The urge to write, to be a writer, stirred inside Caryl Chessman many years before his first publication. As a child he wrote poetry, often reading his work to his mother, Hallie. He tried, as he grew older, to write short stories, and as a youth sent his grandiose efforts to magazines, without success. It was frustrating, as it is for all people who are impelled, for whatever reason, to make such efforts and receive only rejection. These literary rejections played their part in forming Chessman’s attitude toward society, for he saw around him inferior works being published constantly, and he knew that he had a talent, although he was also aware of his shortcomings as a writer. But no one took any interest in his work, partly because the people with whom he associated were, with one or two exceptions, hoodlums, dropouts, and/or hellraisers. Chessman, himself a high-school dropout, had no monopoly on the loneliness of the rejected writer. But some others, perhaps, had fewer frustrations in other spheres of their lives; thus, literary rejections loomed large—and out of proportion—for Chessman from his late teen years.
It was not only the need to express himself that drove Chessman to writing; it was also a fierce need, even a demand, for recognition: one of the driving forces in his life, as he put it in this memoir, was to be “a factor.” He knew, deep within his soul, his own worth, his own values, and he fought desperately—from birth, it would appear—to find someone, somewhere, who would recognize that worth.
With the May 1954 publication of Cell 2455, Death Row, and its subsequent critical and commercial success, Chessman found, after six years of life inside his concrete-and-steel cubicle, the recognition that he had always sought. He had followed a strange and twisting path. At last someone knew, someone cared—and there were thousands of someones to whom he had expressed himself. His first royalty statement showed that, in little more than two months, 17,852 copies had sold, as had “condensation rights” to Pageant magazine, “reprint rights” to Argosy, “German serial rights,” and “Swedish book and serial rights.” By March 1955, Cell 2455, Death Row had earned him $23,425.57 in royalties, plus $6,750 from the sale of movie rights to Columbia. Royalties and subsidiary earnings (sales to foreign publishers) brought another $8,297.13.
The tragedy of the situation lay in what apparently had to take place before his worth could be brought into proper focus. The less tragic irony of the situation is that he discovered his own “worth” for himself, through the act of writing and publishing. Perhaps Elizabeth Hardwick, in a Partisan Review essay published at the time of Chessman’s execution, captured the full flavor of his achievement: “With extraordinary energy, Chessman made, on the very edge of extinction, one of those startling efforts of personal rehabilitation, salvation of the self.”
Getting Cell 2455, Death Row ready for publication was harried and hurried. We were up against the most final of deadlines imaginable: Chessman had a date with the executioner scheduled for May 14, 1954—near the scheduled date of the book’s publication. The officials at San Quentin State Prison and the Department of Corrections were amazingly cooperative throughout this process. They placed rooms at my disposal where I could work in close harmony with Caryl as we went over the edited manuscript. Arrangements were made for speedy handling of mail, beyond the normal routine. Every advantage was given to Caryl Chessman and to the publisher in handling the unusual situation, the publication of a book by a man scheduled to die in the gas chamber.
Chessman did not want some of the changes suggested for the manuscript, but he accepted them and approved them when he had time to consider them. He desperately wanted his book to be a success, and his sense of drama made him acutely aware of the effect that success might well have upon his eventual execution. It should not be forgotten that Chessman earnestly loathed the barbaric institution of capital punishment. He hoped that his books could display its futility to the world, for few have ever known its stupidities so personally, and still fewer have ever been so capable of enlightening an apathetic public to its absurdities. Just prior to his third scheduled death date, the aforementioned May 14, 1954, Chessman told Newsweek: “I’m all ready. I’m a million miles away. It’s difficult to explain but I feel . . . nebulous.”
Having been spared then, as he would ultimately be a total of nine times, he put his fantasy about his own death in the gas chamber down on paper in the prologue to Trial by Ordeal, published in 1957:
You die alone—but watched.
It’s a ritualistic death, ugly and meaningless.
They walk you into the green, eight-sided chamber and strap you down in one of its two straight-backed metal chairs. Then they leave, sealing the door behind them. The lethal gas is generated and swirls upward, hungrily seeking your lungs. You inhale the colorless, deadly fumes. The universe disintegrates soundlessly. Only for an awful moment do you float free. Tor a blackness that is thick and final swiftly engulfs you.
Then—what?
An improbable Heaven?
Another Hell?
Or simply oblivion?
Soon you’ll know. After long, brutal years of fighting for survival, your days are running out.
In a later chapter from the same work, he expanded on his fantasy:
You inhale the deadly fumes. You become giddy. You strain against the straps as the blackness closes in. You exhale, inhale again. Tour head aches. There’s a pain in your chest. But the ache, the pain is nothing. You’re hardly aware of it. You’re slipping into unconsciousness. You’re dying. Tour head jerks back. Only for an awful instant do you float free. The veil is drawn swiftly. Consciousness is forever gone. Tour brain has been denied oxygen. Tour body fights a losing, ten-minute battle against death.
You’ve stopped breathing. Tour heart has quit beating.
You’re dead.
