Not easy to sentence a man to death, was their unvoiced remark. Who could speak of what it would do to your dreams?

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, first published in 1979

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Executioner's Song is based on the actual life story of one man, Gary Gilmore, and the imprint he left on the world, for better and for worse. We follow Gary from his most recent release from incarceration, at which point he's around 35 years old, I think, and has decided after some correspondence with his cousin, Brenda, to move to Provo, Utah, to live near his extended family. Gary, who has been incarcerated for half of his life to this point, struggles to adjust to 'life on the outside', but does manage to get a few jobs, get to know his Uncle Vern and Aunt Ida, his cousins, and fall in love with a young woman named Nicole, who has two children from previous relationships/marriages. Gary and Nicole begin a tempestuous relationship, which is full of deep and meaningful love, but also full of twists, turns, ups, and downs, and not without its fair share of violence. When Gary and Nicole split (for I think the second time?) Gary goes off the rails, and murders two men in quick succession (a gas station attendant and a motel manager), both in armed robberies for smallish amounts of money. Gary is quickly suspected and then convicted of the crimes, and sentenced with the death penalty. 

The story has a kind of rebirth at this phase, as Gary becomes infamous and gains notoriety for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: his charisma, his intelligence, the fact that he doesn't seem all that crazy, and the fact that his sentence comes after a 10-year moratorium on capital punishment in America. Gary stolidly desires to die, at least in his public claims, and makes it widely known that he will take matters into his own hands if others attempt to intervene or stay his sentence. If life in prison or death are his options, he chooses death. He attempts suicide twice, once with Nicole, once on his own, but neither attempt is successful. After a national news circus and a wild series of short term stays and delays, Gary is executed by a five-man firing squad. The media hullabaloo dies down, to a degree, and Nicole is released from the mental hospital where she has been mandated to remain until Gary's death. Nicole ends up sharing her story with Larry Schiller, a producer and writer who has been capturing the story, and the novel wraps up by taking a brief zoomed out look at the family Gary has left behind.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists! 

   I won't say this is my penultimate post, because I'm sure I'll find new projects to blob about, but I will say that this is my penultimate book on the '101 and Beyond' list! I have never read any Norman Mailer books, and I knew nothing about this news story before I jumped into the novel. 

  I found this novel to be remarkable. It's a novel in the sense that it definitely weaves a narrative and tells a remarkably cohesive story, but it's also based on actual events, with a significant amount of actual content from that time (court transcripts, letters from Gary and others, published interviews) so it sits in a very intriguing fiction/journalistic space that I don't know that I've ever encountered before. I would like to read more Norman Mailer, because I think his real triumph in this work is that he makes his presence almost invisible, while masterfully crafting the tale. More on this in a bit. 

 I will also say that any book that deals with death, and specifically capital punishment and death row, is a book worth marinating on, as it's a complex and fraught element of our collective society. I was definitely reminded of A Lesson Before Dying, and my blob entry on that. 

 I came back and read Dave Eggers' intro after I finished the novel (why do they put those at the beginning? They ALWAYS HAVE SPOILERS) and was pleased to find that Dave Eggers explicitly tells you to go read the book and come back and read his intro (HE GETS IT). I also thought his reflections were really spot on and aligned with my feelings. Here are a few of those: 

On reading this story in the present, without the historical context of the moment - reading his story without knowing the outcome will only enhance the experience - it gives the book unimaginable tension and scope. It's true. I had no idea what would happen to Gary, or to Nicole, since we're now almost 50 years removed from these events.

Gilmore was the first person executed in the modern era of capital punishment in America (after a ten-year moratorium, reinstated in 1976). This is wild. I didn't know about the moratorium, and the firing squad feels very wild west to me, but I checked, and the most recent one was in 2010, actually. I also read an AP article that suggested they may be coming back, as there's a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and there's an argument by some that it's a more humane method. 

It reveals Gilmore to be likable, irritating, immature, violent, doomed - but always a three-dimensional human being capable of charming anyone he meets. Yes. This is the real meaty complexity of this novel.

Mailer has sublimated his own style - the prose is flat, unvarnished, plainspoken. I noticed this right away, not even having read what Norman Mailer's prose is normally like, and I think it's so artfully done.

