_From a letter written by Terence Mann, formerly Justice of the Court of
General Sessions of Winchester County, New Essex, July 17, 1960, to Dr.
John Sever Mann, of Boston_:
... For that matter, I can hardly understand that more than a week
has passed since Callista died. My sense of time seems to be still
slightly distorted. For many days and months, too much to endure
and understand, hope for and relinquish; then quiet, aftermath.
Finished. The new things that begin, some of them surely good, are
not yet clear in my mind, nor in Edith's--we're tired, Jack.
Last night I finished and mailed that letter I told you about, to
the president of the New Essex Bar Association, setting out in
writing my reasons for resigning from the bench. Mr. Paulus,
president of the B.A., is a very pleasant character, a successful
gentleman but also mellow and moderately philosophical, capable of
filling that position with no sense of strain, and yet able to see
quite a distance into a stone wall. In him, I'd say that
intellectual compromise rises to the level of a fine art, a
hedonistic achievement which I respect, though I can't imitate
it--my own hedonism requires its ethical frame of reference to be
in plain sight, accessible, subject to change if reason demands.
You might understand Paulus better than I do, since in your work
compromise (though a very different kind) has to be the order of
the day. You try to help your patients live in the jungle, which
must mean plenty of yielding here to gain a little there. Well,
what I started to say--Paulus is a good joe. It was Paulus who
kindly suggested, away back at the time of my resignation, that I
should write such a letter, and he gave me advance permission to
send copies to newspapers if I cared to--which I've done. Perhaps
some of them will allow my cerebral verbiage to rub for a moment
against Miss Americas and Russian face-making.
I wasn't able to start that letter at the time of my resignation. I
kept putting it off. For a while--April and most of May--Edith and
I were in a suspended mental state, waiting out the appellate
decision. I couldn't say it to Edith--(especially since we knew by
that time that she was pregnant, your first nephew apparently
aiming for next February)--I couldn't say it to her, but after the
appeal was denied I never had any hope of the Governor. I know him,
a cultured nothing, mentally gelded by the modern political rule,
never stick your neck out. Even his fishing trip last week was
perfectly predictable.
I began my letter to Paulus after the appeal was denied, and it may
be worth something, for the record, but not very much. The memory
of newspaper readers is remarkably short, I think. Last week there
was the inevitable frenzy over the execution here in Winchester,
and I guess elsewhere--I haven't looked at the out-of-town papers.
Mostly pointless--all of it, so far as saving Callista's life was
concerned--the few reasonable voices drowned out by the crackpots
petting their emotions in public. This week--oh, in the houses and
bars and restaurants this week I doubt if there's very much talk
about Callista Blake. And if a few newspapers publish my letter, or
as much of it as will fit comfortably in half a column, most
readers will be honestly puzzled: Terence Mann, who the devil's he?
It's natural, you needn't tell me, Jack. We aren't geared to endure
sustained high tension very long--though didn't I hear you say once
that some patients have surprised you in that respect? The week of
the trial was enough to kill Cecil Warner--understandable of
course, he must have been ill before it began. I wish you could
have met him. I saw him only once after his collapse the night of
the verdict. He got home--I think I never told you this--by
himself, walked home I believe. His housekeeper called me in the
morning because he was asking to see me. His doctor wouldn't let me
stay very long--he grew too distressed by the effort to tell me
something when words wouldn't come. It was mostly about Callista's
letters, something he wanted me to understand, as if I were capable
of sitting in judgment--but I was not then, Jack, and never have
been. Edith was there too--the first time I'd met her outside the
courtroom. Warner said, so far as I can bring back the words: "I
couldn't believe the letters wouldn't get through to them. I
thought they _had_ to hear the truth in them, the reason and the
sweetness--but I was only sending a child into a snake pit." He
said: "The guilt's mine, Judge--I've killed her, by trusting human
nature." That's when his doctor told me I had to go, but he let
Edith stay, easy to see why. She has that ability--I think you've
felt it yourself--of sharing her own steadiness. It's a personal
magic--I'll never know how she does it. I have, myself, achieved
enough tranquillity, mental security, to see me through, especially
since our marriage and my resignation from the bench. But I seldom
seem able to give others the benefit of it; they are most likely to
be irritated because I don't share their excitements of the moment.
You have a good deal of her kind of magic yourself.
Well, there at Warner's house she came out to me later, told me how
he'd talked more quietly a while, forgetting much of the present,
and taking pleasure in the sound of ocean, which no one else would
hear in this inland town, but he could hear it out of childhood. He
died that night.
My letter to Paulus was, as I said, too cerebral, and that's why it
has left me discontented, aware of much that still ought to be
said.
