Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.

Bob Dylan, “George Jackson.”

Some random thoughts on Jerome Loving's Jack and Norman. That is, Abbott and Mailer, the longtime prisoner and the well-known author whose paths crossed to fateful effect. Near the turn of the eighties, Abbott got wind of the project that became The Executioner's Song, Mailer's book on Gary Gilmore, another longtime prisoner, whose Utah murder case served as catalyst to the revival of capital punishment in the U.S. When Abbott heard about TES it was still a work in progress. He wrote and offered to help Mailer understand prison life, specifically prison violence, and a correspondence began. Mailer was impressed by the literary talent he saw in Abbot's letters and helped get him paroled in 1981. To his eventual regret, seeing as Abbott murdered someone six weeks later.
To speak of the tale Loving tells, or an aspect of it: Abbott's allegiance to Marxism-Leninism seems paradoxical, at least on one level. He hated the authoritarian, spirit-warping, spirit-maiming world of prison. Why then would he idealize an authoritarian form of government that broke not a few spirits, not to mention bodies? Did he subscribe, as I'll admit I once did, to something like the idea—a mistaken one—that the repressiveness of the USSR and its imitations was a bug and not a feature? I don't know. Maybe I'll re-read Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast, his first book, based on his correspondence with Mailer, with which I was impressed back in the eighties.
But here's a thought: Maybe prison life, and prison mentality, as much as Abbott hated both and wanted to leave them behind, were so ingrained in him that he could not imagine a polity altogether different from prison. (As he could not quite shake his own prison mentality and prison-bred reflexes once he was outside; this is why he ended up back inside.) Perhaps his ideal state, in more than one sense of the word, would not be the complete opposite of prison, but rather a (far) gentler, freer version of it. With a Party of an at least ostensibly proletarian character running things, of course.
The tale Loving tells is worth telling. I've got to say that it deserves a better telling. The jacket copy says Loving is a “Distinguished Professor of English”, but unfortunately, his book reads like an early draft. He seems to have done his homework but has little or no style; his sentences are clunky and sometimes unintelligible. Maybe he was on a tight deadline. But he should have engaged a smart grad student, or—why not? a promising prisoner/author—as copy editor or co-writer.