BARS AND PENS: The Biography of a Prison Writer

By Richard Stanford

Using the conventions of biography, memoir, interviews, and screenplays, Bars and Pens: The Biography of a Prison Writer, tells the true story of Peter Madden and his courageous journey from long-term prison inmate to published writer.

It is with the idea of making one last break from prison that Madden taught himself to write – about his experience on the treadmill of incarceration and of the demons possessing his fellow prisoners. 

The portraits Madden created of himself and his compatriots in his stage plays are unique in the annals of prison literature, and went on to captivate theatre and film audiences around the world.

In an extensive interview, Madden reveals the innermost secrets his behind motivation to become a writer in the worst, and maybe the best environment  possible for the creation of a writer: living hell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Stanford
• Release date: Nov 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386518044

Richard Stanford

Richard is a photographer, filmmaker and writer living in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Québec.  His photography has been exhibited at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Vehicule Art Gallery Arbor Gallery, Skelly Gallery, Cornwall Art Gallery, Abbey for the Arts, and Critical Eye Gallery.  He has written and directed 50 documentary films and feature films.  The Adirondack Review, Montage, P.O.V., Canada's History Magazine and Ovi Magazine have published his stories and essays.

Book preview

Richard Stanford

untitled.bmp

eta carinae

Bars and Pens: The Biogrpahy of a Prison Writer  ©Copyright  2018 Richard Stanford

––––––––

Excerpts from The Night No One Yelled  (1974) and

A Criminal Record  (1971) are reproduced with permission of the author.

Table of Contents

The Audition

Enter Stage Left:  The Beggars

Rehearsal Call

Toilets and Set Design

Fade In: Playwright in a Cell

A Monologue

Madden’s Last Tape

Catch The King

The Final Curtain

a cellblock is a length of chain

where each link coldly cradles

one, or two, or three

soft-tissued specimens.

48,000 hours in this cubic space

and other cells

in other places,

each made unremarkable through numbers

I confuse – are spent.

-  The Waiting Rooms – John Rives

If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, it will come: the readiness is all.

-  Hamlet – William Shakespeare

The Audition

Freedom is always battling with confinement, whether in an actual prison cell, or a locked room, or a storm-tossed lifeboat, or merely behind the existential bars of an imprisoned mind.  Entrapment scenarios have a long history in literature and film, their images especially claustrophobic, their frames narrowed to the point of near-suffocation.  There is something about confinement and its tensions which seem to sharpen the mind, sharpen either to the point of violence or to the point of a pen.  The fact that any prisoner chooses to write of the prison experience is considered an anomaly and thus quickly dismissed as nothing more than a kind of penance, a confession of guilt.

One of those writers, however, confessed to nothing.  Instead of penance, Peter Madden chose defiance, writing in a very loud, clear voice.  His was of a theatre that had never been written before and yet for some inexpliable reason Peter remains the most forgotten literary genius Canada has ever produced.  That is the issue this book means to address.  And so this is part biography. 

It is also a very subjective account, being a story about my time with Peter Madden and how his life and his work  affected me. It is the product of many experiences and my attempts to make sense of them, although none of these experiences included spending any time in prison except as a journalist or as a voyeur.  However,the intensity of Madden’s theatre  made prison more real to me than if I’d lived on a range for decades.  Fate played a mysterious game in bringing Peter and me together.  And so this is part memoir, too. 

The 20th century has produced more prisoners and prison writers than all previous centuries combined.  With 8 million men and women imprisoned in the U.S. and another 1.5 million in Canada, it is hardly surprising that a few writers might emerge from the chaos.  The fact that many of them have been ignored by those of us on the outside is itself not surprising.  The whole notion of prison is to put people away so they will never be heard from again, is it not?  And if by some accident of injustice they do find their way back into our frontyards we’ll certainly make sure their voices are silenced. We don’t know what it is like to be on the inside, what it is like to be in solitary confinement or to face a sentence that stretches out "like a knife", but in our gut we know our complicity in the entire process.

What distinguishes Peter Madden from all the other prison writers who have emerged  shouting is that he did not remain quiet either in or outside of prison.  This is what makes his story so unique.  He did not write from a distance but from within the experience itself, within the prison of both his mind and the cells in which he lived.

Enter Stage Left: The Beggars

As I climbed the icy steps of a spiral staircase leading to a third floor apartment, I had absolutely no opinions about prison or the prison experience of any kind, except keeping out of them.  My only thought was to get warm as soon as possible and to get solvent even sooner – solvency here meaning money.  Little did I know at that moment that it was prison which would dominate my life for several years to come.

It was a classified ad in the newspaper that had brought me to this building.  I was to be interviewed for a job as a stage manager for a theatre company.  Having virtually no experience for such a job, I was willing to take a chance on anything that would bail me out of the graveyard shift in a printing shop.  I had dabbled in theatre arts courses in university and even had a couple of jobs as a stagehand which had given me the opportunity to watch a stage manager in action.  As for actually doing the job however, I hadn’t a clue.

There is plenty of architectural mythology about the spiral staircases of Montreal apartment buildings contributing to the larger distinct society myth.  In fact, they are nothing more than death traps, especially on February days such as this one where each step is covered with hard snow hiding a thin layer of black ice. Distinct indeed. 

