The Warriors (24 page)

I ended with a completely un-Camus-like book, being led into astonishing directions and discovering that the world, the real world, was more absurd, crazier, more
ding-an-sichtlich
than any fiction writer, no matter how ingenious and imaginative, could conceive. And, at the same time, without being quite conscious of it, I was also discovering that the social “sciences” were in themselves partially forms of fiction.

In a nutshell, the plot of
Fertig
runs this way: a man, Fertig (this means “finished” in German and Yiddish: I took the name of a college classmate, Howard Fertig, later to become a publisher—we used to jokingly call him Howard's End), marries late in life. He and his wife, social failures with big dreams, are compromising, making the best of a disappointing, loveless life. They have a child, a son. This brings them closer together and, for the first time in their lives, they begin to understand love. One night, the child gets sick. Their doctor cannot be reached (remember that during the period when I was writing the book, doctor-patient relations were changing. Throughout the '50s and early '60s, doctors had been abandoning home visits); The Fertigs give the child aspirin. It doesn't help. They
rush their child to the emergency room of a hospital. (As part of my research, refusing to take the mythology of the caring doctor for granted, I went and sat in the emergency rooms of several hospitals to see what went on. I was shocked at the systemic neglect.) By this time the aspirin has taken effect: the child has begun to feel better. The Fertigs are told to take their child home. They decide to go to another hospital. On the way the child has a seizure and dies.

The Fertigs' marriage begins to fall apart. Fertig tries to decide who is responsible for his son's death. Gradually it dawns on him that while there were “whos,” the three people, a petty-minded intake worker, a nurse, and a resident, there is a “not-who”; he is in the presence of a larger system of mutually shared responsibility (or, rather, guilt). He wants revenge. But how, after all, does any individual kill a system? He selects exemplary victims . . . seven people, the three who were in the emergency room and four directors of the hospital and decides to kill them and, because his life has fallen apart, he wants to be caught and to have his day in court, perhaps envisioning making a stirring speech..

Further researching the project, I went into several hospitals and walked through them various times during daylight hours and at night to see if I could have access to the personnel so that I, like Fertig, might, if I wanted to, kill them. I found it was quite easy.

But Fertig, naive, becomes a victim of his own illusions. He finds that the criminal justice system, as I found it really to be, and given the complex interaction of the media, is bizarre, surreal. He becomes the victim of half-senile and corrupt judges, ambitious journalists and lawyers, and mutually contradicting psychiatrists with certain stereotypical expectations.

Of course Fertig could not be allowed to have his day in court. By definition, within the context of our society, he had to be a rational, malevolent criminal, possibly a left-wing crazy, or a seriously disturbed individual. If there was reason behind his motivation, it might be if not sympathized with, at least understood. But even to
understand Fertig's motivation was to point at the inhuman in society: his complaints about the system that killed his son might fall on receptive ears. Others might take the law into their own hands and do likewise. Juries might choose not to convict. He must be considered psychotic.

Slowly but surely the process drives him insane as, ironically, his corrupt, opportunistic lawyer, to enhance his own reputation, using an insanity-defense plea, begins to regard Fertig—whom he at first considered as a maddened
nebbish
—as a rational and courageous hero. Fertig is remanded to an institution for the criminally insane. He never gets to make his great speech to the world.

Now I have explained this process rationally. What I have not talked about was the way the work consumed me; I worked night and day. There were periods of leaps of insight and periods of slow growth of understanding. I was gradually transformed as I wrote. My view of the world changed yet again.

Fertig
was to be rejected twenty-seven times before being published. I went through a period of despair. I began to doubt myself. I wondered . . . is it me or is it them, the editors? I knew, or thought I knew, what made a good book. I began to notice, as I read the various rejection letters, a peculiar phenomenon. If I compiled those parts of the rejection letters in which the editors were critical, or dismissive, my book was completely terrible; if I added up the parts of my book the editors liked, my book was a work of genius.

I decided that, in the meantime, while submitting my book, I would go ahead and write another novel, which was to become
The Warriors.
Now in part the process of
knowing
that an idea is good is completely irrational. No matter how complicated and sophisticated our communication machinery gets, there can be no program that decides on the
rightness
of a creative idea. And mystery of mysteries, the idea of
The Warriors
had lingered in my mind for about fifteen years!

Whereas it had taken more than a year to write
Fertig,
it took me three weeks of intense work, after research, to write
The Warriors.
I
could not have done it the way I did without having gone through the growth process in the writing of
Fertig.

There were a number of steps in the preparation for writing this book. I'm not sure in what order they took place, sequentially or simultaneously. The creative process is a mystery. I conceived the whole plot in one glowing moment. Well, in fact the plot—or rather the motif—had been lying around for thousands of years: the hero journey through adversities, mental or material or both. And the plot of
this
journey was waiting for me for some twenty-four hundred years.

Originally, when the idea had struck me with force years before, I didn't think carefully about the parallels between the ten thousand mercenary Greek soldiers supporting a succession-to-the-throne struggle, a coup (or even call it a revolution), and a potential “army” of social outcasts in our time. I never thought, at the time, to ask myself what made the idea so right. I had learned the value of certain immediate and “unmotivated,” what shall I call them, inspirations, which seemed to come out of nowhere. But, at some point, perhaps at that time, perhaps later on, I did begin to wonder if the comparison worked “naturally” or if I was forcing it.

