Low Life & High Hack
Griffin, Bryan F.
"Low Life & High Hack" Bryan F. Griffin Norman Mailer' s The Executioner's Song is much more than the story of a minor American murderer, Gary Gilmore. It is also a tale of failing literary...
...The crucial difference between the high hack and the oldfashioned drudge is that the latter never pretended to be anything other than what he was...
...You don't pretend--as I did for years-that the legend ain't there," says youknow-who, shutting his eyes tight and wishing hard: "it is...
...His system, after days of running nonstop and nights with crummy sleep, was by now totally screwed up...
...I f the execution of Gary Gilmore in 1977 did not exactly "electrify the world," as Esquire magazine would have us believe, it did at least attract a good bit of idle attent i o n - p a r t l y because it was the first such execution in the United States in almost ten years, partly because the condemned murderer seemed to embrace his Own fate, but mostly because a lot of bored people saw in the event a chance to make a lot of easy money...
...but he failed magnificently to convince anyone that The Executioner's Song was merely a quickie biography written for fun and profit...
...bad...
...Gary Gilmore had very little to say, and Norman Mailer hasn't much more, and one of the reasons Norman Mailer doesn't have much to say is that he's always in such a godawful hurry: The book is so poorly written partly because it was so hastily written...
...If we believe in the authority of literature, we must also believe that literary animalism is far more brutalizing to the collective humanity than is the individual street attack...
...well, never mind...
...There is nothing wrong with being a hack, of course: Indeed, the old-fashioned literary drudge was a rather comfortable fellow to have around, always ready with a cozy essay or a cute poem...
...W e l l , then, is The Executioner's Song a bad and boring book...
...but this latter station (located at first in East Germany, later in Bulgaria) stopped activity in the autumn of 1976, and since then the total clandestine broadcasting to Iran from the Soviet bloc has consisted of the National Voice...
...Accordingly, with this tale of a two-time murderer, Mailer has written a sort of "left-handed tribute to human dignity in America...
...The horrors were loose...
...It turns otxt that the Russians had something else in mind...
...By this time, a pattern is beginning to emerge, so it's no real shock to discover that the book isn't really as long as it seemed to be at first glance: The publishers (or perhaps the highwaymen) have manufactured quaint artificial paragraphs by dumping lovely( big white spaces all over the pages, so that approximately a fifth of the book (at a rough guess) is blank...
...Any careful writer--and most serious readers--will recognize the prose at once for what it is: lazy writing...
...so much less risky to write "he was looking to give out thoughts that would bring people face to face with stuff they had never pondered before," oi "lost was an organic form of information," than it is to say what you really mean...
...When we realize that the Nation's review is in fact a lukewarm review, we begin to understand the nature of the intellectual, ethical, and artistic limits within which the Mailer game is played...
...There was one reason they got along...
...It was a hasty explanation, but it would have to do...
...He had been talking about that for the last couple of weeks...
...An offer he couldn't refuse," hissed a Saturday Review operative...
...Mailer a few years ago, implying that having your very own legend was a little like having a bad scalp condition (though the Living Legend is a bit too anxious to convince us that the real problem is that "every girl you talk to is not only in love with or disappointed in you but also in love with or hating your legend...
...Let's talk about something else, quickly...
...hence, a poor writer, a mere scribbler...
...Mailer himself is old enough to be a grandfather now, and it's hard to read his own sweaty efforts at kinky eroticism--and they are legion--with a straight face: "Early Sunday morning, lying in bed, Gary asked Nicole to shave her pubic hair...
...which is about what a complete set of Robert Benchley's books might run you in the average usedbook store...
...so much quicker to type "no car, no money, no house," than it is to write "she had no car, and no money, and no house...
...She said, 'Yes, I will, if you want me to.' He kissed her, but it was forced...
...Didion, and everybody knew precisely what she meant...
...The game becomes risky when the grownups begin to pay attention: A hack who pretends to be an honest artist--and who is welcomed as such--can be as unhealthy, and as dangerous, as his own obsessions...
...Here and there, we are beginning to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is Soviet foreign policy, and those relatively complete segments are admirable in their simplicity and coherence...
...As we now know, Soviet clandestine radio stations have aided and abetted the anti-American hysteria in Iran...
...The first thing we notice about the book is that it's big--over a thousand pages long, as a matter of fact, just a tad longer 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 than H.G...
...These are the hollow artists, these are the practitioners of high hack...
...Can Norman Mailer be one of these...
