The Executioner’s Song
I had read it before, 20 years ago. I’m glad I read it again, because the story has more resonance for a 35-year-old than for a 15-year-old — not that 15-year-olds won’t “get it,” but this 15-year-old hadn’t made the choices yet, hadn’t lost the people yet, hadn’t seen enough times yet that wonder and poison can co-exist in a single person, that would give the book that depth.
And I didn’t have the writing experience behind me to recognize the brilliance of the work. The book is affecting; the inevitability of everything begins to press on your spirits after a while, and I couldn’t just sit there and read it for hours on end. I had to break it off in 50-page chunks and then take a breather with some Marie Claire.
And Mailer does that so carefully, I didn’t even realize it was happening — I would just look up from the end of a chapter and realize I very much needed to look at something pretty, or pet the cats. Mailer’s ability to exhaust the reader like that, the way everyone involved with the case just wanted it over after a time, is masterful. His ability to change tones, or colloquialisms, to match the point of the view and the manner of speaking of whomever he’s talking about, is masterful — he doesn’t demarcate it in any way, just begins a new paragraph and the flavor changes a little bit.
And while he’s doing that, Mailer is also walking a very long, very frail line between the almost Gothic, stranger-than-fiction, sins-of-the-father Gilmore myth on the one hand, and the sordid senselessness and pathos of the man himself on the other, because both are true, and then neither is true. Gilmore isn’t a tragic anti-hero, damned to a life of crime by institutions and background, drawing caged birds like himself, the dead bridegroom in a great love story — and at the same time, he is, and he’s also a hood, probably has a personality disorder, racist, controlling, delusions of grandeur. Just when you think you can blow him off as the latter, Mailer gives you a plane of the former, and he does this again and again with all the players in the drama: Schiller is a vulture, Schiller is just trying to figure the situation out; Vern is salt of the earth, Vern is a dupe; Nicole is an acid casualty who needs to spine up, Nicole is a sweet girl whose history of abuse doomed her.
I’d become accustomed to thinking of Mailer as a talented writer majoring in self-promoting bluster — the fighting, the drinking, it’s like he got a handbook from Hemingway and didn’t deviate from it. I’m not saying he earned the more outré behavior; I’m saying I have to put it aside. Writing that can do all this, give you memory that isn’t even yours, and not announce itself as doing so — that is great writing. The story isn’t him; the story isn’t even his, and it’s by approaching it and serving it that way that he makes it his.
This is all a little inside-baseball, probably, but when I see work like that, where I know what it must have required to get done but the text itself just presents itself like Athena and leaves no trail, I like to talk about it.
Tags: books
The Executioner’s Song rivals In Cold Blood and The Right Stuff and others of that level of quality as supreme examples of literary journalism. It’s no secret how much I admire the writing of Mailer, Capote, Wolfe et al, so I’ll just say I heartily agree with your assessment of the book.
Coincidentally I also just read The Executioner’s Song and also thought it was really powerful. It was strange to read it *after* reading Shot in the Heart because Gary Gilmore is so circumspect about his childhood in the Schiller interviews, then Mikal Gilmore reveals how bad things really were.
I wonder what happened to Nicole and her children.
I also just finished this and am looking forward to reading it again when I am older (I’m 16)…even now, it’s wrenching and amazing.
I also wonder what happened to Nicole. One hopes that the sweet-girl side won out.
Googling really doesn’t turn up anything. If she had a lick of sense, she changed her name, but sense wasn’t something she seemed ruled by, in the book anyway.
Didion’s contemporary review of TES is here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/ mailer-song.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I have tried to read this book twice. I just can’t seem to get started, and I’m not sure if it’s because I know what happens and how it ends or if it’s just Mailer’s style. It’s not detached, exactly, but it is a bit dry (?) – I don’t know. There’s something about it that I am not responding to.
I read it a couple of years ago and I was just fascinated by it from start to finish. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I live in Utah and I know where all of this happened. I’ve always wondered what happened to Nicole.
I totally agree that it was exhausting, just for the fact that it made me think so much. I don’t think that anyone would be able to read that book and *not* ask themselves a lot of questions about capital punishment.
