Authors: Thomas Mallon
No such scruples seem to have troubled Sir Francis Bacon about the letter he wrote to James I from the Tower, some years later, after he’d been thrown in for an indefinite term on a bribery charge. We may associate Bacon with the rangy freedom of thought that led him to claim all knowledge for his province, but his epistolary plea is an oily masterpiece of servility and calculation. “Your Majesty’s arm hath been over mine in council, when you presided at the table; so near I was: I have borne your Majesty’s image in metal; much more in heart; I was never in nineteen years’ service chidden by your Majesty … But why should I speak of these things which are now vanished? but only the better to express my downfall.” And, of course, to spring his ruffled hide. “Help me (dear sovereign lord and master) and pity me so far, as … I that desire to live to study, may not study to live.”
He certainly seems to have studied what works in this particular genre. Even those who express doubt about whether the king actually received this letter acknowledge that Bacon was out of the Tower—with another five years to live and study—within four days.
As it happens, Raleigh’s head did not roll the morning after he
wrote his wife. Lady Raleigh was instead brought to the Tower, where both husband and wife resided for a dozen years, until he was permitted to go looking for gold in the New World. When his mission to the Orinoco didn’t succeed, he was again arrested and, finally, in 1618, beheaded. Two centuries later, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reprieve came in an even narrower nick of time. On December 22, 1849, upon the drill ground of the Peter and Paul Fortress, a death sentence, which would turn out to be false, was read to him and his radical compatriots. As he put it later that day in a letter to his brother: “we were told to kiss the Cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and our last toilet was made (white shirts). Then three were tied to the pillar for execution. I was the sixth. Three at a time were called out; consequently, I was in the second batch and no more than a minute was left me to live.” During these supposed last moments, Dostoevsky was surprised to find his brother on his mind and to realize how much he loved him. Worried that Mikhail might think the sentence was carried out, Dostoevsky reassures him with this letter, whose writing he’s been permitted instead of a visit.
Now preparing to serve four years in prison in lieu of his appointment on the scaffold, Dostoevsky is sick with scrofula and afraid he’ll be forgotten by his brother’s family. And yet, his letter to Mikhail is also giddy with a sense of resurrection: “I was today in the grip of death for three quarters of an hour; I have lived it through with that idea; I was at the last instant and now I live again!” Repenting the time he’s wasted in the past, he determines to make the most of whatever chances lie ahead in exile and confinement. Like the imprisoned Raleigh, who found himself so agitated that his thoughts could not “dwell in one body” with his life, Dostoevsky understands that any hopes of surviving the time ahead depend upon the authorities’ willingness to let him write. Otherwise the imaginings running riot inside him “will be extinguished in my brain or will be spilt as poison in my blood! Yes, if I am not allowed to write, I shall perish. Better fifteen years of prison with a pen in my hands!”
Four years and two months later, one week after completing his sentence of hard labor, he writes Mikhail a full, angry accounting of
the filth, smells, vermin and brutality he’s endured in Siberia. But his harshest words are reserved for his brother:
I wrote you a letter through our official staff; you simply must have got it; I expected an answer from you, and received none. Were you then forbidden to write to me? But I know that letters are allowed, for every one of the political prisoners here gets several in the year. Even Dourov had some; and we often asked the officials how it stood about correspondence, and they declared that people had the right to send us letters. I think I have guessed the real reason for your silence. You were too lazy to go to the police-office, or if you did go once, you took the first “No” for an answer …
The anger and anxiety engendered by his brother’s unwritten letters helped to fill
The House of the Dead
, begun in the prison hospital.
NEARLY ALL THE LETTERS
in this last chapter have strong claims to be put in someplace earlier in the book. The conditions of prison intensify or invert the more ordinary human experiences of absence or love or complaint. Shame may do a fast alternation with religious ecstasy; the good-cop/bad-cop team that once secured the confession may now be an internal mechanism, something that seesaws between guilt and resentment on its own automatic switch.