...Then he pushed her away and held her by the shoulders and looked at her . . . . " At other times it's deadlier than the deadest of Hemingway: ,'His eyes had the expression of rabbits she had flushed, scared-rabbit was the common expression, but she had looked into those eyes of scared rabbits and they were calm and tender and kind of curious" (and if that sentence is even harder to understand than the others, it's because Mailer has used the word "expression" twice, to mean two different things--the second usage refers to the phrase, not the gaze: The carelessness is typical, and indicative...
...Unlike the rest of America, he never got over the experience of the 1940s: "IfI hadn't been in the war," he told James Atlas recently, "I probably would have ended up writing books like Iris Murdoch" (but that's just wishful thinking...
...And it is on this level--the moral--that the book is most offensive, to literature and to spirit...
...Mailer's somewhat specialized literary obsessions, it is not really surprising that he welcomes this new concept of the Writer-as-Digestive-Process: "Most nonfiction," he told Ted Morgan of Saturday Review, "is predigested...
...But then, that's the peculiar horror of the spiritual disease: It's contagious...
...News & World Report that he was "never tempted" to write short stories, because, "economically speaking, it was just not terribly feasible...
...For that matter, "What, if any, is its relation to justice, virtue, beauty...
...The obvious question-why write about Gary Gilmore, if you don't have anything to say about him--is best answered with talk of hauls and highwaymen...
...By God," explodes one of Schiller's tape editors, "was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history...
...Morgan of the Review accepted the Cud and began chewing furiously: "The book...
...We are, however, assured that the author did find time to talk to a few of the lesser figures himself, in person...
...But the more advanced highwaymen play on our sympathies by confessing with tears in their eyes that they are very sick, or very alcoholic, or--as in the Mailer The Executioner's Song...
...But perhaps the general intellectual and philosophical thrust of The Executioner's Song is best summarized by a passage in which Gilmore reminisces about the time he kissed a 13-year-old boy: "I don't think I've ever seen a prettier butt," muses the ghastly folk-hero, and Mailer's character of the moment (one of Schiller's tape editors, of course) is simply enchanted: The incident strikes him as "the most moral moment" in the killer's reminiscences...
...Over at Saturday Review, heavier heads are nodding slowly, because they and they alone realize that Gary Gilmore personifies "the main theme of Mailer's entire oeuvre [including the volume of graffiti, no doubt]--namely, that the soul could conceivably' have a separate existence from the body...
...Mailer was raised in the wilds of Brooklyn, but he spent a few months in a combat zone just before the end of the Second World War...
...Meanwhile, young Walter Karp of Esquire is jumping up and down and shouting that he knows the correct answer: Mailer has used his "true gift of the gods" to demonstrate "the moral power of an art," which is "the traditional art of narration and its unique capacity to give each person his due...
...These nice, aimless people are the awful progeny of the first age of mass literacy: They turn to writing as bored children turn to lemonade stands, because they are unfit for other work, and because they smell relatively painless profit...
...The transmission-belt justification for all these poorly digested words suggests that Mr...
...It's been tried so many times before, by hacks who wanted to be real writers, and it hasn't worked yet: Raw fact--even a thousand pages of conscientiously sordid fact-does not suddenly become truth, not until a guiding intellect makes it so...
...war by other means, and have acted accordingly...
...After all, as Cyrus Vance has observed, Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter share common aspirations, and it is only understandable that each might find it necessary to bemoan the sometimes unpleasant aspects of the other's society and national behavior...
...Until the fall of the Shah, the National Voice was at one with the mullahs in its pious embrace of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine...
...It's true that Mr...
...But it's supposed to be that way, that's the scary part: It was assembled on the principle that it is all right to be bad and boring if you intend to be bad and boring...
...From an artistic point of view--indeed, from a social point of view--it doesn't matter how utterly hilarious Gilmore was about his murders, or how intelligent he was, or how psychologically corrupted: In the end, he failed as a man, because his purposes were anti-human...
...They were not written out of some deep well of experience.," he said happily, perhaps going just a bit farther than he'd intended...
...I see myself as a highwayman," added the author, " a highwayman who wants to make off with the swag...
...For the most part, our national leaders seem to have taken them to mean that Russians would speak out on those aspects of American policy that were disagreeable to them...
...And broadcast~ have never ceased to claim that the "satanic" Americans have inundated Iran with espionage THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 19...
...Art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of Human Nature," said the Swiss mystic Johann Lavater...
...What then...
...Fact without truth is often a lie, and the lies of art are ugly lies...
...But a man who grinds out a thousand printed pages in less than 15 months is not a man who cares much for revision, or for careful language...
...Wells' four-volume history of the planet...
...That's the theory, anyway, and for some of us, it works: "I learned how to accept and live with my legend," announced the introspective Mr...
...As Gore Vidal has said, of another writer in the same cotillion: "By arousing universal pity, he hopes to escape predators...