Halfway up to the third floor, just as the staircase curves away from the building and vertigo is at its most intense, I came to three stairs that were covered with ice.  A slip here and it would be free fall effortlessly over the handrail, effortlessly to the street below.  I paused and looked up to the skyline of Montréal.  Up here, you can catch a panorama of the city, the lights coming on, people settling in for their dinners, for their night of television, or the warmth of lovemaking.  All I would have to do is turn around and forget the whole thing.  Whatever was waiting for me up there was hardly worth breaking my neck.  Or was it? 

What was waiting for me on the street below?  There was nothing for me down there.  I looked at the three steps up to the fourth step, invitingly clear.  I grabbed the handrail, stretched my leg as far as I could and pulled myself up.  There was no turning back now.  I sensed someone was looking at me.  Standing in the third floor doorway was a tall, shaggy-haired, bearded man who looked like he had just crawled out of bed.  Ah, show business people, I thought.  He was smiling, somewhat sadistically I felt, and gestured to me to come up.  He introduced himself as Dr. Damion.  He was not in show business.  He had just crawled out of bed, having just finished a 36-hour shift at the emergency ward of St. Mary’s Hospital.  He was also the artistic director of the Beggars’ Workshop Theatre Company.  As we walked down a long oak-paneled hallway, his cowboy boots clicking on the wood floor, he told me he would find the time to direct the play between the gunshot wounds and the heart attacks.

Damion took me into his sparsely furnished living room.  I could see a manuscript lying on a table in the far corner but before I could get to it, a barrel-chested giant of a man came into the room, grey flecks in his long hair combed back exposing a wide forehead deeply-lined with the signs of strain and loneliness.  He smiled at me like a Cheshire cat.  Hi, I’m Peter Madden.  So you want to be our stage manager? he said in a calm, bass voice.

I smiled at him, tentative if I should take the dare.  Yes, I said, interested that he used our.  I sensed something about Peter, about his having been in places I had never dreamed of.  He also had an on-board bullshit detector.

As Dr. Damion described the theatre company, I quickly realized that Beggars’... was to be taken literally: there was no theatre, no company, and certainly no money.  What they did have was Peter’s stage play.  Peter reached back for the manuscript on the table and handed it to me - The Night No One Yelled.   The title alone intrigued me.  Peter laid out the storyline for me in a smooth mellow voice with twists of irony thrown in.  He laughed readily, right from deep in his chest, stringing out this great tale of his adventures writing in prison.  At times he made it sound like it was a comedy, all the bleak horror of it: one night, twelve imprisoned men, their fears, their anger, their passions and their deaths.

Peter told me he was on parole having served five years of a seven-year sentence, but he left off telling me what he was in for.  I didn’t have the nerve to ask.  I would later learn that that was the best approach to take with any ex-con: never ask what they did time for; they’ll tell you when they’re good and ready.  I also thought that Peter liked the suspense.

Then came the fateful question.  And what about you?  What have you done that makes you think you can be our stage manager? Dr. Damion asked.

Well, let’s see, I said. Up until three years ago I was a lab technician in a neurochemistry research laboratory slicing up micron thin sections of dead people’s brains.  When it came to slicing up cats’ brains, that was it  - time to leave.  The past four years I’ve been traveling around Europe, ending up in Israel trying not to get myself killed during the Yom Kippur War.  It’s taken me a year to get home.  On the way back I worked as a stagehand at the Roundhouse Theatre in London, England, until I was fired for bringing the curtain down as Hamlet dies, saying: the rest is silence," three pages before the end of the play.  When I told the stage manager that it seemed like a good cue to me, he said it would be best if I not enter or go near any theatre for the rest of my life.  I’m presently working the nightshift in an offset printing shop.  I once read an Ibsen play but I can’t remember the title.  So, to answer your question: nothing".

Peter nodded: Perfect.

Perfect?  There must have been others in here who have more experience than me, which wouldn’t take much.

Oh sure. Plenty, said Dr. Damion. But they all walked out when they found out about Peter.

Peter was the first ex-con I’d ever met so my expectations were shamefully based on the movies I had seen:  The Birdman of Alcatraz, The Longest Yard.  That being the case, I really had no idea of what an ex-con or even a current con should be.  My father did a stint as a prison guard at St. Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary after the Second World War but he never talked about it much.  I do remember that after coming back from a shift, sometimes at three in the morning, he would always take a shower as if he were cleansing his soul as well as his body.  Prison does that to you, he once said. 

Peter was of a different sort, disarming in a gentle way yet at the same time possessing a quiet strength, not of  brute force but by his simple commanding presence.  Prison may have left its mark on him but it was not a mark of anger or defeat.  It would take some time yet before I was to find out what scars it had left.  All I knew at the moment was that he was serene – at least on the outside – clearly happy to be out of prison and oddly convinced that I could stage manage his play.

Rehearsals were to start the following week and Dr. Damion wanted to know if I was in, making it sound like an invitation to a game of poker.  But you can’t ante up, can you? I asked.  They looked at each other - that damn smile again.  Okay, I’m in. But I want to be a real stage manager, not having the slightest idea what I was talking about.  They eagerly said, Yes and we adjourned to a local bar around the corner on Park Avenue.

Peter is one of those storytellers who likes to laugh at appropriate points as he tells a tale.  Not that there was any sort of punch line.  Rather, you could tell when the story was drawing to a close by the slow build-up of Peter’s deep belly-laughter to the climax of the tale.

We clinked our beer glasses together and toasted to the success of The Night No One Yelled.  I had often heard that parolees were not permitted in bars or even to drink and so I asked Peter if it was all right for him