In the early 1950s, Neal Cassady—that totem and prototype of the Beats—wrote manic letters that his biographer insists “astonished Kerouac and Ginsberg and convinced them that he was the one true writer among them.” Cassady, however, was hoping the mails would bring more immediate satisfactions than long-range literary reputation: “His every letter to everybody during this period,” writes the biographer, William Plummer, “included a request for grass: Did they have any? Would they send him some?” Arrested in 1958 for selling marijuana to some undercover policemen—or, more exactly, giving the officers three joints in return for a
ride—Cassady wound up serving a two-year sentence, most of it in San Quentin, during which the letters he wrote to his wife, Carolyn, bounced as high and low and loud as a book-length Beat poem.
They’re riddled with self-reproach; “a self pitious whale of a wail” is Cassady’s own critique of one of them. Blaming his “shockingly selfish desire for marijuana’s euphoria” for the slide that lost him his railroad-brakeman’s job, landed him in prison and got his family thrown off the welfare rolls, he wonders: “Will I ever become a man?” Now past thirty, he determines to forsake the “sickniks” for whom he’s been such a celebrated muse. He may protest the severity of his sentence by an alcohol-loving society that does not mind tormenting a poor pot smoker, but he’ll retract even this complaint in a breast-beating postscript:
“last paragraph reveals resentment still to be overcome, am
sure
can do it in next 1/2 1000 days.”
The whole effect is jagged: at times his will seems truly broken, but he likes displaying its penitent pieces for the prison censor who’ll see the letter before it leaves San Quentin.
The censor is again on Cassady’s mind when he sends Carolyn an account of his erotic dreams: “suffice to say the last one ended, after much play, with us climaxing together as the book we were reading finished with the heavily printed words,
ROAR, ROAR, ROAR:
funny what?” He worries that his wife’s love is dwindling; pledges his fidelity; promises to make up for the past; gives her permission to divorce him; asks her not to visit; wonders if he still has a chance with her. His teasing attempts to lighten things up have a nervous undercurrent of hostility. When proposing a telepathic experiment that would have them attempt ten minutes of mental communication each day, Cassady instructs Carolyn to send him “a thought message” on the even-numbered days and on the odd-numbered ones to “blank [her] mind—blank
er
I mean, ha ha—to receive one from this devoted husband.”
The live bomb of resentment, ticking between the lines of every letter, involves her refusal, after he’d been arrested, to bail him out by taking a second mortgage on their house in Los Gatos. When he instructs her on how to imagine his confinement, he sounds a bit
like Dostoevsky writing Mikhail. There’s an element of cruelty amid the cackling black humor:
you might put car mattress in the bathtub, thereby making it soft, if not as long, at least much cleaner than my bug ridden bunk; bring Bim Eberline or, say, the even more negatively aggressive McGill woman [both were obese], then lock the door &, after first dragging 11 rowdy kids into our bedroom to parallel the 1,100 noisy ones housed in this particular cellblock. Of course you must remove the toilet seat, towel racks, cabinets; anything other than a small mirror & 4 ½’ shelf—remaining almost motionless so as not to inadvertently irritate Armed Robber Bim, ponder past mistakes, present agonizing future defeats in the light of whatever insights your thus disturbed condition allows …
In the manner of most prisoners, he becomes inventively, obsessively chronological: “I’ve now circled the sun once from behind bars;” “With 1/2 a day less than 1/2 a year remaining, hence being almost down to Wino Time;” “exactly 1 1/4 million seconds to go.” He types his letters standing up, letting the machine bounce on the springs of the cell’s top bunk. His salutations give him the chance to entertain his small children (“Dearest Cherry cobbler Cathy, Jamhappy Jamie & Jellybean John”) and to begin thanking Carolyn with the same sort of nutrient imagery used so long ago by the more reserved Wordsworths: “Dear Wife; Mucho Gratis for your Blessed Letter, it feed my heart’s hunger beautifully well.” He reminds her to rip off the San Quentin address before sharing a letter with the children, who have been told a different story of his whereabouts.
