Il s’agit d’une représentation fictive des derniers jours du gangster Jack « Legs » Diamond, décédé dans une fusillade avec ses ennemis dans une pension d’Albany en 1931. Le livre est ironiquement intitulé « Legs » même si tous ceux qui connaissaient le gars l’appelaient « Jack. » La presse a inventé le sobriquet « Jambes » parce que Jack a dépassé la mort. Survivant à des blessures par balle ou en les évitant complètement au cours de nombreuses tentatives d’assassinat, Jack est devenu célèbre comme « l’homme le plus abattu en Amérique » jusqu’à ce qu’il soit définitivement abattu à Albany en 1931. L’écrivain William Kennedy possède l’histoire d’Albany, et il choisit de commencer son cycle de romans d’Albany avec l’histoire de Legs – je veux dire Jack.
Révéler que Jack se fait tuer n’est pas un spoil. Toute personne ayant une connaissance passagère du gangstérisme américain le sait, et sinon, cela a été révélé par Kennedy au début du roman lorsqu’une poignée de connaissances de Jack se sont réunies dans un bar pour se souvenir de lui 20 ans après sa mort.
Marcus Gorman, un avocat d’Albany costaud ressemblant à Thomas d’Aquin, raconte cette histoire. Gorman surmonte finalement sa peur et ses scrupules restants pour devenir le consigliere réticent de Jack. Ce faisant, Gorman abandonne son monde sûr mais ennuyeux pour entrer dans le monde électriquement chargé de Jack, qui fait la guerre à Dutch Schultz, Leo Rothstein et une demi-douzaine de chefs de gangs mineurs dans le Bronx, Jersey, Manhattan et les Catskills. Gorman a le don d’une compréhension sympathique de lui-même et de la nature humaine, et il saupoudre sa narration d’observations sur la culture et la philosophie. Et, bien sûr, il nous parle de Jack et de l’endroit où les corps sont enterrés.
Jack avait de la sauce. Avec une énergie lumineuse, Jack « a fait avancer la cause de la corruption joyeuse et du vice ». Il avait une foi infatigable en sa capacité à triompher de l’hostilité en refusant de reconnaître l’échec « même après qu’il l’ait frappé à l’entrejambe ». À travers les yeux de Gorman, nous voyons Jack comme un homme ressemblant à Gatsby avec la présence théâtrale d’un psychopathe – « mais pas un psychopathe au sens extrême du terme. Il était aberrant, oui, excentrique, mais ses actes étaient délibérés et logiques, faisant partie d’un modèle de carrière. (58) Jack est devenu un manipulateur des politiciens et a laissé un héritage d’argent et d’armes qui dominerait la ville américaine et deviendrait un paradigme ancestral pour les gangsters politiques urbains modernes.
Certains de ces personnages vont envahir ou faire des camées dans d’autres romans du cycle d’Albany. J’ai lu trois livres de Kennedy et j’adore ses écrits parce qu’ils sont empreints de sympathie et reconnaissent le poids de l’histoire, du catholicisme et des morts sur les vivants. De plus, il écrit avec du lyrisme, des couleurs régionales et une touche de réalisme magique – mis en avant par souci de précision. J’ai également revu le deuxième volume du cycle d’Albany, « Le plus grand jeu de Billy Phelan ».
Je vous laisse avec un échantillon des écrits de Kennedy, dans lequel Gorman réfléchit au fait que sa chance de faire carrière en politique est maintenant ruinée en raison de son association avec Jack, un homme qui a échoué en tant qu’hypocrite :
Au Congrès, j’aurais appris comment l’hypocrisie rudimentaire est transformée en patriotisme, en politique nationale et en loi et comment les hypocrites deviennent les héros du peuple. Ce que j’ai appris de Jack, c’est que les politiciens imitaient son style sans le comprendre, sans comprendre que leur vénalité n’était qu’hypocrite. Jack a complètement échoué en tant qu’hypocrite. C’était un menteur, bien sûr, un parjure, tout cela, mais c’était aussi un homme vénal et intègre, car il ne cessait de revoir sa vulnérabilité au châtiment, à la mort et à la damnation. C’est une chose d’être corrompu. C’en est une autre de se comporter d’une manière psychologiquement responsable envers son propre mal. (118)
(1983): « He was a complex figure, and the world’s response to him was equally complex. »
Kennedy saw in the historical record contradictory public perceptions of the gangster during the morally ambiguous period of Prohibition. In the same essay from O Albany! Kennedy said, « What I came to … was a plan to assimilate all the truth, all the lies, all the fudged areas in between, and reinvent Jack. » That fictional reinvention involved humanizing the brutal Diamond by showing him as a physically resilient, calculating, attractive, charitable, multifaceted human being operating in a morally ambiguous world that neutralized much of Diamond’s menacing behavior to straight society.
The reinvention was not pure fiction on Kennedy’s part but a careful attempt to select and portray significant dimensions from the highly contradictory history and legend that emerged during Diamond’s career.
