A MESSAGE FROM HELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 891, 31 August 1956, Page 12

A MESSAGE FROM HELL

BIRD MAN OF ALCATRAZ, by Thomas E. Gaddis; Victor Gollancz, English price 16/-.

(Reviewed by

O.

D.

NEW YORK reviewer calls this book "most engrossing." I call it as engrossing as watching a man being flayed alive or roasted to death over a slow fire. Those abominations, if they were still committed today, would have their public; but long before the show was over the spectators would have forgotten why the torture was started and have begun shouting for the blood of the torturers. That is one reason why floggings and executions are carried out in camera. However, it is not the floggings and executions in the book — though both happen-that make it such horrible reading; it is the spiritual torture. The bird man (Robert Stroud) went to prison in the first place for shooting a thug who had raped and robbed the woman with whom Stroud was living. He was then 19, almost illiterate, and living the tough life that was normal in Alaska 50 years ago. His sentence was 12 years in the penitentiary at McNeil Island, of which some idea can be gathered from its 95 rules (handed to every inmate): no talking at meals or at work; no pictures in the cells; no gazing about while eating; no crusts to be left except on the left hand side of the plate; inmates to stand at attention, cap in hand, in the presence of guards and visitors; flogging or "the hole" or both for serious violations. And so on. But the bird man spent only two and a half years in McNeil. During a fight with another prisoner, who had informed on him for a breach of rules, he used a knife and was transferred to Leavenworth, a huge penitentiary close to Kansas City. Here in 1916 he killed a guard who was bullying him, and from that day to this--40 years-he has been in solitary confinement. But the real horror has not yet been revealed. To confine a.man in solitude for 40 years in a cell just big enough for a single bed, a washbasin, and a toilet seat, is shocking enough. But this man, in spite of his bad beginning, a father who did not want him and a mother who worshipped and coddled him, took hold of himself in prison, educated himself, and under handicaps that it is quite horrible to read -about, became a world authority on the diseases of cage birds, a good anatomist, an astonishing histologist, as well~as a penologist with such a knowledge of criminal law that the authorities found him both a nuisance*and a menace, and when he had earned his parole, refused it and sent him to Alcatraz. There he still is, in a steel cage, the Prison Bureau hoping that he will die, the prisoner himself determined to keep alive and somehow and somewhere get his true story to the world. This book is as true a story as an outsider has been able to piece together from letters, reports, and other material that the authorities have not been able to suppress. It is impossible to be sure that it is accurate in every detail, but more impossible to suppose that it is fiction. It describes at some length Stroud’s strange childhood; his two murders; his discovery in the "bull pen" of a clutch of fledgling sparrows blown in during a storm; the incredible things he did to restore and rear them; the steady transformation of his mind and

character from that point on till he was not only breeding birds in his cell, under a humane warden, but writing articles about them, answering questions from and giving advice to bird fanciers all over the continent -till officialdom could endure the thought no longer, took away his birds, his book, his typewriter (presented by a University professof), and moved him to "the rock" in San Francisco Bay. It reads like a fairy tale punctuated by gibberings from hell-a murderer become brilliantly humane, security gone sadistic | mad, and we the spectators powerless to interfere. We are not, however, forbidden to look, and if compulsory reading could ever be justified, this book should be a "must" for every politician, every policeman, and every member of the general public who could be trusted to read it and not run amuck.