Up there on the stand Abbott seemed tremulous, distracted, half-way between laughter and teats. His reactions to the prosecutor’s questions fizzed with indignation, with terrible impatience. It is said that the State-raised convict fears society as intensely as the ordinary man fears prison. Jack Abbott looks as if he has never seen much difference between the two.
* * *
Postscript It is absolutely consistent that Mailer should have presided over the publication, in 1985, of the most exhaustive character assassination in the history of letters: Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso. And it is ironical that the only episode in which Mailer fails to gratify rock-bottom expectation is die episode involving Jack Henry Abbott.
The first thing to be said about In the Belly of the Beast is that it isn’t any good. It isn’t any good. One can then add that it is also the work of a thoroughly, obviously and understandably psychotic mind: as such, it is a manifesto for recidivism. Its author, plainly, could never hope to abjure violence. Abbott is quoted in Mailer, from his prison cell, and it is pitiable to read the confused and terrified ramblings of the man Mailer called ‘an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader’. You can hear paranoia snickering and wincing behind every word.
During the trial Mailer admitted that he had ‘blood on his hands’. Yet he never expressed sympathy for the murdered boy or his family. Why not? Why not? The omission was conspicuous, and was meant to be; it is thus doubly inexpiable. But however this may be, the Abbott episode is clearly full of misery for Mailer; and it was, at least, a human folly as much as an ideological one. There is no echo here of the sinister idiocies to be found in Mailer’s introduction to In the Belly of the Beast. He should have listened to his wife Norris (who, after the release, had the time and will to give Abbott a fraction of the human contact he needed). This is Norris Mailer:
I hadn’t wanted any part of it. My attitude to Norman’s involvement all along had been, ‘You wrote the book about Gilmore — didn’t you learn anything? It’s not gonna work, these guys don’t change.’ Norman is the eternal optimist and said, ‘It’ll be fine, this guy’s different, blah blah blah’…
* * *
Anthony Powell stabs Lady Violet — near-fatally. William Golding risks a trigamy scandal by divorcing his fourth wife, marrying and divorcing his fifth, and then marrying his sixth in the space of a week. Arrested for drunkenness, Malcolm Bradbury ‘takes out’ one policeman but is blackjacked by a second, earning himself fifteen stitches. A.N. Wilson goes five rounds with drinking-buddy Frank Bruno.
None of this sounds terribly likely, does it? In British literary circles, what one might loosely call ‘bad behaviour’ is normally the preserve of Celtic micrometeorites like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, who burn brightly and briefly, and very soon rejoin the cosmic dust. But in the United States, provided you are Norman Mailer, it seems that you can act like a maniac for forty years — and survive, prosper and multiply, and write the books.’ The work is what it is: sublime, ridiculous, always interesting. But the deeds — the human works — are a monotonous disgrace.
This 7oo-pager is an oral biography, or better say a verbal one. Peter Manso provides no links, no introduction; after his epic mar-shallings of the tapes and transcriptions, he was presumably hard pressed to manage the acknowledgments and the dedication. Even in America the book has been sniffed at as a by-blow of the new barbarism, but I think there is an appropriate madness in Manso’s method. What’s so great about the literary biography anyway? Mailer intercuts about 150 voices: family, friends, peers, onlookers, enemies. It is deeply discordant, naggingly graphic and atrociously indiscreet. No living writer, you’d have thought, could have more to lose by such an exposure. But then, programmatic self-destruction has always been the keynote of Mailer’s life and times.
‘Do things that frighten you’ is one of Norman’s pet maxims. Needless to say, in real life, doing things that frighten you tends to involve doing things that frighten other people. For some reason or other, Mailer spent the years between 1950 and 1980 in a tireless quest for a fistfight. He liked his dirty-talking, hell-cat women to have fights too, teaching them how and egging them on. ‘Drinking runs through this whole story,’ as one of his wives remarks, ‘drinking, drinking, drinking.’ ‘I am an American dissident,” Mailer has been claiming for more than thirty years. But ‘I am an American drunk’ sounds nearer the mark.