The Interpretation Of Murder (49 page)

    Charles Hugel served eighteen months
for accepting a bribe and falsifying evidence. He slept badly in prison, on
some nights not at all, contracting nervous illnesses from which he never
recovered.

    One fine summer day in 1913, Harry
Thaw walked out the front door of the Matteawan State Hospital for the
Criminally Insane, stepped into a waiting car, and rode off to Canada. He was
captured there and extradited back to New York, where he stood trial for
escape. The prosecution was unwise. To convict Thaw, the prosecutor had to
convince the jury that he was sane at the time of the escape, but if the jury
found him sane, he had a legal right to escape, because a sane man cannot
lawfully be confined in a lunatic asylum. By the end of the proceedings, Thaw
had obtained a complete and unconditional release. Nine years later, he
horsewhipped a young man and was incarcerated again.

    Chong Sing was released from custody
on September 9, 1909, his earlier confession deemed to have been the product of
coercion. No charges were brought against him. Despite an international
manhunt, William Leon was never found.

    George McClellan did not run in the
mayoral election of 1909 and never held elected office again. But he made good
on his pledge to complete the Manhattan Bridge if it was the last thing he did
in office. In those days, a mayor's term ended on the last day of the calendar
year. On December 31, 1909, McClellan cut the ribbon on the Manhattan Bridge,
opening it to traffic.

    Jimmy Littlemore was officially
promoted to lieutenant on September 15, 1909. He and Betty were married just
before Christmas. Greta was one of the guests, accompanied by her baby.

    Ernest Jones never learned of Freud's
involvement in the investigation of the crimes of George and Clara Banwell.
Freud did not want his role, such as it was, made public, and he did not trust
Jones to keep the secret. Jones did, however, hear all about the Charaka
society. He was especially taken with their signet ring. He resolved to have
such a ring made for Freud's genuinely loyal followers, to identify themselves
to one another wherever they should go. Jung, needless to say, did not get one.

    Freud himself never took the
satisfaction one would have expected from the success of psychoanalysis in this
country. Mystifying his colleagues, he called Smith Ely Jelliffe a criminal.
His ideas might be famous in America, he said, but they were not understood.
'My suspicion of America,' Freud confided to a friend toward the end of his
fife, 'is unconquerable.'

    The Interpretation of Murder is a
work of fiction from beginning to end, but much is based on actual fact. Sigmund
Freud did of course visit the United States in 1909, arriving aboard the
steamship George Washington with Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi on the evening
of August 29 (notwithstanding the fact that Ernest Jones's classic biography
originally gave the date as September 27, 'corrected' in later editions to the
still-erroneous August 27). Freud did stay at the Hotel Manhattan in New York
City for a week before traveling to Clark University to deliver his famous
lectures, and he did contract a kind of horror of America. While in the United
States, Freud was indeed asked to render impromptu psychoanalyses, although
never, so far as we know, by the mayor of New York City.

    The Manhattan of 1909 described in
this book was painstakingly researched. The architecture, the city streets,
high society - almost every detail, down to the color of the paneling on the
taxis, is based on fact. Errors undoubtedly remain; readers who find any are
encouraged to tell me about them at www.interpretationofmurder.com.

    I could not, however, stick to fact
on every New York detail. To begin with, a few locations had to be changed. The
main city morgue, for example, was at that time in Bellevue Hospital, on
Twenty-sixth Street, whereas I have located Coroner Hugel - a fictional
character - and his morgue downtown in an invented building. Similarly, I had
to invent the Balmoral, where Elizabeth Riverford's body is found, but
knowledgeable readers will recognize at once the real building - the Ansonia -
on which the Balmoral, including its fountain with seals cavorting within, is
based. Or again, while the Manhattan Bridge caisson is factual in most
respects, it would have been filled with concrete by September 1909, and it did
not have the pressurized debris- elimination chambers, opening onto the river,
described as 'windows' in this book. In reality, there would have been a longer
pressurized debris chute, but I needed the 'windows' for reasons I need not
explain to those who have already read the book.

    I have also moved certain historical
events backward or forward in time. A small example involves Abraham Brill's
reference to Theodore Roosevelt's 'hyphenated Americans.' History buffs will
point out that Roosevelt did not give his well-known 'hyphenated Americans'
speech until 1915. (The disparaging term was, however, already in widespread
use by 1909, and the press would have reported Roosevelt's views before 1915.
Interested readers may, for example, consult the
New York Times
of
February 17, 1912, page 3, which tells us that Ropsevelt 'excoriate[e]
hyphenated Americans' in an article he had just published in Germany.

    Brill, conscious of his German accent
throughout his life, would have been highly sensitive to this issue.) Or again,
the texts Dr Younger consults to discover the cause of Nora Acton's vision of
herself lying in her own bed are real, but several were written after 1909. On
the other hand, Detective Littlemore might indeed have read H. G.Wells's short
story describing a similar event; that story,
Under the Knife,
first
appeared around 1896.

