The evolution of fame is a curious thing. The former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter is moderately famous. Two things above all others have brought him into the public eye in the past thirty-five years: `Hurricane', the song Bob Dylan wrote about him, and the film, The Hurricane starring Denzel Washington which is due to open in Ireland next Friday.
What Carter is actually famous for has got little to do with entertainment. The life that has attracted such high-profile interest is the story of one of America's most heinous miscarriages of justice. Carter was a middleweight boxer, ranked fifth in the world by Ring magazine in 1965. On June 16th, 1966, three people were killed in a shooting in Carter's hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Carter and a friend, John Artis, were promptly arrested, tried and given triple life sentences for the murders.
The forte of Hurricane - The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter, which is Carter's official biography, is its explication of the gargantuan legal battle fought to release him. James Hirsch points the way to understanding why a process that began in 1967 took 22 years to end, and how it did so with the US Supreme Court's overturning of the conviction and the dismissal of all charges by the Paterson police.
It was Bob Dylan's song which first brought Carter's case to the wider public. Hirsch writes well on the genesis of this tribute and the sideshow that went with it. When Dylan turned up to be photographed with Carter, he was horrified to find the "Hurricane" temporarily ensconced in a low-security female prison that did not possess a single iron bar. A metal grille was found and a picture of Carter "behind bars" receiving a smiling Dylan was sent across the world. To Hirsch, Carter's appeal was clear: "The political left was complacent. Rubin Carter, charismatic, persuasive, betrayed, could change all that". Half of the 1970s entertainment world seems to have agreed - while on the heavyweight side Jesse Jackson, Norman Mailer, Don King, Ed Koch, Coretta Scott King and Muhammed Ali all spoke out on his behalf.
It was Ali who did most for Carter. He organised a march on Carter's behalf, and used all the pre-fight media for his "Thrilla in Manila" bout with Joe Frazier to publicise the gaoled fighter's plight. When Carter was temporarily freed in 1975, it was Ali who provided bail for both him and Artis. Between them, the celebrities and politicians, pop-stars and boxers managed to put Carter's case firmly in the public's awareness. But Carter himself says of it several years later that he felt "like the `house nigger', whose presence amongst whites soothed their racial consciousness." He found this out the hard way. Shortly after his release in 1975, he was accused of physically attacking one of the women working on his case, Carolyn Kelley. The story hit the papers and the support fell away. Retried for the murders, Carter and Artis were again found guilty and returned to prison.
Hirsch deals with this incident very poorly. As official biographer, clearly his bias is with Carter, and therefore it is from Carter's perspective that we see the entire story. But elsewhere Hirsch does make several attempts to stand back and offer an overview. He leaves us in no doubt that Carter was far from a laid-back, easy-going character before the case - indeed, he has a shrewd intelligence, as his passionate auto-didacticism and legal knowledge show. But the Kelley accusation is a serious one, both for his case and in itself. Hirsch shows little restraint in dismissing her as a scorned woman whose alleged demands for financial compensation for her work on Carter's behalf are rebuffed. Ergo the accusation. It is an uncharacteristically sloppy depiction on Hirsch's part, and a crucial one.
In spite of this lurch into extreme subjectivity, the book generally suffers from Hirsch's attempts to put some distance between author and subject. We never truly get a sense of what Rubin Carter is like, how prison affected him beyond the superficial, or how he managed to survive the knowledge that he was losing so much of his life to injustice. When he was convicted a second time, Hirsch tells us almost nothing about how this second loss of freedom affected him, other than a blase suggestion of "relief" at leaving the outside world.
The means of Carter's eventual release is as engrossing as it is unexpected. A Toronto-based commune discovered his case through a young semi-literate Brooklyn boy, Lesra Martin, they unofficially adopted and educated. Now a lawyer himself, the adolescent Martin visited Carter in gaol. This encounter led to the commune developing an almost obsessive devotion to freeing Carter. Its leader, Lisa Peters, shared an intense, curious relationship with him and they eventually married when he was freed. The commune's involvement is bizarre from beginning to end, but it is quite clear that without its money and fervour Carter's conviction might never have been overturned.
It stands to Hirsch's credit that he takes such an intelligent, considered approach to Carter's life rather than choose a more tabloid style for what is a sensational story. But while we close the book knowing the legalities of the case inside out, we cannot say the same about the man at their centre. It is Carter who should resonate from the pages of this book, not the commune or the lawyers. Biography, be it that of Caesar Augustus or Lester Piggott, has a fundamental duty to cast an arclight on its subject's life and bring him/her towards the reader with as much illumination as possible. This book fails in that primary task. It is a poignant, thought-provoking study of injustice and a blighted society but ultimately fails its extraordinary subject - a man who effortlessly ran guns for Stephen Biko, yet spent large chunks of his life in prison for three murders he did not commit.
Antonia Logue's first novel, Shadow Box, was recently published in paperback by Bloomsbury. She is Writer-In-Residence at UCC.