THE OLD RELIGION
By David Mamet, The Free Press, 194 pages, $24
David Mamet’s historical novella “The Old Religion” crackles with intelligence and compels the reader to sit forward and pay close attention, to catch-as in Mamet’s plays-not only what is said but what is unsaid, to decipher the innuendo in the ellipses.
A historical episode-the 1915 lynching in Atlanta of a middle-class Jewish man named Leo Frank-is transformed here: The novel opens acute new angles on certain aspects of the true story and distorts others beyond historical recognition. “The Old Religion” makes no pretense at being history; still, because the author has chosen a real man, Leo Frank, and put his photograph on the novel’s cover, and taken the events of his life as the plot, it seems fair to inquire not only into the emotional impact of the book but into what extent this fiction enlarges our understanding of the past, and to what extent it obscures it.
“The Old Religion” consists mainly of two elements: moments of Proustian delicacy and introspection, and events of mob paranoia and hysteria. An interior monologue of fastidious sensitivity opens the book and quietly fills most of its pages. The teller of these rarefied observations, the fictional Leo Frank, is slammed into a jail, yanked into a courtroom and convicted of child rape and murder. These events seem to be the answer to his implied lifelong investigation: “Am I,” he wonders, in effect, throughout the early pages, “being a Jewish factory manager, financially secure and possessing a subtle and meditative nature, am I an accepted and welcome citizen of the Deep South?” The answer comes howling back to him from every man in the street, newspaper headline, jailer, judge and jury: “No! You are not one of us!”
The real Leo Frank has captured the interest of such historians and writers as Albert Lindemann, Leonard Dinnerstein and Harry Golden; playwright Alfred Uhry (whose new musical, “Parade,” will tell Frank’s story); and now Mamet-each, of course, laying out the story as he understands it.
The facts of the case were these:
The body of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker, was found by a night watchman in the basement of National Pencil Co. in the early hours of Sunday, April 27, 1913 (Mamet wrongly writes 1915). She had been battered and slashed, then covered with dirt and sawdust, and a noose was around her neck. Police investigators quickly uncovered the fact that factory superintendent Frank–a 29-year-old engineer, a Texas-born, New York-raised graduate of Cornell University, president of his B’nai B’rith chapter and son-in-law of a prominent local German-Jewish family–had given Mary her paycheck the previous Saturday afternoon and was the last man admitting to having seen her alive.
The child’s people were tenant farmers, driven by rural poverty into Atlanta, where urban poverty and the cotton-mill slums had come as a terrible shock and disappointment. They endured filthy conditions, subsistence wages for 14-hour workdays, child labor and a social standing second to last. Who was responsible for this misery? Who, indeed, was the general sentiment, if not Yankees, capitalists and Jews? Leo Frank was all three.
An obvious suspect in the murder case, Jim Conley, the factory’s janitor, became the prosecution’s chief witness, willingly manufacturing all kinds of self-contradictory accounts of what he had seen Frank do. Conley–posthumously identified in 1982 by one-time office boy Alonzo Mann, who claimed he saw the janitor carry Mary’s corpse to the basement–almost certainly killed the girl (Frank was pardoned posthumously in 1986). But the mobs in the streets seemed to hunger for a more cosmic justice than the lynching of yet another black man (Conley) would satisfy. Leo Frank–representative of all carpetbagging Yankee capitalists and Jews–became the short answer to a complex question about poverty and misery, the true answer to which lay in antebellum, even Colonial, economic and social arrangements.
Ten thousand people visited the morgue to view Mary’s body. The daily newspapers leapt upon the crime with an indecent, voyeuristic sensationalism familiar to late-20th-Century trial-watchers. The public’s appetite for lurid details was boundless; newspaper circulations and political careers skyrocketed with slanderous reports of the crime. News accounts of the trial referred to the defendant as “the monster” and “the strangler.” On slow news days, writers invented fantastic stories: that Frank had another wife in Brooklyn, that Frank had killed another wife in Brooklyn, that he was a sexual pervert given to pulling innocent girls off trams, that he was “built” differently than other men.
Every day for a month, the jurors traveled to and from the courthouse through the mobbed streets, hearing shouts demanding Frank’s death. After four hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Three thousand people in the streets outside the courthouse went berserk rejoicing. The trial judge sentenced Frank to hang on June 22, 1915.
In Mamet’s novella, all historical complexity is stripped away. Factory workers, the urban poor, demagogues, politicians, newspaper editors, local and out-of-town supporters, defense lawyers and child workers have been deleted, leaving on the stage, as it were, just two entities, one sophisticated, one simple-minded: the Jew and the Mob. Leo Frank becomes, for Mamet, the Wandering Jew, the permanent outsider.
In his unsuccessful try at assimilation, Mamet’s Leo Frank is like the prototypical German Jew two decades later, one willing to forego history, tradition and faith in exchange for social acceptance, who then is pursued by the baying mob back into acknowledgment of tribal identity. Mamet’s Frank has contemporary resonance as well: For thousands of secular, unaffiliated American Jews, the strongest statement of Jewish identity they feel able to make is, “Under Hitler, I would have been considered a Jew.”
