Condemned to Life

LIFE PLUS 99 YEARS (381 pp.)--Nathan F.Leopold Jr.--Doubleday ($5.50).

"I don't want to think about those sordid things," writes Nathan Leopold. He may have written this memoir partly to help ease his burden of guilt about "those things," though the book reads less like a cathartic confession than the garrulous, sometimes querulous recollections of a man who had all the time in the world and seems to think that his audience has as much.

Before being paroled (TIME, March 3), Leopold served 33 years of his sentence (life plus 99 years) in Illinois prisons for his share in the "Crime of the Century." His account of how he made the transition from front-page monster to model prisoner is pitiable, but it would need genius--which his friends seem to claim for him, and which he seems not to have --to make the story tragic. Such men as Leopold lead a strange existence--condemned to life, but forbidden to live it. The main part of the book is concerned with details of prison existence--often, perhaps, most interesting to students of penology and the strength-through-pain principle behind it. There is the round of workshops, prison libraries, bouts in "solitary," a pet bird named Bum, a kindly chaplain.

Food was good; the "screws" (guards) were, within limits, kind, Nathan Leopold, 19 years old when he entered prison, did service as a malaria guinea pig. increased his knowledge of foreign languages to 27, and acquired the elements of, or at least a desire for. religious faith. But readers may well feel that they never saw a man who looked so listlessly at the sky. Leopold shows the clear lapse of reason by which, like most lifers, he became a collector of injustices in a place where uncommon cruelty was a common failing. In short, Leopold can tell everything about prison except why he was there.

"That'll Be a Snap." The thrill murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks looms over the whole book, but its only account is left to Mystery Master Erie Stanley Gardner, who provides the book's pompous introduction. Leopold begins his story hours after the deed, and this section is the most fascinating in the book. A few days after the murder, Leopold went out with his girl, and she read him Lamartine. There are other tantalizing and incongruous glimpses of Leopold's cozy Chicago background. His family called him "Babe"; his aunt was "Birdie"; Richard Loeb's mother was "Mompsie."

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the book is the reconstructed conversations with Accomplice Dickie Loeb, who, in Leopold's recollections, speaks a weirdly dated slang. It is with a kind of horror that the modern reader finds an appalling crime described in a debased Tom Swift idiom. Writes Leopold: "Dick was in high spirits . . . 'That'll be a snap. Nate. Nothing to it.' " Says Loeb to Leopold, as they are planning to collect ransom for Bobby Franks: "Hey, this is neat, Nate--hey, I'm a poet!" When headlines announce: BODY OF BOY FOUND IN SWAMP, Loeb asks: "What'cha think, Nate? When are these damn papers printed?" Leopold replies: "Hell, I don't know. Couple of hours ago."

"My Best Pal." Leopold seems to have an oddly clumsy, cloying sentimentality; in a gushing letter to Clarence Darrow, he wrote about the lawyer's courage in taking the case: "Nay, it is more than bravery. It is heroism." From prison he wrote a poem to his aunt ("Birdie, angel bright and fair. So sweet of face and white of hair"), and when he tells of Loeb's murder by a fellow convict, Leopold writes solemnly: "Strange as it may sound, he had been my best pal."

This poorly written book is far less fascinating reading than Compulsion, Meyer Levin's bestselling fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb case (TIME. Nov. 12, 1956), which made Leopold "physically sick." In its own way. though, it may be more revealing.

Nathan Leopold says he sometimes wished that he had been condemned to death rather than allowed to live his long life through. At this point, the reader will feel a twinge of uncommon pity for this twice-doomed man who, at 53, has emerged into the world--or at least into a career as an X-ray technician in a Puerto Rico mission hospital, where, hoping that this book and his crime may some day be forgotten, he claims the charity of silence.

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