In E.B. White's lovely fable Charlotte's Web, the literate spider Charlotte saves a pig named Wilbur from execution by spinning blurbs about him in the barn doorway: SOME PIG, RADIANT, and so on. The astonished farm folk put away their thoughts of slaughter; they no longer regard Wilbur as pork, but as a tourist attraction, and even a celebrity who enjoys the favor of higher powers. Sweet Wilbur will survive to grow old in the barnyard. He gratefully sighs, "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."
Soak the story in reality, bad luck, stupidity and evil for a while, and it might marinate into the parable of Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer: the redemption of the distinctly uninnocent. In one sense, the tale is merely a particularly sensational item of literary gossip. But buried amid the blood and chic is an interesting question of principle. Almost everything, as Thomas De Quincey noticed, has either a moral handle or an aesthetic handle. Which handle do you reach for in the Abbott-Mailer case?
In the beginning, Mailer spins publicity for convict and murderer Jack Abbott, helps get Abbott's prison book published and Abbott paroled. The con with the prose style of a Doberman (all speed and teeth) obeys his muse again. Six weeks after parole, Abbott kills a man in New York City's East Village. Mailer must concoct another redemption. He proposes a principle: "Culture is worth a little risk," Mailer tells reporters. Abbott should not be punished too harshly for this murder. It is true that he is not in any condition just now to walk around loose, but he is a talented writer. Being put away in prison for too long, says Mailer, might stifle Abbott's creativity.
Attempting to spook the bourgeois sensibility, of course, has been Mailer's vocation for a quarter of a century. He has rarely done it so effectively, perhaps because now the blood is real, for the first time since Mailer stabbed his second wife with a penknife in 1960 (and got off with a suspended sentence). A fierce outrage cascaded down on him last week. It was common to hear New Yorkers say that he should be tried as an accessory to murder. Mailer barged around giving interviews and suing a newspaper for libel, looking truculent and stricken.
In one way it was unfair: Mailer had had the courage to sponsor a talented pariah, and then something in Abbott's transition from prison went disastrously wrong. Mailer was personally aggrieved and pained, not only for Abbott but for Abbott's victim. It is true that certain writers adopt convicts: criminals, sinister, romantic and stupid as sharks, become the executive arms of intellectuals' violent fantasies. For some reason, intellectuals rarely understand that they are being conned: convicts are geniuses of ingratiation. Still, Mailer after all was not promoting a killer but a prose stylist and what he judged to be a salvageable human being. He miscalculated: he overrated the writer in Abbott and underestimated the murderer.