...This critical reaction is interesting primarily because it was so predictable: Mr...
...It's doubly important, at times like these, to remind ourselves that there is only one born every minute, and that, statistically, the odds are on our side...
...But what if you don't like the image, or what if you don't care one way or the other about it...
...Mailer's own transports are not quite so explicit as they used to be: The besotted biographer confesses in his Afterword that he has restructured some of Gilmore's interviews in order to "treat him decently," but he forgets to say just why he wants to treat him decently...
...They are also dangerous novels...
...And lately the center has been wobbling dangerously...
...Just what, exactly, is it like at Time these days...
...Time magazine has referred to him as " a hustler," but in sweeter parlors he is known as " a carrion bird"--which is a gentle way of saying that he specializes in books and films about dead and dying Americans of dubious reputation (in the past he has put together deals involving Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, Jack Ruby, the Manson gang, and many other old favorites...
...Some things are better left in darkness...
...When it comes to books, Norman is all business...
...Gary Gilmore killed two very young men, both of whom were married, one of whom had a small child...
...Mailer is so inextricably bound up with his literary groupies that you cannot review the one without simultaneously reviewing the others...
...The second thing we are likely to notice is that this "true-life novel" (Mailer's hopeful description) is going to cost us almost 17 dollars...
...And it did: If the Writer-asHighwayman had been a bit embarrassing, then the Writer-as-Transmission Belt more than made up for it...
...I put in all I knew," says the author of The Executioner's Song, and in confessing this he is only putting his finger on the obvious: A writer who cannot (or will not) master the fundamental art of composition is a writer who cannot distinguish between the relevant and the irrelevant, between the important and the trivial, the true and the half-true...
...A very long time ago Mailer built a reputation for himself as a conscientious Writer who spent most of his waking hours polishing his prose...
...Mailer really wrote the book in order to illustrate "that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms o f human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting...
...Mailer's publishers...
...the violence on paper is exploitative as well...
...Mailer told Playboy magazine that he "dug" being famous because "it enabled me to get girls I would not otherwise have gotten" (it just didn't sound like Tolstoy, no matter how many times you read it--it didn't even sound like Thackeray...
...It is hack work, and dangerous hack work, and we condone it at our risk...
...T h a t is what we are supposed to think, anyway...
...In the same confessional mood, our man told U.S...
...It was all diarrhea...
...Nobody paid much attention to all this, and after a few days of silence the frustrated bandit admitted, somewhat sulkily, that all he'd really had in mind was "a quick haul"--implying that, in certain literary circles at least, heavy swag is not quite so important as speedy swag...
...Those of us who are less well-protected thaa Norman Mailer may be less spiritually anaemic than he, simply because we have had to be...
...And if the author is thinkin~ such thoughts, he ought to be ashamed of himself--the simile is gratuitous and silly...
...Worse, the novelist William Styron has begun to think of the relic as "a figure of pathos" (which just goes to show that Mr...
...In fact, a man who grinds out a thousand pages in less than 15 months is much more likely to be a tape editor than a writer...
...What if--God forbid-you are actually bored by the Writer-asHighwayman...
...I t ' s " a meticulously limited vocabulary," said Joan Didion in the New York Times Book Review, "and a voice as flat as the horizon...
...since the return of Khomeini it has been more ethnic-oriented, urging separatism on the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis, and others...
...Mailer famous back in the forties, but over the years he's been forced to do more and more of it just in order to hang onto his janitorial reputation, and now he hardly has time for anything else...
...Why is the ongoing world like a wagon wheel ? Because it goes round and round...
...Mailer is ever so keen on "scaling his language down to the folksy banality appropriate to his characters" (the actual words belong to the Nation, but the theme is fairly universal...
...e truth, of course, is that Mailer's raw flesh is not rigorously restrained, or spare and dry, or flawlessly crafted, or anything else of the kind: It's just pudgy...
...I t is difficult to tell entirely whether Mailer or various tape recorders are to be congratulated," frets Time, obviously determined to do the right thing by everybody, and everything...
...I've messed this up, haven't I?' " Space...
...Given Mr...
...It's also cheap...
...This is an absolutely astonishing book," sighed Ms...
...this is "a view of America that is seldom seen," they say, which makes us wonder just where these guys have been for the last ten or 15 years (some place pretty nice, no doubt...
...Larry Schiller is a promoter, of sorts...
...Oh, come on--let's pretend...
...In other words, Mr...
...The man who can write the words "he understood the fear at the center of his diarrhea," or "the sound of an empty stomach was in the earpiece of the phone," and actually believe that he has said something (let alone something interesting), is a man who is instantly classifiable, intellectually and historically...
