closure man

The closure man is the name E. L. Doctorow's City of God gives to a former New York Times reporter who, after years of covering stories that never reached just endings, decides to become the agent who finishes them. The concept emerges as a deliberate self-transformation: the ex-Times man concludes that the occupational cynicism of reporters stems from the incompleteness of stories, especially as justice repeatedly fails to catch up in time to effect just endings. He discovers within himself a powerful desire to end a story, and he reinterprets his obscure years of work as having conferred a moral endowment. His journalism career, he realizes, has instructed him in all the delusions and rationalizations, including righteousness, for doing evil or for covering it up. He has all along been his paper's curator of the stories that could have been completed but never were. This realization gives his new role its purpose: he will be the closure man, acting in a state of solemn joy and fervent resolve.

Origins and Self-Conception

The closure man's identity is built on a sharp contrast between two cultures. Reflecting on the Eichmann kidnapping, he recalls that the Israelis' major problem was identification, and that the actual abduction was not neat, even close to being bungled, yet Eichmann offered no resistance and cooperated fully. But the ex-Times man recognizes that he comes from the other culture: the culture of reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right. This heritage is like a ball and chain that drags on him, a heavy weight to pull. He understands that it is one thing to have the resolve to end a story, another to make the muscles actually do it, to actually make something happen in the world. All his life he has looked on, and he reflects bitterly that civilization paid people like him for doing nothing, for living subsidized the way a farmer is paid for not planting crops. He knows in his heart that what was most difficult for the Israelis is easy for him, and he sadly concludes that all the necessary detective work lies ahead of him.

The Mission and Its Method

The closure man begins his work by calling upon his old colleagues at the Times, who, unable to detect in his manner anything different from the colorless drab they have always known, grant him the professional courtesy of access to the clips. In less than a day he has chosen the stories he will complete. The first is the story of the former S.S. sergeant living in Cincinnati. He flies there with an open-ended return ticket, checks into a hotel called the Something Arms on a residential street in the hills above the downtown, rents a car, and cruises around to get the feel of the place. He observes that the whole city smells like beer, with lots of red brick, white granite steps, and sun bronzing off the Ohio River down below. His preparation is informed by the Eichmann case, from which he remembers that the major problem was identification, that they would have the right guy. He recalls how the suspected Eichmann worked under an assumed name, wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, looked unprepossessing, and came home to a cubelike flat-roofed cinder-block house in the middle of an empty lot outside Buenos Aires, a dwelling that could not be sneaked up on. The closure man's method, however, is complicated by his own professional inheritance, which he experiences as a drag on his resolve.

The Schmitz Case and the Limits of Evidence

The closure man's larger quarry is S.S. Major Schmitz, the commandant of the Kovno Ghetto. The evidence against him is assembled through the efforts of Sarah Blumenthal's father, whose file the rabbi has faxed to Sarah. The file contains his letters to the United States Department of Justice and their bureaucratic replies, as well as two 1977 articles from The New York Times covering a deportation hearing and a finding. A blurry head shot shows a bald fellow with a sickly thin face. Three people testify that the man in question is the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer shoots down their testimony, portraying them as elderly and easily befuddled. The defendant testifies that he is Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front, the same identity he presented to the immigration authorities after the war. The judge finds in his favor. Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center show a functionary agreeing with Sarah's father that Preissen is almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the identification cannot be made to justify reopening the case, although the file is being kept open. The Department of Justice offers less agreement, its lawyer somewhat defensive about his handling of the case. The closure man's pursuit of Schmitz thus runs directly into the limits of legal process and documentary proof.

The Archive and the Unsealing

The closure man's efforts become intertwined with the recovery of the Barbanel archive, the ghetto archive chest that is impounded at JFK Airport. At Pem's request, the chest remains sealed until a Justice Department attorney can be present when it is cracked open, as customs has insisted it must be. The reasoning is explicit: if the archive includes documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it will have to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing of the material have to be irreproachable. The arrangements take the better part of two weeks, and on the day of the unsealing, Pem and Sarah ride out to JFK in a taxi on a rainy late weekday morning, not speaking. The closure man's role in this process is that of the one who has gathered the evidence and set the legal machinery in motion, yet the scene is marked by Pem's doubt about his own motives, his fear that he is incapable of an act that does not contain its own corruption, that this could have been at heart no more than a seductive stunt. He reflects on how he had flown into Moscow, made calls, spoken as a priest to the fathers, a diplomat to the attachés, a con man to the hustlers, flashed his roll, laid on a lot of attitude, and fearlessly penetrated the KGB, only to wonder whether they were all like beggars with their hands out.

The Irony of Closure Denied

The closure man's mission ends not in triumph but in bitter irony. At a gathering, Pem takes the narrator by the arm and reveals the news: they found out the day before that the son of a bitch died two months ago. Pem struggles with the name, calling him Schmid, Schmitz, whatever his name was, the Nazi who ran the ghetto, and reports that he died in his sleep at a home in Yonkers. Pem's frustration is palpable: they had him good and nailed, too. When the narrator offers the consolation that he is dead anyway, Pem rejects it, insisting that the man never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The closure man's entire project, the moral endowment he discovered in himself, the resolve to end stories that justice had left incomplete, collapses into the recognition that the story cannot be closed after all. The concept thus becomes the novel's most pointed critique of the desire for narrative and legal closure in the face of historical atrocity: the closure man can gather evidence, penetrate the KGB, and nail his quarry, but he cannot force the world to bear witness. The closure he sought is denied not by his failure but by death, and the story remains, like so many others, incomplete.