‘Voice of violence’ its own author

Press, 7 August 1981, Page 13

‘Voice of violence’ its own author

By

DAVID BLUNDY

“Sunday Times,” London

For any new author it would have been the dream debut on to the American literary scene. For a convicted murderer in a federal penitentiary it was nothing less than miraculous. In the "Belly of the Beast." a. prison memoir by Jack Henry Abbott, became the toast of New York City. The New York Review of Books carried a panegyric about Abbott by one of America's most fashionable writers. Norman Mailer. It was splashed on the cover with a big spread inside. The “New York Times" book review section devoted two pages of praise to Abbott — ‘‘The most fiercely visionary book of its kind in the American repertoire of prison literature." said the reviewer. Abbott, a thin, intense man with cropped hair and steelrimmed glasses, was not able to bask in the glory. The violence described in his book slipped into reality on the New York streets. At dawn on a Saturday morning, the police say, Abbott stabbed a young waiter to death outside a Manhattan restaurant.

Interest in Abbot moved from the literary salons to the ninth police precinct and

to Detective Dennis Carroll who is organising a nationwide search for Abbott. “It's in the wind right now." said Carroll.

"But it's just a matter of lime. I would like to have read his book but I'm too busy looking for him."

Norman Mailer, who employed Abbott three days a week during his pre-release programme doing research for Mailer's ‘ new novel on Egypt, went into seclusion. “We cannot bother Mr Mailer with any queries about this matter?' said his literary agent. It was through the good offices of Mailer and the publishers Random House that Abbott was released early, in time for the publication of his book. Both of them wrote letters to the board of pardon at Utah Penitentiary, saying there was every reason to believe Abbott could support himself as a writer.

"But that's it." said Random House. "We did not give character references or ac-. lively seek his release."

Mailer's support for Abbott verges almost on heroworship.. In his introduction to the book, he calls Abbott "an intellectual, a radical, a

potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge... I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does." One critic accused Mailer of an infatuation with “out-

law mystique which carried over into his praise of Abbott." who was considered a dangerous and incorrigible inmate during much of his prison life. •

Abbott is 37. He went to jail for the first time when he was 12, and has spent onlyfive months and a half of the past 25 years out of jail. That includes a brief jailbreak during which he committed a bank robbery. In 1966. he stabbed another prisoner to death and was sentenced to 14 years. During the trial he threw a pitcher of water at the judge and claimed insanity. The psychiatrists found him fit to plead. He was due to be released on parole at the end of August.

When Abbott was in maximum security he heard that Mailer was writing "The Executioners Song." his novel about the murderer Gary Gilmore, who campaigned for his own execution. Abbott wrote a letter to Mailer explaining what prison life was really like. Mailer was impressed.

"Abbott's letter was intense. direct, unadorned and detached... I felt all • the awe one knows before a phenomenon. Abbott had his own voice. I had heard no

other like it." Abbott read the works of philosphers with fierce intensity: Hegel, Russell and Whitehead, Carnap and Quine. He was most impressed by Marx. His letters to Mailerbecame longer and more frequent and finally totalled more than 1000 pages in close handwriting. Mailer sent them to a literary agent, who passed them to Random House, which decided to publish the edited letters with a long foreward by Mailer. What emerged was an ugly, passionate indictment of prison life in the United States. Vague philosophical ramblings are interspersed with graphic description like this, where Abbott describes knifing another prisoner: "You've pumped the knife in several times without even being aware of it. You go to the floor with him to finish him': It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper, one thing at the end: ‘please’."

After the references from Random House and' Mailer.

Abbott was given pre-release from the Utah Penitentiary and went to live in a Salvation Army halfway house near the ’ Bowery in New York City. He worked for Mailer, saw his editors at. Random House, and began work on a play. On a Saturday morning last month, at about 5.30, he went to the Bini Bon allnight diner on Second Avenue with two female companions. According to Detective Carroll, he got into an argument with the waiter over the . use of a men's room. The waiter told him it was for the use of the staff only. Abbott got angry and the two men went outside. Police say Abbott pulled a knife and stabbed the waiter in the heart. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. .

If Abbott is caught and convicted he will go to prison for 25 years to life. After reading his story of prison horror, it is hard to see how anyone could bear it. But Abbott had doubts about whether he could

adapt to freedom, or control his feelings of anger and resentment.

At the end of his book he writes: "I do not know how I feel at being given a parole:.. Am Ito be content to walk along the same streets as men who have entered my cell and beaten me to the floor with full knowledge and consent of everyone? Or walk the streets with the ‘faceless masses' of our society who during my lifetime have supported or acquiesced to evil men and their ambitions."