The Warriors (23 page)

Skip ahead a few years; it's sometime in the period of 1950–55; I was writing and submitting short stories and writing novels. The stories were regularly rejected. In order to stay alive, I had gone to work for what was then known as the Department of Welfare of N.Y.C. I came in contact with, as it were, the lower social and economic depths . . . impoverished families, culturally and racially different. I went through a kind of social shock. I had grown up in poverty during the Great Depression. My own family had been preserved from disaster during the Great Depression of the '30s by receiving welfare checks. But the difference between my clients and my parents' generation was huge. My parents were communists. They thought of themselves as the coming elite of the world, in fact even a new and superior species, the Proletariat. History was supposed to be on their side. They fought and organized. My clients did not. I couldn't understand why. If you were poor and society was against you, you either fought politically or became a crook, as a loan shark, who had considered the options during the Depression, told me. What other choice was there? I was later to understand the complex reasons that led to what seemed their passivity.

Some of the children of these families were what was then called
Juvenile Delinquents. Many of them belonged to fighting gangs. Some of these gangs numbered in the hundreds; they were veritable armies. This social phenomenon was viewed, on the one hand, as the invasion of the barbarians, only this time they came from the inside rather than from the outside. On the other hand, there was something subversive about the gangs (and especially the music that they loved . . . rock). The social thinkers, academic and popular, failed to understand why these social formations of the deprived crystallized in the midst of what we were told again and again were economically good times.

The media inflated the gang phenomenon to mythic proportions. (Of course they spoke of the “lower” classes: of the existence of violent middle-class gangs, nothing was said.) But then the media deals in the commodification of fear, alarm, and scandal.
The New York Times
ran a multipart series. What seemed like a national eruption of juvenile gangism also gave rise to a publication and theatrical industry. Books proliferated:
Rebel Without a Cause
(the title, and contents of this book almost implied that if the rebel had a “cause” there would not be rebelliousness but possibly rebellion),
The Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes,
etc. A famous killing in New York led to a theatrical production (actually two; Paul Simon's spectacular failure being the second),
West Side Story
(Capeman, Salvatore Agron, meets
Romeo and Juliet;
trivial and silly), and Warren Miller's
The Cool World.
The academy produced a mass of sociological and psychological studies.

I think the elements for
The Warriors
began to come together sometimes during the '50s. I was having a talk with a friend of mine, a writer whose mother and father had been successful Hollywood script writers. He was trying to explain to me what constituted a good idea (the “high concept”) for a script. Almost as a joke, I hit upon the notion of a story of a fighting gang based on, or paralleling, the course of
The Anabasis.
Once uttered, I dropped the idea. I thought the notion was ingenious, but not really serious. Yet I didn't forget it.

Again I pass over the years. I got married, quit working for the Department of Welfare. My wife, Adrienne, told me to quit work and go back to school or stay home and write. I decided to go to graduate school (1959–061), Brooklyn College, so that I could become a teacher while I continued to write. At this point I had completed two and a half novels . . . that would never be published.

This is a diversion, yet to the point, for it entails how I moved away from the influence of my college readings. While I was going to graduate school, my first short story was published in a short-lived literary journal:
The Noble Savage.
Publication hardened my resolve to be a full-time writer rather than a teacher. I was given permission to write a novel as a master's thesis. This became
Fertig,
which played a critical role in my development as a writer and, indirectly, in the formation of
The Warriors.

Originally, when I began to conceive the idea for
Fertig,
I was under the influence of the existentialists, particularly Camus. At first I had wanted to write a spare, perhaps puzzling, Camusian novel like
The Stranger,
with a touch of Kafka. This book attempts to picture a man not so much against his society as outside it (as I thought I was temperamentally). In part, what Camus had tried to do was to strip away the surrounding social and material conditions, isolating his character and his act from contaminating culture, time and place.

When we first meet Meursault (the Stranger), his mother has just died. He seems emotionally unaffected. Then he commits what appears to be a random murder, a murder without understandable motives . . . in fact, seemingly without motive at all. He is condemned by a horrified court. The court partly bases its horror on Mersault's “inhuman” disregard for his mother's death. This disregard not only denies one of the fundamental tenets of bourgeois society but its Freudian variant. We, in this country, would ask if he was a psycho- and/or sociopath. Camus didn't use any of these
categories. (At that point in time, in the late '40s and through the '50s, the question of random and/or serial killers, whose psychology was, and still remains, a complete puzzle, had not yet been shown to be not uncommon.) I wanted my protagonist, Fertig, to commit such a crime.

Now the insane person (or, these days, the one thought to be missing the proper responsibility-gene) is neither for or against the society in which he or she lives but is, nevertheless, a disturbance to it . . . a disturbance that must be accounted for. Our society, America in particular, has found it hard to deal with what appears to be the nonrational. What our thinkers resort to is to shift the inexplicable into one or another psychological and/or sociological categories, thus solving the problem of the irrational person, and so negating his or her act. However, what of the rational person who commits horrendous crimes (such as those who work for the State's interrogation bureaus, and assassinators)? The actions of the intelligent, rationally antirational man may be the greatest danger.

One could read Mersault's motivation one of two ways—as a totally random act of a man without reason and/or as protest. . . but against what? The system, whatever it was? (Now it should be understood that while this “protest,” if that was what it was, against bourgeois life was neither politically left nor right in the usual sense. Nor was Mersault's act criminal in the usual sense, which in most cases implies reason. So the question remains: protest against what? Camus never made that clear.

