Book Review: In the Belly Of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott

In the Belly Of the Beast:

Letters from Prison

by Jack Henry Abbott

      The story of Jack Henry Abbott is tragic. First incarcerated at the age of twelve, he spent most of his life in government institutions. After reaching the age of 18, he was briefly released as an adult and committed a crime soon after that sent him straight back to prison. He began keeping journals and later struck up a correspondence with Norman Mailer who was impressed with Abbott’s writing skills. Mailer went on a campaign to have him released on parole. It became a cause celebre and Abbott got out. Mailer collected some of his writings and published them as a book, In the Belly Of the Beast: Letters from Prison. But Jack Henry Abbott got into a fight with a man in the alley behind a restaurant. He stabbed the man and got sent straight back to the penitentiary. Mailer felt humiliated by this incident and kept his distance from Abbott until the end of his life.

In the Belly Of the Beast is a collection of excerpts from the letters Abbott sent to Mailer over several years before being released on parole despite misgivings from forensic psychiatrists. The excerpts vary widely in quality, dealing with issues like prison society, the purpose of prisons, the effectiveness of prisons, and the way prison culture mirrors the culture of outside society. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and often makes attempts at writing from that theoretical perspective.

The good news is some of Abbott’s descriptive writing about prison life is excellent. He describes the cells, the cafeteria, the relations between prisoners, the behavior of guards, and other relevant things. He doesn’t just describe the appearance of the prison interior though; he describes the subjective miseries, frustrations, distress, and overwhelming sensations of hopeless he experiences in this environment. The highest points of his writing explain how it feels to spend long stretches of time in solitary confinement. This isn’t easy reading and it isn’t light. It’s downright depressing and you can see how it can drive prisoners insane. Abbott is at his absolute best when describing his emotions and states of mind.

Something else Abbott is good at is examining more abstract ideas of justice and the treatment of prisoners. Many people debate whether prisons are for rehabilitation or punishment. From reading this, you get the sense that that debate is addressing the wrong question. Abbott’s point is that, while prisons function more as punishment than rehabilitation, neither the punishment nor the rehabilitation prepare inmates for life outside the prison. The rehabilitation, educational and vocational programs are half-assed and don’t go far enough to do anything more than make it look like something is being done. It’s little more than window dressing. The punishment is harsh, unpredictable, and oriented towards maximizing control over inmates. It’s dished out in equal doses of brutality to all whether the prisoner was arrested for a non-violent drug offense, shoplifting, or mass murder. The result is that inmates adapt to this environment in such a way that when they are released into society without any help in the transition, most of them break down psychologically and either commit more crimes or kill themselves. His accusation is that prisons operate as crime factories, training inmates to be violent, paranoid, unstable and incapable of living with the freedom to make choices for themselves. Therefore, when crime rates escalate, the government uses this as an excuse to militarize the police force and strip people of their civil liberties. It also creates a social climate outside prisons where people can never feel safe. Life in the straight world is just a softer version of penitentiary life. This again plays into the hands of the government who uses the rhetoric and practice of more law and order to strengthen oppressive authoritarian structures and limit citizens’ options for the pursuit of freedom. This may be a conspiracy theory, but at least it is one that prods you to think about the criminal justice system, its effect on the wider society, and why America has such high rates of crime and incarceration compared to other developed nations. We are obviously doing something wrong and, being Americans, we are too pigheaded to solve the problem. Nor can we even effectively address it.

Now for the bad news. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and a communist. That doesn’t necessarily mean that his ideas are illegitimate. Even if you don’t agree with those theoretical frameworks, that doesn’t mean that people who use them can’t have legitimate ideas about the nature of social structures. The problem is that Abbott’s understanding of Marxism and communism are so flawed that his philosophizing often degenerates into nonsense. You shouldn’t even bother trying to relate his ideas to communist or Marxist critiques.

At his best he tries to connect prison inmates with the proletariat and the prison guards with the bourgeoisie, but that is too much of a stretch to be plausible. All he really says is that prisoners need solidarity and guards are oppressors who will be overthrown in some future revolution. Without understanding his own framework, he simply uses it to justify a black and white, us vs. them mindset. It’s more about hating the authorities and fantasizing about a violent uprising rather than solving the world’s problems. It’s a juvenile’s daydream of vengeance mislabeled as political philosophy. And that’s when the writing is at its clearest.

