The Warriors (25 page)

I, through the intermediation of several friends who worked in probation and parole, contacted some gang members and began to interview them. My interviews didn't go well. I began to feel that I was being told what the gang-members thought I wanted to hear; a common phenomenon anthropologists and social workers faced. I had to find some way to observe them without being observed myself; in short, to spy. (As I said above, all sociologists and anthropologists are spies.) My solution was to hire a small, beat-up panel truck, punch little holes in the sides, park the truck on the gangs' turf during the early morning, get in the truck, and just watch and listen. I was trying to capture the jargon, the rhythms of speech, the body English (or is it
ganglish
?), and so forth, if I could. (Even as I was trying to practice what Keats called negative capability, the well-known and omnipresent Heisenberg effect was always operative; indeterminacy was part of mine and everyone's mind.)

Gangs (of the time I was writing about) were quite different than the gangs of today. For one thing, automobiles were not available to them. For another, there were very few guns around. The gangs were neighborhood-bound and quite ignorant of the city outside their own territories; indeed, they were frightened of strange turf. Whatever contacts, alliances, conflicts, and permissions to travel through alien lands belonging to other gangs took place were conducted through their leaders. They practiced diplomacy from gang to gang, albeit in crude language, but, formally, just like the diplomacy conducted by nations. It's fascinating to see these social forms spring up among the “ignorant” “lower” social strata; no
readers of Kissinger they . . . and yet they had the same sophisticated understanding.

Economically the gangs of those times were totally marginal. They had just about no entreé into organized crime. The very need to form gangs was a product of their irrelevance. This situation has changed enormously, fueled by the drug trade, which brings neighborhood localities into contact with the global economy, requiring new, sophisticated modes of understanding and operation. And, as with all trade conflicts over control of markets from time immemorial, disputes require heavy weaponry, which is easily available.

I read in the sketchy history of gangs (after all, they don't leave records); they were a universal phenomenon; even ancient Athens had its youth gangs. Gangs bud off from the so-called main body of society. This, it seems to me, is an almost natural, even bioevolutionary happening, even now, in these days, as a protest, conscious or unconscious, against the homogenization of globalization. The structure of the street gangs tended to be like Latin American dictatorships in which the pragmatic and formal were melded into an amalgam of the military, tribal, and familial . . . a sort of organism. Many gangs rejected their own families and made their own. Since the laws of society around them did not apply in the streets, leadership was determined by force and/or cunning: any leader's reign was always chancy. And yet these leadership maneuverings and fights were like the struggles for control on the national and international level. If one looks closely at
any
government structure, from the so-called democratic—as in our own country—to the so-called totalitarian, one sees constant internecine warfare, usually referred to as bureaucratic infighting. After all, how many routes to power are there? As it was and is with “legitimate” governments, so it was, and is, with the gangs. Violence was the final arbiter.

I decided to use my own variant of this tripartite structure in my
book. I added something that, at first glance, seemed alien. I had been reading the classic Chinese novel called
At Water Margin
(incidentally, one of Mao's favorite books, although I didn't know that at the time). This novel tells the story of a band of heroes, some of whom are criminals, others revolutionary. They combine to overthrow the emperor. What interested me about the book was the combination of ritual language, the use of overpolite honorifics (this unworthy second son honors his elder brother, or uncle . . . etc.), as well as the horrific violence with which they did one another in. I made my subject gang use this familial mode of address.

When I had assembled my material, I had to decide on my structure. At first I laid out the story chronologically. Then I decided that it didn't work. I then began on a note of suspense and puzzlement . . . the hook, so to speak. After the grand meeting—although the reader doesn't know this yet—is broken up by the police, our subject gang has fled. We meet them huddled in Woodlawn Cemetery. We then flash back to the beginning and lead up to the events just before we meet our gang . . . and then proceed forward. My choice of order was the well-known and ancient
in medias res
strategy. In fact, every story in the world begins this way, including the folk tale of the cosmic Big Bang that putatively starts the universe. Something always comes before. And at some point in any story, the what-came-before is either taken for granted and understood by the audience, or must be explained. Let me note in passing that there is no problem with the flashback in literature but it causes trouble in films.

The meeting itself was modeled after the great, Lucifer-led council, the pandemonium—all demons—in
Paradise Lost,
about another failed revolt (the gangs in my book were given names from Milton's epic . . . Thrones, Dominations, etc.). I was connecting Ismael Rivera to Lucifer, who also made his speech in the darkness of hell. What I meant to imply—the subtext, as it were—was that my gang, after its revolt against the “divine” order of things, has
fallen to the lowest possible depths and must “ascend” to their homeland (think
Divine Comedy
or Zola's
Germinal).
This reflected the traditional myth/ritual of the descent into hell and the ascent to a kind of heaven, which turns out to be miserable.

In planning, I employed a corporate management tool called PERT . . . Program Evaluation and Review Technique. Assembling a business enterprise or a story requires the same kind of planning. I made a grid. On the top of the grid, in each box, I placed the time plus each step of the plot. On the side of the grid I placed various things, which would serve as running, extended metaphors. I followed the progress of these things through the long night. . . such as the gradual disintegration of a shoe, the change in the weather, and so forth. These things also mirrored the psychic state of the characters as they were on their “long march” from the Bronx to Coney Island.

Now although this methodology seems very mechanical, very, how should I put it, anticreative (inspirational), at the same time I believed that one should prepare the ground carefully so as to always be ready to encounter the unexpected that is only revealed as the writing continues . . . much like an athlete practices in order to be ready for the contingent that is always part of life, as it is, if the writer is not too rigid, in the act of writing. Many times I have said to myself something like, “Oh, that's what he, or she, is like.”

