Mailer's Cool Killer
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &v Writing MAILER'S COOL KILLER by daphne merkin Throughout his long career, violent and irregular passion has been Norman Mailer's consuming interest. A collection of poems, an early...
...There are in this book many penniless, defeated or demented people-losers, whose idea of living it up is "a classy place like the Holiday Inn...
...the clinical term for it would be psychopathic...
...Mailer conspires to leave us wondering instead of knowing...
...They had a lot of fun...
...It is tough, furious...
...He writes, accordingly, in a style that is not so much flat as withheld, almost as though one of those taciturn cowboys out of the dusty old West had finally decided to speak his mind: "Gary was kind of quiet...
...Along with this comes the writer's other great infatuation: "coolness," especially as it is personified in what Mailer considers to be the street-wise existentialism of the black "hipster...
...To tell this story, Mailer draws upon an exhaustive amount of factual material-taped interviews, recollected conversations, legal papers, and scores of letters...
...Gary has, in fact, been in and out of prison for 22 of his 36 years...
...He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him...
...Find the ones you want,' she said, 'and tell the clerk...
...I always knew it was too green when I first came here,' she said to the walls.'" Then there is Nicole, Gary's girlfriend, "the most beautiful girl in Utah," as he describes her in a letter to Bessie...
...It is also the essence of the modern 'cool' style, the art of controlled and detached delinquency...
...Are you supposed to take the pants off the shelf, or does somebody issue them to you...
...In another life, one imagines, he might have become a television executive...
...Instead she lives, crippled by arthritis, in a plastic trailer on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon: '"When it's real hot in my trailer,' she said aloud, T can lose five pounds an hour.' Of course, she only weighed 110...
...It got into their mood...
...As A. Alvarez wrote in an essay on Laurence Sterne, an 18th-century author who appears to have shared some aspects of Mailer's perverse sentimentalism: "The beautifully posed and pausing rhythm of the prose, by which Sterne passes off an outrageous situation as though it were utterly normal, is the essence of his art...
...Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names...
...She would get flustered...
...Brenda really felt sorry for him...
...Nicole didn't think of herself as especially well coordinated, and certainly she was not fast-her head was too bombed-out for sure...
...At the heart of that wonder is Gary Gilmore, about whom we learn a prodigious amount-sexual predilections (young, very young girls), brand of beer (Coors), favorite authors (Percy Bysshe Shelley, J.P...
...After his death sentence is stayed, he convinces Nicole to attempt suicide with him...
...the conditions of incarceration are the conditions he is at ease with...
...It had a door like an oven...
...She was thinking of how he would wake up often in a real cold sweat...
...A collection of poems, an early detour, was entitled Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters...
...There are also many prosperous, stoic or complacent people?winners, some admittedly lacking imagination or empathy, but others possessed of these qualities in great quantity...
...As he talked, she had a chill...
...Even at that age he was real polite...
...Above all, there is Gary...
...He's been in jail thirteen years...
...When they're in bed together he can't always make it, but he calls her "elf" and tells her about his dreams, especially the dream about Oldness...
...I think it's time Gary came home...
...There was one reason they got along...
...Donleavy), l.Q...
...129), hobbies (reading, drawing, dentistry), dislikes (blacks, Mormons, psychiatrists)?without ever fully comprehending his inner mechanics, the emotional synapses that must have existed between his ability to inspire deep affection in the people he came in contact with and his ability to shoot two young men in the head on two succeeding nights in July 1976...
...If ever anyone was a match for the media's powers of manipulation, Gilmore-with his charm and steely will, fending off offers and negotiating prices-was...
...If you got into trouble, he'd come back and help you out...
...Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his...
...Journalists pride themselves on tying things up, on the art of disclosure leading to the art of summation...
...If you want to try them on, you can.' '"Without paying for them?' '"Oh, yeah, you can try them on first,' she said...
...For this was possibly the coolest killer of them all, a man who honed his wit on the prospect of his own execution: "Gilmore, tonight, would break off his arm if he could make a good joke . . . . 'What's your last best request when they're hanging you?' he asked, and answered, 'Use a rubber rope.' Pretended to be bouncing on the end, he put his face in a scowl, and said, 'Guess I'll be hanging around for a while.'" The book covers a period of a little over nine months, starting with Gary's release from the penitentiary at Marion, Illinois in April 1976, and concluding with his death before a firing squad on January 17, 1977 at Utah State Prison...
