The Poetic License to Kill

By LANCE MORROW

In E.B. White's lovely fable Charlotte's Web, the literate spider Charlotte saves a pig named Wilbur from execution by spinning blurbs about him in the barn doorway: SOME PIG, RADIANT, and so on. The astonished farm folk put away their thoughts of slaughter; they no longer regard Wilbur as pork, but as a tourist attraction, and even a celebrity who enjoys the favor of higher powers. Sweet Wilbur will survive to grow old in the barnyard. He gratefully sighs, "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."

Soak the story in reality, bad luck, stupidity and evil for a while, and it might marinate into the parable of Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer: the redemption of the distinctly uninnocent. In one sense, the tale is merely a particularly sensational item of literary gossip. But buried amid the blood and chic is an interesting question of principle. Almost everything, as Thomas De Quincey noticed, has either a moral handle or an aesthetic handle. Which handle do you reach for in the Abbott-Mailer case?

In the beginning, Mailer spins publicity for convict and murderer Jack Abbott, helps get Abbott's prison book published and Abbott paroled. The con with the prose style of a Doberman (all speed and teeth) obeys his muse again. Six weeks after parole, Abbott kills a man in New York City's East Village. Mailer must concoct another redemption. He proposes a principle: "Culture is worth a little risk," Mailer tells reporters. Abbott should not be punished too harshly for this murder. It is true that he is not in any condition just now to walk around loose, but he is a talented writer. Being put away in prison for too long, says Mailer, might stifle Abbott's creativity.

Attempting to spook the bourgeois sensibility, of course, has been Mailer's vocation for a quarter of a century. He has rarely done it so effectively, perhaps because now the blood is real, for the first time since Mailer stabbed his second wife with a penknife in 1960 (and got off with a suspended sentence). A fierce outrage cascaded down on him last week. It was common to hear New Yorkers say that he should be tried as an accessory to murder. Mailer barged around giving interviews and suing a newspaper for libel, looking truculent and stricken.

In one way it was unfair: Mailer had had the courage to sponsor a talented pariah, and then something in Abbott's transition from prison went disastrously wrong. Mailer was personally aggrieved and pained, not only for Abbott but for Abbott's victim. It is true that certain writers adopt convicts: criminals, sinister, romantic and stupid as sharks, become the executive arms of intellectuals' violent fantasies. For some reason, intellectuals rarely understand that they are being conned: convicts are geniuses of ingratiation. Still, Mailer after all was not promoting a killer but a prose stylist and what he judged to be a salvageable human being. He miscalculated: he overrated the writer in Abbott and underestimated the murderer.

It was not so much ideas as their loudmouthed idiot cousin --publicity--that helped soften the verdict. It began to seem that it was not Abbott and his admitted homicide that were on trial but, in a vague and sloppy way, the entire American criminal justice system. The jury decided that the system had just been too much for Abbott. So the verdict was manslaughter. Abbott had been acting, the jury decided, under "extreme emotional disturbance." Sentencing comes next month. A judge of Solomonic gifts might condemn Abbott and Mailer to be shackled together with molybdenum chains, inseparable ever after, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, to clunk, snarling, from one literary dinner party to another.

Amid the travesty and pathos, however, Mailer had advanced an interesting proposition: the idea that a writer, or presumably any artist, deserves a special dispensation under the law. You can talk your way out of anything; Mailer suggested that a man ought to be able to write his way out of anything as well, including murder. Articulation leads to redemption; language can pick locks.

Mailer's principle--art should redeem or rather, more important, exculpate the artist--reached its full blossom as a tenet of Romanticism. The artist, for centuries regarded as merely a liveried servant of church and aristocracy, sprang up out of the bourgeoisie in the early 19th century as a dashing hierophant whose work connected him to the divine. It excused everything, from rudeness to homicide. "The fact of a man's being a poisoner," proclaimed Oscar Wilde, "is nothing against his prose."

It is a confused and essentially stupid doctrine. W.H. Auden's memorable lines about W.B. Yeats describe a sweet metaphysical arc: "Time that is intolerant/ Of the brave and innocent/ And indifferent in a week/ To a beautiful physique/ Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives." Yes: time grants pardon. But the law is not in the trade of metaphysics; the law's only hope of survival lies precisely in its struggle to be impartial. The Mailer doctrine suggests that somehow the law should set up separate standards for artists. There are grotesque possibilities here. Who judges the literary merit? What if a literary convict is really a terrible writer? String him up? Will we need a panel of literary judges to meet the first Monday of every month at Elaine's in Manhattan to hear its cases? If the perpetrator of the Texas chain-saw massacre shows a certain flair for the short story, do we let him off?

What distinguishes man from the animals is language, articulate consciousness. What distinguishes Jack Abbott from millions of other convicts is a prose style that was capable of catching a famous writer's attention. It is interesting that, as psychologists have noted, some hopelessly inarticulate teenagers have committed murder because they simply lacked the verbal skill to communicate their anger in any other way; Abbott has at his command both the sophisticated and the more primitive forms of communication.

If Mother Teresa of Calcutta should commit murder, any court might weigh her amazing life's labor against the evil of the one deed. The murder would be the exception in a life that otherwise displayed merit and extravagantly claimed mercy. But Jack Abbott's vividly ranting book, brutal and brutalized, should have made the jury wonder which was more characteristic of the man: literature or murder. In a long and essentially tragic perspective (in which all consequences are endured, all debts paid), literature performs its redemptions. Mailer's formula is a shallow little mechanism. "Culture is worth a little risk," he says. The world of that sentence is upside down: you defend culture, do you not, by locking up the people who try to kill it.

--By Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.