Word: abbotts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...