In that letter I marshalled all the familiar arguments against
capital punishment, for the sake of logic and completeness. Paulus
has heard them all, and so have most citizens above the moron
level. Capital punishment does not deter, nor have any effect on
the crime rate one way or another--repeatedly demonstrated by
statistical study long before the time of Warden Lawes; vengeance
does not restore life, but only adds another evil, namely murder by
the state; there can never be complete assurance that the innocent
will not be punished and the guilty go free; punishment itself
serves no purpose except to excite the self-deceptive emotions of
the punisher; and so on, Jack. While I listed and discussed these
and lesser arguments in my letter, I grew increasingly
discouraged, mostly by realization that it has all been said
before, more persuasively than I know how to say it, that the
arguments on the other side seem (at least to my best
understanding) monstrously shabby, unrealistic, archaic, some of
them plain sadism with its nakedness barely hidden by doubletalk,
and yet the laws remain on the books.
You're a headshrinker, Jack--why do so many minds cling to unreason
with such a sullen fury? I am thinking of people like Judge
Cleever, or people who can read the entire transcript of the
Sacco-Vanzetti trial and still declare briskly and earnestly that
the innocent are never punished. How do they do it? What's the
faculty of the mind that makes it possible for an intelligent being
to look directly on a glaring fact and somehow will it out of
sight? For my part I _cannot_, from sheer physical inability,
believe a lie when the demonstration is before me.
And so finally, when I had done all I could with the clear,
sensible, familiar arguments that have beaten on Paulus' head for
forty-odd years without ever moving him to act on them, I found
that I was closing my discourse with nothing more nor less than a
plea for humility.
This was perhaps a little different, a little new--or would have
been if I had not felt obliged to write my letter in academic and
parliamentary language. I think no one ever said to Mr. Paulus:
"You, sir, although an exceptionally decent and clever sample of
_Homo quasi-sapiens_, are much too stupid and ignorant to decide
whether another human being shall live or die; and so am I, and so
are all your colleagues, and all policemen, all Governors, and all
juries." I did say, in terms not obscure, that my reason for
resigning the judgeship was that I felt my own self incompetent to
decide a question of that magnitude. Since he knows I am not a
fool, not badly educated as such things go, not grossly inferior to
others in my profession, and not given to false modesty, maybe the
implications were clear enough to exert some force.
Then having gone so far, it was necessary for the sake of honesty
as well as politeness to say what I could for the law on the credit
side. You can't (as Callista Blake said) have a human society
without laws. The civil law, and with many reservations the
criminal law, stumbles and bumbles through a vast amount of
necessary work, and not too badly. Concepts broaden, eventually.
The law in these years begins to listen more intelligently to your
(very young and new) profession, Jack; I predict that quite soon
the dear old McNaughton Rule will find its proper place--in
historical textbooks. And so long as there are laws, why, the
function of a judge is probably required at certain times, and if
the judge has intelligence it is a potential means of serving order
and human approximations of justice. On the personal level, I
admitted to Mr. Paulus that if I had remained in office I could
have done much useful work for many years, doing at the same time
no more harm than most judges do, and less than some.
But I did not retreat into the formula of declaring that my
decision was purely a matter of private conscience. Mr. Paulus may
so describe and pigeonhole it, but I did not say that. What is so
private about a conscience if it directs the life and actions of a
man? I could not soften the implication that any judge who opposes
capital punishment and yet remains in office in a state which keeps
that on the books is obliged to justify such compromise before the
bar of his own reason. He can do that: he can say that his
compromise enables him in the long run to do more good than harm.
That is honest; that I can respect. But I say, let him remember
that it is still a compromise with evil. And I say also that it
cannot be my way.
I think that in the end all honest reasoning does arrive at the
necessity of humility. In effect you say to all your patients: "I
don't know much about you, you don't know much about yourself;
let's try to find out more, and make what use of it we can, and
remember then that we still don't know very much." Or as my own
dearest teacher used to say to me: "Bring out the inner voices." No
one ever knew all he was capable of learning, or all he needed to
learn. The individual self is the heart of everything we
understand, the world's endless complexity being the product of all
individual selves living and dead. About the self of another we
know one thing for certain and only one: it exists. Therefore, not
as a supernatural dictum but as the command of a human being to
himself: Thou shalt not kill. Therefore, more light! Therefore,
humility.
I am one of the fortunate of course. I think, Jack, that by next
September I can decently start teaching music--with humility, at
least something of the strength and humility that I felt in my
teacher Michael Brooks but was too much of a child to understand. I
shall write books and articles--I told Callista that; or rather I
agreed, for it was the first thing she thought of when she learned
of my resignation from the bench, and all I had to say was yes. I
have a redheaded wife who doesn't allow dull moments, though we
have many peaceful ones, and we shall have children who will
undoubtedly teach me a good deal about humility, if only through
the slow and touchy business of learning it themselves. But Edith
and I will not turn smug and insulated with our good fortune, I
think--we know and remember too much for that.
