who are writing from harsh experience: occasional sentimental–
ity, strained efforts at rhetorical decoration, cultural pretentious–
ness. Its virtues are of the same genre--power, natural expressive–
ness, authenticity.) This is an oddly American book. The need to
confess violent thoughts is softened
by
the cream of despairing
sentiment, remembered hopes, perfect loves, and the incongruent
beauties of the jungle. I had not thought of reading it until after
the execution. It had not seemed likely that Chessman would have
sufficient objectivity to tell us what we wanted to know about
him; or that, if he had the intention to give a serious picture, he
would have the words at hand. Almost unwillingly one discovers
that he really had, as he said, a great deal to tell. The life of a
chronic offender, existence reduced to chaos or ruled by tides of
compulsion, reform school, jail, parole, jail once more, and death
at the end of it-that history he is abundantly able
to
record.
The aim of this aching revelation was to save the author from
the gas chamber and that it did not do. Its other aim-to picture
the life of a young criminal-is accomplished with exceptional
truth. Careening cars, gun fights, arrests, escapes, loyalties and
betrayals, horror, confusion, defiance, manic decisions, hopeless
cruelties: there it is. But it is not a collage. In the center is a person,
young, monstrously careless, living in hell, acting out these sordid
images and twisted yearnings. Chessman is himself and also a
national and international phenomenon of our period. Someone
like
him
will be in the news tomorrow in New York, in Paris, in
Moscow. His story has an uncanny application at a hundred points.
You never doubt his existence or that of his companions, desperate
boys named Tuffy or Skinny, and coarse girls, defiantly self–
debasing. These are harsh portraits, very unlike the social worker's
case history, the TV delinquents, who cannot avoid a false tidi–
ness and handsomeness as they sweat to render an image not their
