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Volume 9, Number 2 (1985) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum THE LAWYER AS NARRATOR IN WILLIAM KENNEDY'S LEGS* STEPHEN WHITTAKER Department of English, University of Scranton death of the notorious racketeer and convicted bootlegger, Jack Diamond, as written by his attorney, Marcus Gorman, some forty years after unknown assailants murdered this "founder of the first truly modern gang" (p.13) on the evening of Friday, 18 December, 1931. Gorman weaves his narrative out of his own recollections and those of others and from stories told him at the time of the events by various of Diamond's associates. The employment of the lawyer as narrator solved an obvious technical problem for Kennedy but simultaneously posed new ones. Kennedy's willingness to explore these new problems within the text results in some of the most important features of Gorman's narrative. Consider Kennedy's dilemma. He needed for Legs a narrator who could know all the relevant facts about Jack Diamond. But the first person narrative was precluded by the author's additional desire that the psyche of the renowned criminal remain an enigma. Marcus, supposedly Jack Diamond's lawyer from midsummer of 1930 on, who was, in fact, Daniel H. Prior, an Albany lawyer whose career in criminal law - like that of fictional Marcus Gorman - gained national attention during his association with Diamond, seems an ideal solution to a simple technical problem confronted by Kennedy in setting up the story. Only Diamond's lawyer could have access to so much as it happened; only his lawyer would be subject to the combination of pressures which finally seduced Gorman into ambivalent admiration of his client. But the peculiarly forensic nature of the lawyer's approach to narration (the process of making a story out of facts) becomes an important feature of the book. That is, Kennedy makes the reader's dependence upon the lawyer as narrator a predominant characteristic of the book and the reader's problem becomes, like a juror's, the problem of choosing among competing stories, or narrations, built out of more or less the same facts. As if the distance of his retrospect freed Gorman from both the courtroom's demand for a single construction of the f acts and the attorney-client relation's requirement of discretion, he offers us numerous interpretations of the events of Jack Diamond's life. And the culling and balancing of competing interpretations becomes a central theme and activity of the narrative, even to the point of insistence that Diamond himself saw his life as an attempt to mediate conflicting versions of himself. Thus reader, narrator, and character all engage in the same process. The text raises problems and gives these problems a peculiarly forensic cast. What trial lawyers do is explore the various discrete narrations that can be made out of the isolated facts. In the process of narration intent enters the world of fact. We understand the facts to fit together in a certain way for a reason. A story is facts plus motives. The motives may remain implicit, or even ambiguous, but they distinguish a story from mere facts. So the central question of narration, of making a story of the facts, is always one of motive. Why has this story been made, and not another, one may always demand. The answer may be, to get my client off, because I think it is true, or even, because the facts are less painful to me if I understand them this way. This discovery of motive in narration and of the fact that humans are constantly narrating their experience has made it a given of twentieth century fiction that a tale tends to be as much about its teller as about its apparent subject. And Legs is as much a portrait of lawyer Marcus Gorman, its narrator, as it is that narrator's portrait of John Thomas (aka Jack, aka Legs) Diamond. We know that Gorman has always been a compelling story teller. In fact, his remarkable off the cuff analysis of Al Jolson's life first gains Gorman Diamond's respect. But as if an exercise in jurisprudential virtuosity, in Legs, Marcus Gorman presents to us, as it were, several Jack Diamonds. We see the heinous criminal of the news reports but also the timely benefactor of his rural neighbors. We hear the mindless snarl of a vicious animal as well as the bon mots of an amazingly popular man who would "talk to anybody about anything, anytime"(223). Marcus Gorman, a man accustomed by temperament and profession to the common inconclusiveness of evidence, has set for himself the formidable task of making his presumably skeptical reader believe in a man who "was alive in a way I was not"(36) and about whom accuracy "wasn't possible"(310). At times in the text Gorman actually compares Diamond to such heroic figures as Finn McCool, Jesse James, Gargantua, and Prometheus. In order to distinguish himself from ordinary idolizers of Jack Diamond, Gorman must show that he recognizes the frailties of appeals to sentiment, to grandeur, and to the ideal. If we are to be able to share the lawyer's heroic picture of Diamond, we must not think that such distortions cloud Gorman's vision. So he weaves such faulty views of Diamond into his text and undercuts them with various kinds of irony, one of the lawyer's and the narrator's most reliable weapons. Three examples will serve to suggest the kind of portrait Gorman does not intend: the Nun's tale, Flossie's