The writer should know when something—the choosing of an image, a simile, the making of a metaphor—is right. But in order to justify the sudden and perfect insight—whether in science, mathematics, or literature—you go back and construct the mental pathway that originally led up to the illumination that seems to have come out of nowhere (in other words, first the effect, which seems to come suddenly out of nowhere, and then the cause). So the question for me, years later, when I was “recollecting in tranquillity,” became: What did I see at that particular time in the notion of fighting gangs of the '50s that was in any sense similar to the fate of those Xenephon-led ten thousand ancient Greek mercenary soldiers? I don't know.

Curiously, in our postmodern, poststructural, what have you, time,
when the singularity, the absolutely untranslatable uniqueness, of each culture is stressed, I have to note that people—storytellers, poets, writers, memorializers of every kind—in
every
culture, from the most “primitive” to the most “sophisticated,” no matter how diverse from any other culture, employ the rhetorical arts. That is to say that the systems of significations, the came-befores, came-afters, is-likes (comparison making, image, simile, and metaphor) and stand-fors (symbol, emblem, synecdoche, etc.), may vary from culture to culture, yet
all
cultures employ the same methodologies as they attempt to represent their internal and external environments. Call this the Thesaurus syndrome because the thing-in-itself, the thing, the experience, the smell, etc., is indescribable and so is-likes are piled on top of is-likes.

If these modes of representation and comparison take place everywhere (and everywhen), are we in the presence of something biological? I believe that bio-chemical-electrical receptors process impulses (translated into need in our minds) that come to us from the outside
and
the inside. This is the way we read . . . no,
we are made
to read the environment. These impulses drive all people. One reads the environment directly or indirectly (in terms of geography and time) using a variety of prosthetic devices (such as, for instance, the writings and ancient relics of others) as if things and forces were very, very close. How, after all, are humans, who are for the most part distanced from direct contact with the nurturing environment, attempting to communicate or describe any “thing in itself,” an event or a sensation, a feeling—for instance a smell, or pain—to talk about anything other than in terms of something else, a comparison with some other event, word, thing, sensation, feeling, or sign (or someone else's constructions of signals)?

But there are levels of sensitivity in human consciousness. Whereas most people take their world for granted, some writers, some poets, some language-spinners see certain relationships among people, things, events, or signs of people, things and/or
events in a special way, a way that most others cannot or have not seen them.

When I saw the relevance of the two different “texts,” fighting gangs and the kid-mercenaries of
The Anabasis,
from two different times, in two different “languages” from two different cultures, to one another I think I saw something no one else had seen. This was not a natural given. So to some extent it had to be forced. This was the question of the choice of mediational ground, the ground of translation. Fundamentally, there are two kinds of mediational grounds; and
inter
cultural (of course there are many more interacting levels).
Inter
cultural “texts” should, according to the postmodernists, be exclusive, untranslatable, and inviolate (which doesn't stop people from violating and translating). But by forcing incommensurables (referencing them, indexing them) onto the mediational ground of his or her choosing (influenced by the context of a received culture), the artist (or, for that matter, the social and psychological “scientist”) colonizes and conquers all “texts.” Intellectual imperialism? Of a sort. And, after all, isn't the writer a kind of spy?

In retrospect I suppose that in my mind the immediate mediational ground upon which fighting gangs met
The Anabasis
was a publication of that time,
Classic Comics.
(The very publication of this periodical constituted an act of expropriation.) This periodical presented great works of literature such as
The Iliad
or the adventures of the Argonauts (but never
The Anabasis,
which was too esoteric, but would have made a great comic book). Somehow, in my imagination
Classic Comics
—possibly the only material gang members might have read—could have presented the Greek warriors as the kind of heroic cartoon figures with whom they might have identified.

To make my parallel fit, I invented a gang leader—Ismael Rivera (reference here to the rebellious and Young American critic hero of
Moby-Dick,
but taken a step further)—who envisioned the
possibility of organizing all of the gangs of New York into one huge semirevolutionary army. Of course I “invented” nothing. There were, in fact, several gang leaders who not only had that vision but also had what one could call “native” organizational genius; they were “instinctive” theoreticians. My “hero” replicated the “Cyrus” of Xenephon's history. He would send word to all corners of the city, summoning plenipotentiaries of all the city's gangs for a grand, revolutionary meeting.

I chose to tell the major part of the story from the perspective of, first, a small, insignificant gang and then from the point of view of one of its members, Hinton (I had already invented him in a short story). This gang would make the journey up from the projects in Coney Island to the meeting ground in the Bronx (Van Courtlandt Park, or call it Babylon) and then back. The representatives, after the whole venture had been broken up by the police, would seek refuge in Woodlawn Cemetery (where, incidentally, Melville was buried) and then they would have to, like the Greek ten thousand, fight their way through hostile territories ruled by other gangs to their home grounds. The escape from the cemetery is of course a kind of resurrectionary move. Like the Greeks, they would finally reach the “Black Sea,” only, in this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island. Thus also the sea, considering the hero's last position, curled up with his thumb in his mouth, to be a “return” to the womb, having gained much knowledge, and in the light shining on the sea, he has, indeed, returned to a grave again.

Since I had gone through the writing of
Fertig,
I was determined to construct a true reflection (!) of the real world through which my literary gangs would move, the world of New York City as it really is, with its streets and subways. Could they do it; could they assemble without being spotted? I decided that I had to actually traverse the distances via subways in order to time the journey (this included walking through the tunnel between 96th Street on the West Side and the next stop, 110th Street: scary).

And yet, since I wanted to fold in the mythic and ritual, to make this journey a rite of passage, I thought in terms of similar (anthropological and literary) rite-of-passage journeys. Yet, whatever I thought about rhetorical devices, parallels, literary references, I was determined to bury them in such a way that they would work subliminally on the minds of the literate reader. If you missed the references, then you had, I hoped, a good story.