Monday, May 12, 2008
In "King of the Jews," Nick Tosches takes on Arnold Rothstein, the legendary gangland figure who fixed a World Series, mentored young hoodlums, and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Jul 12, 2005 | With the possible exception of Norman Mailer when he's on a roll, Nick Tosches might be the most distinguishable nonfiction prose writer in America today. Everything he writes is intensely personal and relentlessly idiosyncratic; all his books are driven by a ruthless insistence on not being like anything else that has come before them -- even another Nick Tosches book. So how do you tell a good Nick Tosches book from a bad one?
For starters, the good ones -- such as "Hellfire," his white-hot fan's notes on Jerry Lee Lewis, or "Dino," his plunge into the black hole of the life of Dean Martin, and even "Where Dead Voices Gather," his Holy Grail hunt to uncover the life and work of an obscure blackface performer, Emmett Miller -- draw you into Tosches' vision like a tractor beam in a sci-fi movie. His misfires, like "The Devil and Sonny Liston" and "King of the Jews," his new biography of the legendary gambler and seminal gangland figure Arnold Rothstein, don't let you in. They make you feel like an outsider in a strange land.
At his best, Tosches works through his obsessions until they crystallize into sentences that pop in your mind like mental flash bulbs. Let's mine a nugget from perhaps Tosches' most underated work, "Where Dead Voices Gather." Emmett Miller, he concludes, was at "the heart of 19th century show business, the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture." And "In the world as colored by Miller's voice, we are never far from Nightmare Alley ... for all his brilliance, he [Miller] belonged, at best, to the sideshow of the age, where all that does not conform, all that lies beyond the range of the lowest common denominator, brilliant and bad alike, is relegated to curiosity and in the end left on the church steps of posterity." By the end of that strange and passionate little book, a reader with true romance in his soul can't be satisfied until he has sought out Miller's music and tried to hear it through Tosches' ear.
As someone who shares his fascination for the dark frontiers of the American psyche, I'm always willing to go where Tosches wants to take me, knowing that the trail might lead to some fabulous treasure trove of forgotten or discarded artifacts that can change, if not the world, at least my manner of looking at it. But "King of The Jews" leads nowhere. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that, when all the pieces come together, don't form a picture but a perfect blank.
The real Arnold Rothstein was a financier, teacher and role model for hoodlums from diverse ethnic groups including Jews (Meyer Lansky), Italians (Charles "Lucky" Luciano), and Irish (Jack "Legs" Diamond). There is some truth to Tosches' hyperbole that "Arnold Rothstein was the first true and great equal opportunity employer." As a young man he cut such a dashing figure as to inspire Damon Runyon (who modeled the Nathan Detroit of "Guys and Dolls" after him), and by middle age, already a celebrity among the Broadway crowd and a crony of such celebrities as New York Giants manager John McGraw, he became openly notorious for his involvement in the 1919 "Black Sox" betting scandal. Jay Gatsby's friend Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who just "saw the opportunity" to fix the World Series in Fitzgerald's novel, was based on Rothstein. ("I've loved baseball," says Lee Strasberg's Meyer Lansky-modeled Hyman Roth in "The Godfather, Part II," "ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series.")
Tosches spends a great deal of unnecessary effort swiping at earlier depictions of Rothstein. Did we really need to be told that Runyon's caricature, Nathan Detroit, isn't historically accurate? He attacks Fitzgerald for being grossly anti-Semitic -- and his Meyer Wolfsheim probably is -- but Tosches seems to bring it up only for the purpose of taking a cheap shot that dismisses all of Fitzgerald's work. Leo Katcher's entertaining and highly colored 1959 biography of Rothstein, "The Big Bankroll," becomes a straw man set up for Tosches to knock over. Katcher's book, Tosches writes, "is generally considered to be the classic biography of Arnold Rothstein. I remember reading and enjoying it a good many years ago, when I was even more stupid than I am today." Tosches isn't stupid today, he's just mean-spirited. "The Big Bankroll" isn't considered by any serious student of organized crime to be a "classic biography," but a collection of colorful stories and tales that grew in the shadow of Rothstein's legend. The classic biography of Rothstein is David Pietrusza's "Rothstein," from Carroll and Graf, published more than two years ago but of which Tosches seems to be unaware.
"It is not the artful novelist," Tosches writes, "who has blurred the divide between fiction and fact: it is the professor of learning, the peddler of secondhand misknowing ... It is better to keep away from words, 'facts,' 'knowledge.' They are almost always the carriers of disease." Yet less than 50 pages later we are treated to several paragraphs of conversation between Rothstein and the young Lucky Luciano on the subject of grooming and wardrobe. From what artful novelist, one wonders, did these quotes magically appear? (No source is listed.) Did Tosches simply divine what Rothstein and Luciano would have talked about in moments of leisure? Who, exactly, is peddling this misknowing?
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