Death of a waiter

Christopher Hitchens

New York -0 very day, thousands of people here

watch the new film Ragtime and see. Norman Mailer (playing Stanford White) shot in the head in the first few moments. In actual life, Mailer is rather more famous for dishing it out than taking it. Mark the sequel.

Last year in New York City there were 1,833 homicides, which was by no means a record (indeed, the friendly police sergeant who gave me this statistic was, on first in- quiry, one hundred corpses short). Murder is still one of the likelier ways in which an adult male New Yorker can expect to die. As a result, conversation in the city tends to 'Now that you are living down here you may find us a little behind you London sisters.'

circumnavigate murder as a topic in general, while regularly selecting one par- ticular slaying as 'significant'. This pro- cedure is not as superstitious as it may sound. Already this season we have seen Diana Trilling's book on Jean Harris, the WASP lady of a certain age who slew her Jewish lover, a diet doctor, for his repeated infidelity (and thus appalled the governors of the fashionable girls' school of which she was headmistress). As I write, Lally Weymouth, the daughter of Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, has penned a giant article about the case of Claus von Bulow, about to stand trial for the attempted murder of his wife by insulin poisoning. In the first example, opinion divides along feminist lines With partisans talking of American womanhood and its fate in the Eighties (the dead doctor, as often as not, forgotten). In the second case, attention is focused, even as the jury is be- ing empanelled, on a host of New England yacht people with Austrian titles whose world only a creep could describe as High Life. But both of these dramas are about to enter total eclipse. Last week, New York City opened the trial of Jack Henry Abbott.

Some recapitulation may be in order here. When Norman Mailer published his book The Executioner's Song, concerning the desire of a convicted murderer in Utah to be shot by a firing squad (which request was graciously granted by the state authorities), he began to receive letters. These came from one Jack Henry Abbott, a much-convicted felon who had taught himself the rudiments of Marxism and

sociology while behind bars.

To say that Mailer was stirred by these letters would be an understatement. He described them as revealing 'an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human rela- tions in a better world.' Wheels began to revolve. A collection of the letters was published by Random House, and a selec- tion by the New York Review of Books. Letters were written by people with pull. Last summer, after a quarter of a century behind bars for offences ranging from arm- ed robbery to the murder of a fellow in- mate, Abbott was released on parole and taken on by Mailer as a 'research assistant'.

That was in June. On IS July last, Ab- bott was entertaining two young women in a Greenwich Village restaurant. An argu- ment developed with a waiter about whether one of the lavatories was, or was not, for the exclusive use of the staff. The altercation ended with the waiter dead from an expert knife stroke in the heart and Ab- bott once again on the run. He was recap- tured last October, working as a manual labourer in the South.

Not for some years has there been such a feast of schadenfreude at the expense of the liberals. It has, after all, taken more than a decade for the New York Review of Books to live down the heady time when it printed a formula for Molotov cocktails on its front cover. Many people had also forgotten Norman Mailer's stabbing of his wife, and his many and promiscuous justifications of violence by 'out' groups. All of these memories, and more, are now being gleeful- ly revived. (The amazing latitude granted to the press here is not as one-sided as it might appear. Even while Abbott's guilt was be- ing canvassed in the public prints, he was firing off a piece in his own defence to the New York Times. They did not print it, but others did. And all this before a jury had even been selected.)

It is most certainly tempting to join in this baiting of the trendies and the do- gooders, many of whom have compounded their rank offence by dropping Abbott like a scalding brick. But, behind all the cynical satisfaction, there lurks a piece of the ob- vious. American prisons really are very bad, and they do contain many innocent or just unlucky people, a wretched proportion of whom are there because of skin or other deficiencies. As proof of this, we may cite William F. Buckley Junior, who ten years ago felt moved to adopt Edgar H. Smith. Smith was a convict on Death Row. He had been convicted of a rather specially nasty child murder, and had written a book argu- ing his innocence. Buckley took him up, gave his work a boost, and helped to secure his release. Not terribly long afterwards, Smith killed again and during his trial con- fessed to the original murder as well. Buckley, never before associated with the bleeding heart lobby, has not involved himself with penal reform since that time. But that he should ever have done so is a species of evidence for the justified cons- cience I am talking about.

It looks as if Mailer will at least be stay- ing the course with his friend. Indeed, hav- ing described him as among 'the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor', you could say unkindly that he was stuck with him. I cannot forbear to mention that, when the jury was being empanelled from amongst a random selection of 400 New Yorkers, no fewer than 75 of them said that they had never read anything by Mailer, had never read Abbott's book In the Belly of the Beast, and had not read in the newspapers about his alleged offence.

It was clearly important for the defence attorneys to establish that no prospective juror had read In the Belly of the Beast. The book contains an almost sexual description of the joy of plunging a knife into another man's heart — the sort of passage that used to make Genet come on strong — and though Abbott now claims that this is a metaphorical description of a 'classic' prison murder, it remains true that he was once convicted of stabbing a fellow inmate to death. So far, the judge in the case has ruled, to the ire of the prosecution, that the book cannot be introduced as evidence but may be employed in cross- examination.

Mailer has announced that he will testify as follows: that Abbott was in 'a cele- bratory mood' because of the giant success of his book and thus without motive to stab anybody. This may strike many people as a

little disingenuous, especially given the behaviour of our New York authors at publishing parties in general. Yet a great deal will turn upon that interpretation. As lt will, outside the formality of the court- room, when people ponder Mailer's description of the whole affair as 'tragic' Does he mean that he and his co-thinkers suffer as much as the parents of the waiter, and that no really identifiable human agen" cy is to blame?

New York might be the one place where shoulders could be shrugged at a murder- But it is the one place where this most ap- parently commonplace of crimes is taken very seriously. In the case of Jack Heal, Abbott, even the most gloating law and order advocate had recognised some ele- ment of American tragedy. It was not, after all, Norman Mailer who actually released the guy. Nor was it Mailer who made him, in the argot of the trial, a 'child of the State' at the tender age of 12. Nor yet was it Mailer who inflicted gang rape, isolation cells and the rest on Abbott for the next 25 years. Nor was it he who made Abbott into a prison 'snitch' whose life would now be in danger, inside. Abbott may have conned ' the liberals and the radical chic. But he stands as rather a reproach to the status V°, for all that. After all, Gary Gilmore, central character of The Executioner's Song, demanded his own death rather than stay for a lifetime in the Utah prison system which-was Abbott's school and university.