Hail to thee, our alma mater!

As a Northwestern University alum, I can assure you that they don't tell you about this during orientation:

They called it "class rush." At sunset, the freshmen rallied in one place, the sophomores in another. It happened every September before classes began. Everyone carried ropes, wrapped around their waists, so they could tie their prisoners. Once it was dark, so dark no one could see who did what to whom, they attacked each other; packs of freshmen, gangs of sophomores, a mob of five hundred boys. The girls stayed inside, crowded around the windows of their dorms. The boys chased each other back and forth across the campus, through the streets of Evanston, down to Fountain Square, then back to the lake. Respectable people stayed inside. Local drunks and toughs joined in.

Whoever captured the other would force them to strip, then tie them up and march them off. If they captured their prisoners by the lake, they'd force them to jump in, or they'd row them out, a few at a time, to a raft or a jetty and leave them there--to untie themselves, swim ashore, find clothes before they were caught again. Worse than being dunked or marooned was to be kidnapped--stripped, tied, taken in a car to the forest outside of town, then left there.

Like me, do you hear echoes of the hijinks to be found in Tom Brown's Schooldays? To be fair, contemporary Northwestern officials probably don't mention "class rush" because it doesn't really happen like that these days, the most violent and combative impulses of the undergraduate population having been directed into the more contained arenas of fraternity hazing, binge drinking, and sports.

The account above, which describes the activities of students in 1921, comes from Michael Lesy's wonderfully strange Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), which always rewards me when I pull it down from the shelf and flip through it. The story's presence in a book with such a title might lead you to suspect that things turned out poorly for at least one of the rampaging students that night, and you'd be right: a freshman from Evanston named Leighton Mount went missing, and in Lesy's hands, the story--which he draws from lurid newspaper accounts, supplemented, in his usual style, by evocative, even creepy photos--is sad and creepy and awkward and satisfyingly unresolvable.

Northwestern alums should check it out: it'll give you a grisly topic of conversation the next time you run into a fellow grad--say, one of hyper-careerists with whom you had little in common as an undergrad, and less now. They mention Mark Witte and their fraternity, you bring up poor Leighton Mount's corpse rotting under the Lake Street pier, and the next thing you know you'll be free to escape to the bar for another drink.

Phil Harris, Jack Benny, and . . . Robert Musil?

Monday night's post about Michael Lesy's Murder City wasn't what I had intended to write when I plopped down with the old laptop. But as I flipped through the book's pages, I kept coming across lines that were too good not to share . . . and an hour later, I had a whole post.

All I'd intended to do was extract a single pair of sentences about the soon-to-be-murdered rake Herbert Ziegler, from the testimony of a woman with whom he danced early on that fatal evening:

Herbert was so drunk that, when he did ask Mrs. Lewinsky to dance, he could barely stand. After three minutes on the dance floor, Herbert's knees buckled.

Why those lines? Because they give me a chance to tell my favorite Phil Harris joke from The Jack Benny Program. Harris, who led the band on Benny's show, played himself as an uneducated, smooth-talking wild man with an overly developed sense of his powers of attraction, intellect, and humor--a man so self-regarding that his young daughter always asked for "Hotshot" when she called for him on the phone. "Oh, that's cute. Is that what your mother calls him?" Jack asked once. "No," she replied. "That's what he calls himself."

Harris's band was a motley assortment of ex-cons and drunkards, with the worst of the tipplers his trumpet player, Frankie Remley. That gets me to the joke that started all this, which comes after Phil has explained to Jack that he had to wake Remley up and drag him out of a trash barrel to get him to rehearsal:

BENNY

Now tell me, Phil: why on earth would Frankie be sleeping in a trash barrel?

HARRIS

Jackson, when your knees buckle, you ain't always over a featherbed!

My delay in posting this was unexpectedly fortunate, because in the interim I found another reminder of Jack Benny--much to my surprise--in The Man Without Qualities. Appearing in a jailhouse rumination by the Simenon-esque sex murderer Moosbrugger, this passage could easily be describing Jack's experiences with a certain recurrent nemesis:

In a bad mood, he could tell by a fleeting glance at a man's face that here was the same man who always gave him trouble, everywhere, no matter how differently he disguised himself each time. How can anyone object to this? We all have trouble with the same man almost every time. If we were to investigate who the people are we get so idiotically fixated on, it is bound to turn out to be the one with the lock to which we have the key.

Non-Benny fans may be confused, but those in the know surely just recognized their cue to turn and bellow, "Yeeessss?"

"She paints the man who gave her his all as the devil incarnate."

