Compulsion

“All right. That’s where he got the image. From a war poster. Man stuff. But that only added to the hatefulness of the world. And himself in it. And he was going to rid himself of all this by killing a girl. What girl?” Willie looked at me and said with finality, “The girl in himself. Judd had to kill the girl-part of himself, before he could become a man.”

It was really ingenious, I told him. He had built up a really clever theory. Perhaps it was a good thing the alienists had not brought such an idea into court, because Horn would have had a field day with it.

“Yah?” Willie’s voice became argumentative. “Now look at the act of murder. How were they going to accomplish it? They talked about it for weeks, they developed the details. There was the chisel, to knock the victim on the head – that was Artie’s part, we know that. And it was Artie who used it. But then they had all these other things they pla

“Isn’t this idea a birth in reverse? What were they reading at the time? Judd was full of Huysmans’ A Rebours. And the perversity, the inverted ideas of writers like Huysmans, the ideas like the Black Mass, the conception of doing everything backwards, by the substitution of opposites, black for white, girl for boy, death for life – the cord – you can’t discard that clue entirely.”

I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.

“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible co

“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”

“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.

“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”

“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the i

Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible co

“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cu

Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”

I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the a

If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.

And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cu

And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.

We walked on silently.

Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”

Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”

Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”

“That’s what I think,” Willie said. “Once Artie started them on it.”

Automatically we had turned, to circle back. Willie remarked again about the choice of spot. Wasn’t it there that Judd took his class of children, perhaps literally to watch for a stork, a rare visitant in the Chicago area? And the children must have echoed for Judd his own childhood absorption in the source of the birth mystery. Thus it became inevitable that he should return the child’s body there, almost as though he had delivered his soul to the original source. And what did he lose, there? His glasses, his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more, in the womb or in the tomb.

For me, the depths of Willie’s explanation brought on an oppressive feeling. If something like this were valid, then we were hopelessly driven, in the grasp of such dreadful forces. This was only an elaboration of Wilk’s mechanistic philosophy, with the physiological determinants augmented by the mechanics of psychology and psychoanalysis.

If someone had seen what was happening in Judd, could he not have helped him? Couldn’t a less dangerous form of catharsis have taken place? Hadn’t he been on the verge of emergence into normal relationships with women?