While my protagonists -Younger, Littlemore, Colette, and Luc – are fictional, many of those with whom they interact are not, such as Police Commissioner Enright, Treasury Secretary Houston, New York City Mayor Hylan, 'Big Bill' Flynn, and Dr Walter Prince (of the American Society for Psychical Research). There was also a real Mrs Grace Cross who apparently had an affair with Warren Harding, but the character bearing her name is not otherwise based on the actual person.
Arnold Brighton is a fictitious character. Edward Doheny was the real oilman who backed Fall's efforts to make war on Mexico and paid him at least $100,000 in bribes, for which Fall would later become the first Cabinet member ever to be imprisoned for a crime committed while in office. The real head of the US Radium Corporation in 1920, at whose New Jersey factory Quinta Maggia McDonald and her sisters worked, was Arthur Roeder. There is absolutely no reason to believe that either Doheny or Roeder had anything to do with the Wall Street bombing.
By contrast, the tragic poisoning of the radium dial painters is well established. In several respects the true facts are worse than my description. Up to one hundred twelve dial painters may have died as a result of 'pointing' their brushes with their lips – a practice not abolished until 1925. Many more suffered painful, debilitating illnesses.
The Maggia sisters – Quinta, Amelia, and Albina – were among the victims. (Although I use these three women's names in my book, my characters do not correspond to the real-life women, and the story I tell about their escape from the radium factory, their being hunted, and their efforts to communicate with Colette, is complete invention.) Amelia died in 1922, the first of the dial painters known to have perished from radium poisoning. When her body was exhumed in 1927, it was still radioactive. A handful of women, including Quinta and Albina, sued US Radium in the mid-twenties, but the law did not treat them well. In 1928, terminally ill, Quinta received a modest cash payment and an extravagant $600 annuity 'for life'; she died less than two years later. Albina lived until 1946.
The corporation apparently suppressed or even falsified a report demonstrating that its officers knew of radium's danger to the dial painters. At one point a medical specialist from Columbia University volunteered to conduct independent examinations of the complaining women and concluded that they were either in excellent health or that their symptoms were due to syphilis or other illnesses unrelated to their employment. That specialist, Frederick Flinn, neglected to mention that he was not actually a doctor – and that he was being paid by US Radium. My character Frederick Lyme engages in similar misdeeds, but his further nefarious conduct is imaginary.
Sigmund Freud first articulated his theory of the death instinct in a short book called Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920. Understood as a drive of pure aggression, a kind of lust for killing and destruction, the notion of a death instinct might raise questions about the goodness of human nature, but would otherwise be simple enough to comprehend. Freud insisted, however, that the instinct is fundamentally and originally directed at the self's own destruction. As a result, his death drive is regarded as a much more difficult and controversial proposition – although self-destructiveness is surely a phenomenon almost as familiar as aggression.
By and large, the psychoanalytic world since Freud has been happy to forget about the death instinct or at any rate to deemphasize it. Melanie Klein was an important exception; so was Jacques Lacan, who considered the death instinct central to psychoanalysis, although he sought to prize the instinct free from the biological foundations Freud had given it. Another exception is Andre Green, also a French psychoanalyst, whose excellent recent book on the death instinct – Pounquel les pulsions de destruction ou de mort? (Editions du Panama, 2007) by contrast explicitly connects Freud's theory to apoptosis, the biological process of programmed' cell death or cell suicide.' I have Freud draw the same connection in a conversation with Colette, perhaps,a little anachronistically. Although apoptosis was known to scientists by the late nineteenth century (called at that time 'chromatolysis'), its connection to cancer was not established until the late twentieth.
Readers familiar with Freud's work will recognize the famous fort-da game that figures so prominently in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The unnamed boy who plays the game in Freud's essay has been identified as Freud's grandson Ernst; his mother was the Sophie whose death Freud so deeply mourned in 1920. There is another place in my book where Luc assumes the role of one of Freud's grandsons. The anecdote I tell about Freud, Luc, and the beggar feigning epilepsy was told to me by Clement Freud – brother of the painter Lucian Freud – and appears in the late Sir Clement's autobiography, Freud Ego.
The astonishing story Freud recounts to Colette and Younger demonstrating the accuracy of one of his dream interpretations – in which Freud correctly deduces that a patient witnessed an affair between the patient's nurse and a family groomsman when the patient was about four years old – is entirely true, or at any rate is attested to by the patient herself, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie, however, did not begin her consultation with Freud until 1925, so the story is not in correct time sequence in my book. As in The Interpretation of Murder, many of Freud's statements in The Death Instinct are drawn from his actual writings. Although it is common today to refer to Freud's death drive by the name of Thanatos' (after a Greek god of death), Freud never did so in his writings, and accordingly that term does not appear in my pages. He does refer to the death goddess Atropos in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets,' a 1913 essay that contains the key to the symbolism of The Death Instinct. Freud lived in Vienna until 1938, when he narrowly escaped Nazi persecution. He died in England in 1939.
Acknowledgments
I ran up too many debts writing this book to name them all. First and foremost, my beautiful wife, Amy, to whom I already owed nearly everything good in my life, made countless improvements, small and large, to the manuscript. My daughters, Sophia and Louisa, provided wisdom beyond their years and saved me from numerous embarrassments. Sarah Bilston, James Bundy, Alexis Contant, Anne Dailey, Susan Birke Fiedler, Paul Fiedler, Dan Knudsen, Daniel Markovits, Katherine Oberembt, Sylvia Smoller, Walter Austerer, and Lina Tetelbaum were incredibly generous, ingenious, perceptive readers. I'm grateful as well to an incomparable agent, Suzanne Gluck, my publisher at Riverhead, Geoff Kloske, and to painstaking editors, Mary-Anne Harrington and Jake Morrissey. My thanks in addition to Jennifer Barth, Diana and Leon Chua, Kathleen Brown-Dorato, Nancy Greenberg, Tony Kronman, Marina Santilli, Jordan Smoller, Anne Tofflemire, and Lucy Wang, all of whom helped more with this book than they can know.
About Jed Rubenfeld
Rubenfeld is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University (A.B., 1980) and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D., 1986). He also studied theater in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School between 1980-1982. Rubenfeld clerked for Judge Joseph T. Sneed on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1986-1987. After his clerkship, he worked as an associate attorney at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. He joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1990 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1994. Rubenfeld has also taught as a visiting professor at both the Stanford Law School and the Duke University School of Law.