Good god, it would be easier if this were not the case. If murderers were of a wholly different species, if they were beasts who we couldn't talk to, relate to, understand in any way, if they were incapable of love or light - it would be far easier. But this is not the case. They are almost always people precisely like ourselves, flawed and good and weak, capable of acts of courage and horrible mistakes. Again, yes. Writing a narrative of a murderer is complex, and messy, and fraught, and heavy, and of course we must and do also weigh in the impacts on the victims of the murderer and the ripple effects on their families, but I can see why this story captured national attention, and I think Normal Mailer really did it justice. 

The Cast of Characters

Here are some of the main characters we meet in the novel, all of whom were real people. Some of them may still be alive, but the internet is not proving terribly fruitful in revealing this, and they deserve their privacy anyway. 

Gary Gilmore, in and out of jail, really wants to be loved, intelligent, charismatic, and a murderer

• The more he was really in trouble, the more he'd look to get himself lost real fast.

• I don't feel that I have ever had a break from the law. When you are free, you can afford to be broke for a few days, and it doesn't matter, but if you are a fugitive you can't afford to be broke at all. 

• If he messed this life up, he'd do a better job in the next one. 'Why not a better job in this one?' Spencer thought. Chose not to say it.

• 'Brenda, I am not insensitive to being called insensitive.' Gary's relationship/frenemyship with his cousin Brenda was one of my favorite things about the novel. 

• It seems that I know evil more intimately than I know goodness.

• his lawyer: It was like dealing with a crazy pony who was off on a gallop at every wind. Then wouldn't move.

• I like it quiet. I would love an absence of sound so profound I could hear my blood. On the seventeenth of January I hope to hear my last harsh noise.

• Cline Campbell had seen Gary get angry once or twice before. He took on wrath in a different way than most people. Gilmore's anger, Campbell had long ago decided, came from very far inside. 

• 'Well, Vern, I want to show you. I've already shown you how I live' - he gave his most mocking smile - ' and I'd like to show you how I can die.' This line broke me.

Nicole Barrett, Gary's on-again, off-again girlfriend, mother to Sunny and Jeremy

• With her eyes closed, she had the odd feeling of an evil presence near her that came from Gary. She found it kind of half agreeable. Said to herself, Well, if he is the devil, maybe I want to get closer.

• To Pete Galovan: 'He's a hell of a lot more important to me than your life. If he don't get you, I will.'
• Nicole loved Gary enough to be willing to commit murder for him. It hurt Pete that no woman had ever loved him that much.

• She was never abusive to the kids, just didn't pay much attention.

• Nicole always received things you said very seriously. Even the most casual remark she would take all of the way into herself. It was as if she only trusted herself to give the right answer if she got all of what you laid on her.

• Nicole was not only getting ready to leave, but had, in fact, even gone up the hospital corridor one last time to pick up her street clothes, when a girl asked, 'How do you feel about Gary?' Nicole said, 'If he was alive, I'd do it all over again.' They turned her right around and put her back in the hospital.

Brenda Nicol, cousin to Gary, straight shooter, kind-hearted but no nonsense

• Brenda didn't want to hope too hard, but, God willing, Gary might come around the bend.

• 'You're probably going to be bent real out of shape with me. But Gary, it had to stop. You commit a murder Monday, and commit a murder Tuesday. I wasn't waiting for Wednesday to roll around.'

• Brenda was in misery. She came, and all the while she was testifying, Gary glared at her. He gave the Kerby look that made your blood clabber on the spot. If a look in somebody's eyes could kill you, then you had just been killed. Wiped you out like an electric shock.

When Gary tries to kill himself the first time: 

Brenda: How come you didn't take enough to do the job?  

Gary: Well, I might know one of my cousins would pick up on that. 

Brenda: I think you're being a selfish lover. You wanted to stay awake long enough to find out if she was really dead, then you wouldn't have to worry she'd take another lover.  

Gary: I am jealous. This was crazy. I really thought Gary and Nicole were just ready to die, but Brenda is very astute, and she sees right through Gary's plots and ploys. I love that about Brenda.

Vern and Ida Damico, aunt and uncle to Gary, parents of Brenda, brother-in-law and sister to Bessie

• Vern was having to make a lot of decisions about people before he knew how much to trust them. That was not what he called comfortable. 

Bessie Gilmore, Gary's mother, mother to Gaylen, Mikal, and one more son, sister to Ida

• She had the washed-out, unhealthy look of someone who was in a great deal of pain and rarely saw fresh air.

