The Murder of Edmund Grant

There is widespread disagreement as to just what the world lost on that summer night last year when Daniel Dunhaven leaped toward Edmund Grant and cracked poor Grant's skull open with a poker. We lost Edmund Grant, of course, but some who have read his novels say that was no loss. We lost Daniel Dunhaven, too, for he will probably never write another critical essay. This is not because the struggling quarterlies have closed their pages to his work; on the contrary, both New Broom and Parnassorama have written to the critic himself as well as to the warden of the prison where he will spend the next 99 years, professing themselves eager to continue publishing Dunhaven's provocative critiques -- those same critiques which once caused the poet Alfie Doremus to apostrophize him:

hail, critic!

never a critic more sympathavant-coollike,

never a critic less contemptobastic, onliest critic that writes with his G U T S --

an accolade originally mimeographed in New Broom, but given somewhat wider circulation by The New Yorker under the caption "Neatest Trick of the Week."

The warden interposed no objection to Dunhaven's writing in prison. In fact, when I interviewed him for an article on Should Prisons Be Punitive? and he discovered I had known both Dunhaven and Grant, he told me, wistfully, "I wish Dunhaven would write. It would be splendid public relations for the prison."

But Dunhaven has refused to write anything but regrets to the editors. A critic (he said in his letter to Parnassorama) needs booze and cool jazz and prostitutes just as much as a poet or a novelist. What I'd turn into if I wrote criticism here in this antiseptic jail, I'd turn into a square. I'd be saying John Hersey was cool. Regards to all the losers in the Village, all the junkies and the free lovers and the trumpeters who've lost their lip. Forget about me. I'm dead. There's nothing to smoke in this place but tobacco.

As I say, I knew both Dunhaven and Grant, though not really well. I had sought them out while preparing a magazine piece called Are the Beat Also Lost? I had interviewed Dunhaven about a week before he killed Grant, and I met him again when he came to Grant's one-room apartment -- or "pad," as they called it -- on the night of the killing. I had never seen Grant until that night, but with the exception of his murderer, I was the last to see him alive. The last words the novelist addressed to me were: "Get out, get out, you creep, some other time, got to talk to Danny."

I complied with his request, of course, but not without regret at having our talk terminated thus abruptly. The truth is, I had for weeks been looking forward to chatting with him.

For the reader must surely know that Edmund Grant, as the author of Shantytown Hamlet, Zing!, Down Kiwanis and several other novels, had achieved a considerable reputation. He was the originator and, indeed, the only practitioner of Dialogic Realism. I can think of no other 20th Century novelist except Ivy Compton-Burnett whose novels consist solely of dialog; but since Miss Compton-Burnett's dialog is really a heightened parallel of the consciousness of her characters, Edmund Grant stands magnificently alone as the faithful transscriber of the fragmented quality, the inarticulateness, the downright dullness of common speech.

His devotion to his purpose was of an enviable purity. He never compromised with popular taste. He gave the lazy reader no relief. Who has not yearned, along about page 500 of Shantytown Hamlet, for a solid 50 pages of description? Who would not, by that time, gladly skip the dialog to read about the colors of the sunrise, or to scan an exhaustive catalog of the furnishings in the room where the characters sprawl talking? But Edmund Grant's novels give us no sunrise, and indeed, we never discover whether the characters are talking in a room at all, or on a park bench, or while perched in the branches of some tree. They talk. That is all. That is enough, for the art of Edmund Grant is essentially a simple art.

Those who have encountered the dialog in Grant's novels may be interested in the novelist's own speech patterns. Let me quote from the tape recording I made when I interviewed him:

Grant: What's with the pencil?

I: It's for taking notes.

Grant: You got that machine, that tape, that thing there, that tape. That thing. It's going. It's running. What you need notes?

I: Well, as we go along, maybe I'll write a comment or two in the notebook.

Grant: Hey, you take it for serious, right?

I: Um-hm.

Grant: I be goddamned. Well, OK, start noodling.

