House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York.

“It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system, he was guilty of no crime, yet he came to thank God for the humiliation of an imprisonment that helped him become a believer. Indeed, despite all of their incredibly brutal and dehumanizing efforts to make the Gulag a tool for en forcing their atheistic doctrines, the Soviet prison authorities un wittingly provided Solzhenitsyn with a classroom where he learned “the truth of all the religions of the world” and “the falsehood of all the revolutions in history.” Religion is valid, he concluded, because it combats the “evil inside a human being.”

In contrast, revolutions are invalid because they attack “only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also full, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well)”; consequently, “they then take to them selves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”

Nathan Heard has also spent a number of years in prison, and has likewise taken his experience as a basis for his writing. But he was justly convicted and sentenced by a judicial system that presumed his innocence, was never deprived of adequate rest or nourishment while incarcerated, nor was he denied visits from family and friends nor time for reading, writing, and recreation. Regrettably, he apparently learned from this experience only how to write noxious novels glamorizing communism as an alternative to the “racist capitalism” which allegedly forces men to crime when outside of prison and to bestial depravity when inside. His transparent protagonist in House of Slammers, an articulate armed robber who has educated himself while in prison and who is finally killed by murderous prison authorities for leading a demonstration for prisoner’s “rights,” spouts end less leftist drivel. Declaring an equal love for Jesus and Karl Marx, for Arthur Koestler and Lenin, he preaches the “total democratic equality” of every person (baby rapers included), prophesies that “revolution has to be the main trend in the world today,” and champions “what’s best for all the world’s peoples, not just for a privileged few.” Not surprisingly, he doesn’t ”mock” communism because he cannot “see how I could do any worse under communism than I’m doin’ here under capitalism.” Though one doubts that Mr. Heard would learn enough from any experience to attain the faith, insight, and moral stature of Solzhenitsyn, perhaps a year or two building communist power plants in Siberia by day and sleep ing in communist straw by night would at
least release him from the self-imposed imprisonment of pernicious ideology.