Jack and Norman

   Tom Wolfe was not impressed by the “radical chic” phenomena of the 60’s, and he made it clear in his book. Whether it was Leonard Bernstein raising funds for the Black Panthers; or Jane Fonda stumping for the communists; or some rich Hollywood celebrity inviting activists to their party; Tom saw it as grandstanding, others saw it as slumming. Regardless, Norman Mailer took radical chic to new extremes with the cause of Jack Henry Abbott. The man of Mailer’s fascination was not a political prisoner or freedom fighter, but a 34-year old convict who’d done robbery, assault, and murder. Born to an Irish-American sailor and a half-Chinese woman who turned tricks, he was rejected by both his parents’ families for being mixed-race. He grew up in boy’s homes, juvenile prisons, then adult prisons, and by age 34 had a record of violent extremes. Not the kind of guy you want to have around. Mailer helped free him, death and disaster followed. This book tries to explain how and why.

    Jerome Loving, the author, is a professor at Texas A&M, so I’ll assume he’s dealt with his fair share of radicals in academia. His book has major surprises in store, even for people who are familiar with the Mailer-Abbott story. Most readers are familiar with the basic plot; Mailer was writing a crime book, Abbott the convict heard about it, he offered his knowledge about prison, and they exchanged letters. Mailer, along with Jerzy Kozinski, was so impressed with Abbott’s writing that he persuaded the parole board to let him go. Now here’s where the surprises come in; there was a huge amount of fraud involved, and Jack Henry Abbott was a seriously bad guy.

    Professor Loving makes a convincing claim that Abbott was embellishing a lot of his story. According to Abbott, he’d spent years in the hole, yet he was surprisingly well-read. Prisoners in solitary have no access to the prison library, and where he was incarcerated, you’d be lucky to get anything other than the Bible and the Book of Moron. So how did he read all the books on philosophy that he knew of? Books on Communism were definitely not on the high-security reading list, nor anything by radical authors, so how did he get them? It’s likely that he was lying about how much time he’d really been in solitary.

    From the get-go, the author stresses that Abbott was incredibly self-indulgent and blame all his bad habits on prison. Not one single mistake did he ever take responsibility for. As for the connection with Mailer, it was his book about Gary Gilmore, who like Abbott had been in Utah, that put them in contact. Abbott wrote that he was admirer of Marx and Lenin, which fascinated Mailer. However, Loving thinks that after Mailer did seventeen days in the loony-bin for stabbing his wife, he developed guilt for being too privileged. Was this Mailer’s way of atoning for his crime? Ironically, Gary Gilmore asked to be executed by firing squad to fulfill the Mormon law of “blood atonement.”

    I applaud the author for his unbiased writing on a highly debated topic. Some say that it was Mailer and Kozinski that got Abbott paroled, while others point out that it was in exchange for ratting out other convicts. There’s also the fact that the prison warden wanted him out, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. Then there’s the misery that Abbott put his family through; when his sister and brother-in-law visited, they couldn’t touch each other, because he was sexually attracted to her and seeing a man touch her would set him off. At least his sister led a happy life without him. As for Abbott’s short stint at freedom, it soon ended when he stabbed a waiter to death for not letting him use the bathroom. Abbott didn’t want to go to New York in the first place; he wanted to go to Cuba or the USSR because they were Communist. Maybe that’s what should’ve happened? It would be a great way to get rid of American undesirables, shipping them off to Cuba and Moscow, places where nobody else seems to want to live. They sent us all of their criminals, so why shouldn’t we send them ours? Despite Abbott’s love of left-wing ideology, the Black Panthers had no use for him. They publicly criticized his behavior.

   Liberals have often had a sense of “feeling sorry” for men in prisons. I remember a Richard Pryor skit where he said he visited a prison and thought the Black men in there would all be political criminals. He was going to march in there and show solidarity with his “brothers.” When he came out, all he could say was “Thank God for prisons!”