Chessman did not write his first book with any thought that it might save his life, or even affect his situation. Indeed, it was not begun with any thought of actual publication in view. It was begun, continued, and completed at the instigation of prison and departmental officials. Their motives are, of course, best known to themselves—a chance to be seen as progressive, a chance to pacify an otherwise demanding and aggressive prisoner—but I am convinced that they were totally unprepared for the success of Cell 2455, Death Row. Warden Teets told me at one time, prior to publication, that he had begun to read the manuscript, but could not finish it. He thought it unpublishable.
A prison author was nothing new, even an author on Death Row. Indeed, San Quentin was the “home” of David Lamson, who, in 1936, published the famous We Who Are About to Die while serving time on Death Row. (Lamson was eventually acquitted of murdering his wife and freed.) Saint Paul and Cervantes, Bunyan and Defoe, Wilde, Gandhi and Bertrand Russell, Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Nehru and Frangois Villon were all “prison” writers, and the simple fact of Caryl Chessman’s being in prison did not warrant the uproar which eventually surrounded him. His writings did.
The many reviews of Chessman’s first book were fascinating. It was especially interesting to note that one could almost determine the character of the reviewer by his reactions to Cell 2455, Death Row. Many reviewers had a field day at Chessman’s expense, and few of their reviews were objective. Even some of the most enthusiastic reviews were, it seemed to me, spurred by a need to express sympathy and make public the reviewer’s own “goodness.” Rarely did one sense a real awareness of the awesome spectacle presented by the combination of Chessman’s case and his writing skill. These attitudes on the part of reviewers were worldwide, not merely confined to the American scene.
Few reviewers realized the sheer skill of Chessman’s writing. With his narrative powers, Chessman could easily have written his book with a more careful eye to protecting his own reputation. He could have avoided distasteful episodes, watered down his own version of situations, and walked delicately among the names and dates and people of paramount importance. But he did not. Cell 2455, Death Row, which was eight hundred pages in manuscript form, was assuredly a catharsis. How drai
ned he must have felt when he was done!
Some columnists, reviewers, and reporters stated rather flippantly that it was easy enough to write when you had nothing else to do all day—that Death Row was probably the perfect place for writing. Many prisoners do write, and perhaps the time available to them is a contributing factor. “Outside” authors have to worry about meals, making a living, and the trivia of everyday life. A prisoner, in that sense, has more freedom than a free man. Yet the absurdity of such an attitude is obvious, for having time available does not necessarily give a human being something to say and the skills with which to say it.
Besides, Chessman’s days were anything but empty. Having served as his own counsel since 1948, he spent many long hours researching and writing those many legal briefs. He also read lengthy court reports in order to clarify his own thinking, the better to approach his own desperate situation.
In addition, Caryl Chessman lived facing death, at a specific hour, a specific minute. All the gruesome details of his manner of dying, too, were in his mind. He was forced to recognize, quietly and daily, that he had only a certain number of days remaining. And despite the legal battles, the efforts to gain more stays of execution, he could never really know if he’d get another one until it was actually granted. Then, once more, he could tote up the hours and minutes that remained to him, and the devil’s merry-go-round kept turning.
It would seem, therefore, that only with a total disregard of the facts could one say that Caryl Chessman was in a perfect environment to write. To write meant taking time away from his battle for his very existence. How many authors would take such a gamble?
To fully appreciate the development of Chessman as a writer, it is imperative that one try to understand what his life was like before the publication of Cell 2455, Death Row. For five years, from the time of his sentencing until he contacted Critics Associated, he labored anonymously in his cell. During those years, he read constantly; wrote legal briefs, petitions for writs of prohibition and habeas corpus and rehearings; and fought desperately for his life. All the while, the urge to convey his message was strong, and he was steeling himself for a major effort. Years of watching other unfortunate human beings walk those last dreaded steps past his cell on their way to the gas chamber made Chessman’s need to convey to the public the truth of this barbaric punishment increasingly more urgent. And when his spirits flagged, as the toil seemed pointless and death seemed like blessed relief, Chessman consulted a magazine illustration that he kept on hand. It was an artist’s rendering of San Quentin’s lethal gas chamber, the so-called “Green Room,” located six floors below his cell. One glimpse at this drawing might have made others queasy, but it was like a shot of adrenalin for Chessman.
Caryl Chessman equipped himself for his career in the proper fashion. He played with words constantly, eyeing them, absorbing them, pondering them, putting them on paper and juggling them for every ounce of power and meaning he could draw from them. He had learned the hard way that the pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword. He discovered, painfully, how a sentence must be written and rewritten, cut and changed and altered and turned about in order to make it as effective as possible. He studied punctuation. He had long before learned to type with astonishing speed and almost without error. And at last, Caryl Chessman had a superb command of the tools of his trade.
It has always seemed significant to me that Caryl Chessman wrote the first of the three memoirs that comprise his autobiographical trilogy—Cell 2455, Death Row—in the third person, using a character named Whit as a stand-in for himself. He was literally standing on the outside looking in. In Caryl’s mind, using the third-person Whit was a literary device, and in a sense it certainly was. But it also seems to indicate that the forces at play during the early life of Caryl Chessman—parental relationships and so on—were so powerful, so vivid in his memories, subconscious and conscious, and so compelling, that it was mentally impossible for him to speak of them in the first person. In his mind, he was another person during those years. He was, so to speak, writing, psychologically, of a life with which he could not cope. I do not imply justification of this viewpoint, but merely emphasize the intensity of it for Chessman.