...Mailer was all wrong when he said that "a dangerous idea has never infiltrated Styron's brain...
...Presumably the author of Myra Breckenridge knows exactly what he's talking about...
...In our own time we may gaze .into the sentences of No~man Mailer and see that they are calm and tired and kind of bad: Gilmore's mother, for instance, wonders "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels in the prairie grass...
...Rather, it is the prose of a "quasi-literate," of a person who has not yet mastered the art of composition...
...Wobe sure, Mr...
...It is a particularly bad crush, even for the ungrown man who once said that "a murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 17 as complete as the transport of the saint...
...It was a desperate author who told Saturday Review that he was merely functioning as " a transmission belt" for his characters, or his tapes, or whatever...
...There is nothing at all shameful ab6ut a sheltered life, but there is always something a bit pitiful about the life that resents its shelter: In other words, this self-professed highwayman's lifelong infatuation with the mechanics of brutality and death tells us a lot more about Norman Mailer's middle-class fantasies than it tells us about either life or death...
...I n another sense, of course, The Executioner's Song isn't really about Gary Gilmore at all: It's about Gary Gilmore and his friends, as seen through the eyes of Norman Mailer and his friends...
...They had a lot of fun...
...He was probably right...
...The actual violence is cowardly...
...His literary style, or lack of it, is essentially a diversionary tactic, calculated to direct attention away from t h e absence of meaning: It is the 20th-century version of the Victorian "purple prose," and we are going to be seeing a lot of it in the years ahead...
...It's just so much easier to type " i t got to her" (as Mailer does) than it i s to write "his THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 15 behavior annoyed her...
...Virginia Woolf must have seen Norman Mailer coming: "If you are anaemic," she said in 1923, "there is a glory in blood...
...He can't be a folk-hero to us, as he is to Mailer, because we've seen his vacant face too many times, in too many unhappy places...
...Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener...
...Indeed, these Gilmore letters, "which Mailer rightly quotes at length," are "charged with intense sexual intimacies that are at once moving and discomfiting," according to New York magazine...
...I n the end, then, the transmission-belt theory falls apart primarily because The Executioner's Song is bad in such an astonishing number of different ways...
...Now, she said yes...
...It's okay to say "predictably," because Mr...
...Because it is at this point--on the first page of this heavily padded classic, as a matter of fact--that it begins to dawn on us that The Executioner's Song is a badly written book: "Gary was kind of quiet...
...Mailer has done this prepublication dance many times before, and he hops about the floor with a certain grace: The appearance of Why Are We in Vietnam?, for example, was preceded by the author's unnecessary announcement that the novel had been written in just four months, "to fulfill a contract...
...He's just an old leg-puller, that Norman...
...But at least we can let him know that we are no longer amused by his ignorance...
...While it is not much of a recommendation to write only for financial gain, it is not a literary crime either...
...Like any other writer, Mailer ought to be taking a risk when he details monstrous things (and the operative word is "details...
...In Mailer's case, for instance, there is little reason to doubt the veracity of his mercenary thesis: He recently told an interviewer that all his "best things" had been written primarily "to pick up a paycheck...
...Mailer is no newcomer to this sort of thing: In recent years he has produced not only the definitive Marilyn Monroe picture book, but also the definitive (perhaps the only) graffiti picture book, not to mention a non-definitive Muhammed Ali adventure book (and even now he is hard at work on an exciting new picture book, which is to be full of snapshots of women...
...Plus an Afterword, as if we needed another word...
...The Gary Gilmore story drags all these hoary themes into a "seething nexus," because it is about "the uses and abuses of power in sex, language and action," not to mention "the dramatic confluence of the private and public spheres in spasms of force and repression...
...r 2"-]kA hack," says the Oxford English Dictionary, "is a common literary drudge...
...As she climbed into the tub, she was thinking, 'It really means something to him.' " The adventure continues, but we won't, because we've got the giggles (it's no accident that, as of this writing, the latest Norman Mailer book is right next to the latest Harold Robbins book on the national best-seller list...
...In fact, of course, she isn't thinking it--the author is thinking it, which rather spoils the conceit that both the language and the thought are to be blamed on the characters, rather than on their chronicler...
...They took the "ideological struggle ~' to mean the waging of Michael Ledeen is Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...
...So does the left rear wheel of a 1964 Pontiac...
...There are, after all, a lot of aging literary reputations riding around on the Mailers of our day, reputations that might start tottering if it became evident that they had been perched on top of a litter of professional hacks for the past 30 years...
...Norman Mailer, says the Nation's professor of English, has always been "intrigued, obsessed and sometimes frenzied by the subject of power...