I was able to see Callista several times in the death house. I
remember I wrote you a little about some of those visits, probably
not too well. The first time was right after my resignation. I felt
I had to see her and talk to her, if only for my own sake. It was
no crawling search for "forgiveness"--she would have thought that
absurd and contemptible; she knew (I think) as well as I know, that
during the trial I was partly a mechanism on the bench, partly a
bewildered and rather inexperienced man who liked her and did not
want her to die. But I was undeniably in search of understanding.
She was someone who had gone into regions I had never known--not
all of them dark and fearful either, for surely her brilliance,
insight, humor, daydreams, were quite as meaningful as her
suffering. She was also someone who was articulate, observant,
wise, and could therefore tell me something of those regions, if
she was willing. In meeting Callista you somehow by-passed
"forgiveness" and other vanities. I think it was because, when she
was not too unhappy, she was often able to speak from mind and
heart at the same time. She had no acidulous interest in puncturing
sham for the sake of puncturing it. It was simply that, once
friendship and communication were established, she was so
straightforward and clear-minded that one's own shams and
self-deceptions showed themselves up as abominations, and one could
only wish to be rid of them, and to exist for a while on her level.
She would never have thought of asking a friend to be honest; she
merely took it for granted that he would be, took it for granted
with an innocence and uncalculated kindness that even Edith says
she can't understand.
Never suppose that Callista wanted to die. She wanted life, and all
it might have brought her. She followed closely and hopefully
everything that we were trying to do, the appeal, the later
efforts. She was happy and intensely _interested_ when she learned
that Edith and I had become close friends and then lovers; it was
Callista who urged us to marry without too much waiting. She wanted
to know everything about this Emmetville house we've bought--yes, I
listen for The Express, though it's always a Diesel now and doesn't
sound quite right to you and me--and she seemed to get a wholly
relaxed, natural fun out of telling us how to fix the guest room
where she would sometimes be staying. When I told her of Edith's
pregnancy (not even sure that I ought to) she was happy--I swear
there was not one moment in the little time I had with her that day
when I could see any shadow on her face, any hint that she was
comparing Edith's lot with her own. Later of course, after I was
gone--but no one will ever know about that.
And in spite of all this, her manifest interest in living, I think
she sensed all the time that the appeal would probably fail, and
the appeal for executive clemency. Once or twice--only once or
twice--she was bitter and miserable. I will not make a saint of
her, and so lose what she really was. She was greater in many ways
than most of us; she was also a nineteen-year-old girl,
unfortunate, frequently sharp-tongued and hasty; loving beyond
measure to her friends but incapable of suffering a fool with
patience. Once, only once, I saw her truly angry. Well, she had
said to Warden Sharpe himself that she wanted no visits from the
chaplain, and then after respecting her wish for quite a long time
he had come in anyhow, poor earnest man, and prayed at her--just
unable, in his good intentions, to understand that there really are
those who prefer to employ their minds in other ways, especially
when the time is short. But I found out on talking with her, after
her anger had given way to amusement, that what had chiefly
exasperated her was her inability to recall chapter and verse
numbers for the quotation from Exodus she wanted to cite to him:
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." (It's XXII, 18, if you're
curious.) She said: "I did want to give him just the numbers so
he'd have the fun of looking it up himself."
Later, unsmiling, she asked me: "Will it accomplish something, do
you think, if I'm able to demonstrate with what peace a freethinker
can die?"
She was like that. She could say that, and saying it, compel me to
answer straightforwardly instead of with a mere desperate
insistence that I didn't think she would die. I said: "Yes." Then
of course I was driven to say the other thing too, because, like
Edith and Cecil, I loved her and I could not look at the thought of
her death. But the yes was what she wanted and what she remembered.
She would not permit me to be present at the execution. She said I
must stay with Edith at that hour, and that was right, and I did
so. We lived through the time--I don't care to remember any of it
except that Edith took hold of my hand and held it above the life
growing in her body, until the minute hand had gone past that mark.
Warden Sharpe has told me there was "no confusion." Callista walked
alone--of course. Sharpe says she smiled suddenly at the chaplain,
patted his arm, said: "It's all right. Come with us if you want
to." When they strapped her in the chair she said only: "You people
here are not responsible for any of this. I'd like you to know I
understand that." Then the hood was over her face, and an employee
of the sovereign state moved the switch to perform on her body the
ultimate indecency.
She was one of the lonely and strange. Though we destroy them, they
give us a light that can become our own.