• 'His nightmare will be over, but mine will never be.'

Gary and Nicole, the love story, which, as you can read, is more than a little all over the place

• 'Hey, there's a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.' The connectedness and interest in afterlives that Nicole and Gary operate with is fascinating. 

• But when she looked at Gary, she didn't just see his face and the way he looked, it was more like Nicole felt in the right place for the first time.

• All she wanted was more hours with him. I don't think I've ever felt this way about anyone. It must be exhilarating, and also kind of terrifying?

• For a day and a night everything was better than if they had never been apart. It was as if somebody had hidden sparklers inside her heart in that place where she had expected to find nothing.

• Nicole, to a family member: Gary is crazy. We might end up dead.

• Gary, to Nicole, from jail: 'Nicole - is my love not enough to suffice for even one small lifetime - my love for you can it not be enough? Do you have to give your body, your self? Your love to other men? Am I not enough?'

My Thoughts and Reflections

Why write about a murderer?

I liked Dave Eggers' take on this: murderers are fully human, too, and there is beauty to their lives, and joy in their days, and love, and music, and even aspirations of bliss or least peace. The terrible, exasperating thing about humans is how goodness and gentleness, and utter depravity and disregard for human life, can be contained within the same person, and in terrifyingly close proximity.

By the time Gilmore commits the murders in The Executioner's Song, Mailer has already done a terrible thing: he's made us care about the man. This is so well put. 

On taking up space

One thing I found a bit odd about my copy of the book, which came in at 1109 pages, was that it has a lot of extra spaces. Each paragraph is granted a kind of double spacing, which makes the whole book much longer. I imagine it was done for a particular effect, maybe a kind of 'start/stop' reading experience, but I was also struck by this wondering: would anyone OTHER than a super famous white man be permitted to take literally take up extra space in this way? Food for thought.

On painting Easter eggs

I liked this scene, because it reminded me of an actual Easter egg dyeing memory with my own cousins. Johnny is Brenda's husband, btw.

After a while, Johnny and Gary began to giggle together. They were still painting eggs, but instead of saying, 'Cristie, I love you,', or 'Keep it up, Nick,' they were printing stuff like 'Fuck the Easter Bunny.' Brenda exclaimed, 'You can't hide those.'

  'Well', said Gary with a big grin, 'guess we got to eat 'em.' He and Johnny had a feast of mislabeled hard-boiled eggs. I had to giggle at this. My cousins were writing in invisible crayons things like "Jonathan is a girl" one year. ;0)

On death

I imagine a great part of what made this story so captivating at the time (and continues to captivate today) is that we still know nothing about death. 

How long a journey is death? Is it instantaneous? Does it take minutes, hours, weeks? What dies first - the body of course - but then does the personality slowly dissolve? Are there different levels of death - some darker and heavier than others, some brighter and lighter, some more and some less material? These are some of Gary's reflections in a letter to Nicole.

The 'pro' argument, in favor of killing Gary

• If you can't rehabilitate somebody in twelve years, can you expect to ever rehabilitate them at all? 

• If he's ever free again, nobody who ever comes in contact with him is going to be safe, if they happen to have something that he happens to want. 

• What then is the point at this time of allowing him to continue to live?

The 'con' argument, in favor of shifting Gary's sentence to life in prison

• Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? This feels like a very compelling argument to me.

• By now, everybody was liking Gary. Even the people that didn't like him, liked him. Everybody was starting to think, What are we killing Gilmore fore? What's the death going to accomplish?

• How could you love a guy because he wanted to wear a crazy hat? There are much longer and more devoted sections arguing against the death penalty for incredibly valid and thoughtful reasons, but I also wanted to capture the fact that even those people who were helping Gary to attempt to bring about his own execution were deeply saddened when it actually came to be.

The 'Gary' argument, on whether he should be killed

• 'Now, don't I have the right to die? Can't I accept my punishment?'

• You don't interfere with somebody's life. You let people meet their own fate. 

On prison life

• The first time that Grace went into the prison itself, she was overcome with the power of the echoes.

• Gary: 'I was hopin' it would stay quiet in here for a while. But it never does.'

• I'm not saying its right to break the law. I'm not talkin about that - but these prisons as they exist are wrong. 

• If he had to stay in prison, he wanted to die. But if he could get outside, that was another game.