    Another slight temporal relocation
concerns the strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where Betty is hired;
the strike did not take place until November 1909 (the famous fire occurred in
1911). Another is Mrs Fish's fictitious ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. In
reality, the 1909 social season in Manhattan would have begun later.
Incidentally, the Waldorf-Astoria described here is not the hotel we know by
the same name today, located on Park Avenue north of Grand Central Terminal.
The first Waldorf-Astoria stood on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street; it was
demolished in 1930 to make way for the Empire State Building.

    A more significant case of
time-shifting is my treatment of Jung's break with Freud, which in reality
occurred over a three-year period culminating around 1912.1 have telescoped the
relevant events and moved some of them to America even though they took place
elsewhere. Nevertheless, the scenes between Freud and Jung described in my book
- amazing as they may seem - did apparently take place. For example, a loud and
mysterious report really did interrupt the two men in the middle of an argument
about the occult (with Freud taking a skeptical position), and Jung really did
claim to have caused the noise telekinetically through what he called a
'catalytic exteriorization.' When Freud scoffed, Jung predicted an immediate
recurrence of the sound to prove his point, and, inexplicably, his words came
true. This episode took place, however, not in a room at the Hotel Manhattan in
September 1909, but rather in Freud's house in Vienna in March of that year.
Moreover, Freud twice fainted in Jung's presence, including one occasion on
August 20, 1909, the day before the voyagers set off for America. Freud's
enuretic 'mishap' in New York City was disclosed by Jung himself in 1951 -
although Jung may have invented the story to discredit Freud.

    Jung's biographers disagree about his
alleged philandering, delusions, and anti-semitism. The portrait of Jung in
this book is just that - a portrait, based on his writings, his letters, and
the conclusions reached by some, but not all, of those who have written about
him.

    Readers may wonder whether Freud and
Jung would really have expressed the views I attribute to them in
The
Interpretation of Murder.
The answer, in almost every case, is that they
did express them. Much of Freud and Jung's dialogue is drawn from their own
letters, essays and statements reported in other published sources. For
example, in my book Freud says, 'Satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably
more pleasurable than satisfying a civilized one.' Interested readers can find
the corresponding observation in Freud's 1930
Civilization and Its
Discontents,
in volume 21, page 79, of the Standard Edition of Freud's
collected works. The physical attacks, however, and the murder mystery are of
course entirely imaginary.

    As Freud aficionados will have
instantly recognized, Nora is based on Dora, the young woman described in
Freud's most controversial case history. Dora's real name was Ida Bauer; she
was not American, nor was she treated by Freud in America, although she died in
New York City in 1945. Nora is in no sense a carbon copy of Dora, but the basic
facts of Nora's predicament - the advances made on her by her father's best
friend, her father's refusal to take her side, her father's affair with this
same friend's wife, and the attraction Nora herself feels toward the wife - can
all be found in the Dora case. The Oedipal interpretation of Nora's hysteria
that Freud offers Younger in my book, including the oral component, is the
actual interpretation that Freud offered the real-life Dora.

    Mayor George B. McClellan's attempt
to wrest control of the city government from Tammany Hall is well known. Indeed,
it is even possible that McClellan would have personally supervised an
important homicide investigation in September 1909, because he had at that time
practically put the entire police department under mayoral control. On the
other hand, McClellan's interest in securing a nomination for another term is
pure speculation. Publicly, he insisted he was not running.

    Charles Loomis Dana, Bernard Sachs,
and M. Allen Starr are historical figures. They were in fact known as the
Triumvirate; all were bitter enemies of Freud and psychoanalysis. I want to
emphasize, however, that the villainous acts implicitly imputed to them here
are completely fictitious. There was no plot to derail Freud's lectures at
Clark. I have also, for dramatic purposes, exaggerated Dana's wealth and his
blood relationship to the more prominent family bearing the same last name.
Although Charles L. Dana apparently descended from the same illustrious
ancestor as the more prominent Danas, he was born in Vermont and may not even
have known his exact relationship to Charles A. Dana, the other New York Danas,
or the Boston Danas. Smith Ely Jelliffe is another historical figure whom I
have embellished. Jelliffe was not, for example, rich; nor is there any reason
to think he was a womanizer. Incidentally, while the Players Club is real, the
suggestion that prostitution went on there is pure speculation. It is the case,
however, that Jelliffe was both a chief psychiatric expert for the murderer
Harry Thaw and the publisher of Freud's first book in English - the
Selected
Papers on Hysteria,
translated by Abraham Brill. It is also the case that
Jelliffe attended meetings of the Charaka Club, the exclusive (but not secret)
society that Dana and Sachs cofounded.

    The accounts of Thaw's sadistic attacks
on his wife and other young women are taken almost verbatim from documentary
sources. For the record, Mrs Merrill's astonishing testimony was given not at
Thaw's murder trial in 1907, but at one of Thaw's subsequent sanity hearings.
Moreover, it is only an urban legend (although reported as fact countless
times) that Thaw was tried at the Jefferson Market courthouse; he was arraigned
there, but both his murder trials took place in the criminal courts building on
Centre

    Street, next to the Tombs. There is
no evidence that Thaw ever visited Mrs Merrill's establishment during the
period of his confinement in the Matteawan asylum. Given the ease with which he
escaped, however, such an absence without leave would not have been
inconceivable.