I: All right. About Shantytown Hamlet: I'm wondering whether you deliberately decided to do the Hamlet story in a squalid modern setting, or --

Grant: Hey, what you doing, you reading there, in the notebook there, you got it down there, the question, you reading it off like a trombone player plays for Sammy Kaye or something? You reading it, the question?

I: No, I'm just looking at my notes.

Grant: Notes! Notes! What's the matter with write your article like I write my books? What's the matter with improvise, huh?

The perceptive reader will have noticed, I am sure, that though Grant's speech is somewhat more coherent than that of the characters in his novels, his speech rhythms are remarkably similar to theirs. I point this out for the edification of literary historians; but in the present context, such considerations are peripheral, however interesting -- for the purpose of this memoir is journalistic, not literary. I am writing to set the record straight.

I am in a position to do this, because when I went to Edmund Grant's apartment, or pad, I took with me, as the reader now knows, my tape recorder. And when the unlocked door opened and Daniel Dunhaven, bloody-eyed and drunken, stood peering at us and roaring, "Got to talk to you, want to talk, got to get things straight, you son of a bitch, Eddie," my host was in such a hurry to get rid of me (I have already set down what he said as he pushed me toward the door), that I found myself out of the apartment and down on the dark street, empty-handed.

Upstairs, my tape recorder was taking down everything that was said in that one-room pad that night.

After the murder my machine was, of course, appropriated by the police; but when Dunhaven agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in return for an indictment charging only second-degree murder, there was no need to run off my tape in the courtroom. When the trial was over, it was returned to me.

I played the tape, of course -- and it confirmed what I had suspected all along: that the newspapers had been wrong about this case from the moment it broke.

Every paper had seen only one thing in the murder of Edmund Grant: a critic had killed a novelist. It was Murray Kempton, I think, in the New York Post, who made the only gentle comment when he said that Dunhaven had been considerably kinder to Grant than Dwight MacDonald had been to James Gould Cozzens; but even this charitable judgment was based on a false assumption. Other scribes, equally mistaken, were more brutal. Those who have forgotten the journalistic reaction to the murder have but to glance -- oh, at the editorial page of the Daily News or at a copy of Time, or at Pegler's column, or John O'Donnell's, or Sokolsky's; for even now, so many months after the event, there are those who still remember Grant's murder with anti-intellectual glee.

See how the comments have gone on, month after month. First, in a column written a few days after the murder:

To soft-headed apologists for Soviet methods, we can point out that this week in our own country we were served Literary Criticism á la Russe, and the District Attorney, at least, found it indigestible. The men in the Kremlin habitually cut down their artists as Dunhaven cut down Edmund Grant, the only difference being that the Commissars lack Dunhaven's apparently discriminating literary taste.

Then, when the trial opened:

The formal indictment spoke of homicide, but when merry-eyed, spade-bearded Daniel Dunhaven went on trial in New York's Court of General Sessions last week, it was for a crime many of us have committed: disgust with Beatnik Edmund Grant's Dialogic Realism. (continued on page 148) Edmund Grant (continued from page 66) And when Dunhaven was sentenced:

Though we have often said we favor not only capital punishment but also public torture for sadists and sex fiends, we're glad Dunhaven didn't get the chair. Maybe before they row him up the river, they could give him a baseball bat and put him in a room with Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, and the writers who fill hours of TV prime time with gore.

And finally, this allusion to the murder in a political editorial written nearly a year after the trial was over:

What we say is, it's not the decent right-thinking Americans who conform, it's the pinkos. And we'll go right on thinking this until one big-domed ADA member criticizes another sometime -- preferably with a poker, in the effective manner of the critic Dunhaven driving home the point that he didn't like Edmund Grant's prose style.

In short, everybody assumed, or pretended to assume, that the murder of Edmund Grant was the translation into action of a critical essay, that because Dunhaven was a critic, the homicide was a criticism.

But the truth of the matter -- willfully ignored by journalists to whom the facts were easily available -- is that Daniel Dunhaven admired Grant's novels and always had.

