Mailer is a well-liked figure among the New York literati: there is much protective affection for the loud-mouth and tantrum-specialist whom they have indulged for so long. ‘Oh, I like Norman,’ was the typical response of one Madison Avenue publisher. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to room with him next year … but he’s good to have around.’ It seems that every MA in Manhattan has his Mailer story: ‘Then he smashed this window … Then he loafed this guy … Then he grabbed this bottle … ‘ But he is spoken of with the reverence customarily accorded to people who live harder than most of us do.
It is always possible that Mailer’s best work is yet to come. Age is currently doing a good job on his infinite variety. Although his writing in the Fifties seemed prescient, Mailer’s ideas solidified in the Sixties, despite his attempts to get interested in ecology, graffiti, the Yippies, and what not. He seems well-poised to make some sort of reconciliation with his own limits. Money worries constrain him now; but eventually the wives will remarry, and the kids will all grow up. Then the Avenger might get his piece of the Great American Bitch — or, in language more appropriate to his years, Mailer might write the novels that are in him.
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In the Belly of the Beast, the book that sprang Jack Henry Abbott from jail, played a key part in putting him back inside. All last week, the State Supreme Court had the carnival atmosphere which New York reserves for its celebrity murder trials. Through a gauntlet of camera lights and superfat security guards strolled writers Jean Malaquais and Norman Mailer. Among the intent voyeurs of the public gallery sat filmstars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken. Already there was speculation about the film of the book of the trial of the life.
‘”It’s like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all,'” quoted the prosecutor. ‘”They always whisper one thing at the end: ‘Please’. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes.” Did you write that?’ Abbott — a jittery figure, terribly thin, a man clearly in a state of intense and permanent confusion about what the world is making of him — gave one of his rare, murky grins. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he said.
At the end of the day’s hearing, a turbulent press conference was held by Mr Mailer. He said that he hoped Abbott wouldn’t get too long a sentence for his latest murder. ‘Culture is worth a little risk,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you have a Fascistic society. I am willing to gamble with certair. elements in society to save this man’s talent.’ Mailer is willing. But does society feel the same way?
One thing seems clear: the Jack Abbott story will run and run. ‘It is a tragedy all around,’ Mailer had said. But it is a farce too, an American rodeo of inverted cal!ousness and pretension. Could this happen anywhere else? The world looks on fascinated, rubbing its eyes.
Now thirty-eight, Abbott has been in prison since he was twelve. He was released at eighteen and promptly readmitted for theft. Three years later he murdered a fellow inmate — ‘in combat’, according to his book. At one point he escaped, robbed a few banks and was recaptured within a month. Abbott is what they call ‘State raised’. Eight years ago Abbott started writing letters to Jerzy Kozinski, a correspondence that ended, for the novelist, in alarm and repulsion. ‘So stay away, Abbott,’ read Kozinski’s last letter. ‘You have killed a man already — you won’t kill a man in me.’
In 1977 Abbott tried his luck with Norman Mailer, then at work on The Executioner’s Song. Instantly Mailer felt ‘all the awe one knows before a phenomenon’. Extracts from Abbott’s letters appeared in the New York Review of Books. Mailer was joined by other literary figures in championing Abbott’s cause in submissions to the Utah Board of Correction. Abbott’s letters were edited down and Random House made plans to publish. Abbott was duly paroled and established in a halfway house in the Bowery, where he braced himself for literary fame.
It could be argued that literary fame, in New York, has been more than a match for the equilibrium of Norman Mailer. So God knows what it did to Jack Abbott, a man who had spent half his adult life in solitary confinement. With Mailer, Abbott preceded Dudley Moore on the TV show ‘Good Morning, America’. He was photographed by Jill Krementz (Mrs Kurt Vonnegut). He was toasted and praised at literary dinner parties. Then the reviews started to appear: ‘One of the most important books of our age__a stunning and original writer__Conrad-like lyrical beauty… awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible’.