The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Over 1,300 posts on Fifty Books Project, and not one mention of one of the luminaries of American literature, Norman Mailer. Maybe he falls a little outside our purview, or maybe he’s overlooked nowdays as one of the “great male narcissists [who] dominated postwar American fiction”¹, as David Foster Wallace called them, for their supposed misogyny and nearsightedness... or maybe it’s just because there’s a lot of reading to do and only so much time in which to do it.

I had never read Mailer either, in spite of having a copy of The Naked and the Dead sitting on my bookshelf for a few years, but The Executioner’s Song caught my attention in the bookstore for two reasons--it was huge, and the premise--a man, Gary Gilmore, is given the death penalty and executed--didn’t seem like enough to support the length. Not to mention that it was a true story and I’d never heard of Gary Gilmore. So my interest was piqued.

In some ways, the single-sentence summary above does the book justice--it is single-minded in the sense that it keeps the execution front and center throughout--but, of course, further explication is necessary. Gilmore spent over half of his life behind bars, beginning as a juvenile. In 1976, he was paroled and sent to live with his cousin Brenda in Provo, Utah, the heart of Mormon country. During this time he struck up a tempestuous, intense relationship with a young single mother named Nicole Baker, and, after an unusually severe fight and breakup, killed two men, execution style, over a two night period. He was caught and sentenced to death, notable because, at the time, the U.S. was currently in the midst of a moratorium on the death penalty, imposed by Furman vs Georgia in 1972.

The death sentence happens less than halfway through the book. The rest is the story of Gilmore’s fight to be allowed to die and the media circus that surrounded him. Because of the moratorium, numerous civil rights groups, including the ACLU, were fighting Gilmore’s execution, even though he wished for his sentence to be carried out, because they feared, correctly, that if Gilmore was executed, many others would be executed in short order.

Normally, in a story like this, there are clearly defined heroes and villains, and, in true stories, if the facts don’t point to a clear dichotomy, the author usually chooses sides and, inadvertently or not, paints one side more sympathetically. Not so Mailer in The Executioner’s Song. As long as it is, the novel is a picture of restraint, with Mailer refusing to cast Gilmore as a misguided saint or his antagonists, such as they are, as anything other than complicated people with (generally) legitimate reasons for the things they do. It would have been far easier as a reader if I could have seen Gilmore as a monster or the ACLU lawyers as hypocrites, but Mailer’s thoroughness doesn’t really allow for such simplistic line-drawing. Even Gilmore’s motivations for the murders are in question: were they emotional responses to his problems with Nicole? Inevitable behaviors for a bad seed like Gary? Indicators of some deeper mental issue? Results of repressed pedophilic impulses? Deus Ex Machinas handed down from unfeeling gods? We’re never told, and the length of The Executioner’s Song serves as a challenge. Mailer seems to be saying, “Here’s all the information. Figure it out.”

There are moments in The Executioner’s Song that cut deep, like Mailer’s sensitive portraits of the two men Gilmore killed, but even here, he resists the urge to beatify, communicating the facts in flat, affectless prose that works even better than cloying melodrama. Gilmore’s letters to Nicole are the same way--of course, love letters from a man on death row are going to contain some pathos, but Mailer doesn’t edit, and their contents reveal Gilmore’s duality as well as his humanity, his intense longing beside his almost feral brutality. Finally, after Gilmore’s execution, the one spot where a little bit of punch-pulling might be in order, Mailer refuses look away from the grislier aspects of Gilmore’s death--including his autopsy, described in some detail--and the unresolved grief of his victims’ families and Nicole, who Mailer even dares to suggest may someday forget Gilmore, ostensibly her soulmate throughout his time on death row. At risk of hitting the point too many times, Mailer refuses to espouse one simple answer to the questions he raises. It’s what makes The Executioner’s Song worthwhile, what justifies its length, and it’s a good argument for why Mailer, great male narcissist or not, deserves to be part of the “great authors” conversation.

¹The others being John Updike and Philip Roth, who we at 50B apparently love.

"A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium / When his spouse finds he's given her cubic zirconium."

Kenji Yoshimo discusses the criticism of Justice J. Michael Eakin's use of the above couplet in his dissent in the case of Porreco v. Porreco.  In general, Yoshimo disapproves, but concedes that the distinction between law and poetry is not cut-and-dry:

But like every generalization, the idea that law is a serious business while literature is an ornamental pastime has some important exceptions.   Given a culture that seeks to drive a wedge between law and literature, we should not expect legal poems to declare themselves as such.   This is not, however, the same thing as saying such poems do not exist.  

The most famous poem in law is the Miranda warning.   More people can recite this quatrain than can recite the Gettysburg address, much less a quatrain from most poets who were intentionally writing quatrains, like the quite catchy Alexander Pope. The broad dissemination of the warning in our culture through television and film has not just given it force, but affected its Constitutional stature.

Three thoughts:

First, I'm saddened by Yoshimo's premise that literature is an "ornamental pastime."  I think he's right, if you substitute the word "poetry" for "literature," and not because I believe that poetry is by nature nothing more than decorative or aesthetic, but because that is probably a fairly accurate description of poetry as it functions in America today.  Novelists, I think, can still claim to be about something far more serious and socially valuable, but the poet is so marginalized it's hard to imagine one claiming a part in the broader political or social debate without laughing.  ("Say, did you hear what Louise Gluck said about immigration reform?")

Secondly, I really love Yoshimo's description of the Miranda warning as a poem.  Here's how I'd do the enjambment:

You have the right to
remain silent
anything you say
or do
may be used against you
in a court of law

Finally, Yoshimo quotes from Robert Cover's 1986 essay that differentiates literature and law because the latter "deal[s] pain and death."  The suggestion is that the stakes are simply too high to play literary games with.   I'd suggest that that is more or less the right distinction; that the problem blurring the line between literature and law is that literature relies too often on purposeful ambiguities and ironies that make interpretation difficult, while the purpose of law is to eliminate those ambiguities as much as possible.  Yet to think of them as obviously distinct is to ignore the way in which law necessitates interpretation, and the way in which interpreting a legal text is not so different from a literary one.  (Stanley Fish has made a career out of mining this overlap, and Justice Scalia's recent book makes this point right in the subtitle.)

Yet I think implicit in Yoshimo's critique, as well as Cover's, is the distinction between texts that do something--here, something as serious as "pain and death"--and texts that do not.  I'm suspicious of this attitude because, a.) I think it's false (all texts are meant to "do something"), b.) I think it neuters the power of literature, reducing it to being "ornamental" and not just describing it that way, and c.) ignoring the fact that law is explicitly textual and without force in and of itself does us no favors.  To put it another way, the great difference in the power of a legal poem and a literary one is that no one puts in you in handcuffs while they read the latter.

Yoshimo ends his discussion by noting that "The Greeks embodied law-like mores in poetry to ensure their broad dissemination in an oral culture."  Sure, but Yoshimo is still thinking of law and poetry as essentially separate activities in a way that might have been lost on an ancient Greek.  He does, however, remind us that there was once a time in which poetry did have the kind of illocutionary power that's lost to it now.

Can poetry deal "pain and death" today?  This might be a logical leap, but Yoshimo's article made me think of Robert Oppenheimer, who commented on successfully detonating an atomic bomb with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, which is, of course, a poem: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

I assume that if Justice Eakin had said something like that, nobody would have batted an eye.  Maybe next time he should avoid the silly, three-syllable feminine rhyme.

P.S. I am not a lawyer, but some of you (Billy, Randy, Kunal...) are--what did you think about Yoshimo's piece?