Literati fail to see their prison darlings as murderers
Back to the Political Correctness Page
02/17/02
Philip TerzianI f Jack Henry Abbott did nothing else in his life, he put an end to the budding romance between public intellectuals and murderers.
Abbott, who hanged himself one recent weekend in a New York prison, was languishing in a Utah penitentiary in the late 1970s -- convicted of passing bad checks and killing a fellow inmate -- when he began sending letters to Norman Mailer. Abbott was shrewd to choose Mailer, whose lifelong fascination with violence, tortured masculinity and the underside of American life guaranteed a favorable response. Mailer was enthralled by Abbott's vivid descriptions of prison life -- "As good as any convict's prose . . . since Eldridge Cleaver" -- and in due course their correspondence, "In the Belly of the Beast," was published by Random House in 1981.
Abbott's vulgar, overwrought, self-infatuated style might not be to everyone's taste -- mine, for instance -- but his book was received with tumultuous applause. It was serialized in the New York Review of Books and reprinted in Europe. Reviewers compared him favorably to a host of writers behind bars -- Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade, etc. -- and hailed the arrival of an American master.
In the midst of all this rapture, Mr. Abbott was paroled from his Utah prison and transported to Manhattan, where he planned to settle in to the literary life. He was interviewed with due deference on ABC's "Good Morning America," profiled in People magazine and was guest of honor at a glittering testimonial dinner. Two weeks later, while dining with two female admirers in an East Village restaurant, he became enraged because his waiter, an aspiring actor named Richard Adan, wouldn't let Abbott use the employees' bathroom, and Abbott stabbed him to death.
To his credit, Norman Mailer later said that he felt "a very large responsibility" for Mr. Adan's murder, and admitted he "never thought Abbott was close to killing, and that's why I have to sit in judgment on myself. I just was not sensitive to the fact." It's never too late to learn.
Although Mailer is firmly on the political left -- and more likely, one would guess, to champion society's outcasts -- it is worth mentioning that the right is equally capable of bad judgment. In the 1960s, a New Jersey murderer named Edgar Smith began exchanging letters with William F. Buckley Jr., who came to champion Smith's innocence and persuaded the venerable house of Alfred A. Knopf to publish their correspondence, "Brief Against Death" (1968).
Needless to say, shortly after Smith was paroled in 1971, and made the obligatory appearance on Buckley's TV program, PBS's "Firing Line," he was arrested for yet another violent crime and confessed that he was guilty of the earlier murder as well.
A decade later, Mailer repeated Buckley's mistake. Since then, it is no surprise to report that public figures have been notably shy about befriending saintly denizens of death row. The principal exception to this rule, the Philadelphia cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal, must content himself with adoring entertainers -- Whoopi Goldberg, Mike Farrell, Ed Asner, Harry Belafonte -- rather than people who think for a living.
There is plenty to debate in America about the nature of judicial punishment and about the value of imprisonment for various crimes. But our horror of violent crime seems to pull us in different directions: We are insistent that murderers either be put to death or imprisoned for life, but we cannot escape a certain fascination with them, either.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer learned the truth about their protgs inconveniently late; no doubt, Ed Asner and Whoopi Goldberg will be similarly disillusioned with their friend, Mumia. The instructive irony is that, as terrible as imprisonment and capital punishment may be, some people deserve it.
2002, The Providence Journal Reach Philip Terzian, associate editor of the Providence Journal, by mail at Providence Journal, 1325 G Street N.W., Suite 250, Washington, DC 20005.