There is brilliance in Mamet’s early chapters, in his portrayal of Frank as a man so uncomfortable in his own skin, in his own house and back yard, that he must endlessly convince himself of his right to enjoy the simplest pleasures: a gaze at the moon, a puff on a cigar. His interior monologue is a ceaseless soliloquy on the premise that his enjoyment of these human entitlements will not, or ought not, offend the gentiles. You feel Frank’s yearning not to be disapproved of.
The portrait of this bloodless, passionless, fearful man, terrified of making a misstep or miscalculation, is compelling and powerful. He may represent to Mamet the Jew torn from his ancestral roots, drained of religious and national lifeblood, but so well-conceived is this tentative creature that he may stand for any timid exotic set down in a bustling world, surrounded by boisterous citizens full of their own purposes, whose language and pursuits are indecipherable to him.
That this is the man accused by the authorities of a crime of unthinking animal lust, accused of having uncontrollable sexual proclivities, is rendered as absurd as it must have felt to Frank in real life. It is inconceivable that this “nervous Nelly” could have raped and murdered a child.
This very believable early-20th-Century Leo Frank becomes, in jail, disembodied and abstract and very modern in his musing. Here the divergence from historical reality becomes more problematic and, at times, objectionable. Mamet’s Frank evolves in jail from an eagerly assimilating businessman into a person of acute and painful sensibility, one who muses, “How can those who are not Jews understand Jews?” He turns to a rabbi for guidance out of his spiritual abyss and seems to come to an understanding and acceptance of himself as a Jew who will be hounded unto death by the Others, by Them, by the Christians. It is the denouement of the “under-Hitler-I-would-have-been-considered-a-Jew” line of thinking: Frank, repulsed by Christian society and condemned to die, is now, for Mamet, really a Jew.
Early in the book, it seems to be Mamet’s intention to imaginatively recreate a historical figure, to bring to light the consciousness that may have been his. In the later chapters, this endeavor is abandoned, and we have instead a modern meditation on the fate of Jews tormented by Christian society, as if Leo Frank has risen out of his being for a long look backward and forward across the centuries. If Mamet had let him remain his own nervous self, readers well may have taken that long grim look on their own.
Prison conversions are a well-known phenomenon, and it makes sense that Frank–captured more for his Jewishness than for any crime–might have taken a closer look at the Judaism that branded him. But the historical record indicates a man who was trying to cope on a day-to-day basis, rather than one falling through an existential abyss. The real Frank’s letters home from jail, according to Dinnerstein, read like a child’s letters home from summer camp. In them he asks for pajamas, toothpaste, Lysol and Beech-Nut gum. “I am going to live,” he tells the prison doctors after he is knifed by a fellow prisoner. “I must live. I must vindicate myself.” He appears, from this great distance, to have tried to handle each day and each hurdle in a practical fashion, while working with his lawyers toward acquittal. Mamet’s Frank, on the other hand, abandons all illusion that American democracy eventually will work for him: “He was The Jew, and that was the end of it.”
While the Leo Frank of Mamet’s early chapters seems quite alive and believable, the Frank of the later chapters seems as much Mamet as Frank. While one imagines this gifted, late-20th-Century writer asking, in the first half of the book, “What would it have been like for Frank?” the question now seems to have become, “What would it have been like for me?”
As Mamet’s Frank evolves into a far-seeing, eternal Jewish victim, the gentiles around him evolve, in his mind, into the archetypal enemy. Far now from wanting to join them, to be liked by them, to have them not disapprove of him–far from the man who barely thought in terms of “Christians” before–Frank’s thoughts now are filled with pondering their cruelty. “He thought he saw pictured before him the courtroom, and the faces of the reporters, transfixed in perfect completion. Perfect in their happiness. . . . `You swine,’ he thought. `You Christians.’ “
But it was a Christian governor who tried to save Frank’s life. In fact, Georgia Gov. John M. Slaton acted with considerable heroism: Four days from the end of his term as governor, and the favorite to win a U.S. Senate seat in the next election, Slaton might simply have avoided the political hot potato when it landed on his desk in the form of Frank’s plea for clemency. Instead, he invited arguments by the defense lawyers and the prosecutors, he visited the pencil factory himself, and he studied the volumes of court proceedings and letters. One letter Slaton received was from the trial judge (a Christian), who pleaded with the governor to rectify the judge’s error in having sentenced Frank to die. The evidence struck Slaton as strongly incriminating Conley, the janitor. Believing in Frank’s innocence, Slaton commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, thinking first to spare Frank’s life so the case might later be reopened.
Mobs burned Slaton in effigy all over the state, and in Atlanta, crowds armed with guns and dynamite marched on the governor’s mansion. Slaton declared martial law and called out the state militia. The crisis lasted a week, until after Slaton’s successor was inaugurated; then Slaton left the state for extended travels, his political life over. Vigilantes broke into the state prison, kidnapped Frank and hung him on Aug. 17, 1915.
The exclusion of Slaton’s dramatic story–and its replacement by the smaller cast consisting of the Jew and the Mob–seems a loss, an oversimplification, an avoidance of historical complexity and moral ambiguity, surprising in an author not known for avoiding complexity and ambiguity in his work.
A novelist is free to choose one vein out of the many that make up a complicated historical event and mine it deeply. This is what Mamet has done. The result, while a partly ahistorical confection, is nonetheless gripping, intelligent, deft and bitter.