...On the contrary, if we may take the slightly huffy word of his latest publishers, he "has not predigested his material and imposed a point of view" (and if you think that's a veiled apology, you just haven't been paying attention to the course of AngloAmerican literature over the last 30 years...
...it was funny as hell...
...Joan Didion of the New York Times Book Review, for instance, didn't care for all the chatter about hauls and highwaymen and paychecks: She noticed at once that the Gary Gilmore story was set in Utah, and before she could get a grip on her better self, she had come up with the idea that Mr...
...On the other hand, when you come right down to it, it doesn't really matter what Norman Mailer says about himself: He just can't be a hack, you see, because if Mailer is a . . . a hack, then that means...why, don't you see, it means that the rest of us...well, it's just too awful even to consider...
...Certainly an author may write legitimately of murder, and rape, and child molestation (as Mailer does), and of all kinds of pain and ugliness and bestiality--he may legitimately detail such things, if that's his field of interest-but he must do so with genuine purpose or new insight, and at risk...
...Mailer, "then there's a tendency not to write that way...
...Do we bring our own bottles, or is there a keg...
...Violence is more real and more familiar to us than it ever was to Norman Mailer, and therefore less romantic: Since we can't see the glory in senseless murder, we can't get all worked up about the demise of Gary Gilmore...
...The technical term for this ploy is "poor-mouthing"--which is not to suggest that the literary highwaymen are never telling the troth: Sometimes they really are a bit sick or a bit drunk or a bit batty or a bit short of cash...
...the fact that it is no longer so means that it answers itself...
...Mailer starts talking about "allowing his [Gilmore's] brain to have its impact on us," and about all "the pleasures 0f writing this book...
...No doubt it's a scandalous state of affairs, but the sad truth of the matter is that the English language does in fact dis...
...In other words, things do tend to fall apart, when the center cannot hold...
...Of course it's a bad and boring book...
...I don't even remember writing i t ! " ) , and sometimes, along with Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut, you explain that the whole book is just a huge joke ( " I t ' s not meant to be taken seriously, it's a parody, for heaven's sake...
...By God," cries Newsweek, "the book is good, a phenomenal feat of narrative...
...Mailer on the grounds that he "was in debt and had to make a small fortune in a hurry...
...The game seems to have been playe d entirely at random: Sometimes sentences or paragraphs are segregated in this eccentric fashion, sometimes they're not...
...Mailer fills in the gaps between bathrooms with seemingly endless quotations from Gilmore's aggressively pornographic writings...
...In other words, a reader has to be very interested in minor American murderers--or in Norman Mailer--to want to adopt this enormous volume in the first place...
...he ought to have to justify doing so, and that justification ought to be contained within the body of the novel itself-otherwise, the author offers the world merely one more precious monstrosity, and we have plenty of those already...
...Schiller, according to Mailer, had to ask himself at one point "whether he was qualified, at bottom, to know Gary Gilmore...
...It goes without saying that Mailer does not ruminate...
...Prose that glorifies such men is anti-human in itself, and is therefore not literature, and not art...
...When Joan Didion read that passage, she remembered that the tracks made by wagon wheels are still visible from the air, "like the footprints made on the moon...
...That far down, hey...
...There's a larger point here: If the world does indeed go around and around (and maybe even down and around), then surely it is the task of the artist to show us exactly where it comes out, and why--not just to tell us that it goes around and around (I mean, we knew that...
...What is i t ? . . . How is it manifest in the sadist, the masochist, the lover, the gangster," etc...
...Mailer never even met Gary Gilmore, but merely inherited an enormous shipment of taped interviews from the Schiller organization (many of these interminable recordings are reproduced in their entirety in the pages of The Executioner's Song...
...It is also a tale of failing literary powers and shaky reputations, of bathroom habits and dangerous obsessions...
...variationmvery poor, and desperately in need of some fast cash...
...Our expectations are large as we approach The Executioner's Song," confesses Rovit of the Nation, and that's precisely where the difficulty lies: The crudely-fashioned public image of Norman Mailer still dwarfs the actual talent, if indeed there is an actual talent--whiCh is to say that you're sure to like the artist, if you love the image...
...Wilfrid Sheed, for example, has referred to Mr...
...The contemporary hack can be just as boring as his predecessor (Mailer's chief concerns are boxing, sex, and Henry Miller), but he is not content to stay in the literary cellar: He wants to bring his enormous books into the front room, and read them aloud to the grownups...
...t16.95...
...Perhaps he suspected that the rest of us might notice it, too (it's not an easy thing to ignore, there's so much of it...
...The characters are dull and semi-literate, so Mailer has to be dull and semi-literate, get it...
...Silly old Mailer, trying to tell us that he never writes "out of some deep well of experience...