Most of his thoughts on these matters are little more than babbling and should have been edited out. It comes across as even more psychopathic because never once in all these essays does he mention his own role in his situation. He never takes responsibility for his crimes, writes about himself as being a victim of social injustice, and blames everybody else for his life behind bars. There is an ounce of truth to this. As mentioned before, he was raised as a ward of the state and spent most of his life being socialized in institutions for warehousing criminals, but he never looks at prisons from any other point of view. A true Marxist critique would take into account why prisons exist in the first place and then deconstruct the institution from inside the framework of the institution. Abbott is more concerned with burning everything to the ground without a plan for what to do afterwards. It’s an immature approach to politics, an empty howl of rage.

Jack Henry Abbott is an American tragedy. It’s hard to say, or even believe, that he could have become a well-adjusted member of society. But with effective mentoring, he could have pursued a career as a writer, maybe even becoming a spokesman and advocate for prisoner’s rights and prison reform. His important insight is that prisons rob inmates of the possibility of reform before parole, turning them into dysfunctionalcrime-committing machines. This results in high rates of recidivism and destabilizes society overall. But Abbott didn’t live up to his potential as a human being and In the Belly Of the Beast doesn’t live up to its potential as a book. Still, it’s worth reading as a work of outsider literature.

If you want to pursue Jack Henry Abbott’s insight a little further, the Australian film Ghosts...Of the Civil Dead, co-written by Nick Cave, is based on In the Belly Of the Beast and brings some of Abbott’s best passages to cinematic life in a highly disturbing way. It’s offensive and violent, and it will give you nightmares, but it’s also unforgettable and worth hunting down if obscure hidden gem movies are your kind of thing.

 

Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

      In the early 20^th century, the Irish modernist poet W.B. Yeats believed the end of the world had arrived. So he wrote his most famous poem called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. In it he described the coming of the Antichrist, a repulsive monster that would unleash chaos and mass confusion as society collapsed, leaving everything in ruins. You don’t have to be a mystical Christian like Yeats to feel the abject terror in the poem. You wouldn’t want to be anyways since Yeats’ answer to what he saw as a collapse of civilization was to support fascism. Yeats’s point of view isn’t a whole lot different from what we see in 21^st century America. If Yeats were here today he would be a white Christian nationalist and most likely a MAGA supporter. But that’s not the point here. What is important is that Joan Didion opens her essay collection, called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with the W.B. Yeats poem. Like the Irish poet, she believed the chaos and confusion of her time would unleash a tidal wave of insanity into the world.

The essays in this book were originally written as magazine articles. Joan Didion in the 1960s was part of the New Journalism movement that included such now-famous upstarts as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson on the liberal left and Tom Wolfe and Didion on the conservative right. Before the 1960s, journalism was always presented as being objective without any trace of the writer’s attitude in the writing. This, of course, was a lie and an illusion as journalism had typically been written as propaganda. The New Journalists were more honest. They didn’t pretend to be objective. They made their own opinions and perceptions part of the writing and they didn’t hesitate to make that clear. The New Journalists were part of the story and they weren’t shy about saying so. Now in the 21^st century, journalism is almost nothing but opinion, but both mainstream media and podcasters on the left and right are now presenting opinion and ideology as fact and absolute truth. Fact-based journalism has receded into the distant past. But that’s another matter altogether. The matter here is that Didion’s first collection of magazine articles is a relic from the moment when New Journalism was a fresh and pioneering new style of media communication.

Yes, it’s a relic or an artifact, if you will. The collection opens with some underwhelming essays. The first is about murder and adultery in a quiet California suburb. This is followed by a time Didion hung out with John Wayne on a movie set in Mexico. She waxes poetic about how great he is while he babbles about nothing important or interesting. Then there is a piece about a conservative think tank that doesn’t do much thinking. These are all trivial works of journalism and I couldn’t care less about any of them.

It picks up a bit in an article about Carmel, California where the folk singer Joan Baez has opened a meditation center for hippies. The conservatives in the town want to kick them out but can’t scheme up a good enough reason to do it legally. There certainly can’t be any noise complaints since the hippies spend most of their time there meditating silently and peacefully. Their big crime is being different. Didion obviously isn’t one of the hippies, but she definitely takes their side when the cranky conservatives hold town meeting about the problem that really isn’t a problem. It’s a more exciting essay, but nothing so great.

This brings us to the titular essay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is all about the counter culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene around the time of the Summer of Love. In her characteristic style, Didion writes about what the people do without so much concern for why they do it. Most of this involves her hanging out with young hippies while they do drugs and listen to music. The hippies inhabit communal living spaces in houses and a warehouse. If you’ve spent any time in the drug scene, you’ll know the kind of places she writes about. She is friendly with them, even non-judgmental and without an air of condescension. But some hippies around the Haight-Ashbury scene are suspicious of her and refuse to talk.