The complex Diamond was both a gangster and a married, sometimes churchgoing, citizen. He is described in the novel primarily through the eyes of Marcus Gorman, an Albany lawyer and political insider fascinated by the Diamond persona. Gorman sees a physical aura, feels palpable electricity surrounding Diamond when they first begin their friendship. That physical vitality stands in marked contrast to both the enervated Gorman and the enervated society of the time. Gorman responds to the physical euphoria he feels the first time he visits Diamond and takes target practice using a Thompson submachine gun. As he finds he has a talent for hitting the targets with Dutch Schultz’ face on them, he feels a surge of excitement: « How boring it is not to fire machine guns, » he says. As he walks away from the targets he is told by a Diamond henchman that Schultz has just killed a « kid cousin » of his. Gorman responds, « And so I had moral support for my little moral collapse — which sent a thrill through me, made me comfortable again … »
Gorman acknowledges his own emptiness (« my life was a stupendous bore ») and that of establishment America (« I felt I was at the center of America’s well-fed Depression complacency »). That complacency is spiritual rather than social, as America during Prohibition evoked memories of a violent frontier past. Diamond represents to Gorman the individualist American thriving in a violent America: « a singular being in a singular land, a fusion of the individual life flux with the clear and violent light of American reality, with the fundamental brilliance that illuminates this bloody republic. »
Diamond’s physical vitality, symbolized by the aura, manifests itself in different ways. His sexual vitality and attractiveness in the competing eyes of both his voluptuous showgirl mistress Kiki Roberts and devoted wife Alice fascinate the public. He is propositioned while on his European trip and later while dining in the Rain-Bo room with both his wife and mistress. During his trial, he receives propositions in the mail. Gorman calls him « a man in touch with primal needs. » He survives four attempts on his life, including one where he is shot with five bullets by five gangsters at point-blank range. He is handsome, well dressed, a « dude of all gangsters, » a « dauphin » according to Gorman.
The opening line of the novel is Gorman’s (« I really don’t think he’s dead ») and the last line of the novel is the dead Diamond’s (« Honest to God, Marcus … I really don’t think I’m dead »). These fanciful denials of his mortality which frame the narrative express the incredulity of both characters that the seemingly invincible Diamond could be killed. His mythic presence in the public consciousness asserts another kind of vitality. In his status as a folk hero and legendary figure he has achieved immortality and outlasted death.
Diamond’s physical vitality is complemented by his shrewdness as a gangster. Gorman recognizes his calculated menace: « He was aberrated, yes, eccentric, but his deeds were willful and logical, part of a career pattern, even those that seemed most spontaneous and most horrendous. » His brief but rapid rise to prominence results from his ability to manipulate, outsmart and brutalize enemies and allies alike into obedience. He avenges attempts on his own life and insults against his mistress Kiki. He kills within the predatory subculture of the gangster world and does so in direct response to threats to his own life, honor, or business. Flossie the whore recalls Diamond’s no-nonsense authority: « He was our protector . . . Some protector … It was him and his guys beat up Loretta and Marlene . . . But they also took care nobody shook us down and nobody arrested us. »
Gorman echoes Kennedy’s own words when he calls Diamond « the most active brain in the New York underworld . . . shaping the dream that you could grow up in America and shoot your way to glory and riches. »
To show Diamond’s worth, Gorman inventories liquor confiscated by federal officers in one raid on Diamond’s supplies and values it at $10 million.
This version of the American dream during the Depression was clearly not morally inspired. Diamond’s attraction is picaresque, his appeal found in the egoistic acquisitiveness and amoral energy that defined the establishment and outlaw loner hero. In a breathtakingly complex genealogy, Gorman sees Diamond in the tradition of « Horatio Alger out of Finn McCool and Jessie James » and shortly thereafter says « If you liked Carnegie and Custer, you’ll love Diamond. » Another character simplifies the heroic ancestry, quoting Oscar Wilde: « Americans love heroes, especially crooked ones. » Diamond becomes among the first cultural antiheroes of the century.
Diamond’s stature as antihero was dependent in large degree on the public view of bootleggers and bootlegging during Prohibition: « a necessary social misdemeanor, as most bootlegging was contemporaneously regarded » according to Gorman. Diamond makes a disingenuous distinction when he tells the British newspapermen « First off, boys, I’m not a gangster, only a bootlegger…
Just a man of the people trying to make a dollar. » Bootlegging quenched the public thirst and provided a source of illegal income to untold numbers of otherwise unemployed citizens and ameliorated its illegality to a large segment of the American public. Gorman says about Diamond, « He advanced the cause of joyful corruption and vice. » « He was a bootlegger and, as such, had celebrity status, plus permission from the social order to kill, maim, and befoul the legal system, for wasn’t he performing a social mission for the masses? » says Gorman with that ironic perspective Prohibition morality created. Jack the bootlegger also happens to be an active Mason.
