The penitential pen
Peter J. M. Wayne
UNLOCKING THE PRISON MUSE: THE INSPIRATIONS AND EFFECTS OF PRISONERS’ WRITING IN BRITAIN by Julian Broadhead Cambridge Academic, £19.95, pp. 245, ISBN 1903499267 Throughout the summer I railed continually against a coterie of soi-disant commentators, selfserving and self-styled ‘experts’ on the criminal justice system who, regardless of what little experience of the actuality of imprisonment they possess, are given seemingly unlimited space in the columns of our most prestigious newspapers and magazines to preach and pontificate, disseminating fanciful notions and half-baked ideas to a readership that both expects and deserves better. To draw a parallel, how many people would buy a guidebook on Berlin if they knew its author had never visited Germany?
Convicted bank robber Jim Phelan had their measure when, as far back as the 1930s, he was complaining about ‘scientifically inclined penologists’ without access to their own laboratories. Julian Broadhead gives Phelan free rein in this timely addition to the penal debate: ‘I had the men themselves,’ the old lag argued, ‘their chuckles and their groans, their blood and sweat and excretement, the animal growth of jail voices, the sniffing one another from afar, the lip-licking, saliva-drooling jungle technique of homosexual love-making, the fantasy hiss, the small sadism, the neuroses...’ And how. Who but a serving prisoner can so authentically evoke the conditions, the raw emotion, the agonies and ecstasies, the visceralities of doing time? Perhaps this was why the Guardian, shining on this occasion like a beacon of enlightenment in otherwise murky waters, chose to advertise, without any sense of irony, for a new ‘prisons correspondent’, a full-time post they thought ‘might suit a recent former prisoner’; and to publish Erwin James’s ‘Life Inside’ columns, which proved so popular that a collection of the lifer’s articles appeared in book form. I only wish some enterprising publisher would come along and bring together all my prison journalism — there must be 500 pieces by now — if only to correct Broadhead’s supposition that my work is merely ‘topical and short-lived’ despite his extensive quotations from it. What I think he means is that I haven’t yet published a full-length book on the subject, as he has, using my material, alas, without permission.
But let’s not carp. Across the broader canvas, in this country at any rate, it would appear that the truly literary con is a very rare bird indeed. As Broadhead is anxious to establish, and pace undisputed classics of the genre like Wilde’s De Profundis and Behan’s Borstal Boy (both significantly Anglo-Irish contributions), the United Kingdom has no novelist (and the novel seems to be his preferred measuring rod) to compare with the likes of a Dostoevsky, a Genet, or ever an Edward Bunker (Tarantino’s infamous ‘Mr Blue’), a man so dedicated to his craft in the beginning that he ‘had to sell [his] blood to pay for postage’.
Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, Norman Parker, Mark Leech or Hugh Collins just don’t seem to cut it in such exaltedly picaresque company. One only has to hold up the latest ‘blockbusting’ example of an English prison ‘memoir’ to figure out why. Will Self described the work of Noël ‘Razor’ Smith (not to be confused with Terry ‘College Boy’ Smith, whose deliciously baroque Art of Armed Robbery is conspicuous by its absence here) as reminiscent of ‘Chester Himes with a generous dash of Damon Runyon’, and, as Broadhead reminds us no less than four times in as many chapters, arranged for its publication under the title A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun.
Nothing particularly original there, as film producer gangster manqué Guy Ritchie would no doubt confirm. I mean, what on earth are we to make of a man who christens himself ‘Razor’ in the first place? Did the sobriquet come about on account of the fellow’s sharp intellect? Smith, in his own words, is a criminal of the ‘old school’, one who ‘can appreciate the weight and power of a decent shooter’; who ‘never slashed a face that wasn’t looking at me’. Please. Will Self should know better, for there are within the penal microcosm some genuine contenders for the unplaced crown.
Matthew Williams is one such: a lifer who never killed with whom I shared many a creative half hour during exercise periods in Longlartin prison. Before he was sent down, Matthew was reading biology at Leeds University, the very model of a modern student. But I guess he wasn’t firing on all six cylinders. One day he went out and tried to put anthrax into the water supplies for the whole of the north of England. That was 20 years ago. Now, he’s something of a renaissance man. Still entombed somewhere ‘in the belly of the beast’, Mathew has transcended his predicament through creativity. He writes, sculpts, paints, constructs, versifies, oh ... and he made a rather dramatic bid for freedom some years back, escaping from Parkhurst (remember the Paxman/Howard confrontation) and damned near taking the then home secretary with him.
Matthew’s literary output has appeared in various in-house journals but warrants a far wider circulation. There was one time when he managed to sell a radio play, Seascape, to the Irish broadcasting organisation RTE. The piece had already won a £30 cash prize in the annual Koestler Awards Scheme for prisoners. Yet instead of offering encouragement as one might have expected, the governor came down on him like a ton of bricks, invoking the dreaded Standing Order 5b, a seldom used prison rule (not enshrined in any law of the land) which attempts to stop people ‘running a business’ from inside. Even after Stephen Shaw, the prisons ombudsman, intervened, upholding Matthew’s complaint and urging the prison service to do away with the order, and they accepted the recommendation, the governor still held firm. Then the very next day my article appeared in the Sun castigating the Home Office for wasting public funds. Whilst all the above was going on they had meanwhile paid £375 for one of Matthew’s paintings to decorate their smart new eco-sound HQ in Marsham Street.
Such, ladies and gentlemen, are the vagaries of the writer’s life inside. Julian Broadhead, to his credit, has produced as quirky a volume on the motivations and inspirations as the convict chroniclers themselves. Nevertheless, as close as the author likes to think he has got to his incarcerated subjects, he gives himself away with one of the strangest disclaimers I have ever come across, absolving both himself and his publishers of any liability for ‘damage or injury arising from any interpretation of [the book’s] contents’. Don’t put your fingers through the bars, he seems to be warning anyone smitten by such career brilliance. For make no mistake about it, the animals in these cages are extremely dangerous.
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