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—blanker 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 e
pisode, 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.
DURING THE SAME ERA when Abbott’s metamorphoses briefly intrigued the public, Jean Harris became even more famous for an even more improbable transformation.
For ten years after the headmistress of the Madeira School was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for murdering her lover, the famous “diet doctor” Herman Tarnower, the letters she wrote to the journalist Shana Alexander functioned as Harris’s “steam vent.” Marking Time, a selection of them from 1989 to 1991, is not without Abbott’s tendency toward apologia (Harris refers, for instance, to the “New York gulag”), but the collection is generally so much more measured and proceeds from an earlier lifetime so much more imaginable than Abbott’s that it does manage to read like a collection of letters instead of documents.
Jean Harris’s prison sufferings are undeniable: her depression; her fear of stroke; her failure to get one of the pardons handed out, year after year, at Christmastime. Her powers of evocation usually operate by inversion: the smaller the humiliation, the more finely observed and affecting her rendition will be. One day, for no reason, a favorite blouse is deemed an infraction of the rules: “suddenly its cowl neckline was called a turtleneck, and I couldn’t see my visitor until I walked back up the hill to my cell to change it. I was too angry to sit and visit. For the first time in nine years I told them to send my visitor away.” What she can never get used to is “being considered a liar and a cheat and being treated like one every day. A whole lifetime to the contrary is as nothing.”
About prison’s hierarchical chemistry, Abbott wrote: “Among themselves, the guards are human. Among themselves, the prisoners are human. Yet between these two the relationship is not human. It is animal.” If Bedford Hills is less brutal than the array of penitentiaries from which Abbott gained his experience, the general impossibility of relating to the guards still provides Jean Harris’s letters with one of her major themes. The system runs on expensive, petty cruelties. Mulberries growing on the grounds of “this ridiculously overfenced pen” cannot be eaten because they are “supposed to go to waste.” One guard, doing nothing to change Harris’s opinion that the female officers are worse than the male, insists on calling her “Princess Di.”
The “ladies” she refers to are her fellow inmates, with whom she has nothing and everything in common. The teaching she does—parenting classes—may be “a minor drop in the ocean,” but a reader sees what was once a mere profession for Harris becoming something more like a true vocation. Thrown amidst sadder souls than she ever knew existed, she has enough respect for the ladies not to take them on their own terms: “How do you measure the emptiness of a life of, say, twenty-five or thirty years that has not somehow stumbled across the knowledge that birds build nests? Don’t ask me who am I to look askance at another person’s culture. Don’t tell me a tree never grew in Brooklyn. Don’t tell me they’re street smart. Today I consider that an oxymoron. I’ve seen too many of the street smart, and heard them, too, to be moved by their much-touted smarts.”
She learns humility during her dozen years at Bedford Hills, but one can’t say she overdoes it or that the crisp contempt her old job sometimes required doesn’t serve her even better in prison. If nothing else, it helps her make plain to Alexander a whole cellarful of unpleasant realities: “There’s something about sharing a tub in an institution where herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, and TB are on the rise and one in five test positive for the AIDS virus that quenches one’s desire for a nice hot bath.” A reader who appreciates her considerable wit can’t help wondering what Harris, in her past life, might have said about her own crime, what bons mots she might have discharged, on better stationery, about the boarding-school head who iced her lover.
The new world she moves in is squalid and scary, but she does her best to be its Madame de Sévigné, evoking its elaborate customs and hidden structures. The longer letters become not manifestoes like Abbott’s, but small essays. There’s a mordant tour de force on the actual similarities of prisons and country clubs, and a primer of recidivism: “Prisons work the way companies do that build obsolescence into their products so you have to buy them again and again.” She worries about the egocentrism of what she mails to Alexander—“what I care about, what I find interesting, what I just learned”—but the letters don’t strike a third party that way, not when they contain the observations of someone with no choice in what she observes. They actually are a kind of grand, ongoing rise to the occasion.
It was a truly egocentric letter—a pained, frantic and pathetic one—that helped send Jean Harris to prison. At her trial in 1980–81, the district attorney attempted to establish deliberate intent in the murder of Herman Tarnower by introducing the “Scarsdale Letter,” written to the doctor by Harris just before the shooting. It is a long cry against Tarnower’s indifference; against the misbehavior of his new and, of course, younger mistress; and finally, against Harris’s own neediness and vanished pride. She wrote to Tarnower for probably the same reason she shot him: relief.
“I am distraught as I write this—your phone call to tell me you preferred the company of a vicious, adulterous psychotic was topped by a call from the Dean of Students ten minutes later and has kept me awake for almost 36 hours. I had to expel four seniors just two months from graduation and suspend others. What I say will ramble but it will be the truth—and I have to do something besides shriek with pain.” She lists Tarnower’s “years of broken promises,” involving everything from financial help with dentistry to the apartment in New York he never bought for the two of them. “It didn’t matter all that much, really—all I ever asked for was to be with you—and when I left you
to know when we would see each other again so there was something in life to look forward to. Now you are taking that away from me too and I am unable to cope.”
Once displaced from his paltry attentions, she had to sustain their long-distance affair entirely at her own expense, financially and otherwise: “All our conversations are my nickels, not yours—and obviously rightly so because it is I, not you, who needs to hear your voice. I have indeed grown poor loving you, while a self-serving ignorant slut has grown very rich.” The younger mistress’s alleged harassments (cutting up Harris’s clothes) and the older one’s admitted retaliations (“I have, and most proudly so … ripped up or destroyed anything I saw that your slut had touched and written her cutesie name on”) sound eerily like a preview of the pointless prison vendettas that lie ahead for Harris to witness.
Strung out on pills the doctor dispensed with his only evidence of liberality, Jean Harris began to feel desperate. “To be jeered at, and called ‘old and pathetic’ made me seriously consider borrowing $5,000 just before I left New York and telling a doctor to make me young again—to do anything but make me not feel like discarded trash—I lost my nerve because there was always the chance I’d end up uglier than before.” Declarations like this one rendered her claim that she went to Tarnower’s house to kill herself, not him—and that he died by accident in a struggle over the gun—almost plausible.
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