What We Read in the Fifties: The Amboy Dukes

During my Erasmus Hall High School years, the hottest of all "hot" books was Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes. It was official doctrine that a single oblique glance at the inflammatory cover of this paperback could transform a well-behaved kid into a murderous, reefer-crazed, oversexed hooligan. Simply to read about the "juvenile delinquents" who populate The Amboy Dukes was to wander into a criminal twilight. A guy definitely did not want his mommy to know that he had heard of this book, let alone possessed a sticky contraband copy.

What was all the fuss about?  Why was the book condemned all over America and even banned (for a while) in Canada?    

Here's a paragraph that was much brooded upon in the local schoolyard. (I've since learned that some 1950s moralists condemned it as pornographic -- and perhaps they were right.)

They pushed onto the bus, and Frank watched Black Kenny and Mike get a nice-looking broad between them and give her a rub. Mike and Kenny hemmed the girl between them, skillfully pocketing her to prevent her escape. In her eyes there was loathing and fear of the two hoodlums, who did not look at her but nevertheless pressed against her lasciviously, pinioning her against their rigid hot bodies. Mike pushed against the girl's buttocks, thighs, and legs, while Kenny pressed against her stomach and breasts. The girl wanted to scream, to cry out, but she was afraid....

Ugly to be sure, abusive, sexist, nasty, but still rather tame by later standards. It's an effort of will to remember that during the Eisenhower years, words such as "breasts" and "buttocks" were not uttered casually and that their appearance on the printed page was rare and incendiary. But I don't think it was the language alone, or even the stark portrayal of adolescents in heat that rattled polite society. It was the intrusion of viciousness in the tame 1950s father-knows-best twin-bed universe that provoked the reaction. That "nice-looking broad" whom Mike and Black Kenny molest was, or was imagined to be, some respectable family's sister or daughter. Just as the two hoods thrust themselves against the young woman, so The Amboy Dukes flaunted itself in the face of respectability. The proper middle class went to great lengths not to acknowledge that brutes such as Black Kenny and Mike were their next-door neighbors. The Eisenhower era lived in denial; there were some things that everyone knew but of which no one spoke. In The Amboy Dukes, Shulman spilled the beans. 

That's why The Amboy Dukes fascinated the guys who hung around the P. S. 217 schoolyard. Unlike our parents, we couldn't choose to deny the existence of psychopaths such as Black Kenny and Crazy Shak (the novel's rapist and murderer). Guys like that smoked and spit on every street corner and disrupted many of our classrooms. We had to negotiate with violence or with the threat of violence every day. To read The Amboy Dukes was oddly refreshing; it validated the daily reality of teen-agers who weren't gang members.

Moreover, the novel had a strong vicarious appeal. While my friends were trying to manage their hormones, keep up with their schoolwork and occasionally get in a good game of basketball or stickball, the Dukes were cutting class, punching out their teachers, smoking dope, and getting laid. Reading the novel let us share in some of that other-side-of-the-track forbidden fruit. But it allowed us to participate safely. The Amboy Dukes, like so many such scandalous publications, is at heart a cautionary novel. Frank Abbot, the central character, is a bad guy but he's appealing and not irredeemable; he goes too far, gets in over his head, and winds up dead -- a warning to all of us. The Amboy Dukes allowed "normal" kids to enjoy the novel's transgressive moments and still return safely to the nest.

Although The Amboy Dukes sold millions of copies, I couldn't find it in any of the libraries that I use. Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to buy a tattered, yellowed-pages-unglued 35-cent 1949 Avon paperback. The object itself is a piece of history. On the cover, a woman with flaming red hair resists the embraces of a dark and handsome young man. Their facial expressions (he: lustful; she: fearful) are highly melodramatic, but the pair are dressed conservatively, as though they've just returned from a day of yachting. Also on the cover are a couple of claims to literary merit: "The one book that tells the inside story of juvenile delinquency no other novel has told before." And an appeal to the moralists: "This book is emphatically a reading 'must'" --Edwin J. Lukas, Executive Director, Society for the Prevention of Crime." Finally, in almost unreadable tiny print, "This book is specially revised and edited for Avon Books" -- an admission that leads me to guess that the paperback mass edition expurgated some words or events that were deemed too strong for the kids who bought the cheap edition and concealed it inside their official three-ring binders. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

"The Amboy Dukes" mentioned a street I was familiar with because my grandparents lived on it between Sutter and Pitkin, and it was one horrible neighborhood, and they just would not move. It scared the hell out of me every time I went there. Even when I was teaching at Eiseman I.S. and played basketball at Marcus Jr. High, I hated driving into that neighborhood.

The other forbidden fruit book we read when we were PS 217ers was Harry Grey's "The Hoods." I loved that book. It was full of sex and danger and had a great ending, one slightly happier than the one in "The Amboy Dukes."

[Splooge Gainsbourg]

John Hand is correct about the hair-style being described in the novel. It writes: "The boys sported duck-tail haircuts: long, shaggy, and clipped to form a point at the backs of their heads." It also describes protagonist Frank Goldfarb coiffing his duck-tail to make it prominent. Readers may enjoy consulting an interactive historical map of Brooklyn placing the story venue in a broader context, at [remove line-break] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1cL8gO_EsSvYjQOS9-EyRy_dZF_Q

[John Hand]

Correct me if I am wrong since I don't have a copy of the book, but I believe that the so-called 'Duck Tail, aka Duck's Ass, haircut was described in that book and throughout the 50s imitated by youth across the nation.

[Splooge Gainsbourg]

Mr. Starbuck,

The film adaptation, 1949's "City Across the River," was the first movie in which Tony Curtis (credited as "Anthony Curtis") appeared. In the exterior shots, Williamsburg stood in for Brownsville. Today in 2016, WorldCat reports knowing about less than 100 libraries which hold at least one copy of one or more of the many versions of the novel.

[Paul Starbuck]

I've always remembeered "The Amboy Dukes" and vow someday I'll lay hands on a copy. It's a morality play, really--set in alleys, with a cast of irredeemable delinquents run wild while their parents work overtime in WW2 defense industries. Interestingly, the tough guys, by and large, wind up dead, or in the crosshairs of even tougher guys. Why this book wasn't made into a movie, I'll never understand; it makes "Rebel Without A Cause" look like a schoolyard game of mumblety-peg.