...Norman Mailer is not an especially illiterate man, and presumably he noticed that he had some pretty sloppy prose on his hands...
...After all, says New York, Gilmore is "aching with desire for his woman," and if that's not full of redeeming social significance, what is...
...Sometimes, like the late Noel Coward, you pretend that the work was dashed off during a long coffee break ("What, that old thing...
...For some 17 years this station broadcast along with another station that was formally allied with the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh...
...Those of you who live west of the Mississippi may ponder your nihilistic dread for a moment, while everybody else takes a quick look at Newsweek...
...The prose is spare and dry and clean," agreed the reviewer for New York magazine...
...Twenty years ago--even 15 years ago--that might have been a provocative question...
...He does manage to squeeze in a good deal of earnest chatter about last year's trendy subject ("she wasn't into orgasms very regularly' '), and lots of dreary descriptions of sexual intercourse that drag on for pages (including, in a related development, an extended account of Gilmore's efforts to retrieve balloons from peculiar places in his girlfriend's body), and some childishly graphic mortuary scenes for the juniorhigh-school set ("it got really gruesome," chortles the transmission belt, especially that time when they "sliced the brain like meat loaf...
...Make no mistake: It's a dangerous game we're playing here, and one we've been warned against...
...She said, 'No, you haven't, Gary.' " Well, somebody has: It's hard to keep from blushing when one realizes that a large part of one's 17 dollars has gone for funny big white spaces...
...And finally we notice that Mr...
...Predictably, one of those sharp-eyed entrepreneurs turned out to be Norman Mailer, who has now given us a big blue book all about the deceased killer...
...We can see poor Mrs...
...It is one of the intellectual curses of the second half of the twentieth century that the literary woods are full of reasonably intelligent, welt-educated men and women who write because they have notlaing better to do with themselves...
...Accordingly, he is using a "near-flawless craft" to pound the rest of us into " a numbed state of rapt attention" (or, if you prefer Newsweek to the Nation, you can have "the rapt quality of hush before a storm...
...They are, by their very 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 nature, rather tedious people, with boring concerns...
...True-life novels" that try to conceal philosophical vacuity and intellectual mediocrity behind a facade of tawdry facts and criminal vulgarities are illegitimate novels...
...Accordingly, it is mostly about making money, and having sex, and breaking wind, and visiting the bathroom...
...But mostly Mr...
...When one can have t h e cooked flesh," asked Virginia Woolf, "why have the raw...
...Gilmore right now, sitting there on her front porch and thinking, "My oh my, isn't this old ongoing world just exactly like some old iron-banded wagon wheel in the prairie grass...
...Its content has been for the most part entirely predictable: unrestrained attacks on the Shah and on "American imperialism," calls for revolution and freedom from Western influence, appeals for better relations with the Soviet Union...
...Even at that age he was real p o l i t e . . . , " and so on--for 1,049 pages...
...Sometimes it reads like the worst of Barbara Cartland's paperback romances: " 'You're not going to see me again, are you?' he asked...
...chances are he'll never understand...
...In the eyes of our national spokesmen, nothing is more understandable than that disagreements be aired, the better to resolve them in lawyer-like fashion...
...Not too lyrical, either: "He [Schiller] went into the bathroom and took the longest f...
...Woolf was a writer, not a transmission belt...
...When such an artist attempts a serious work, he almost always tries to disguise his lack of purpose by dragging in anything and everything that happens to cross his mind, in the vague hope that some of it might ring an old bell somewhere...
...But then, Mrs...
...And when the separations do occur--which is on the order of four or five times a page--they do so without any discernible artistic purpose: "He said 'I'm sorry...
...but because they are also fairly literate and fairly imaginative, they are able to bore the rest of us as well...
...Since 1959 the Soviet Union has been operating a clandestine and unofficial radio station in Baku known as the "National Voice of Iran" (it is also called "Our Radio...
...These quotations (which we won't quote) are okay, you see, because it's Gary talking, not Norman...
...And ever since the Shah's fall appeared likely, the National Voice has doubled its broadcasting time...
...We may also remember 1963, and 1968, and 1972, and feel justifiable disgust when Mailer notes fatuously that Schiller thought of Gilmore' s executioners as "assassins...
...We might peer at The Executioner's Song from that heretical perspective, and see where it gets us...
...Norman Mailer wouldn't agree, of course, at least not this year...
...ends without a pat, predigested, conclusive answer," he mumbled delightedly, and this omission was a grand thing for all concerned, since it proved that "even when we know everything about another human being we can never understand his ultimate moral nature...
...And on occasion the correspondence between the words of the National Voice-and the actions in the streets of Iran has been impressive indeed...