I’ve been thinking about re-reading The Executioner’s Song for the last couple years, but I keep putting it off. I read it when I was in my early 20’s. I remember being disturbed by it then. Thirty years later I have to assume I’ll be even more disturbed by it. But I think it’s a book that needs to be re-read.
I hate to admit that Mailer was a great writer, but his persona was that of a total jackass. But he had the gift, that third eye, as I call it, that one has to have to be a truly great writer. It’s rare, and he (mostly) didn’t squander it.
I need to read this just to see if it changes my opinion on capital punishment in any way. Although otherwise fairly liberal in my views, I’ve never been opposed to the death penalty; and in fact, while working as a broadcast journalist in 1994, served as a media witness for the execution by hanging of Charles Rodman Campbell. I was 25 at the time and it didn’t bother me in the slightest.
(Campbell walked away from a work release crew and murdered the woman he’d been convicted of raping, as well as her 8-year old daugter and a neighbor. He tied up the legal system for 12 years with appeals and showed no remorse right to the end. He was the last execution by hanging before Washington state changed the default to lethal injection.)
It’s also interesting to me because of the four executions in Washington in the “modern” era, two (like Gilmore) declined their right to appeal. Westley Allan Dodd and Jeremy Sagestegui were both convicted child molesters/murderers. Dodd said he knew he would kill guards to escape, and would continue raping and killing kids once free. Strangely enough, both of these men were from our small-ish community in the southeastern part of the state, which is just about an hour away from the prison where they conduct executions.
I highly recommend his brother Mikal Gilmore’s book, “Shot In The Heart.” Their family story is just absolutely chilling. I got a little obsessed with it years ago, after reading this book, and I didn’t read “Executioner’s Song” until years later.
I’m listening to it right now on my iPod; Mikal’s a good writer, generally, but I don’t like this book. It’s a too in love with the idea of the family’s predestined doom, and the symbolism frequently comes across as overheated workshop bullshit. And the narrator they selected for the audio version isn’t helping.
Late to the party here, but I loved “Shot in the Heart” — though had i listened to the audio version, I would have been just as irritated as you, Sars. On the page, the only thing that really seemed overdone was all the attention paid to Bessie and Harry Gilmore’s family history. (That said, Harry Gilmore was one weird mofo.)
Reading “Shot in the Heart” provoked me to read “Executioner’s Song” late last year. I walked around in a daze for a couple of weeks afterward. Anyone who reads one of them should read the other, for balace, IMHO.
Whereas Mikal Gilmore’s story was a very personal one — and my view, at the time, was the view from the crowd — Mailer’s p.o.v. was the mid-range one, the “all-access backstage” vantage point, if you like. Just the passages describing the bus ride from the prison to the execution site, when the radio on the bus starts playing “Una Paloma Blanca” … who’d have thought that a cheesy ’70s song could be so powerful?
I was 11 when the whole sad Gilmore saga reached its climax. Before reading “Executioner’s Song” and “Shot in the Heart,” all I remembered of that time was seeing his face on the news a lot and being told that his last words were “Let’s do it.” (Which was wrong, according to Mailer and his brother.)
P.S. “Una Paloma Blanca” lyrics here: http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/g/georgebakerselection8827/unapalomablanca299554.html
I like to think of myself as fair-minded, reasonably intelligent, and as someone who can appreciate a great work of literature such as Cormac McCarthy’s ” All the Pretty Horses’ ” or Frank McCourt’s ” Angela’s Ashes, ” or Truman Capote’s incredible ” In Cold Blood, ” but every once in a while something like this happens. I read a book such as ” The Executioner’s Song ” (actually I’m not completely finished with it ) and a great mystery is unveiled : why, in the name of all that is holy – or even unholy – has this book received the praise it has. I see the book as an OVERLY detailed day-to-day description of the life of one unremarkable white trash individual. If I were feeling really charitable – and I’m not – I might allow that it is at least one-tenth as good as ” In Cold Blood,” but it doesn’t even come close. I could go on and on ( as Norman Mailer did ) but I think I’d rather just go and drink some turpentine and forget about it.