I won't go into this further here, but our prison industrial complex in America is so completely and totally screwed up, and Gary at least has the benefit of being a white man throughout his experience in prison, which surely gave him any number of privileges over the Black and brown men who were and are incarcerated today. 

On psychiatrists

• All them doctors are weird. You ever met a psychiatrist who had all his marbles? I'm with you on this one, Gary.

On a problem Humbert Humbert would well understand

Of all the possible reasons and prying into Gary's psyche as to why he murdered the two men, Max Jensen and Benny Bushnell, I found this argument (while of course deeply disturbing) to be the most compelling:

Could it be said that Gilmore's love for Nicole oft depended on how childlike she could seem? Yes. What if Gilmore, so soon as he was deprived of Nicole, so soon as he had to live a week without her, began to feel impulses that were wholly unacceptable? What if his unendurable tension (of which he had given testimony to every psychiatrist who would listen) had had something to do with little urges? Nothing might have been more intolerable to Gilmore's idea of himself. Why, the man would have done anything, even murder, before he'd commit that other kind of transgression. There's more exploration of this possibility in other parts of the novel, and while it could definitely also stem from his own trauma, I found it plausible.

Referents and Reverberations, or books this book reminded me of

(1) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Gary and his Mustang - Now, he didn't seem to show any initiative. It was more like he was offended there was something wrong with the car. What he couldn't recognize was that these malfunctions might be due to his inability to drive knowledgeably. This line reminded me of John and his endless desire not to learn more about his motorcycle, but just have it run well. ;)

(2) L'Étranger, Albert Camus

I was reminded of this book often as I read the various people (doctors, journalists, cops) trying to understand why Gary Gilmore did what he did. Here are some of his lines:

• I don't feel too responsible. It was as thought I had to do it.
• It just seemed like it was the next move in a motion that was happening.
• I sometimes feel I have to do things and seems like there's no other chance or choice.

(3) My Antonia, Willa Cather

Gilmore had a way of looking into his eyes that made Nielsen shift inside. It was as if the man was staring all the way to the bottom of your worth. This line reminded me of how Jim describes Antonia's father, Mr. Shimerda, looking at him.

Words or Ideas That Were New to Me

gobbets - a piece or lump of flesh, food, or other matter

orange sunshine - a brand of LSD

picayune - petty; worthless

procurer - a person who obtains a woman as a prostitute for another person

Prolixin - Prolixin (fluphenazine) is a phenothiazine, also called a neuroleptic, used to treat symptoms of a certain type of mental/mood condition (schizophrenia). The brand name Prolixin is discontinued and this medication is available in generic form only. This was the other argument/explanation of Gary's actions that resonated with me. Here are a few lines about this: 

• Woods wasn't at all certain that the Prolixin hadn't done a real damage to Gary's psyche. Whole fields of the soul could be defoliated and never leave a trace. Yet how did you convince a Jury? The medicine had been accepted by a generation of psychiatrists.

• Gary had never done anything cruel to her, certainly not, but she had seen something awful come into him after his Prolixin treatments, a personality change so drastic that Grace could honestly say she didn't know the man named Gary Gilmore who existed after taking it. It was as if something obscene had come into his mind. The next time Grace saw him, he was on Prolixin. Looked as if he had left his body, and come back in the hulk of a stranger.

• The prison took him off Prolixin, and the symptoms went away, but he was a different man to Grace. There was something in him now she did not trust. His talk turned shabby. His view was nasty. It was as if they were on different islands. 

Sounds Pretty intense, and maybe like something we should just casually administer to convicts without their consent. 

Lines I Particularly Liked

• It was one more unhappiness at the bottom of things. 

• It was like the air was being eaten by the nervousness he felt. 

• There was an unheard sound in the air like everybody was waiting for a scream.

• Brenda had been walking around all evening with a sense of disaster.

• She was left in the hall of the court with the world rocketing around her. Outside, in the summer light, the horseflies were mean as insanity itself.

• Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.

Well blobbists, I'll leave you here with a poem from Nicole that I liked, that she wrote in one of her letters to Gary: 

For lost is my mind

Silent by dawn

Loves away stolen

And hurting is Long

So ask me no questions

Sing me no songs 

Follow me nowhere

im already gone

I'm already gone myself, that is, I'm off to Africa to meet Kunta Kinte in Roots and wrap up this second 100 books. See you on the flip side!