My Generation

by William Styron

  Early in April, only a few days before the magical date, Reid walked off into the woods from a work detail just outside the gates of the prison. An alarm was sounded, and Reid was pursued by state police with dogs, but his trail was lost. After a night in the woods, during which time Reid had strayed into Massachusetts, he lingered through the early daylight hours outside a house in Longmeadow, a well-to-do, semirural suburb of Springfield. Reid found an automobile antenna and sharpened it into a weapon. He then entered the house where a thirty-seven-year-old woman was preparing breakfast for her two young children and the child of a friend. Forcing the woman and the children into her car, he made her cruise up and down the Connecticut River Valley for a large part of the day. At one point during the abduction, Reid told the woman to drive into the parking area of a deserted state park. There, he raped her. (In subsequent testimony some conflict developed as to whether there was an element of consent on the part of the woman, but this would seem to be an almost frivolous point.) Later on in the day, after the woman had driven him to Holyoke, he boarded a bus for New York but was spotted by a prison official and was quickly arrested. Tried that summer in Springfield for an assortment of crimes—including rape, kidnapping, forcible entry, and assault with a deadly weapon—Reid was sentenced to ten to fifteen years in state prison. These horrible, bizarre, and seemingly improbable events took place twelve years ago. At this writing—in the spring of 1982—Reid is approaching the end of his sentence at the Bridgewater facility in southeastern Massachusetts. This is a medium-security prison where, as before, he has been a model inmate. At the age of forty-four, he has spent all the years since the age of nineteen behind bars. Could it be—as I suspect—that Reid's frantic flight from freedom was a way to ensure staying incarcerated?

  In the summer of 1981, when Jack Henry Abbott—Norman Mailer's protégé—knifed to death a young aspiring playwright on a Lower Manhattan sidewalk, a tempest of public rage roared around Mailer's head. Had it not been for Mailer's misguided zeal—it was said—had it not been for the sentimental ardor which impelled him to espouse the freedom of a murderous convict simply because he displayed a literary gift, this terrible crime would not have taken place. Well, yes and no. There was no doubt that the tragedy happened, that it would not have happened had Abbott remained in prison, and that Mailer was a critical factor in Abbott's release. But as I replayed over and over again those ugly events, I could find no possible way—with the memory of Ben Reid's own near-release into my custody so immovably fixed in my mind—to condemn Mailer for his role in the awful story. There were significant differences, of course. For one thing, Reid had escaped before his parole took effect, although this is an academic point. Unlike Abbott, Reid had displayed no artistic talent worth nurturing; he had seemed to be merely an attractive and salvageable human being who had behaved well in prison (unlike Abbott, who, whatever the motivation, had killed a fellow inmate). Then, too, their last crimes on the outside had been of different magnitudes—manslaughter even in this day being an atrocity greater than rape.

  Nonetheless, the similarities of background were wickedly familiar: broken homes, poverty, neglect, abuse, foster parents, and the loathsome taste of incarceration at an early age. And years and years of the inhumanity of prison life. It is hardly possible to feel anything but revulsion for both Reid's and Abbott's ultimate crimes, but it is plain that each crime in its way was the result of perceptions wrenched and warped by the monstrous abnormality of long imprisonment. An almost unbearable fact here signals for attention: both Reid and Abbott were in prison as children. Much was made during the Abbott case about the alleged romanticism of writers in their conjunction with prisoners; some of us have been called, with a certain appropriateness, “jail groupies,” and certainly there are writers who have had to answer for their silly love affairs with criminals. But I am quite sure that romance alone does not explain the fascination or the constant devotion that many writers pay to those that live half-lives behind bars. Remembering one's own Elysian childhood in juxtaposition with that of Reid and of Abbott, I think it is fair to say that a concern for either of those wretched felons has to do less with romanticism than with a sense of justice, and the need for seeking restitution for other men's lost childhoods.

  It could be argued that the power of the written word, effective in helping to save Ben Reid from death, had the unanticipated and certainly pernicious result of causing a suburban housewife terror and suffering. So there we are. Do we abandon our efforts to salvage prisoners because of the savage acts of Reid and Abbott? Almost as important is the question:

  Do we indeed now abandon Reid and Abbott themselves? As for the first question, neither Mailer nor I would have acted as big brothers—or as surrogate fathers, or role models, or simple sponsors—to these men had we known what they might perpetrate on two innocent people. But daily throughout this country prisoners whose records are every bit as flawed with violence as Abbott's and Reid's are released into freedom, and maintain clean records thereafter. Such a statistical consideration was not in my mind when I vouched for Reid (nor do I imagine it was in Mailer's), but our mistakes were committed within limits already well established by precedent. Therefore—speaking for myself alone—I can feel (and at times have felt) aching regret, but no guilt. We are neither the first nor the last to be shattered by this dilemma. And others will make fearful errors in helping their disadvantaged brothers seek redemption.