The letters dispatch news of Cassady’s religious questing—his spontaneous invocations of Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy and Swedenborg, and somewhat more steady retreat toward the Catholicism in which he was raised. When Gavin Arthur (grandson of the 1880s president) fails to show up to conduct a comparative religion and philosophy class for the inmates, Cassady fills in and lectures to them on the psychic prophet Edgar Cayce. He embraces “perservering
[sic]
prayer” and even struggles to see the policeman who arrested
him as an instrument of God’s Will. But in his excited pilgrimage, he often seems more frightened than peaceful. He memorizes the names of all 262 popes, a desperate magical effort that continues far longer than the comfort he derives from news of John XXIII’s Christmastime visit to an Italian jail.
Despite calling himself a “very very
Ex
-Beatster,” Cassady can’t stanch the alliterative flood of his own prose. One can almost picture Kerouac’s famous roll of paper coursing through that typewriter on the top bunk. Carolyn is his “Dearest daft dove deliberately doubling deft devotion despite despair dripping dumbly down delicately dim decolletage …” His renunciations—of unprocreative sex, tobacco and pot—don’t sound too convincing in a consonantal cascade: “that nicotine narcotic tobacco & that hardly more horrid Indian Hemp.” The hipster and the paterfamilias, the man of the road and the struggling new square, have a comical clash on the page. The letters to his children can be gently, touchingly pedantic, full of vocabulary builders and math problems and explanations of the Four Freedoms; he goes so far as to emphasize good grammar and punctuation. But even in these prescriptive sentences, Daddy can’t stop being Daddy-o.
His desire to go straight once he’s released—so forced and so obviously doomed—makes him scorn the prospect of connecting with either old friends or new ones, as if each group is one more Lenten sacrifice he has to make. “I want to work myself to death, seriously, a kind of legitimate suicide; why? well, not being loving, cheerful, etc. & not being able to stand people or the world, about the only service left that I can perform is supporting you all …”
When he does get out, on Independence Day 1960, the old lures of North Beach and the new one of Ken Kesey are just outside the gates. He will be dead within eight years.
NORMAN MAILER’S CORRESPONDENCE
with Jack Henry Abbott—a convict who spent twenty-five of his first thirty-seven years in prison—now stands as the novelist’s own last hipsterish episode, a final existential burst before he settled into a paunchy gray
eminence. Receiving Abbott’s letters while writing
The Executioner’s Song
, Mailer came to feel “all the awe one knows before a phenomenon.”
In those letters, Abbott calls himself “state-raised,” even though he acquired his considerable book-learning on his own: “nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never
heard
spoken.” His descriptions of life among a ferocious “new breed” of American convict can be quietly breathtaking. More literally so is his exposition of the technique one prisoner uses to stab another, as precise as Hemingway’s account of hooking a trout:
You are both alone in his cell. You’ve slipped out a knife (eight-to ten-inch blade, double-edged). You’re holding it beside your leg so he can’t see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. You see his eyes: green-blue, liquid. He thinks you’re his fool; he trusts you. You see the spot. It’s a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down; you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest.
Much of Abbott’s rhetoric is defensively glazed with self-regard, but when he writes of the things he has lived and not about the politics he grabbed on to in desperation (“Communists
always
behave as anyone would expect real people in a real society to respond to one another”), he can seem dignified and commanding. Convict-versus-convict carnage seems more reasonable than mysterious after reading his book: “you are not killing in physical self-defense. You’re killing someone in order to live respectably in prison. Moral self-defense.”
He says that his letters to Mailer are the closest he’s ever come to keeping a diary. When they were published in 1981, as
In the Belly of the Beast
, Mailer contributed a sincere but silly introduction on the subject of prisons: “Somewhere between the French Foreign Legion and some prodigious extension of Outward Bound may
lie the answer, at least for all those juvenile delinquents who are drawn to crime as a positive experience.” The novelist’s faith helped win Abbott’s conditional release from the Utah State Penitentiary a few weeks before the book’s appearance, but a month later, Abbott was arrested for the murder of a young actor, Richard Adan. Mr. Adan had been skillfully stabbed in the chest.