Final Faces
Life Plus 99 Years. By Nathan F. Leopold. (Gollancz, 21s.) Strangers in my Body. By Eve Lancaster and James Poling. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.) THE rabbi who first persuaded Nathan Leopold to write his autobiography urged him to conceal nothing : to describe his childhood and his family life before going on to relate how Dick Loeb and himself came to murder young Bobby Franks, just for the fun of it, that day in 1924. Leopold refused; 'They're right, but I cannot bring myself to . . . I just can't do it'; the book takes us back only to the evening after the crime was com- mitted.
Although his excuses—that he does not want to hurt his family by spattering it with any more mud; or himself, by picking the scab from the wound—are compelling, they deprive the book not merely of its impact, but of much of its justification. As the story of a gaol sentence it is mildly interesting, at times even moving; but with all access to his mind before the murder denied to us, it is hard to keep up an interest in his later career. The book is in any case three times too long, appearing all the longer by a weak introduction and the publisher's irritating habit of rewriting the story at length on the dust- cover. In the end, though Leopold has extracted our grudging admiration, he has not won our sympathy.
None the less Life Plus 99 Years deserves to be studied, if only to help dispel the still prevalent notion that the community can be protected from crime by shutting men up in prisons, where they not merely learn how to become better criminals but are induced to accept the criminal code, with its rigorous rules and loyalties. Leopold justifies his acceptance of them with the same self- satisfied air as he seems to have accepted Loeb's invitation to join him in a little murder. Loeb, incidentally, emerges as a likeable fellow, very far from being the loathsome pervert that rumour has painted him. Corruptio optimi pessima : the more attractive the psychopath, the greater the danger he is to the Leopolds of the community —and to the community.
This is also one of the lessons from Strangers in my Body, at first sight a largely unnecessary rehash of Thigpen and Cleckley's The Three Faces of Eve by 'Eve' (Mrs. Earl Lancaster) herself. But right at the end she reveals that what the two psychiatrists thought of (and wrote about, in the earlier book) as the final face of Eve, with its merger of the Jekyll and Hyde elements, was in fact only her penultimate condition. Nor was it, as they believed, a happy one. She had not settled down well with her family. With her new husband she was frigid; with her child, an ob- sessive disciplinarian; and the marriage became so miserable that she tried to end her life by suicide. She did : but not in the way she ex- pected. A new 'Eve' woke up under the stomach pump, warmer, more human, less neurotic. It was as if her cards of identity had been once again in some inexplicable way reshuffled in the suicide attempt; and the result, at the time of writing, has been an altogether more satisfactOry and— it is to be hoped, for her sake—a final face of Eve.
Apart from the new ending, there are also differences of emphasis. Mrs. Lancaster casts a more friendly eye on her past 'Hyde' element, Eve Black, in spite of her vicious and sometimes nearly disastrous escapades. She describes them in more detail; and again the havoc that can be done by an engaging psychopath is made clear. Admittedly complete dissociation into two separate personalities of the Jekyll/Hyde pattern is very rare; but much less rare—in fact, ex- ceedingly common—is the existence of revolu- tionary forces in a normal individual trying to overturn the established personality : often suc- ceeding, temporarily, when the established per- sonality is caught off guard by drink or mass hysteria. Even when 'Hyde' is not permitted to come into the open, he can still continue to plague his host with neurotic symptoms. The chief value of the 'Esie' case has undoubtedly been its demonstration of the way that what we think of as a personality is not necessarily a single in- violate whole; it should rather be regarded as a state in which various elements, some unruly. some dangerous, are continually struggling for more power. And though most of this book will be. familiar to anybody who read its predecessor, the story remains so remarkable that the repe-
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