Bootlegging was the consequence of unpopular Prohibition politics which in turn corrupted politicians and neutralized Diamond’s complicity. In reflecting on the Albany politicians with whom he is associated, Gorman says « They could do beer business all year long with Jack, but after mass on Sunday they could tut-tut over the awful gangsterism that was fouling the city. »
This political hypocrisy and corruption during Prohibition is another major social concern in the novel. In an extended passage, Gorman contends that Jack was…a pawn of the entire decade. Politicians used him, and others like him, to carry off any vileness that served their ends, beginning with the manipulation of strikebreakers as the decade began and ending with the manipulation of stockbrokers at the end of the crash, a lovely, full, capitalistic circle.
His contempt for the political establishment he himself has courted leads Gorman to note in one of the most thematically significant passages in the book: When I think back now to whether the Congress or the time with Jack would have given me more insight into American life, I always lean to Jack. In the Congresswould have learned how rudimentary hypocrisy is turned into patriotism, into national policy, and into the law, and how hypocrites become heroes of the people.
What I learned from Jack was that politicians imitated his style without comprehending it, without understanding that their venality was only hypocritical. Jack failed thoroughly as a hypocrite. He was a liar, of course, a perjurer, but he was also a venal man of integrity, for he never ceased to renew his vulnerability to punishment, death, and damnation. It is one thing to be corrupt. It is another to behave in a psychologically responsible way toward your own evil.
Diamond’s vulnerability is renewed each time his life or freedom are threatened by other gangsters or the law. Gorman sees him as a man willing to face the potentially fatal consequences of his highly risky behavior without flinching. The phrase « venal integrity » nicely captures the paradox of the gangster antihero.
Gorman’s cynicism towards the corrupt establishment accounts in part for his own fascination with Legs. He sees in Diamond’s charisma, leadership, and public popularity « an ancestral paradigm for modern urban political gangsters. » In one of the most pointed of Gorman’s observations, he says he does not want to trivialize Jack’s achievement by linking him to lesser latter day figures such as Richard Nixon…whose corruption, overwhelmingly venal and invariably hypocritical, lacked the admirably white core fantasy that can give evil a mythic dimension. Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but heroes and poets followed Jack’s tribulations with curiosity, ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of their own response.
Kennedy’s depiction of Diamond makes no attempt to hide his brutality.
Diamond empties his gun into Tim Regan at the Hotsy Totsy Club, then cracks Billy Regan over the head with the gun butt and throws the gun into his chest. He burns up Red Moran in a car and then ties sewer grates to Moran’s girl friend and throws her alive into the river. His kidnapping and torture of Clem Streeter is maniacal and to no purpose. Kennedy said about Diamond in the Diamond essay in O Albany! that « His cruelty pervades my book. » In one symbolic reflection of that, Diamond enters the hold of the Belgenland which is transporting 4500 canaries for the Hartz Mountain company. Immediately upon his entering the hold, the singing birds go silent as if recognizing his menacing presence.
But the cruelty is confined by and large to the predatory gangster world and is thus immoral within that immoral context, neutralizing it to the sympathetic observer struck by the hypocrisy of the unethical political commonwealth. Diamond’s own integrity within the ambiguous ethical climate of Prohibition casts him as less unethical than that political establishment. After being shot, he refuses to follow the advice of a Broadway producer to retire from the rackets, repent, and become an evangelist, a preacher capitalizing on his previous notoriety: « Force-feed ’em their own home-grown bullshit » the producer encourages Diamond. After Diamond’s murder, both Kiki and Alice try to capitalize on their relationships with him through tawdry and unsuccessful personal appearances which are seen in pathetic contrast to their once regal aloofness as Jack’s consorts. On his European trip, Jack literally scares the excrement out of a decadent young German playwright who lectures Jack on his Nietzschian status as a morally transcendent superman in an attempt to flatter Jack into letting him write a play based on his life. Jack’s integrity in the face of his lionization by a fawning public audience bespeaks purity of motive, violent and venal as it may be. His first notice of Gorman occurs when Gorman is voicing a sympathetic interpretation of Al Jolson that stuns Diamond for its accuracy and relevance: « it’s all emotion, all a revelation of who he is. I don’t care how much he’s rehearsed it, it’s still rare because it’s pure. He’s so at home in himself he can’t make a false gesture. » The contrast between integrity and hypocrisy is critical to ameliorating the character of Diamond.
Kennedy humanizes Jack beyond these contrasts with a corrupt establishment. The local people in the Catskills tell stories attributing Diamond with paying medical expenses to cure a sick child, and financing the costs of building a new cow shed for an old woman. He and Alice sometimes attend mass, and Jack donates an organ to the Sacred Heart Church. After he is shot five times by rival Jimmy Biondo’s men he tells Gorman « I’m in God’s grace, » and makes confession to a priest. Diamond admits to purchasing life insurance for the families of men he was about to murder and several times expresses regret for the children of the first man he kills. Later, after his conviction in federal court on bootlegging charges, he tells a young admirer « Stay in school. The rackets are a bum life . .
. Don’t mess in the rackets. » A few moments later, recollecting his brother Eddie, dead from tuberculosis, Diamond cries.
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