Since it was to be an attempted revolution, I chose that most patriotic of all days, July Fourth. Perhaps this choice of revolution and date reflected my relation to this country in which I was born . . . a fundamental hostility that is more than political, also part of my psychology. (And yet, at the time of the writing I was not consciously political because, in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, I became apolitical . . . until the later '60s. My
conscious
involvement with politics came
after
writing
The Warriors.

Fertig
was still circulating and being rejected as I was writing my
second book. However, unknown to me, there had been editors who had been in different publishing houses who had read it and wanted to take it on but didn't have the clout to do so. As they changed jobs, they had come together at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, into a sort of critical mass. They read
The Warriors
and agreed to publish it. I was to work with one of them who was enthusiastic about my book.

Now that my book was to be published, perhaps my other book,
Fertig
—I thought of it as the more serious work—would be taken on, depending, of course, on the success of
The Warriors.
I was not alarmed when my editor said that he thought that a few editorial changes should be made. However, when I got the manuscript back, there were at least five to ten changes per page. Was this the book the editor liked so much? The fight began.

Consider my state of mind. I had been submitting works for years; my work had been praised but no editor had taken it on. If I resisted the changes, would I be jeopardizing publication? And yet I fought, page by page, even including the number of times the word “fuck” occurred. (The editing process took place in 1963–64, before the great linguistic, sexual, and political climacteric of the '60s.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
had been shocking; publishing houses censored through the editorial process.)

In addition, we had a very big quarrel over the last chapter of the book. My protagonist, Hinton, comes home after a night of adventure and terror. As he walks through his apartment, he passes a bed where one of his half brothers is sleeping with one of his half sisters (from three fathers); the description was quite casual . . . almost, as it were, in passing; no big deal. My outraged editor asked how I could violate that great taboo, common to all societies, oh dreaded word and worse, act, incest (he forgot, of course, Egypt, and even Corinth—an aside; Oedipus was “from” Corinth—and other cultures)? I pointed out that in the first place, the couple was sleeping together, not fucking. Space was limited. But in the second
place, incest was, in my experience, not unusual among my clients. (This was an elitist assumption on my part. I was wrong. Incest is also common in middle-class families, to say nothing of upper-class families.) I refused to change it. My editor kept saying, “Well, Sol, if you want to ruin your own book . . .” Very scary. I persisted. The editor did, in part, prevail; one “fuck” was excised. The book remained as I had submitted it.

My editor did serve one useful, indeed vital, function: he chose the introductory quotes from Xenephon. At the time I couldn't realize how important these quotes were to the making of the reputation of the book. Without these quotes, how would anyone know about its classical parallel. (If one didn't know about the parallel between
Ulysses
and the
Odyssey,
would it have gotten on the college reading lists?)

Despite the fact that the printing was small, surprisingly
The Warriors
got national attention. What was more surprising was that so many people had even decided to review what might have been just another book about “juvenile delinquents.” The review in
The Nation
was favorable. The critic had one important reservation; he thought that the analogy to
The Anabasis
was perhaps a little too forced, even contemptuous of one of the Greek classics. After all, this was Greek civilization I was talking about. Well, at least the reviewer had not only heard about
The Anabasis
but had actually read it. What, I thought, were those mercenaries (kids, really) but the result of overpopulation whereas, in this country (this was before the escalation in Vietnam), there was no use for our indigenous poor young people. And after all, were the Greeks really so noble?

I determined that my next novel (actually the previous one,
Fertig)
would go to another publisher. I later found out that an important stockholder in Holt was so incensed by the book's content that he wanted it removed from the market.

The Warriors
was picked up and published in England and, of all
places, Japan, which, of course, did not have these problems . . . or so I thought.

And now a period of hiatus came once again. While my reputation was established and reinforced by the publication of
Fertig,
I thought that was the end of
The Warriors.
What I didn't know was that several movie producers had considered making the book into a movie, among them, Otto Preminger, of all people. I ran into another producer who was interested in the book. He told me how much he liked the book. But the only thing that bothered him was that he—a man undergoing psychoanalysis—couldn't understand the psychology of the kids. I didn't tell him that I didn't understand them either.

The years passed; I wrote other books. Then, 1976—or 1977, I don't remember exactly—I got an offer from a small, independent filmmaker to make a movie out of
The Warriors.
He told me that he had always loved the book and had long wanted to produce it. He said he could do it almost exactly as it had been written. I was excited. However, at the very last moment, in fact the day before signing, my agent received an offer for the rights to the novel offered by a Hollywood producer, Lawrence Gordon. The movie would be directed by Walter Hill. I agreed to the more lucrative offer. I would get more money but more important, perhaps my book would be republished.

What I didn't know was that, at the time, a kind of collective madness had seized Hollywood; a number of gang movies were scheduled to be made at the same time by different studios. As it would turn out, the first to make it to the screen would be
The Warriors.

After the signing, months went by; I heard nothing. Then one spring day I read in the newspapers that Lawrence Gordon and Walter Hill had come to New York to film the movie. The newspaper article happened to mention the name of the hotel where Gordon was staying. I wanted to see some of the filming. On an
impulse, I telephoned the hotel and asked for Gordon's room. I introduced myself, giving my name. He was puzzled; he didn't know who I was. I told him I was the author of
The Warriors.
Immediately, to my surprise, Gordon went into what seemed like a canned rap to the outraged author who feels that his sacred work of art is about to be philistinized. Even worse, the author might ask for some part in the production of the movie. Gordon said that this was to be an action movie, an adventure story, and that a movie was different from a novel. What this
spiel
reflected was the traditional conflict between writers on the one hand and actors, directors, producers, and studios on the other.