Books in Brief: In the Belly of the Beast

In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, by Jack Henry Abbott, introduction by Norman Mailer (Random House, 166 pp., $11.95). Norman Mailer’s correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott—a 37-year-old convict in the Utah State Penitentiary who has spent all but nine and a half months of the last 25 years in prison —began while Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song. From Abbott’s letters, collected in this volume, Mailer came to feel “all the awe one knows before a phenomenon.” This is a dreadful book in both the informal and the exact meanings of the word. Its level of political thought can be represented by the observation that “Communists always behave as anyone would expect real people in a real society to respond to one another.” But in the first ninety or so pages Abbott offers concrete and horrific descriptions of life among a ferocious “new breed” of American convicts. His exposition of the technique one prisoner uses for stabbing another in the chest is as precise as Hemingway’s account of hooking a trout. When Abbott writes of the things he has lived, and not about the politics he has grabbed onto in desperation, he is dignified and commanding. The convict-versus-convict carnage last year in New Mexico is considerably less mysterious after reading his book. Mailer has contributed an introduction that is sincere, but often silly 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.”

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Thomas Mallon

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In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, by Jack Henry Abbott, introduction by Norman Mailer (Random House, 166 pp., $11.95). Norman Mailer’s correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott—a 37-year-old convict in the Utah State Penitentiary who has spent all but nine and a half months of the last 25 years in prison —began while Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song. From Abbott’s letters, collected in this volume, Mailer came to feel “all the awe one knows before a phenomenon.” This is a dreadful book in both the informal and the exact meanings of the word. Its level of political thought can be represented by the observation that “Communists always behave as anyone would expect real people in a real society to respond to one another.” But in the first ninety or so pages Abbott offers concrete and horrific descriptions of life among a ferocious “new breed” of American convicts. His exposition of the technique one prisoner uses for stabbing another in the chest is as precise as Hemingway’s account of hooking a trout. When Abbott writes of the things he has lived, and not about the politics he has grabbed onto in desperation, he is dignified and commanding. The convict-versus-convict carnage last year in New Mexico is considerably less mysterious after reading his book. Mailer has contributed an introduction that is sincere, but often silly 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.”