While all of this mostly looks harmless enough, the essay does show a growing awareness of darker elements creeping in. Hard drugs show up more and more often. Sleazy people are coming in and preying on runaway teenagers. The essay ends with performance artists walking around in blackface and drugs being given to little kids. Without directly referencing the Yeats poem, it is easy to see what Didion is implying about the future of America.

This is actually a very superficial portrayal of the hippy counter culture. It was a complex and multi-layered social movement that resulted from a wide range of issues and attracted people from a multitude of backgrounds. There was far more to it than a bunch of lazy kids who dropped out and sat around doing drugs because they couldn’t handle the responsibilities of life. Certainly some of them made bad decisions, but not all of them permanently ruined their lives. Most of them weren’t the types of people who would give LSD to a four year old child. The hippies didn’t usher in Armageddon. Instead they brought some much needed social and cultural changes to the American landscape and beyond, some of which are changes that the conservatives of today are directly benefiting from. The media would have you think that the Manson murders and the Altamont concert proved the hippy dream had failed. It’s more accurate to say that the vast majority of hippies simply grew older and moved on to other things, taking some of the new values along with them. That isn’t giving up or selling out. It’s maturing. It’s a process that is as much biological as it is cultural. But you can’t deduce any of this from Joan Didion’s writing because she takes a black box approach to journalism. Her concern is with what people do, not why they do it. That surface level approach leaves most of the story out.

The remaining two sections have personal statements about Joan Didion herself. One of the more memorable ones, “On Morality”, relates back to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” without mentioning it. She addresses the issue of morality being a practice of community values, a kind of roadmap for conduct within that society. But then what happens when individuals are outside the boundaries of that society? They have to adapt and possibly reinvent rules or morality in order to survive. Didion brings the Donner Party into the discussion. Those were the 19^th century pioneers who got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism for survival. The point of this is that their ordinary moral codes had to be suspended when they were forced into a situation outside the boundaries of ordinary living. Survival would have been impossible if the Donner Party had strictly adhered to a moral doctrine that didn’t apply in their unusual situation. This brief essay, which I think is the best one in this anthology, can retroactively be applied to her essay about the hippy counter culture. Like it or not, young people embrace new ideas and those who are too inflexible to adapt to an ever changing world are the ones who suffer for it the most. Joan Didion is explaining moral relativity and how it functions. This is quite interesting considering her conservative political views. I tend to think of her as a moderate Republican, if not an actual Democrat, who supported a party that didn’t align with her values.

The Donner Party comes up in other essays. Didion identifies with them because she descends from an ancestral line of pioneers who settled in the Sacramento Valley of California. Those settlers, once they stopped on the West Coast, were faced with a new situation requiring a new set of standards and lifestyle. While they didn’t have to resort to cannibalism like the Donner Party, they were faced with a similar void of morality making it necessary to adapt and build up society from scratch. Applying this principle to her other essays and novels, it can be deduced that California is still in a state of formation. This might account for the shallowness and lack of soul that characterize the Californians in her writing. Didion extends this idea in her essay about white Americans who settle in Hawaii, specifically mentioning the real families she portrays in her novel Democracy.

I have to admit, after finishing Slouching Towards Bethlehem I couldn’t remember most of what I had read. Joan Didion’s writing just didn’t stick in my mind. Possibly that’s because this is a collection of magazine articles. Magazines are full pf ephemera and tend to be little more than literary fluff. They are written for people riding the subway or waiting in a dentist’s office waiting room. New Journalism or not, these articles are surface level reportage, mostly of things that aren’t that interesting to begin with. Joan Didion never does a deep dive into anything here. I get a lot more out of her novels. This book is a museum piece. I think it has value as an artifact exemplifying the style known as New Journalism from the 1960s, but on its own it doesn’t carry much weight.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology by William S. Burroughs

Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology

by William S. Burroughs

      A lot of William S. Burroughs’ readers don’t realize how much Scientology influenced his writings, especially the science-fiction novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, Burroughs was introduced to Scientology by Brion Gysin and the two of them unofficially practiced those techniques outside the cult. This actually is not as bizarre as you might think at first since a lot of science-fiction authors of the 1950s were heavily influenced by Scientology as well. This is largely because the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer and moved in the circles of those other authors. But none of those writers took their interest to such an extreme as William S. Burroughs did. In the 1970s he was still convinced of the veracity of Scientology so he decided to join the organization and receive the official teachings and methods. According to biographers, he specifically thought they could cure him of his homosexuality and his heroin addiction. Of course, he continued being a gay junky until he died so that doesn’t reflect well on the efficacy of Scientology. While being a member of the cult, Burroughs wrote three magazine articles and some brief columns about being a member. Along with a Scientology-themed short story, two of these articles were published as Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

