Word: mailers
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...