...I walked in on [one of the victims]," Gilmore told his cellmate later, "and I said to that fat son of a bitch, 'Your money, son, and your life '~ The prisoners "both cracked," writes Mailer-as-Cellmate...
...And a literary atrocity, one that is written without purpose--or with weak purpose, or failed purpose--is no more to be admired and gushed over than the literal assault it seeks to imitate...
...and what Nature will he Honour who honours not the Human...
...The diarrhea went through him as if to squeeze every last rotten thing out, and .still it c a m e . . . " and so it does, but we're running out of dashes, and in any case you'd be bound to find your attention wandering after a page or two, especially if you don't share old Norman's fascination with young Larry's bathroom habits-which is pretty likely, if you're much over the age of three and a half...
...It is also "Rabelaisian humor," according to Mr...
...it's enough to know that the ongoing world is like an old wagon wheel which is like a footprint On the moon which is like...
...It's no wonder thatlarge chunks of The Executioner's Song were originally published in an obscure literary journal like Playboy: seething nexus, indeed...
...For years the Russians told anyone willing to listen that while d6tente required a certain degree of East-West cooperation, the "ideological struggle" would continue unabated...
...In short, the clandestine Soviet broadcasts--purporting to come from within Iran itself--have encouraged that sequence of events that has now become our major national preoccupation...
...Mailer's hair is white, now, and there wouldn't be much point in trying to teach him that we all have to die, someday, or that lite Is more important than death...
...Unfortunately, these things are catching: The critic for Saturday Review can't decide if Gary Gilmore was "a man of depth and artistic temperament" or, "to paraphrase what was once said about Harry Truman, an example of mediocrity enlarged by history"--proving that they read new novels very carefully over at Saturday Review, or that they don't read them at all, or that they do but they think we don't...
...Mailer's publishers do their best to persuade us that his indiscrefions are absolutely essential it we are to get a really good peek at "the moneyless side of the modern West, with its petty crime, and its county jails," etc...
...It's an old ritual, and a very civilized one: When you are afraid that people will not like your latest book, you declare in advance that you don't think much of it yourself--you say that you wrote the silly thing for money, or for fun, or because your mother made you do it (it is understood that you are allowed to change your mind later, in the extremely likely event that the volume is a critical success after all...
...By the same token, An American Dream was excused by Mr...
...Also "lyrical...
...And if it has a familiar look to it, it's because Mr...
...and Norman Mailer is the leader of the pack...
...A novelist who gleefully describes an act of animalism has automatically created a fresh, separate, self-supporting brutality, a new atrocity, one with a life of its own...
...The trouble is, the trick didn't work--or rather, it worked too well, from the point of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 13 view of the dazed bystander...
...One imagines the boys in the mailroom jumping to their feet as one man and breaking into a raucous chorus of thanksgiving (' 'By God the Book is Good, Tum-tum...
...This is because the book is about "real events" and "real people," and we all know what they're like...
...Others jumped onto the transmission belt and couldn't figure out how to get off: "His p r o s e . . . i s banal, idiomatic and somehow grainy," said Lance Morrow of Time magazine, "like the scenes in 1950s pornographic films in which the characters meet and part like neighborhood dogs, the men never taking their socks off...
...Well, not too clean...
...On the day of the first seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran, for example, the National Voice announced that the archives of SAVAK--the Shah's hated secret police --had been transferred to the Amexican Embassy...
...Their work lacks genuine meaning because they themselves lack purpose: They don't write about anything, simply because they can't , s o they just write, on and on into the night, coughing up pools of directionless, readable prose for a quasi-literate audience...
...Mailer needed dough," concluded the Times, "and he needed it Bryan F. Gr~ffi)~ 's essays have appeared in Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly...
...Many of us have seen a good deal of that America, and it's really not our fault if Norman Mailer has led--dare we say it--a somewhat sheltered life...
...Neither does he explain his partner Schiller's irritation with a newspaper that has "impugned Gilmore's honor in death" (that's right, Gilmore's honor...
...Norman Mailer's own hard-won rePutation as "the most important literary figure of his generation" (Grove Press) is a vital component of a particular intellectual and literary matrix: If the Mailer-component is revealed as something other than what it has always pretended to be, then other components are exposed as well...
...Michael Ledeen THE KGB RADIO HOUR On the air from Baku...
...It is sorry writing, of course, but it is not the prose of a fundamental illiterate...
...We know the hacks are at hand when the irrelevancies begin to accumulate, when the cluttered pages begin to pile up, when the infelicities are notable chiefly for their infinite variety...
...I'm all diarrhea," announces Schiller at one point, though he fails to set Off a debate on the subjec 0. This is the sort of thing that made Mr...