The first articles included in this slim volume originally appeared in the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other, two underground newspapers spawned by the hippie counter-cultural generation. Burroughs here wrote polemically against the Church of Scientology because of their rightward leaning political values. He accuses them of being an authoritarian organization that is racist and politically aligned with the values of the John Birch Society. He laments this because he thinks that Scientology has a lot to offer the psychonauts of the LSD generation with their taste for drugs, occultism, meditation, yoga, and altered states of consciousness in general. He argues that Scientology would be better off aligning with the Esalen Institute rather than the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican party. Burroughs’ writings on this subject are more interesting than convincing, though he is right about the disturbing nature of the Church’s quasi-fascist political leanings.

The other article of most interest in this collection appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Previous to its initial publication, Burroughs had written an in depth article about life in the Church of Scientology for the British porn magazine Mayfair. The cult sued the publishers for defamation and all remaining copies of that issue were ordered destroyed. Under British law, that article, unfortunately, could not be included in this book. But anyhow, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology wrote a response to it which is published here. In response, Burroughs dissects the Scientology representative’s critique line by line and point by point in the article for Rolling Stone. The first thing to notice about the Church’s representative is that he has poor spelling and grammatical skills; his reading comprehension skills are almost as bad. Burroughs doesn’t comment on this, but it fits in with other things he has said in other places about the shabbiness of the whole Scientology operation. Burroughs does respond in an overly polite manner by pointing out the representative’s misinterpretations of the Mayfair article, along with criticisms that he stands by. He even points out some places where he said he felt some degree of satisfaction with the results of Scientology auditing and e-meter techniques. This article is brief, simple, and doesn’t qualify as something you would read if you wanted any real information on Scientology.

The standout piece in this book is the short story “Ali’s Smile” which previously appeared in Burroughs’ novel Exterminator. It involves a British colonial linguist, stationed in Malaysia, who takes a local boy home, presumably for sexual purposes although that isn’t clearly stated. The linguist inherits a kris from the boy whose name is Ali. A “kris” is a tribal and ceremonial dagger carried by males in some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile back in an unnamed village, which is probably in England, an aristocrat hires a private espionage agent to infiltrate the Church of Scientology and return to administer the techniques to the aristocrat who doesn’t want to join the cult. Meanwhile, a riot starts in the village center. A gang of hippies begin fighting with locals and an army of uniformed Scientologists show up to fight too. The previously mentioned linguist attacks the rioters with Ali’s kris and they all end up dead. My knowledge of Scientology is limited, but I do know that they believe negative thoughts and behaviors are caused by spirit invaders from outer space. Burroughs appears to be saying that such a spirit is possessed in the kris and it causes those who bear the kris to become violent. But this is a William S. Burroughs story so he also appears to be saying that such a spirit can be useful when used against your enemies. Making sense of this story requires some thinking outside the box. In fact, you may have to destroy the box altogether. But it’s a story that is both acerbic and horrifying for those who care to grapple with its obscure meaning.

While “Ali’s Smile” is a good story if you are a devoted Burroughs reader, the articles in “Naked Scientology” don’t add up to much. It would have been more compelling if the notorious Mayfair article had been included. I wish Burroughs had written an essay where he goes more in depth into his involvement with the Church of Scientology since it had such a big influence over his writings and most readers would concede that he had a unique mind and a wild imagination. As it stands, this book is probably best for archivists and collectors, not so much for general readers.

I remember the first time I became aware of the Church of Scientology. While walking down Yonge Street in Toronto, I passed by their building. Men wearing suits were standing in front handing out pamphlets to passersby, most of which threw them on the ground creating a giant pile of litter. The front of the building had large plate glass windows so you could see into the reading room. A bunch of men were sitting inside smoking cigarettes. This was back in the day when smoking was common and done freely in public. It looked about as inviting as a bus terminal in a Midwestern city struggling with its economy. I thought it was a trashy looking place. William Burroughs was a man of some intelligence and it seems surprising that he would get so caught up in such a scam of an organization. But he always did have a fascination for pseudoscience and pop occultism like the fake shamanism of Carlos Castaneda. But I’ll forgive him that considering he wrote some of the most imaginative and provocative books in the history of American literature. John Coltrane, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, was was deeply inspired by junk mysticism like Theosophy. Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer in Spiritualism. If this kind of stuff serves as inspiration for great art then I’m willing to set my convictions aside for a short time and tolerate a con game or two.