litany, and the German's story. Marcus Gorman tells us in some detail of how he won an acquittal on charges of kidnapping and assault in Jack Diamond's second trial in Troy, New York. (This acquittal came just hours before Diamond's murder). Gorman speaks proudly of "the major weapon of the defense--my voice,"(282) which weapon is, lest we forget, also the substance of our text. The prosecutor has called Diamond a "figure of unmitigated evil" and a "conscience less devil"(283). Gorman counters, with indignation, that he had not intended to tell the jury of an incident which had occurred earlier in the courtroom but which now he must reveal. He tells them of "a little old Catholic nun" who came to see the man who was once a boy at her knee. JackieGorman then tells the jurors of the nun's assurances to him of young Jackie's many pieties and of her certainty, as one who teaches children and who knows in fact boys "who delight in drowning puppies," that having seen Jack Diamond's eyes in this room, she is "as certain as I am of God's love that whatever on earth that man may have done, he is not an evil man"(284). Later Diamond asks Gorman concerning the courthouse regular upon whom this oratorical fantasy is based, "Does she really know anything about me?" Gorman writes: I looked at my client, astounded.The lawyer underscores for his client and for his reader the outrageous sentimentality of the story and that it may be recognized thereby as a fabrication. The irony of the situation, though initially lost on Diamond, cannot escape the reader. We are warned against sentimental versions of Jack Diamond, and more specifically, against an egregiously sentimental story invented by our narrator. Except for a last imagining of Diamond dead, Gorman closes his story where he opened it, sitting on a bar stool with a few survivors of a by-gone era and telling Jack's tale again. With a litany of attributions to Jack that stretches beyond the exaggerations of the others into a realm of grotesque and hilarious hyperbole, Flossie, the now aged prostitute, punctuates Packy Delaney's and Tipper Kelly's story of a white poodle (or was it a black and white bull terrier) that Jack Diamond had taught to do tricks. She begins by asserting that the dog (a tan collie by her reckoning) "could count to fifty-two and do subtraction". As the others struggle to correct her account she says, "Jack could turn on the electric light sometimes, just by snapping his fingers" and "Jack could run right up the wall and half way across the ceiling when he got a good running start," that "Jack could outrun a rabbit," and finally that "Jack could tie both his shoes at once"(31 1). Her drunken and disconnected attempts to describe Diamond via these exaggerations move toward pathos and the absurd, and the reader cannot miss the irony (unintended by Flossie, to be sure) of such a portrait. It is as if Jack Diamond were three different dogs at once. Weissberg, a young playwright (and the nephew of Diamond's lawyer in Germany, Schwarzkopf) attempted the third false-portrait of Diamond. Weissberg had written a well-received play about burglars, pimps, andHalf drunk, the German writer declares his desire to come to America and live with Diamond in order to write a play about his life. Weissberg's declaration reeks of posture and bravado. He idealizes jack Diamond's life: . . . there are similarities among the great artist, the great barriers (and what is morality to the whore, the artist?). InDiamon is, Weissberg assures him, "a great mad' who has "leaped all moral and social barriers," and, intoxicated by his own lush, self-aggrandizing eloquence, Weissberg concludes that: You live in the mind as well as on the street of bullets andDiamond responds to this florid sycophancy by casually firing "one shot into the grass between Weissberg's feet, which were about six inches from each other"(111). As expected, Weissberg wets himself and exits weeping. The idealizations of the would-be chronicler abruptly break against what is the common coin of Diamond's life, real violence. The third tool of the ironist, juxtaposition, underscores the folly of the German's story. To help us evaluate his portrait of Jack Diamond, Marcus Gorman helps us see what it is not, The irony which undercuts the three examples above, and which undercuts similar kinds of stories throughout Legs, assures the reader of the narrator's worldly sophistication. Here is a man not given to sentimentality, overstatement, or idealism but who none-the-less would have us believe "that Jack had a luminous quality at certain moments"(105) and that: here was a singular being in a singular land, a fusion of theGorman's rendering is of neither a crazed killer nor an idealized outlaw but rather a paradoxical man struggling somehow to balance the forces of his life in a way that would give him ease, letIt is with irony that Gorman asks the rhetorical: "How does a mythic figure ask a lady to dance?"