  But, finally, do we abandon Jack Abbott and Ben Reid? Since Abbott was sentenced to fifteen years to life for his New York crime, he would now seem to be placed beyond any such consideration, at least for the time being. Reid's case is considerably more simple, since in only a few more years he will have paid his debt and will go free. When I asked Robert Satter—who had invested almost as much time as anyone in working selflessly in Reid's behalf—what he felt when he first heard of the escape and the rape, he replied that he experienced a sense of utter betrayal. So, I must confess, did I, and I have often wondered what might have been the consequences for me and my family had Reid—suffering the emotional upheaval that caused him to erupt so violently—actually taken up residence with me as planned. In my grimmest imaginings I could not help thinking that he might have raped my daughter instead of the Longmeadow housewife. Yet—and I can only try to dream of the stoicism it required—Satter immediately went to Reid's aid again during the Springfield trial, offering legal and moral support to a man whom most people might have written off for good.

  My own sense of betrayal has been strong, but not so complete that I have been able to turn my back on Reid's destiny. His conduct in the Massachusetts prison system has been once more, as I say, exemplary, and even if he has to serve a year or two more in Connecticut for his escape (he is hoping to be pardoned from this), it will not be long before he is free, after more than twenty-five years. It will doubtless become a difficult matter for Reid to adjust to freedom, and his return to society will have to be monitored with delicacy and care. But hope persists. I have talked to Ben Reid several times; he speaks of his remorse and his repentance, and of his conviction that he will make good on the outside, and I cannot explain why I believe him.

  [Written by Styron for This Quiet Dust and published first in the 1982 edition of that collection.]

  The Joint

  Twenty years ago, when he was thirty, a talented white college-educated jazz pianist named James Blake found himself serving a two-year sentence in the Duval County jail in Jacksonville, Florida, charged with petit larceny and breaking and entering. It was his first experience at doing time, and although Blake was absurdly out of character as a criminal type and, by his own admission, the world's most inept burglar, he discovered that confinement offered such sovereign satisfactions and fulfillments that he caused himself to be incarcerated at the Jacksonville jail or, even more happily, at “The Joint,” the Florida State Penitentiary at Raiford, for thirteen of the next twenty years.

  Blake's work—a collection of let
ters written to various friends, including two writers he had come to know and who had befriended him, Nelson Algren and James Purdy—comprises a vivid and illuminating chronicle. It is one of the most wickedly entertaining of its kind, a thief's journal that reflects the mordant, droll, nervously sensitive consciousness of a man for whom prison was far less a purgatory than a retreat, a kind of timeless, walled Yaddo for the gifted misfit.

  Since the Marquis de Sade there has been a paucity of significant prison literature and there have been too few articulate recorders of prison life. In our own time, save for the work of Jean Genet, writings by and about prisoners have not often surpassed in quality the level of the Sunday supplements. Our legacy of inside accounts has tended to be characterized by garishly colored tall tales about escapes from Devil's Island, pedestrian reminiscences by celebrity cons, death-row sensationalism on the order of The Last Mile, and characteristically American examples of uplift and redemption, such as The Birdman of Alcatraz.

  Many of these are well-meaning and even informative but often grossly lurid and, in any case, lacking the perceptions and insights necessary to render the prison environment and the lives of its victims with the complexity they deserve. There has been much earnest sociology, some of it readable, useful polemics by knowledgeable observers like John Bartlow Martin, and sympathetic accounts by such humane officials as Warden Lewis E. Lawes and Warden Clinton T. Duffy, who despite their sincerity and compassion retain the point of view of the overlord, the Establishment.

  To some extent, this situation resembles that of the historiography of American Negro slavery. Of those “many thousand gone,” only a few such eloquent witnesses as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson (all ex-slaves) survived to tell us what it was truly like to live under that unspeakable oppression. In particular Douglass, a superb psychologist who would be horrified to observe the foolishness being purveyed about Negro history by many present-day black militant intellectuals, knew that slavery (which to an important degree resembles prison in that both are closed, totalitarian systems) could foster rebelliousness and the wildest desire for freedom in the breasts of many men while at the same time the very ruthless and monolithic nature of its despotism might, in certain circumstances, wreck the personalities of other men, making them supinely content with bondage, eager and happy to genuflect before authority.

  Like slavery, prison life is an abominable but nonetheless human situation in which men will respond to their predicament in diverse ways that still reflect their individuality and humanity. It is a measure of the excellence of James Blake's work and the grace of his survival that he has given us a record that is both an enormously revealing chronicle of life behind walls and a fascinating self-portrait by a man who continues to be steadfastly an individualist, telling his own truths.

  Like Genet, Blake is both a prose stylist of distinction and a homosexual; the incandescent homosexual activity of prison life is of course the preoccupying concern—the obsession—of Genet and the entire jailhouse mystique of carnal love is a large element in Genet's recidivism, as, at least implicitly, it is for Blake. But here the resemblance ends. Genet is a visionary and a mystical genius, and Blake's gift, however beguiling, is a minor one. Then, too, his voice, unlike that of the Frenchman whose tone is passionately embroiled, remains detached, ironic, witty, lyrical.