{The Rainbo Gardens Auditorium, Chicago, February 1925.}

The prosecutor sounded resigned:

"You can't convict a woman--a good-looking woman--of killing a man." . . . He spoke, thoughtfully:

"The promiscuous killing of men by women should be stopped--but it can't be done without the assistance of juries."

That's Cook County prosecutor Lloyd Heth speaking in the late summer of 1921 about Mrs. Cora Isabelle Orthwein, whom he'd just failed to convict of murdering her brutal drunk of a lover, Goodyear exec Herbert Ziegler. The sordid story is just one of many in Michael Lesy's Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the 1920s (2007), which I've been slowly making my way through since it was published a year ago.

Despite my enjoyment and appreciation of his work, Lesy's not a writer I can read at length: when I read more than a chapter or two at a time, his highly affected, choppy, hardboiled deadpan can begin to wear, making me less tolerant of the occasional passage where it doesn't quite work:

Sackcloth and ashes might have been a useful costume for Cora to have worn when she appeared, under guard, at Coroner Hoffman's inquest. The pleasure produced by the misfortunes of privileged people--who turn out to be as foolish, helpless, and sad as everyone else--guaranteed that whatever Cora did and didn't do, said and didn't say at the inquest would be closely watched.

But consumed in the proper dosages, Lesy's accounts of the seedy nexus of casual violence, newspaper sensationalism, and the ravages of love and liquor in a gangsters' paradise can rise above their inherent voyeurism and take on the force of tragedy. His tales are at their best when they draw most heavily on firsthand testimony; hearing the story in the voices of the time renders it both more strange and more intimate.


{The Green Mill Gardens, Chicago, 1915.}

The story of Mr. Ziegler and Mrs. Orthwein alone offers plenty of examples. The doomed philanderer, who spent the first half of the last night of his life pickling himself at the Rainbo Gardens, was said by a waiter at the nearby Green Mill to be full of extravagant nervous energy when he arrived there later, so wild that he danced without a partner:

Mr. Ziegler danced alone near his table; he danced the shimmy alone.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Orthweig was doing some drinking of her own, after fleeing Ziegler for her apartment:

I drank gin 'til I could drink no more. It fired me, inflamed me, made me crazy. I didn't know what I was doing.

And from the police report, Lesy plucks Mrs. Orthwein's first statement on being discovered near the body:

Police found Cora, sitting on the bench of her baby grand piano, eyes closed, swaying from side to side. "I shot him," she said. Her clothes were bloody. "I loved him and I killed him. It was all I could do."

Even the words of the press can be similarly evocative, as in this summation from one of the Tribune's stories:

Booze and a woman's kisses, the swift nightlife of old, persisted-in despite the law's edicts, open brawling, gin rickeys splashed in the faces of angry quarrelers . . . .

Though Lesy eschews the more clinical approach taken by William Roughead in his classic accounts of sensational Scottish murders, the effect is not dissimilar: to bring these acts of violence close to us and remind us that, regardless of how passing strange these people may still seem, ultimately the distance between their fates and ours can be as narrow as a knife blade--and that what we on a good day ascribe to personal strength and innate rectitude can sometimes, at the end of a long, lonely winter's night, feel a lot more like the sheer luck of the draw.

Reading Simenon in an airport

I've written before about the difficulty of selecting books to carry on a trip, and yesterday I decided that I may need to add a new categorical consideration to my pre-trip book packing: I should always pack a slim and claustrophobic novel to read in case of airport delays.

The needs of an airport reader, after all, are different from those of an airplane reader. The oppressive open-endedness of an airport delay also argues for the short novel over the epic or Victorian: unlike plane reading, which is conducted in full knowledge of its end point, airport delay reading should, if the reader wishes to stay sane, inherently reinforce the idea that he and his fellow passengers will surely be leaving soon, O'Hare's vagaries and incompetencies be damned. And the more claustrophobic and involving the narrative, the better, as few places are less conducive to reading than an airport full of delayed passengers; poetry won't long survive the blither-blather of CNN, the fuckery of Fox, and the soul-sucking cell-phone addictions of business types. A perfect airport delay novel will seamlessly trade the oppressiveness of the modern lounge for its own form of oppressiveness, escaped only at the turning of the last page--at which point, if the stars have aligned, your plane will be ready.

All of which leads to my nomination of Hesperus Press and the matchless New York Review of Books Classics line as the official publishers of airport delays. All of Hesperus's titles would fit the first criterion, as would a number of the NYRB's, while both lists are thick with murky foreign settings, eerie tales, and hideous crimes conducted under cover of darkness (or, in the case of Ivy Compton-Burnett, the thinnest veneer of politeness). Now if only I can get all the Hudson News stores to agree with me, the world of the airport will be a much better--if far more sinister--place.