It was not until his first book was published successfully that any semblance of complete objectivity came to Caryl Chessman. The style, the words, the feelings behind his every bit of correspondence changed from the very day he first held a bound and finished copy of his book in his own hands. That day, that moment, Caryl Chessman became his own man. He was no longer “Whit.” He was “I.” Or, rather, “I” and “Whit” were one organic whole.
It is my unalterable conviction that, legalities aside, had it been possible for Caryl Chessman to become a free man at that moment, he would have become one of the most significant crime fighters in history. He would have been one of the greatest single assets to penology and criminology in our times. His one achievement, that one book—the one you now hold in your hands—had undone his past, had jerked him effectively to reality and to a sense of his own place in the world and to an honest desire to contribute to its betterment. I sincerely believe he would have then been as capable of adjusting to a confused and confusing world as any of the rest of us are. No writer ever achieves “the end,” the ultimate, the finished, final work which he feels is an unimprovable masterpiece. With success, Caryl Chessman first realized how much he had to learn, how far he had yet to go.
After the publication of Cell 2455, Death Row, Chessman’s hardened criminal carapace seems to have been molted. Now, without rancor or bitterness, he was capable of understanding the exaggerated and false statements about himself frequently printed in newspapers. He could smile knowingly when sums of money were attributed to his earnings which simply did not exist. Caryl Chessman finally knew tolerance.
For me, as Chessman’s friend and literary agent, it will always remain the great tragedy of his life that, from the moment of his triumph—which is what Cell 2455, Death Row really was, a literary triumph over unimaginable odds—forces began to work to undermine and minimize that accomplishment. Indeed, those forces tried to make it physically impossible for any such success to be repeated. Every possible effort, from then on, was made to stop Chessman from being published, and even from writing. He was forced to resort to legal loopholes, and eventually to subterfuge, even to write, much less publish. The very authorities who had formerly urged his rehabilitation upon him now calmly and deliberately set about undermining its success. Those who held sway over Caryl Chessman’s existence forced him to resort to underhanded means and devious paths in order to sustain any semblance of his success, sincerity, and sanity.
Can anyone comprehend the inner turmoil that must have tormented Chessman when, having achieved so much and having received acclaim from many quarters for his efforts, he was legally barred from continuing? What went on in his mind and heart when those who had encouraged him earlier now attempted to stamp out forever his chance for acceptance, his right to expression and true rehabilitation? Such attempts might have broken others, might have been the last straw, the penal equivalent of a lobotomy or a premature death penalty. Rather than buckling, however, Chessman went “underground”—writing in secret, writing in code, even during one stretch in an isolation cell, writing on toilet paper, and smuggling his efforts out of the prison to an eagerly waiting outside world.
Eventually, the law upheld Caryl Chessman’s belief that he had the constitutional right to put the creations of his mind on paper and sell them if possible.
Chessman completed the manuscript of his second book, Trial by Ordeal, early in 1955, shortly after another close brush with death in San Quentin’s apple-green gas chamber. He then attempted to convey his second book’s property rights to attorney Rosalie Asher by written assignment and to give Miss Asher physical possession of the manuscript. Acting on the orders of his superior and on the advice of the California attorney general, Edmund “Pat” Brown, Warden Harley O. Teets stepped in. Ove
r Miss Asher’s strenuous protests, Teets confiscated both the written assignment document and the manuscript.
While it was hard to gauge at the time what was going through Chessman’s head over these new restrictions, a singular piece of writing came to light following his execution. Unpublished, never even offered for publication, there existed a series of “interviews” with the convict author. I now have that series of articles in my possession. In them, every aspect of the complex Chessman case is discussed.
The intriguing part of these “interviews” is that Caryl Chessman wrote them himself, but even left a blank space for the name of the “interviewer” to be inserted. In regard to this situation, Chessman wrote:
To famed personal injury lawyer Melvin Belli, himself an author, this confiscation and the writing ban smacked of“thought control.” “Why, even in the Dark Ages, prisoners were allowed to have their works published,” Belli acidly commented. He offered his services to Chessman and Miss Asher. A court fight was launched to pry the manuscript loose from the prison officials. Meanwhile, Clarence Linn, Chief Assistant to the California Attorney General, and a man who has grown older fighting Chessman’s numerous appeals, told the press: “The prison people can take it [the manuscript] out in the back yard and burn it if they choose to do so,” with his inflection suggesting he would approve the idea.
“I made up my mind this would never happen,” Chessman said. “And the claim that the manuscript was really prison property was nonsense.”
The litigation aimed at securing release of the manuscript got temporarily bogged down on a jurisdictional point, and Chessman lost another round in his hectic court struggle for survival. A new execution date was set for July 11.
Cell 2455, Death Row Page 2