In the April 1957 issue of Parnassorama, Dunhaven wrote: "There's the literary landscape, the sky painted all blue like on a postcard and the smells all sick-sweet like from Bloomingdale's perfume counter -- and along comes Eddie Grant, big as a giant, and he tramples on the pretty flowers and he blows out his breath, and all of a sudden there's no more perfume smells, but the stink of booze and sweat smells and dirty-laundry-under-the-bed smells, and what we've got now, we've got no phony postcard any more, but real life, painted by a great artist who knows how to make his readers suffer."

There is a more recent public record of Dunhaven's adulation of Grant. In an issue of New Broom which appeared just a month before the murder (though it was dated three months earlier) it was Dunhaven who introduced the excerpt therein reprinted from Grant's Shantytown Hamlet.

The excerpt itself begins:

Ham said: "Hey, mom there." Gertie said: "Well, what?" Ham said: "Afterward, after he got killed dead -- and what'd he die, anyway, my old man, some virus? But I mean afterward, why Unk?" Gertie said: "You don't think I'm attractive?" Ham said: "But why Unk? And nobody said what virus." Gertie said: "You don't think Unk's attractive?" Ham said: "Maybe no virus, no germ, no disease there at all." Gertie said: "Unk's taller than your old man was." Ham said: "Maybe the Unk virus." Gertie said: "I'm still pretty." Ham said: "Goddamn to hell, I know! And afterward you didn't tell me. Maybe Unk 'ull catch the Ham virus." Gertie said: "Go out and play now." Ham said: "I'm old, you forget I'm old. I grew up last year and you never looked and you never said and you never made marks on the wall with a pencil higher and higher, no, you and Unk said go out and play and thought I'd maybe never miss the pencil marks on the wall and I'd never catch wise to the virus about my father, but I'm old, I'm grown up, I'm a virus, too, and you and Unk just wait. Just wait! Just wait! Just wait!"

Dunhaven, introducing that scene, said: "Powerful! This is the way it always is between a sensitive kid and his mother. You think they talk iambic pentameter? They talk like Eddie Grant puts it down, that's how they talk."

And finally, when I visited Dunhaven in the prison -- after the murder, remember -- he said to me: "Eddie put down the way people talk when they're off guard, when they're feeling deep. Some guy in the Saturday Review, you know, the puzzle magazine, the double-crostics, he said Eddie's people were muddy, he said, and incoherent, he said. Some criticism! What the hell does he think, people are eloquent? The deeper they're feeling the more they talk like Eddie wrote them."

The point is clear, I think. Daniel Dunhaven killed Edmund Grant, not because he disliked Grant's work, but in spite of the fact that he believed Grant to be a great artist!

Why, then, did he kill?

We do not have to guess at the answer to that question. I have the tape which tells us why he killed.

I now offer to the world the evidence of that tape, which was still rolling as I left Grant's room on the fatal night. I start my transcript just after my exit:

Grant: Square. That writer, that magazine guy. Square.

Dunhaven: I didn't come about square, Eddie.

Grant: Tie. Knitted tie. And he takes notes. Hey, have a cup of rum, Danny.

Dunhaven: I won't drink your rum. I gotta have it out with you, Eddie.

Grant: Blue suit, too, that guy. Like a funeral. No rum? What's a matter?

Dunhaven: The matter is you got a great career you shouldn't ought to ruin.

Grant: Yeah? Name me who writes a better book. I'll prove to you. Wait a minute. Here it is ... New Broom. Quote. "Eddie Grant makes the avant-garde look like they're guarding the derriére. " There.

Dunhaven: Eddie, I wrote that.

Grant: Oh, you did?

Dunhaven: Sure. Didn't I always say you're the best writer in the whole wide Village? It's just your next book won't be any good.

Grant: Why not?

Dunhaven: Because you got a girl now.

Grant: Me?

Dunhaven: Yeah, you. You got a girl.

