Last year more than 1,500 people entered PEN’s inmate writing competition. Prison has become a concrete salon: the Infamous Writers’ School, sort of. They give you solitary for plagiarism now: and cancel your paperback sale. Hardly to wonder that authors develop in jail. If the alternative were one-man poker or grout counting, even I would screw my lead out with enthusiasm. Seven to 15 is a pretty declarative sentence after all: the slammer can impose structure and syntax on life. Also you’ve got no rent to cough up. No phone calls. No ya-ya from the children. Civilization, I’m told, evolved from a single cell. What is fiction anyhow but straight time done?
They called the symposium “Writers and Convicts—An American Romance.” Aptly: Jack Abbott was on trial for murder that week. But no one, unless the observant dead, held a grudge against Norman Mailer there. Too many others have used good prose in pleabargaining. Edgar Smith. Frank Lee Andrews. William Styron talked about his own recidivist pen pal, Benjamin Reed. All men who, with support from our literary appeals court, had been sprung by writing, then were sent back for an extensive second draft. To prove, once again, that art and morality don’t travel in the same crowd.
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