...After a while, he said, "Hey, I don't know how to go about this...
...In Mailer's case, you might say it is murderous intent that imparts daunting force to his prose...
...The press swarms in and out of this tale like a band of locusts drawn by the scent of blood and the spectacle of a murderer demanding the right to die...
...When they first meet he stares at her with his very blue eyes and says, "I know you," When he moves in with her he carves their names on the apple tree in the backyard of her little house in Spanish Fork: "gary loves nicole...
...In his essay, "The White Negro," he declared that "the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself...
...Westerners, it appears, feel the need to pit themselves against its vast imperviousness...
...He came out in the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree...
...As for the ways of the "civilized" world-well, they simply bewilder him: "In the Levi's department at Penney's, Gary just stood there...
...Gary wants what Gary wants, everyone around him can see that: "Gary had a problem...
...16.95), billed with his unerring instinct for controversy as "a true life novel," is about Gary Gilmore...
...The heat was strong and terrible, a jungle...
...Mailer is working a different vein here: one of suggestion rather than explanation...
...Mailer both resists and succumbs to the temptation to idealize the losers and imprecate the winners: It is a fascinating struggle to observe...
...This shouldn't be Portland, she told the walls, but Africa...
...Yet the work retains the opacity generally associated with fiction, rather than the translucent quality of bona-fide journalism...
...Once he had talked about another dream where he was put in a box, then put into a hole in the wall...
...What Gary wants most of all is Nicole, who has a "hell of a figure, not too tall, with a full mouth, a small nose and nice long brown hair...
...Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener...
...His bewilderment will ultimately land Gary back behind bars, this time for murder, for his is not an impotent bewilderment...
...The mood of most of the people encountered in these pages vacillates between passive and irate submission, their energy seemingly drained by Mormon pieties turned lugubrious...
...It is a ghoulish romance, straight out of Hades, and still there is, at moments, something lovely and breathtakingly normal about so savagely unyielding a passion: "nicole loves gary...
...She felt like Portland would soon overgrow itself and wipe it all out...
...There is also a deliberate capriciousness in the way that certain subjects-e.g., Gilmore's relationship with Bessie, his mother-Are portentously developed only lo be later mysteriously dropped, just as certain revelations that would appear to be crucial are made little of...
...Most uncharacteristically...
...No patience...
...Years afterward, in Armies of the Night, he described himself as "devil-ridden," an attendant upon "the calm lucid abilities of sin...
...Something ugly, old and moldy...
...The mountains," Mailer writes of the Rockies, "had been gold and purple at dawn, but now in the morning they were big and brown and bald and had gray rain-soaked snow on the ridges...
...Mailer keeps himself out of the narrative-At least overtly-Although he makes his presence felt through his implied identification with both Gilmore and with the figure of Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who contracted to document the events leading up to Gilmore's death...
...Brenda, the cousin who did all the gabbing to Gary's listening when they were kids, explains to Mont Court, his parole officer, why she has agreed to sponsor him...
...They would put her on one machine and just about the time she started getting the hang of it, and was near the hourly quota, they put her on another...
...Of course, the work was hard...
...Of course, the two obsessions-psychopathology and extreme sang-froid-complement each other...
...The Executioner's Song is a brilliant work, abounding in mesmerizingly grubby detail...
...She is 19 years old, the mother of two children, and makes "better money than she had ever brought in before"?2.30 an hour operating a power sewing machine...
...When Nicole breaks up with him because she is afraid "one of them might kill the other," Gary walks into a Sinclair service station, tells Max Jensen, the attendant on duty, to get down on the floor, and then fires an Automatic twice into his head-one bullet "for" himself, as he says out loud, and one "for" Nicole...
...It is altogether fitting, then, that The Executioner's Song (Little, Brown, 1,056 pp...
...There is another almost equally mysterious presence, the Western landscape...
...I am one of those people," Gilmore wrote Nicole in a letter he handed her following one of their tiffs, "that probably shouldn't exist...
...Take, for instance, Bessie Gilmore: "She could have been the widow of the president of a utility company who dressed all the way down in grays as if she wouldn't give an inch to money...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 22