(243). But in fact Jack Diamond emerges as a kind of mythic hero in Gorman's narrative, as a larger than life creature embodying the conflict of disparate qualities. Gorman even opens and closes his story by doubting that Jack is "really" dead, and such doubt is the sure earmark of the mythic hero. Kennedy perhaps based this detail on the actual New York Times report (Saturday, 19 December, 1931: Late City Edition, page 1) that: One of the killers, as he pounded down the stairs after his In any case, Gorman labors at an ambivalent agenda. He wishes to convey to us that this gangster was a sort of mythic hero. But he wishes also to demonstrate his own consciousness of the follies of the three attitudes ironized above. This has the obvious benefit of demonstrating the narrator's skepticism, which in turn should encourage the reader's credulity. But Gorman's motives are more complex than that. Several times in the course of Legs, Marcus Gorman recounts his assuring Jack Diamond and others that "I get paid for what I do"(260). But in the course of his association with Diamond, Gorman's much asserted impersonal motive decays. Gorman sacrifices a promising political career and a secure place in Albany society and, though his prospects as a criminal lawyer blossom because of his notoriety as Legs Diamond's mouthpiece, Gorman's values change and at last even his legal service to Diamond goes unpaid. Gorman's experiences with Jack precipitate an ethical crisis for himself: The wiping away of my political future, however casually I'dMuch of Gorman's motive in Legs is desire to justify his own actions. The lawyer, seduced by the glamour of his client, produces a final defense of that client that is freighted with self apology. The inevitable ambivalence of Gorman's narration of the facts about his association with Diamond interferes with our ability to see Diamond as heroic. Gorman's sophisticated use of irony, designed to overcome our skepticism about Diamond, necessarily increases our skepticism about Gorman and, as a result, the very text of his story. Gorman the lawyer exults in his own "splendid rhetoric"(251). He flaunts his ability to manipulate juries and his ability as a narrator both..to present and to undercut ironically various narrations of the facts. He teaches us to doubt, to suspect motives, and we finally suspect his and so also his evaluation of Jack Diamond. The text becomes a curiously detached document, curiously hermeneutical, curiously resistant to a single interpretation. The voice which teaches us to doubt voices is finally all we have of evidence. And it claims to be the voice of a man who "liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history"(15). Everything we know we know because Gorman says it, either explicitly or implicitly. To interpret we must take the narrator apart and reanalyze the facts of the case in the light of what we take to be his motives. But even the facts are his, even our reasons to doubt him. So either the criminal Jack Diamond was genuinely heroic (whatever that means in the appropriate psychological jargon) or his lawyer, Marcus Gorman, is a guilt-ridden fool. The text leaves us to deliberate this dilemma. With little hope of a resolution, we, like Marcus and like Jack, attempt to balance our own either/or. In Legs William Kennedy structures a narrative in the reading of which we begin to doubt the very substance of the narrative. The technique lawyer-narrator Marcus Gorman uses to win our sympathy for his client and friend, Jack Diamond, casts this shadow of doubt. Gorman's virtuosity at narration (this virtuosity itself designed to win our sympathy for a particular view of Diamond) inadvertently leads us first to see that all attempts to make stories out of facts depend on motives, second, to question Gorman's motives, and third, to suspect even the facts. Gorman's ambition, to make us see Diamond as a sort of hero, leads directly to the narrative's problematic nature. The text makes us self-conscious readers. The various elements of Kennedy's novel are not new. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby we are led to see an American gangster as an almost Byronic hero. In Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky investigates the conflicted psyche of the law student turned murderer, Raskolnikov. As does Legs, Crime and Punishment purports to be an attempt to determine the facts and accurately divine a motive, with the proviso that such motive may of course be ambivalent. These are not analyses of particular crimes, though many are analyzed along the way. These are attempts to investigate the criminal mind. The unnamed narrator of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" most resembles Marcus Gorman. Melville's narrator is also a lawyer and his forensically scrupulous (if troubled) observation of his scrivener makes possible both our perception in Bartleby of some ineffable combination of human traits and our belief that Bartleby exemplifies a mysterious, almost tragic conflict. Like Melville's narrator, Kennedy's would have us see his subject as the embodiment of a mysterious conflict, this time, though surely tragic, also somehow mythic. But the unique combination of these well established narrative elements in Legs produces a very different kind of story. The fictional criminal lawyer who suspected "a pattern hovering over our relationship"(162) has woven for us a tale of remarkable complexity which at last questions even its own reality. The lawyer is too slick. And so Kennedy has made the uneasiness many feel when faced with such fictionalized histories as Legs an integral part of his novel. * Parenthetical references in this essay are to the Penguin edition of Legs (Penguin Books: New York, 1983). The third volume of the cycle of novels initiated by Legs, Ironweed, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. |