Yesterday, trapped by rain at La Guardia, I occupied myself with Hesperus Press's recent translation of Georges Simenon's Three Crimes (1938). Simenon has been enjoying an English-language renaissance lately through the help of both of the aforementioned presses, and Three Crimes could be the model airport delay book: it's only 125 pages long, thoroughly sordid, and just fragmented and disjointed enough to require real attention. Three Crimes tells the story of a pair of men, friends of Simenon in his youth, who later committed violent murders, one man of his wife and mistress, the other of his mistress, his mother, and his former Jesuit confessor. There is almost no plotting to the book; Simenon is far less interested in the how of a murder than in the unfathomable skein of whys that led to it. So he opens with details of the murders, then slips back into his energetically dissipated youth in Liege and his adventures--which range from teenage seductions to vague black magic--with the murderers-to-be, in search of the roots of their crimes:

Why? How? Where should one begin, since there is no beginning, nor any other link, over the years and across space, between three crimes, between five or six deaths and between a handful of the living, except for myself?

I seem to hear Danse's voice, in the strange Court of the Assizes in Liege, pounding out the words, "When I was four years old my mother took me to the countryside, and there, in a farmyard, I saw a man killing a sow, first with a hammer, and then by slitting its throat. . . . "

When he was four years old, I did not know him; I wasn't even born. What is more, I wasn't there when, forty years later, in a small house in the French countryside, he killed his mother and his mistress in exactly the same way he had one seen a sow being killed.

. . . .

Three crimes! It's easily said. But before them?

The novel is formed around, and returns obsessively to, the fact of Simenon's once-close connection to the murderers and the question of why he, having shared with them so many of the same adventures and vices, did not like them become a killer. Ostensibly, he is glad to have been spared that outcome and is truly marveling at the workings of fate--but at least a hint of disappointment at his comparatively ordinary life seeps through. Any lifelong student of what is found creeping around under rocks is bound to wonder about the seductions of that life; it's hard not to see Simenon throughout Three Crimes imagining himself as murderer--maybe even, in the unwritten spaces between lines and pages, wondering about who his victims, unwittingly saved, might have been. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Simenon is wistful about that road less traveled by, but his mind does turn regularly in that direction:

I belonged to the most respectable newspaper in the town and I was the youngest of the journalists. I still recall that, for the first official dinner that I attended, I borrowed not a dinner jacket, which I considered common, but a gray morning coat, and I am not sure if I didn't wear with it a white tie and gloves the colour of fresh butter.

Well, some time after that, during a grand lunch, which was, I think, given the title of a lunch for the Fervent City, I suddenly stood up at the table of honour, where I happened to be with my colleagues, and spoke out loudly and clearly: "I'm clearing off! It's bloody boring!"

After which there was an immense void. When I woke up I was in my bed, with a heavy head thumping like a drum. A little later I found my mother sobbing and my brother looking at me in horror.

"What's happened?" I asked in a casual tone.

"Don't you know that some neighbours picked you up from the doorstep at six o'clock in the morning, and that three people were needed to carry you to your bed?"

No, I didn't know. And I examined with astonishment an enormous dagger, which had been found, it seemed, in the pocket of my gabardine.

"What have you done?"

How did I know? They could have declared that I had killed someone and I would have believed it.

But for all its probing of the psychological and social roots of murder, Three Crimes is at its best in its scenes, like that one, of Simenon's youthful escapades, sordid and reckless, which he retails with verve and relish. He tells in detail what he learns about what happened during that "immense void," for example:

And I learned that I had arrived at the newspaper office, without my hat, and with a broken walking stick in my hand, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and that I vomited with all my might. The boss took care of me and tried to make me drink some hot coffee, in the usual way. But what is worse than that I hurled the coffee at his head, yelling, "You're a great coward and you betrayed me! That's exactly what you are! I know what I'm saying!"

Now [the next day] he just waits for me, as is only right. He starts by firing me. Then he calls me back, because he is a nice man and informs me that he will give it a try again with me, but that I won't be sent to banquets any more.

At this point, a colleague rings me up.

"Are you better? Did you find your dancing girl?"

"My dancing girl?"

"It would be a good idea to drop by the Trianon to apologise . . . "

In his ability to wed late-night stories of drink and dissipation with the closely observed details of grotesque crimes, Simenon comes across as a sort of unholy mix of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Powell, William Roughead, and Michael Lesy. Which, now that I think about it, would also serve as a good description of Luc Sante, whose article about Simenon in the current issue of Bookforum is a good place to learn more about Simenon and his four-hundred-book oeuvre.

[By the way, both Hesperus and the NYRB Classics have blogs that are worth checking out.]