But had Camus really succeeded in detaching himself from his background and its traditions? The place was Algiers, the time may or may not have been immediately before or after World War II. This culture, in which Camus had grown up, was French-colonized Algeria. (Camus was later to say, in the midst of the Algerian liberation struggle, that Algeria
was his mother.
What's more, Mersault's victim was an Arab. One can speculate; if Meursault had killed the Arab because of social, political, or class differences, the
court might have understood. That is to say, if Meursault had socially shared motives for killing the Arab, he was not a threat to the social order. Conversely, if Mersault was sane, which is to say rational (rationality always defined in terms of what a society calls rational), and did this irrational act, then he was a threat to social order because who knew where and against whom he might strike next.

(What has all this to do with
The Warriors
? Remember that gangs were thought to be an irrational manifestation.)

What Camus was trying to get at was that there are empty interstices of understanding between one action and another action, a gap that is the ground of artistic, philosophic, and scientific creation.

Further, even though Camus had tried to detach his hero from culture and tradition, I began to find, as I read more, disguised literary references—such as
The Divine Comedy
. . . particularly “Paradiso”—in
The Stranger.
What this said to me was that in spite of his attempt to escape the constraints of Western tradition into—what? pure anomie?—he was bound by it. That is to say that Camus's subtext denied his philosophical endeavor. He could not imagine the mind of the truly random killer. All this is by way of saying that you cannot go from the pure universal to the particular because, whether you like it or not, you always construct the universal out of the particular, sabotaging the universal.

Perhaps, for Camus the killing represented his
unconscious
reaction to the Algerian liberation forces. I was not aware of the subtext when I first read the book . . . until the '60s.

So, as I was writing my book and as I thought I was drawn to this existentialist philosophy, perhaps because of my own psychological makeup and my commitment to reason—negated, of course, as it is for all creative writers, by my practice that favored quantum leaps of understanding and construction—and because of my experience as a social welfare worker, I began to be forced to begin looking for new
ways to express the real world in my writing. That is to say, I sought, and had to invent a rational motive for my hero's crime. At the same time this
real
(I don't care what the postmodernist relativists have to say) world was more irrational and absurd than the existentialist philosophers—those meta-hyper-rationalists—could imagine. In order to try to understand how my hero would encounter this “real” world, and move through it, I began readings in practical and theoretical sociology, anthropology, and psychology (I rejected Freudian and Jungian thought, or any variant thereof. On the other hand, I found that behaviorism was mechanistically Laplacian). The sociologists who interested me the most were Weber and Durkheim, perhaps because of their interest in the “primitive” and the ancient (read prerational). For what were my clients, I must have thought, but prerational? And what were the fighting gangs but prerational? Slowly, even without knowing it, I thought I had begun to form aspects of a theory of writing based on
my
sociology.

And yet, at the same time, as I hunted for the rational behind the mysterious apparent and irrational immediate surface, the ordinary, the non- or antiliterary, I began to discern that even behind that, negating the whole social and psychological quasi-scientific endeavor that sought to explain why humans did what they did, lurked the ever-recurrent presence of the ritualistic, ceremonial, and mythic (which meant to me the unresolved “primitive”) in everyday life. Why? As I observed life, ordinary people, in twentieth-century U.S.A., suddenly became as exotic and “primitive” to me as, say, Australian aborigines. And, reflexively, slowly I began to see that the mythic and metaphysical and
something biological
(the urge to form tribal/family-like/gang groups in any and every culture, so-called primitive or modern sophisticated so-called civilized in history) also played a role in the discipline of sociology-aspiring-to-be-hard-science (as later I was to discover the haunting, left-over “background radiation” of metaphysics in science and mathematics).
I came to see my mistake in being drawn to existentialist thought. To escape the spell of Camus's creature, I reached back into the memories of my early life and found that I had distinct,
rational,
formable, statable grievances against the system of our country. I and my family had suffered what to me was perhaps the greatest nonphilosophical, nonpsychoanalytic, materialist, if you will,
traumatic
absurdity . . . the Depression of the '30s. My parents were communists. Coming from a communist background and being a Jew added to my sense of alienation from American life. These social and economic traumas had become part of my unconscious. To me, being a writer was like being a rebel. I'll show you what your world is really like, I must have thought. And what of the gangs? Theirs, too, was a form of revolt. Some gangs take to the streets; some gangs emerge in October 1917.

And the more I thought about it, given our social system (even at that time), the more I saw the social forces as they “really” were. I couldn't allow myself to present my stories in the kind of semidreamlike ways that Camus and Kafka used. To put it in a kind of old-fashioned quasi-Marxist terminology (which I would not have done when I was writing
Fertig),
the attempt to reconcile the multiple conflict of multiple interests (there are always 613 contradictions) was what constituted the concrete basis of irrationality in everyday life. I knew. I had, after all, been a bureaucrat. I had learned what went into the making of what appeared to outsiders as systemic absurdity in government; that if you went back into the making of every regulation and law, there was a kind of ancient craziness, a craziness embodied in the very flesh. And more, I knew, unlike the postmodernist, academic glossolalists, that difficult-to-understand writing is, in fact, a government and business strategy . . . in order how, as Dickens put it, not-to-do-it, or prevent it from being done as long as possible, or to do it before anyone understood what was being done.

At the time I was writing
Fertig,
the emerging dominant psychosocial theory of the day had it that anyone who murdered was psychotic and so not responsible for their acts. (This theory didn't, of course, take into account those who killed for gain—Mafia, for instance—or for reasons of state that involved soldiers and CIA operatives, state torturers, and so forth). The kinds of categories employed by Camus were never considered. Psychosis or the not-responsible approach was opposed bitterly by those who promoted the old-fashioned virtues, such as responsibility for one's deeds; ignorance, irresistible impulse, and so forth, was no excuse. These kinds of unresolvable conflicts of moral systems required the production of generations of ethics rationalizers as, it seemed, people moved further and further away from religion (as they seem to be moving back again: well, these things come and go in waves).