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It was not so much ideas as their loudmouthed idiot cousin —publicity—that helped soften the verdict. It began to seem that it was not Abbott and his admitted homicide that were on trial but, in a vague and sloppy way, the entire American criminal justice system. The jury decided that the system had just been too much for Abbott. So the verdict was manslaughter. Abbott had been acting, the jury decided, under "extreme emotional disturbance." Sentencing comes next month. A judge of Solomonic gifts might condemn Abbott and Mailer to be shackled together with molybdenum chains, inseparable ever after, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, to clunk, snarling, from one literary dinner party to another.
Amid the travesty and pathos, however, Mailer had advanced an interesting proposition: the idea that a writer, or presumably any artist, deserves a special dispensation under the law. You can talk your way out of anything; Mailer suggested that a man ought to be able to write his way out of anything as well, including murder. Articulation leads to redemption; language can pick locks.
Mailer's principle—art should redeem or rather, more important, exculpate the artist—reached its full blossom as a tenet of Romanticism. The artist, for centuries regarded as merely a liveried servant of church and aristocracy, sprang up out of the bourgeoisie in the early 19th century as a dashing hierophant whose work connected him to the divine. It excused everything, from rudeness to homicide. "The fact of a man's being a poisoner," proclaimed Oscar Wilde, "is nothing against his prose."
It is a confused and essentially stupid doctrine. W.H. Auden's memorable lines about W.B. Yeats describe a sweet metaphysical arc: "Time that is intolerant/ Of the brave and innocent/ And indifferent in a week/ To a beautiful physique/ Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives." Yes: time grants pardon. But the law is not in the trade of metaphysics; the law's only hope of survival lies precisely in its struggle to be impartial. The Mailer doctrine suggests that somehow the law should set up separate standards for artists. There are grotesque possibilities here. Who judges the literary merit? What if a literary convict is really a terrible writer? String him up? Will we need a panel of literary judges to meet the first Monday of every month at Elaine's in Manhattan to hear its cases? If the perpetrator of the Texas chain-saw massacre shows a certain flair for the short story, do we let him off?
What distinguishes man from the animals is language, articulate consciousness. What distinguishes Jack Abbott from millions of other convicts is a prose style that was capable of catching a famous writer's attention. It is interesting that, as psychologists have noted, some hopelessly inarticulate teenagers have committed murder because they simply lacked the verbal skill to communicate their anger in any other way; Abbott has at his command both the sophisticated and the more primitive forms of communication.