Grant: You mean just because some girl, some twist, some broad there, you won't drink my rum? Take away the sweat socks, the blue jeans, and what's the difference between a girl and a man? Have some rum.

Dunhaven: I don't drink with someone that spoils a great career.

Grant: Anyways, who said I had a girl?

Dunhaven: Don't fake, Eddie. I'm talking about Emma.

Grant: Oh. Emma. Well, yuh, I've seen Emma a few times.

Dunhaven: A few times. I introduce her to you at the party Friday, and ever since I can't find her in her pad. Once the door is even locked and there's little noises inside. Tonight I found her and she said she's waiting for you.

Grant: Oh, yuh, well, thought I'd take the kid to a belly dance or something, and a butterscotch sundae afterward.

Dunhaven: Eddie, you're an artist! You can't get mixed up with a girl! Look what happened to the boxer in Golden Boy!

Grant: I'm no critic. I don't read the classics. And what's with you, Danny? I been with girls before. You never minded.

Dunhaven: This is Emma.

Grant: Hey, listen, you like Emma yourself? That it?

Dunhaven: Never mind.

Grant: You like her yourself!

Dunhaven: Goddamnit, when you found her, she was in my lap!

Grant: So that's it! You like her! All right, wanna know what I thought when I saw her there at the party there, Friday, in your lap there? I thought ... How can I express it? There must be a word for it. Let's see ... Beautiful! Yes, that's the word. Beautiful! She's beautiful!

Dunhaven: I know that.

Grant: How many times you think beauty comes into a guy's life?

Dunhaven: But she's mine! Mine, Eddie! Whose lap was it?

Grant: If beauty sits in the lap of my best friend, then rises and comes into my arms, all friendly considerations fade in the wonder and the glory of that moment.

Dunhaven: Eddie, she's my girl!

Grant: Your girl? Emma? Never. The secret spot behind her ear quivers damply, and oh, how beautiful are her feet with sandals! Never could you appreciate Emma!

Dunhaven: I could not appreciate her? Emma, with her raven tresses? Emma, who each time she walks 14 steps writes a sonnet?

Grant: Ah, now I know you, villain, as you are!

Dunhaven: How am I?

Grant: Traitorous.

Dunhaven: No, I'm just in love.

Grant: Traducer! Plotting, voicing graveconcernLest my career expire -- when all the while'Tis only of my Emma that you care!

Dunhaven: My Emma!

Grant: Mine!

Dunhaven: I saw her first!

Grant: But I Spoke tender to her. She herself avowed No man before me thus bestirred her.

Dunhaven: No? Then ask her, prithee, what befell last monthWhen I escorted her unto her pad, And there with gentle words, importunate hands,Had all my will of her.

Grant: Aha! But I Have had my will more lately. Mark you, too:My will of her is hers of me. We twainMelt into one. Her hips are fluid locks;Her mouth is wounded as it wounds mine own;The ears of Ethiopian Night are splitWith her hurt joyful cries and gladsome moansCommingling with my own. For we are one!

Dunhaven: She's mine!

Grant: Not so. You cannot touch your handTo her -- whilst I romp picnicking uponHer hillocks and her valleys.

Dunhaven: Damn your eyes!

Grant: She's mine!

Dunhaven: I love her!

Grant: Still, I say, she's mine!

Dunhaven: Bastard! Son of a faithless whore!

Grant: Watch out!

Dunhaven: Watch out yourself, youblackest-hearted friend!Take that! And that! Your treachery's at an end!Farewell, my sometime buddy. Now has comeThe time when yes, I will drink up your rum!

I have of course omitted the sounds of the attack with the poker, which were clearly recorded on my tape. The reader can imagine those sounds, I think.

And the reader can see, too, what injustice has been done in the public prints to both Grant and Dunhaven. The critic killed for no mere literary reason. No -- in jealous rage he took the life of the man he admired because they both loved the same woman.

And now that my tape has revealed the truth to all the world, I trust that the press will henceforth treat Daniel Dunhaven with all the respect it habitually accords to killers motivated by the tenderest of passions.