Chris Caldwell of The Weekly Standard writes on the passing of Jack Henry Abbott, a one-time liberal icon and cause celebre who committed suicide February 10th. He was 58:

In 1977, Abbott, then 33, had spent all but six months of the past 21 years in reform school or prison, for everything from kiting checks to killing a fellow inmate. Hearing that Norman Mailer was at work on a nonfiction book about Utah killer Gary Gilmore (‘The Executioner’s Song’), Abbott wrote to offer background information on the mindset of convicts. Mailer was wowed. Abbott, unquestionably a man of considerable intellectual gifts and some writing talent, had run through whole prison libraries. He had a large vocabulary, even though he admitted (or bragged) that half the words he knew–including ‘college’–he’d only read and never heard pronounced. Mailer arranged to have Abbott’s letters reprinted in the New York Review of Books and published as the memoir ‘In the Belly of the Beast.’

In 1981, Mailer argued for Abbott before his parole board and obtained his release from prison. Abbott had other supporters–Susan Sarandon, for instance, who named her baby ‘Jack Henry’ around that time–but none more ready with concrete assistance. He gave Abbott a research job and introduced him around literary Manhattan. Six weeks into his new life, Abbott got into an argument at the Binibon restaurant in lower Manhattan with waiter Richard Adan, who refused to let him use the employees’ restroom. He challenged Adan to step outside, and stabbed him to death.

At a 1990 civil suit, the lawyer for Adan’s wife said, ‘Jack Abbott is not a writer who killed. He’s a killer who wrote.’ The evidence of that was everywhere, even in his writings. Only an intellectual could have missed it.

Sad to say — because I like him as a writer — but Mailer’s been consistently wrong on just about every important social issue for going on 35 years now. Pity. If only he’d let his books speak for themselves…

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