  If Genet is the rhapsodist of criminals and their greatest metaphysician, Blake is an artificer in light verse, the criminal's best satirist, a sardonic voice that is often surprisingly poignant—one is somehow reminded of Chaplin. An epistolary collection runs the risk of monotony, however; the reader begins to detect that solitary, self-concerned, droning sound. One of the strengths of Blake's letters is their consistent readability, the secret of which is a lilting, rueful, bittersweet awareness of the sheer monstrousness of things, and a gift for hilarity in the midst of a depiction of grim events that blows like a fresh wind through the pages and keeps them mercifully cleansed of self-pity.

  Blake is especially brilliant in his descriptions of his fellow convicts—both the “straight” ones and those with whom he is having homosexual relationships—and often writes with a fine novelist's canny eye for detail, incorporating so much in a brief passage that its resonance, physical and moral, haunts one bleakly long afterwards:

  So now I am back on the J-Range where I feel more comfortable, and my cell partner is a check artist from Maryland who has been ostensibly rehabilitated to the extent that he is leaving on parole next week. Glib, devious, sadly shallow and incredibly beautiful, the Narcissine mirror that goes everywhere with him has prevented him from absorbing anything. (He was locked up with David Siqueiros in Mexico City and could only shrug when I asked him about it.) He claims he is the way he is because his mother held his hand in the fire when she caught him stealing. She should have put his head in the fire. No no no, that is quite wrong. He has been amiable, pleasant and almost completely absent, it has been like coming together with a Popsicle. Put the blame on the cosmos, put the blame on Mame. His prognosis, murky, and what is not?

  Or, describing another relationship, Blake indulges his flair for extravaganza:

  I'm sharing a cell now with a young cat sentenced to the chair for gangbang. He's a beautiful child, a little solemn sometimes, which I guess is allowable under the circumstances. He asked me what I thought Eternity was like, and all I could offer was a guess—an Olivia de Havilland movie on television….Ina laudable attempt to dodge the thunderbolt (his case is on appeal) he has been improving each shining hour by hitting the Glory Road with the travelling bands of flagellants that haunt the jail—Holy Rollers, Mormons, Baptists, Anabaptists—and he has become an Eleventh Hour postulant in the Seventh Day Opportunists. These pious acts swing a lot of weight, such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Bless the boy, he's far too beautiful to go down for such a flimsy transgression, and I hope he makes it. The Holy Ones have a lobby in Tallahassee that don't quit.

  Yet I should not want to give the impression that the tone of these letters is one of unalloyed facetiousness in the face of adversity, for Blake is a profoundly serious writer, and the jocular tone often is merely a decorative gloss upon insights that are original and startling: “I remember a black lover I had….Our arrangement was an eminently workable one. We were aware that the powerful attraction we felt was because we were bizarre to one another, and we were also aware that hate was just as much present as love in our relationship. That was a really swinging affair, no nonsense at all. Not a hell of a lot of conversation, but then there wasn't much time for it, either.”

  But why is it that so many felons return to The Joint, abandon freedom in favor of prison's seductive lure? We know through their own confessions that many men—more than is comfortable to think about—have murdered for the very reason that they were aware that the consequence of their act would be the noose or the electric chair. If this alone is almost sufficient justification for the abolition of the death penalty, it would likewise seem that the hunger, the visceral longing, the truly quivering nostalgia that Blake, representing so many other men, felt for The Joint when away from it would be sound enough reason to abolish the institution of the prison itself. More than once Blake committed crimes—chiefly burglary as a result of the need for drugs—through a barely subliminal impulse to achieve his reincarceration; it is this mighty urge to return to the smooth, amniotic surroundings of The Joint—where all things are provided and the tensions of a too-often-terrifying and monstrous outer world are erased—that Blake anatomizes better than any convict before him and, together with the theme of homosexuality with which that urge is so closely connected, helps give the book the quality of revelation.

  If some of the true horrors of prison life are absent from The Joint and if one does not obtain a sense of the dark midnight of the soul that one gets from such prison sojourners as Wilde and Dostoevsky, it is simply that for a man for whom prison is a shelter and a haven—a spiritual home—the horrors cannot seem so
oppressive after all. Also, Blake is a self-confessed masochist; such a predilection for suffering, needless to say, takes care of a lot of things when one's associates, as Blake describes them once with a kind of half-hearted antipathy, are “dull and brutal and often more square than the squares outside.”

  In a remarkable passage written from freedom, Blake describes what it is about prison that he finds so irresistibly appealing; how many legions of men have felt the same way can only be a matter of conjecture, though it must assuredly be vast.

  You know what's in my mind? The Joint. I thought I was getting off free from that experience. I thought they hadn't managed to touch me, but it colors every moment and every action of my life. I think always of the peace that I had there—this working to survive and surviving to work seems increasingly like an arrangement I would not have chosen were it up to me. Those gates, man, they're inviting. So much lovely time stretches out before you, time to read, to write, to play, to practice, to speculate, contemplate—and without the idiot necessity to Hold Up Your End. It is so well understood, the lines are so definitely drawn: I am Society and you are Not, and there is such a weary patience with nonconforming, it is infinitely restful.

  Elsewhere:

  [I feel] the inexplicable pull of The Joint, trying to fathom the Why of this incredible homesickness, trying to name for myself the kinship of the doomed I felt for the other cons when I was in.