The killing only becomes understandable when we recall Van Vogt’s comment on the violent man: that he has made the decision to be out of control in a particular area. Abbott made the decision to be out of control in the area of wounds to his self-esteem (and no doubt the presence of two women companions reinforced the decision). In short, we are back in the realm of ‘magical thinking’ – that is, thinking in which an emotion has been allowed to distort the sense of reality. The result of magical thinking is some completely inappropriate action that cannot possibly achieve the desired result – like the ostrich burying its head in the sand to make the enemy ‘go away’ (in fact, a gross libel on the ostrich, but an apt simile all the same). There is always an absurd, slightly comic element in magical thinking, like Bernard Shaw’s description of his father ‘with an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other… butting at the garden wall in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat into a concertina in the process…’ But only for the onlooker. For the man beating his head against the brick wall, or the bee hurtling itself at the windowpane, the situation is grimly serious.
In a sense, the bee is behaving perfectly logically; it is only trying to escape towards the light, and can see no reason why it should not do so. We can see that one of its basic premises – that light cannot pass through solid objects – is mistaken, and that if it wants to achieve its objective it must change its direction. But the bee, conditioned by millions of years of evolution, is in no position to revise its instinct.
Human beings can change direction – which is why the behaviour of the violent man strikes us as so absurd. He seems determined to smash his way through the sheet of glass or destroy himself in the process. Yet to him this is not self-destruction so much as his own stubborn and quirky notion of courage. The violent man’s problem lies in his own logic – that is, in his concept of what is a normal and rational response to the challenges of his existence. The premises of this logic contain a mistaken assumption – like the bee’s assumption that the window-pane is unreal because it is invisible.
Abbott offers us a clue to his own premises in the list of men to whom he dedicates the book. Most of them are ‘criminal rebels’, and the first on the list is Carl Panzram, whose career exemplifies the logic of self-destruction.
Panzram, like Abbott, became a writer in prison; but in 1928 his autobiography was regarded as too horrifying to publish and had to wait more than forty years before it finally appeared in print. Panzram was awaiting trial for housebreaking; his confession revealed him as one of the worst mass murderers in American criminal history. The odd thing is that most of these murders were ‘motiveless’. He killed out of resentment, a desire for revenge on society. Panzram’s basic philosophy was that life is a bad joke and that most human beings are too stupid or corrupt to live.
His is a classic case of a man beating his head against a brick wall. His father, a Minnesota farmer, had deserted the family when Carl was a child. At eleven, Carl burgled the house of a well-to-do neighbour and was sent to reform school. He was a rebellious boy and was violently beaten. Because he was a ‘dominant male’, the beatings only deepened the desire to avenge the injustice. He would have agreed with the painter Gauguin who said: ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’
Travelling around the country on freight trains, the young Panzram was sexually violated by four hoboes. The experience suggested a new method of expressing his aggression.’… whenever I met [a hobo] who wasn’t too rusty looking I would make him raise his hands and drop his pants. I wasn’t very particular either. I rode them old and young, tall and short, white and black.’ When a brakesman caught Panzram and two other hoboes in a railway truck Panzram drew his revolver and raped the man, then forced the other two hoboes to do the same at gunpoint. It was his way of telling ‘authority’ what he thought of it.
Panzram lived by burglary, mugging and robbing churches. He spent a great deal of time in prison, but became a skilled escapist. But he had his own peculiar sense of loyalty. After breaking jail in Salem, Oregon, he broke in again to try to rescue a safe blower named Cal Jordan; he was caught and got thirty days. ‘The thanks I got from old Cal was that he thought I was in love with him and he tried to mount me, but I wasn’t broke to ride and he was, so I rode him. At that time he was about fifty years old and I was twenty or twenty-one, but I was strong and he was weak.’
In various prisons, he became known as one of the toughest troublemakers ever encountered. What drove him to his most violent frenzies was a sense of injustice. In Oregon he was offered a minimal sentence if he would reveal the whereabouts of the stolen goods; Panzram kept his side of the bargain but was sentenced to seven years. He managed to escape from his cell and wreck the jail, burning furniture and mattresses. They beat him up and sent him to the toughest prison in the state. There he promptly threw the contents of a chamber-pot in a guard’s face; he was beaten unconscious and chained to the door of a dark cell for thirty days, where he screamed defiance. He aided another prisoner to escape, and in the hunt the warden was shot dead. The new warden was tougher than ever. Panzram burned down the prison workshop and later a flax mill. Given a job in the kitchen, he went berserk with an axe. He incited the other prisoners to revolt, and the atmosphere became so tense that guards would not venture into the yard. Finally, the warden was dismissed.
The new warden, a man named Murphy, was an idealist who believed that prisoners would respond to kindness. When Panzram was caught trying to escape, Murphy sent for him and told him that, according to reports, he was ‘the meanest and most cowardly degenerate that they had ever seen.’ When Panzram agreed, Murphy astonished him by telling him that he would let him walk out of the jail if he would swear to return in time for supper. Panzram agreed – with no intention of keeping his word; but when supper time came, something made him go back. Gradually, Murphy increased his freedom, and that of the other prisoners. But one night, Panzram got drunk with a pretty nurse and decided to abscond. Recaptured after a gun battle, he was thrown into the punishment cell, and Murphy’s humanitarian regime carne to an abrupt end.
This experience seems to have been something of a turning point. So far, Panzram had been against the world, but not against himself. His betrayal of Murphy’s trust seems to have set up a reaction of self-hatred. He escaped from prison again, stole a yacht, and began his career of murder. He would offer sailors a job and take them to the stolen yacht; there he would rob them, commit sodomy, and throw their bodies into the sea. ‘They are there yet, ten of ‘em.’ Then he went to West Africa to work for an oil company, where he soon lost his job for committing sodomy on the table waiter. The US Consul declined to help him and he sat down in a park ‘to think things over’. ‘While I was sitting there, a little nigger boy about eleven or twelve years came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it too. I took him out to a gravel pit a quarter of a mile from the main camp… I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader…’
‘Then I went to town, bought a ticket on the Belgian steamer to Lobito Bay down the coast. There I hired a canoe and six niggers and went out hunting in the bay and backwaters. I was looking for crocodiles. I found them, plenty. They were all hungry. I fed them. I shot all six of those niggers and dumped ‘em in. The crocks done the rest. I stole their canoe and went back to town, tied the canoe to a dock, and that night someone stole the canoe from me.’