Fredric Wertham and 'Tomboy'

Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on January 05, 2010 at 7:10 PM, updated January 06, 2010 at 3:53 PM

I picked up a copy of Hal Ellson's Tomboy at Powell's today, the 1950 Scribners' hard cover that sold for $2.75.  And I bought it largely for the introduction by Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose 1954 anti-comics epic, Seduction of the Innocent, deserves a great deal of credit for the congressional hearings and bonfires that consumed so many comic books in the 1950s.

Given that his name is misspelled -- as "Frederic" Wertham -- on the dustjacket of this edition, it would appear that the good doctor had not yet hit it big.

In case you've never read it -- and I hadn't -- here's Wertham's intro to Tomboy, a 15-year-old gang member who "knew how to break into a store, how to mug a drunk, and what to do to a girl who squealed to the cops":

Non-fiction literature on juvenile delinquency often contains a lot of fiction.  That holds even for a large part of scientific literature on the subject.  It looks at juvenile delinquency from the limited perspective of a few sweeping psychoanalytic generalizations.  Frequently it has little regard for the social facts and connections which may be just as hidden and repressed as the "deep emotional disorders" from which these children are supposed to be suffering -- children who more often than not are even as you and I.  Here is the central fallacy which obstructs modern psychotherapy:  to see too much abnormality in the individual (especially the child) and too much normality in society.

There is a new fiction literature dealing with juvenile delinquency which should open the eyes of many.  One of its leading writers is Hal Ellson.  What characterizes his novels is their authenticity.  When his previous book appeared, I drew attention to it in a scientific journal, the American Journal of Psychotherapy.

fred.jpgFredric Wertham, in his glory
"The public is being inundated," I wrote then, "with books and movies that harp on one, two or all of three themes:  popularized psychiatry (so thin in the first place that it needs littler popularization); juvenile delinquency (usually depicted as a problem of the individual child rather than as that of the community of adults; race prejudice (usually misrepresented as a psychological flaw independent of its social roots).  Most of these books and movies are second-rate.  So it is a surprise to come across so excellent a book as Duke.  Here these three themes are skillfully interwoven.  They are show in the natural relationship which they have in the present-day life of an adolescent who knows about democracy only from hearsay.  (He doesn't know it from books because those he reads are comic books which glorify the very worst that he does anyhow: violence in assorted forms and experimenting in various kinds of crime.)

"Such a book depends of course on one thing, namely truth -- the authentic truth of real conditions, the psychological truth of individual reactions, the artistic truth of presentation, and the moral truth of facing evil that exists right under our noses.  Novelists as well as psychiatrists frequently make the mistake of treating the individual as if it were always clearly determined, and the social as if it were always fortuitous.  Hal Ellson sees the interaction between the two and conveys to the reader the idea that one cannot be understood without the other."

What I wrote then about Duke is even more valid for Tomboy.  Ellson has collected more material, deepened his understanding, perfected his form.  Tomboy can serve as a good test for people's knowledge of literature and life.  Ask the average reader what is the central theme of this novel and he will speak of complexes, psychopathic personalities and aggressive instincts.  But the underlying theme of this book is fear.  Not naked fear, but fear disguised as bravado, cruelty, brutality, hate and sadism.  Even the daring exploits of Tomboy, the adolescent who sometimes seems to be afraid of nothing and is tougher than the rest of the boys and girls in the gang, are only a veneer.

However well the personalities of the gang members are drawn, their actions and thoughts are understandable only on the basis of the book's second theme, the drab degradation of the adults.  Instead of talking glibly about society's failure to curb juvenile delinquency, we should ponder society's responsibility for continually creating and recreating it anew.  While the "reformers" and the psycho-reformers exhort us to delve into the unconscious of these children (to come up with complexes they postulated in the first place), there is plenty to be known and to be done about the conscious of their parents and other adults.  These children, Tomboy and others, are first of all victims.

The adults do not make school attractive for them.  ("Why do we have to go to school anyhow?  I'd rather work even.")  They buy their stolen goods in an organized way.  ("I heard he's not the big shot.  Some other guy comes in a big car and gets the stuff from him.")  They make it possible for them to get bullets for their guns. ("How about the Penny Arcade in Times Square?  You can get bullets there.")  They show them movies which team them how to treat women.  ("Well, Alan Ladd ain't bad, I like his face and the way he fights.  But the way he treats his women!  He stomps them.")  They indoctrinate them in millions of comic books with the Superman conceit, the arch rationalization of evil that has seduced a whole generation of Central European adults.  ("I wish I was Superman so when the cops shoot the bullets bounce off.")  They are ignorant of what children are up against.  ("They don't even know what's going on.  My old man and old lady is the same.")

jailbait.jpgA later Hal Ellson novel.
When these delinquent children get found out, they know what they can expect.  ("But the cops know.  They'll beat it out of us now.")  There is a revealing passage when Tomboy reminisces about gang members who have been arrested and in the same vein thinks of one boy who was run over by a truck.  ("She thought of Mick, then, for he had been caught, too, but in a different way.")

Whey do these children form a gang, why does Tomboy join one?  Why do they have a secret clubroom where they go through rituals of initiations, courts, sex orgies and all kinds of brutalities?  By banding together in such a group they find a kind of emotional self-fulfillment.  They don't mind authority, but they can't find one they respect.  They want to identify themselves with a group that will respect them and give them protection.  Theirs is a misguided attempt at a healthy reaction to the essentially unhealthy situation society puts them in.

So a third theme emerges from this book:  the hypocrisy of the do-gooders (or rather, talk-gooders) who get shocked every time such conditions are described, but never get shocked enough to take real action.