...The point here is not that Norman Mailer writes books like The Executioner's Song in order to make quick hauls (that's his own business), but that he has decided to go public with this embarrassing information...
...Mailer has been writing this way for about 15 years now (ever'since that colossal embarrassment, Why Are We in Vietnam...
...True, the book is a bit "unsavory," but our critic is "too busy turning pages to throw stones...
...What did the United States make of such proclamations...
...Little, Brown...
...After a few more man-to-man interviews, the awful message began to get through: "Mailer seems to have undertaken the project mostly for money," noted Time magazine, with a puzzled air...
...Why, heck, " i f you can't earn money at a certain type of writing," explained Mr...
...By God the Book is Good, Tum-tum, and So Say All of Us...
...criminate against vacuous minds--because in order to say something well (let alone grammatically), one must first have something to say...
...In other words, everybody has gone to a great deal of trouble to persuade us (and themselves) that intellectual weakness is literary strength, to convince us that it is somehow proper t h a t an artist should abdicate the 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 artistic function...
...The writer ruminates on the material before he presents it to the reader...
...I ( s easy to see that all the really punchy stuff--nihilistic dread, religion, patriotic dignity, etc.--was snatched up almost before the book hit the stands...
...Let's suppose, just for a moment, that there is no Legend...
...Even if all this were true, it wouldn't salvage the situation: Labored banality, folksy or not, does not make for effective art, or even for readable journalism...
...So does a loose transmission belt, for that matter: Imagery for the sake of imagery is creative-writing school stuff...
...The Newsweek reviewer thinks that The Executioner's Song is just, well, you know, just a damn good story: "an extraordinary demonstration of Mailer's novelistic skills," and so forth...
...Mailer is tops, or almost tops, in his chosen field--and he knows it...
...The Americahs at Random House are tougher: "A hack is one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success...
...Norman Mailer's customary vulgarity, intellectual and otherwise, pales beside the larger obscenity of his adolescent crush on this insignificant killer...
...Try that one out on Bess Truman, and see how you feel the next morning...
...Mailer shares his copyright with someone named Lawrence Schiller...
...The idea is that if you can collect enough meaningless information about enough meaningless people, and put it all down on paper in the right order, it will suddenly turn out to have meaning, or truth, or something like that...
...Mailer managed, as so often before, to scare away the sharpest of the predators...
...Mailer as "a second-class relic...
...Mr...
...And so, they did...
...It's best not to answer that sort of question, but we are quite right to feel a kind of moral and intellectual queasiness as we slog through fan-magazine sentences like this: "It was as if he [Gilmore] was staring all the way to the bottom of your worth...
...In this case, he simply nailed down the rights to Gary Gilmore's sordid story, and then went looking for Norman Mailer, who wasn't so very hard to find (the irrepressible chums had worked together once before, on--you guessed i t - - the Marilyn Monroe picture book).'A little idle research reveals the embarrassing truth: All hints to the contrary, Mr...
...Bryan F. Griffin LOW LIFE & HIGH HACK Norman Mailer' s The Executioner's Song is much more than the story of a minor American murderer, Gary Gilmore...
...Readers in general may be forgiven if they have already turned away by the time Mr...
...And one of our most influential critics, James Atlas, recently sent a shudder through the entire literary community when he quoted Mailer himself as saying, "I find myself noticeably aware [sic] of a certain shrinkage in my reputation...
...Maybe even scarier than that dreadful time when Mr...
...Especially visiting the bathroom: There are lots and lots of imaginative bathroom scenes, and much excited talk about excrement, toilet paper, funny smells, etc...
...Curiously enough, he wants everybody else to know it, too: " I ' m always looking to make a big haul," he told the New York Times recently, presumably with a disarming chuckle...
...The Most Important Literary Figure was only joking, of course, but you've got to admit it was a pretty scary joke, even scarier than all that talk about the swag...
...I mean, it was so gross, my little sister wanted to leave the theater, you know...
...In any event, he did the only thing he could do--he decided to bluff it out, to argue that the book was supposed "to be poorly written...
...We can let him know that he writes at risk...
...g s--t of his life...
...This sort of padding might be okay, if it were genuinely pretty, but in fact it's rather irritating (in any case, the Gary Gilmore saga hardly lends itself to aesthetic adventures in book design...
...It's not fair, of course, but a latecomer like the Nation has to settle for Sex and Power, those old post-Watergate standbys...
...She doesn't say why they're like footprints on the moon--just because they're there, perhaps--but let it pass...
...Thanks to the Wall Street Journal and a handful of other papers, a window has been opened on this fascinating and crucial aspect of the current phase of our predicament...
...The originality of this proposition--that the soul is not a physical entity--boggles the mind...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
