E-Book, Englisch, 206 Seiten
Parker A Man of Good Abilities
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30433-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 206 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-30433-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)
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This is an account of a failure—or rather of two failures, as it is not only about a man who has led a life of intransigent criminality for more than fifty years and has been repeatedly and ineffectively imprisoned for it, but it also displays my own inability either to understand him properly or present any kind of really comprehensible or comprehensive portrait of him. ‘Norman Edwards’ was an enigma to me from the earliest days of our acquaintance and has remained one ever since; and it would be correct to say that the better I have come to know him personally, the more I have been made aware that my understanding of him is severely restricted and I am incapable of doing much about it.
In previous books—The Courage Of His Convictions, The Unknown Citizen and Five Women—I wrote about criminals who came from what is usually described as ‘working-class’ backgrounds, and at the front of each I put the same prefacing quotations as this one bears from the writings of Dr. Edward Glover and Dr. Terence Morris, two modern criminologists whose work I greatly admire. In his study of the criminal areas of Croydon Dr. Morris also said: ‘Legally defined delinquency is a social characteristic of the working classes in general and the family of the unskilled worker in particular’; and he continued: ‘The behaviour of individuals in other social classes is so organised that departure from established norms is far less likely to bring the nonconformist into collision with the criminal law.’
Norman Edwards is not from a working-class background, but he has departed to such an extent and with such persistence from the established norms of his social class that he has regularly been brought, or has brought himself, into frequent collision with the criminal law. Elsewhere in the book mentioned above Dr. Morris also comments that while what he calls ‘social’ delinquency flourishes in working-class districts because of the support it finds in working-class culture, ‘psychiatric’ delinquency occurs in all social classes. But unfortunately, at least for my own understanding, Norman Edwards does not show much evidence of this ‘psychiatric’ delinquency. It is there: but his normality, his balance, his ability to function satisfactorily (as current jargon has it) whether he is inside prison or out—these are convincingly present too, and few judges or magistrates could be persuaded that he was in urgent need of mental treatment.
It would be difficult if not impossible to convince Norman Edwards himself of it either. If he did agree, at the age of sixty-five he is now probably too old to benefit much from treatment; and it is anyway doubtful if he could survive even its initial stages, let alone the continuing process of intense self-examination. Having constructed his whole life around a core of self-deception, looking at himself in a plainly reflecting mirror would almost certainly be an experience far too painful for him to sustain. His most marked characteristics not only as a criminal but ordinarily as a person have always been an inability to reveal his feelings, the reluctance to try, and a strong and fundamental disinclination to do so.
He has found even the small amount of discussion and self-analysis we have indulged in to be far more distressing and disturbing than he ever imagined it could be, and I would like to pay tribute here to his bravery in voluntarily offering himself like a bankrupt at public examination, and emphasise that I am aware that however difficult it has been for me to try to get to know him it must have been far more painful to him to allow the process. Great courage on his part must have been needed to continue to submit over a long period to a situation which outraged every principle and practice he had adopted since childhood—of keeping himself to himself, minding his own business and not enquiring into others’, dealing determinedly in superficialities, keeping up appearances, not indulging or even admitting feelings, and avoiding ever taking much thought for himself, for others, and of the past or the future.
At my suggestion, but only after very long consideration, he was prepared for the first time in his life to try to be different: to talk, to discuss, to answer questions, to think and to write; and to reveal. He has read the result in draft: and this too cannot have been a very pleasant experience either. But he has allowed it to stand without alteration, because he felt that after over twenty years spent actually in confinement something might be learned from the account—for others if not for himself. For making the effort and persisting with it for so long, for adhering to what he said and allowing me to present him as I see him, and for not at the end of it exercising his right to have alterations made to the text, I am more grateful to him than I can say.
Norman Edwards is slightly unusual in the variety of his offences—forgery, fraud, false pretences, larceny, office-breaking and embezzlement (though they all are basically different methods of stealing money). The one he commits most often, most successfully, and with the greatest enjoyment, is embezzlement. In his detailed two-volume study Comparative Criminology Dr. Herman Mannheim points out that this is an offence which necessarily requires a certain level of educational and cultural refinement, and in addition can only be committed by persons in a position of trust. Of a middle-class nature, it comes within the category designated by E. H. Sutherland as ‘White Collar Crime’, and discussing the latter’s definitions Dr. Mannheim comments that there are very few professional embezzlers—‘partly because the mentality and position of embezzlers usually go against the ideology of professional crime, and partly of course because the embezzler once convicted will as a rule find it difficult to obtain another position of trust’. The first difficulty has long since been overcome (if it ever existed) in the basic nature of Norman Edwards; and the obstacle presented by the second is one which he easily circumvents.
It is fortunate for society at large that his ambitions and operations are modest. When he is out of prison his wants are few and his tastes are simple; he does not wish to live in opulence and he does not gamble or drink heavily. His desires are for prestige rather than for purely material benefits. He is a nuisance rather than a serious menace, therefore; but all the same he faces society with a problem which, in our present state of limited knowledge, seems incapable of rational solution. The invisibility of obvious causes of his delinquency no less than the incapability of finding excuses for it are baffling factors.
In the lives of most of the other habitual offenders I have written about it has usually been possible to see some circumstances of which it could have been said, with a certain amount of justification, that if they had been different their lives would have been different also. It might have been something simple and obvious, like a total lack of talent for any really interesting or satisfying work, an inability ever to live with others without friction, or an incapacity to deal with any of life’s daily problems; or it might have been something complex but still dimly perceivable like a disturbed mental condition with elements of schizophrenia or psychopathy. And usually it was not difficult in these cases to see a connection between such circumstances or conditions and a marked childhood-deprivation of some kind.
But with Norman Edwards neither the circumstances nor the origins seem either clear or certain, nor do causes rooted in childhood appear plainly convincing. He was not brought up in poverty in an area where crime was regarded as usual: he was brought up in a comfortable middle-class atmosphere of respectability. But he is not in rebellion against these attitudes and values; they always have been and still are his own. He was not deprived of or separated from either of his parents at any early age: they lived until he was over forty, kept constantly in touch with him and always tried to help him, and never even considered breaking off what must have been a most difficult and a times painful relationship. He was not treated unkindly by his parents; but on the other hand he was not spoiled or over-protected. He had some sense of personal inadequacy in comparison with his father—but this is surely so commonplace that it might almost be considered one of the prerequisites of ‘normality’.
And finally and perhaps most puzzling of all is the fact that he was one of four children brought up by the same parents in the same surroundings in the same ways—and that the other three, whatever the hidden stresses and failings of their upbringing may have been, grew up sufficiently undamaged to be able to live normal and socially acceptable lives without resorting to any kind of delinquency. When I talked to his younger brother in fact I felt it was he who might most understandably have been the criminal member of the family, since his feelings of inferiority in comparison with his brother and sisters were markedly present in childhood and could well have led him earlier in life into socially hostile attempts at compensation.
Our knowledge of the workings of the human mind will probably seem as comically inexact in five hundred years’ time as the maps of the world made in the fifteenth century by Ptolemy appear now to...
