The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Deathbed Autobiography and Postmodern Gangster Fiction

JOHN F. KEENER The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Deathbed Autobiography and Postmodern Gangster Fiction RTHUR FLEGENHEiMER—alias Dutch Schultz—was an outsider: -surly, silent, and uncharismatic in an underworld embogued with charisma. While gangland violence clung to many crime bosses with a righteous exigency, Schultz was perceived through the year ofhis death as a "butcher." While many underworld figures moved in an envelope of sheen and silk, Schultz at the height of his power, to quote a bemused New York Times, "managed to look like an ill-dressed vagrant. . . . His trousers were always baggy and his topcoats always backed away from the neck. ... He seemed to have a special talent for looking like a perfect example of the unsuccessful man" (Berger 17). Yet, by the time he was gunned down in late 1935, Dutch Schultz had become the most powerful single figure in the New York underworld, not only "the last of the great pre-Repeal gangsters" ("Judge" 13), but also "the nation's most notorious post-Repeal criminal" ("Triple" 16). Three years later, the Times would recall: "Why Schultz became so powerful was always a mystery. . . . Schultz was an anomaly" (Owen 4.10). As literary figure, Dutch Schultz is similarly anomalous. Compared to men like Capone and Diamond, he appears in only a scant body of texts. I argue that a few ofthese, including works by E. L. Doctorow and William S. Burroughs, are uniquely provocative because they take advantage of Schultz's least known and most surprising anomaly: unlike any other gangster of his time, Schultz left behind his own autobiographical "text." The "Last Words of Dutch Schultz," as it has come to Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004- 1610 136]ohn F. Keener be known, remains one ofthe most perplexing documents in die annals of life writing, one whose eccentricities have relegated Schultz to the margins of gangster fiction. But writers like Doctorow and Burroughs have discovered in it a rich field for exploring both the parameters of autobiography and the instability of,personal discourse in the context of gangland violence. The composition of the last words is a story in itself. Around ro:i5 on the night of October 23, 1935, Dutch Schultz took a single, fatal bullet to the abdomen in the Palace Chop House in Newark.1 Between his admittance to City Hospital several minutes later and his death some twenty-two hours after that, the "Dutchman" lay delirious with peritonitis. Meanwhile, in an effort to seize upon any information pertaining to the hit, the Newark Police Department posted stenographer F. J. Long at Schultz's bedside with instructions to take down every word that escaped his lips.2 What Long recorded appears to be nonsense . Schultz begins with the executive order, "George, don't make no bull moves!" and ends with the exhortation, "French Canadian bean soup; I want to pay, let tJriem leave me alone." The nearly two thousand words that fall between these phrases run the gamut of intelligibility; TIME called Schultz's monologue "an amazing babble, some ofit wildly poetic, most of it completely Delphic" ("Triple" 17). When the New York Times published a transcript on 26 October, a spotty but fascinating literary history was begun. There was a brief attempt to gather the last words into mainstream culture by characterizing them as modernist literature. Alfred Kazin has mentioned several "young professors, understandably looking for novelty" who have over the years treated the last words as an impromptu poetic monologue (41). Kazin may be extrapolating from Paul Sann's account of a single instructor, Leo Lemschen of Newark Junior College, who in 1940 treated Schultz's "ravings" as a "piece of American folk literature, borrowed from the James Joyce stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction " (74). Meanwhile, most writers have maintained a "hands off" policy toward the last words by leaving Schultz either previous to, or at the moment of, the shooting. Even histories either dismiss the text as a capricious narrative digression or examine them solely for the (dubious ) associations contained therein. It is difficult to defend the last words as an example either of Modernist craft or...