That last gobbet is from the New York Times Book Review. Twelve hours before the paper hit the stands, however, Abbott had allegedly stabbed a man to death and was on the run. It has emerged at the trial that throughout his few weeks of freedom Abbott was in a highly volatile state — failing, in other words, to adjust to society. Asked to extinguish a cigarette in a museum, he reportedly flicked his butt in the guard’s face. Told in a department store that it would take ten days to complete an alteration, Abbott started upending clothes displays, looking for scissors to do the job himself. Everyday vexations: but it was a routine spat of this kind that led Abbott to stab a waiter at an all-night cafe.
As Abbott went on the run, his sponsors grew silent. Some suggested that they had wanted simply to encourage a writer rather than unleash a con — as if, wrote one commentator, ‘the most they hoped for in writing to the parole board was to provide Abbott with an electric pencil sharpener’. The ‘Right’, in fact, had a field day. Radical chic, in hiding for over a decade, had taken a peep out of its burrow and been stomped on all over again. Abbott was recaptured, in Louisiana, and the circus resumed. Last Thursday, on his thirty-eighth birthday, Abbott was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter, not murder, a verdict which the family of the deceased regard as ‘an outrage’. ‘Happy birthday, Jack,’ said one of the jurors.
So what is one to make of this mess? First, the book, Belly, represents only a fraction of the original 300-odd letters. Even in its reduced form the book is grotesquely uneven, as well as aggressive and deluded, full of giveaways and triple-thinks.
‘I have read all but a very few of the world’s classics, from prehistoric times up to this day.’ Nourished by these bronto-texts, Abbott develops a primitive canvas of the outside world, entirely notional, tendentious and self-reflecting. It is a world-view based on nothing but books and (h must be said) psychosis. Reading Abbott, with his categorical stridency, his hollering italics, is like being drunkenly buttonholed by Colin Wilson’s Outsider — all night, and with his finger jabbing at your chest. In a way the book is a precise and miserable testimony to the effects of lifelong isolation and terror. The real mystery is how it got confused with meaningful polemic, let alone with literature.
It was Mailer, initially, who did the confusing. His introduction to the book (not to mention his other cavortings) would be shameful and ridiculous even if Abbott were now a well-established poet and humanitarian. In his introduction Mailer reaffirms that society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens. We shouldn’t bother, he says, about the threat they pose ‘to the suburbs’. What are the ‘suburbs’ doing in this argument? Abbott, anyway, posed his threat on Second Avenue and Fifth, and perhaps will again if Mailer’s priorities are honoured.
There are several wishful misapprehensions on offer here: that a ‘creative individual’ can’t be evil; that writers, too, are outsiders, unheeded prophets; that life is a prison in the first place, and that the incorrigible criminal is forged only by contact with the criminal system, a system which gives distress to all well-informed Americans. Which comes first: the Beast, or the man in its Belly?
There have been rumours that it wasn’t Mailer and Co. who sprang Abbott from jail: it was the Feds. After a violent strike-beating operation in Marion Penitentiary in April 1980, a broken Abbott co-operated widi the prison authorities. Informers don’t live long in the Pen, so it may have been a handy coincidence when Mailer’s letters testified that the snitch happened to be a genius too.
In an article commissioned and rejected by the New York Times Abbott claimed that ‘the Press has helped the Government to make it finally impossible for me to survive in prison’. In the piece, Abbott presents himself as the classic Kierkegaardian poet-martyr, transforming pain into music. To Mailer he is a victim, an existential hero. The sympathies of the public, of tabloid America, are rightly with the murdered boy — who was also, apparently (as if this case needs any more irony), a writer of promise.