The Executioner's Song
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG MAILER'S BEST IN YEARS IN THE OPENING line of Norman Mailer's An American Dream there is a casual link between John F. Kennedy and F....
...But comparisons of Mailer with previous Mailer can distract us from seeing how faithful this book is to the way people really talk...
...It isn't that Mailer's own concerns don't surface in The Executioner's Song—what other modern American writer could write, "Gilmore had also felt compelled to take a chance with his life...
...This is, of course, not an artistic question, but it leads to one...
...Certainly Gilmore fascinates Mailer for reasons that are as personal as they could be...
...How much of what people understand about Gary Gilmore will be filtered through Mailer's reworking of Gilmore's letters and his fascination with Gilmore's obvious intelligence...
...If future readers want to know how Americans sounded in the 1970s they can come to this book...
...In The Stranger Camus tried to handle the same sort of incident without reducing it to comfortable, manageable dimensions...
...Schiller shook his head...
...The Executioner's Song is also a remarkably compassionate work...
...It promised to be a tasteless thing, brilliant and low...
...When Mailer has Schiller thinking of Gilmore's letters to Nicole, "must be tons of meat and potatoes in those envelopes," we know Mailer isn't writing about Francis of Assisi...
...it seems nearly effortless, but it is the most impressive thing about the book...
...Insanity can be a consoling word for the rest of us...
...the people in The Executioner's Song aren't inventions...
...People doing straight reporting, not a hybrid of fiction and reporting, are forced to worry about this, and the worry is not unimportant...
...It was good stuff, because Mailer simply does see things which nobody else notices...
...In some recorded interviews with Mailer you can hear his accent change, from clipped careful Mailer to Southern to east-coast Irish American, as if he can't help tailoring his emotions to the rhythms which he thinks will handle the feeling best...
...Despite the dark subject, or maybe because of it, there are funny moments...
...By making the letters a little better than they were, Mailer may be backing away from Gilmore's reality...
...the impression is that he must be made to look more interesting than the con he was...
...His journalism is full of this concern: he sees himself doing things, cleverly and stupidly, sneaking cleverly (for example) into die Republican convention disguised as a guard, and stupidly approaching Sonny Liston with good advice on boxing...
...I began to read it before going to work one morning, and by the middle of the day I resented the work and family obligations which kept me from it...
...Gilmore had been keeping in touch with something it was indispensable to be in touch with...
...I believe that Mailer has been compassionate and probably fair—but how will they feel about seeing themselves revealed this way...
...What I mean by that is the tendency of some writers who deal with criminality to see in the victims a naivete or smugness of stuffy respectability which draws violence, almost justifiably.What Mailer shows us is the horror which occurs when decent people happen on a man like Gilmore at the wromg moment...
...Commonweal: 134 people began to parody it...
...Gilmore didn't want to be represented as insane, and Mailer is fair to him here: he shows him as a man who was not crazy, whose life was limited, driven, and terrible, but not insane...
...He killed the decent men he killed because the alternative that day would have been to kill Nicole...
...It's a great throwaway beginning which sets a tone, like "Call me Ishmael...
...Mailer got to know a lot of the people and families he writes about, and they appear here as full people...
...And Schiller certainly doesn't come off as well as some of Mailer's critics have implied...
...Sometimes these things happen...
...Still, it doesn't matter to me if what I encounter here is Mailer's Gilmore and not history's...
...I do have a couple of problems with the book...
...This problem of reworking, deletion, and selection is as true of any reporting as it is of "true life novels" (the book's subtitle), but it is still a problem, especially when the mind at work is allowed to rewrite Gilmore to the novelist's satisfaction...
...But about some things his most recent approach wouldn't work, the way he has taken on of describing his own reactions in third person form, with some fancy name like "Aquarius" standing in for Mailer: "Seabiscuit could sense his own failure here, charged with the tang of ammonia which follows sudden unexpected exertion, or the glue-factory smell of a losing race-horse led away...
...JOHN GARVEY 14 March 1980: 135...
...This is the best thing Mailer has done in years, and considering the good books he has given us that's saying a lot...
...But it wouldn't work close to some subjects, and when I saw that Playboy was excerpting something from a book by Mailer on the execution of Gary Gilmore I imagined a third-person Mailer under another name trying to figure out how he felt about a person getting shot...
...As real as anovelist's characters are, they are the author's work and are his sole responsibility, an act of imagination...
...Mailer's journalism, and much of his fiction, was full of Mailer or Mailer substitutes...
...He is obsessed with power and prestige and good and evil, and with making choices that matter morally— morality here having to do with specific lightness, being true to the moment, a working out of Mailer's unique version of "existentialism...
...He has pointed out, rightly I think, that his relationship with Schiller and his work on the book began after Gilmore's execution...
...Of several minds: John Garvey THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG MAILER'S BEST IN YEARS IN THE OPENING line of Norman Mailer's An American Dream there is a casual link between John F. Kennedy and F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...That linkage of history and fiction shows up in the rest of the novel, and in Mailer's later journalism...
...As most reviewers have pointed out, there is a remarkable selfeffacement here: Mailer vanishes, to let the book appear...
...Right in fucking Provo...
...But Nicole, whose sadness and lovemaking and suicide attempts are all described here, is a person who was around before this book and will be forced one way or another to deal with it, as will the relatives, victims' families, friends, lawyers, etc., who are made part of this book...
...But Mailer is also fair to Gilmore and Nicole, Gilmore's lover, and this romance—exploitative, manipulative, also complicated and true—is the center of the book...
...The Mormon families whose lives were torn open by Gilmore's murders are decent people whose hopes were modest and good, and Mailer is able to write about them without condescension...
...Obviously he was not going to tell a Christmas card company that Gary Gilmore was what he intended to use their machine for...," Mailer has been criticized for not being more specific within the pages of this book about his relationship with Schiller...
...A Christmas card company...
...A friend sent me a copy of The Executioner's Song...
...His ear for the way Americans talk is clean, and what can seem flat for pages, the plain speech you hear in the midwest and west, can rise suddenly to wonderful moments...
...I can see the novelist's reasons for wanting the prison letters to be better, but whoever Gary Gilmore was begins to blur with the alteration...
...The thirdperson device was a means of keeping in shape for novels, maybe, and it made for some fine journalism...
...There is not too much apparent self-consciousness in this handling of the American language...
...When Larry Schiller (who had the "rights" to Gilmore's story and in fact got Mailer involved in writing the book) wanted to reproduce Gilmore's prison letters to Nicole, full of sex and art education, he worried about the sort of machine he might find to do the job most efficiently, and phoned from Provo to Denver's Xerox headquarters to locate one, "when damn if they didn't tell him that right in Provo, the Press Publishing Company had just a machine...
...It is about existing people— not imagined people, like Raskolnikov...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
