Part One

In the event that you’ve just picked up this book, and know little or nothing about it, and are unsure whether you should read it, I want to urge you with all my being that you must read The Executioner’s Song. I want to further guarantee that you will finish it. It’s the fastest 1,000 pages you will ever know.

It’s necessary to say, up front, that whatever you might know or think about Norman Mailer, or whatever you might assume about the man, his work, his personality or his sociopolitical views, none of that information (or misinformation) applies here. This is a story that bears no markings of what we presume to be Mailer’s prose style or point of view. The Executioner’s Song is completely something other. Mailer once said that the book was given to him, whole and complete, from God, and it’s difficult to argue with that. The Executioner’s Song cannot be improved. Mailer did not write a better book, and I’m not sure anyone of his generation wrote a better book.

I urge you to read this book without knowing anything more about the story it tells. By now, in 2012, the vast majority of readers new to The Executioner’s Song will have little to no knowledge about Gary Mark Gilmore, the book’s central figure, where he came from, what he did. That is to be expected, and perhaps even embraced for our purposes here. Reading his story without knowing the outcome will only enhance the experience—it gives the book unimaginable tension and scope—and so I urge you to read nothing more of this introduction, which will discuss some of the issues the book raises and will reveal too much. Come back to these pages only after you’ve read the book, if you come back to them all.

Part Two

When The Executioner’s Song was published, Gary Gilmore was as well-known in the United States as any film star or athlete. Now, in 2012, very few people under fifty would be able to identify Gilmore without some prodding. His crimes were not at all unusual then or now. Men go on similar killing sprees every week in this violent nation.

There were two things notable about Gilmore during the time of his crimes, arrest, and trial. First is that the death penalty had been reinstituted in 1976, after a ten–year moratorium, and Gilmore was the first person executed in the modern era of capital punishment in America. His execution reignited our national taste for vengeance. Since his execution, over 1,000 others have been killed by the government of the United States.

And though anti–death penalty lawyers fought to stay Gilmore’s execution, and were twice successful in doing so, Gilmore himself wanted to die. In prison, he twice tried to kill himself. When third-party appeals dragged on, he insisted that he be executed, and finally a panel of judges gave him his wish. “Among other people who have rights,” one of the judges said, “Mr. Gilmore has his own. If an error is being made and the execution goes forward, he brought that on himself.” When Gilmore was facing his firing squad, Gilmore was asked for any last words. “Let’s do it,” he said.

The execution of Gary Gilmore was crude and it was barbaric. He was wearing a T-shirt. A bag was put over his head. In a converted prison cannery, he was strapped to what looked like an electric chair. Twenty people were watching as five men with rifles, hidden behind a screen, shot bullets into his torso until he was dead. When he was cremated, his ashes were placed into a 59-cent bread bag and then scattered over Utah by his uncle. It was an ugly end to a life of ugliness.

Why, then, write 1,000 pages about the man? The answer is inconvenient. The answer is a holy pain in the ass. The answer is that 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 at 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.

And so Gary Gilmore, a troubled young man in prison for armed robbery, writes eloquent, sensitive letters to his cousin Brenda. And so Gary Gilmore, who frequently gets in violent altercations at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, draws exquisite pictures in his cell, accomplished renderings of children, among other subjects, and has an IQ of 130. And so Gary Gilmore, when released from prison, moves in with his uncle and quickly falls in love with Nicole Barrett, a beautiful and confused single mother of two. And so Gary Gilmore, shortly after Nicole leaves him, goes on a crime spree that claims two lives.

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. We want Gilmore to live up to the expectations Brenda places on him. We want him to make his uncle Vern proud. We want him to work hard, build a new life, and we want him and Nicole to make something of themselves. But his narrative follows a different path.

On two successive nights in 1976, Gary Gilmore committed murder. First he killed a gas station attendant, after robbing the station of less than $100. Next he killed a motel manager, after taking a little more than that. They were the kind of senseless murders that even Gilmore’s closest friends and family couldn’t explain. They never doubted he did the crimes—they knew what he was capable of—but still, he could have robbed the stores without murdering the clerks. He could have borrowed the money he needed. But instead he used a stolen gun to kill both men in cold blood. And in tiny Provo, Utah, there was only one man anyone suspected: Gary Gilmore. Before he was arrested, even his aunt and uncle knew it was him. “Do you think he did it?” Ida asks. “Yeah, he did it, the stupid shit,” Vern says.

Gilmore was locked up, tried, and convicted. With the death penalty reinstated, Gilmore’s notoriety grew. When he refused to appeal his verdict and insisted that he wanted to die, his story became known around the world. And it was then that Lawrence Schiller, a young photographer and producer, gained access to Gilmore and his family, friends, and ex-lovers, and began the process of meticulously interviewing them all, gaining a novelistic level of detail that was unprecedented and has yet to be matched in the history of American journalism.

Schiller then reached out to Norman Mailer, who was then one of the most famous, celebrated, and controversial authors in the world. Schiller asked Mailer to convert his notes and interviews into what became The Executioner’s Song. And this book gives us every step Gilmore took from his violent beginnings to his brief dance with freedom and even love, to his violent end. It reveals Gilmore to be likable, irritating, immature, violent, doomed—but always a three-dimensional human being capable of charming anyone he meets. It reveals a family of profoundly giving and steady people who try to give Gary a new life but cannot heal a broken man. It reveals a judicial system in the United States that was and is deeply flawed, wildly inefficient, but largely well-intentioned. And it reveals a nation that is full of decent, astonishingly generous people who then and now feel that the best thing to do with a murderer is to murder him.

It’s important to know where Norman Mailer was in his career when he wrote this book. Since his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he had published books—including Armies of the Night and The Deer Park and An American Dream—to great acclaim, and some to great opprobrium. He was considered one of the most powerful stylists of his generation, his sentences muscular, hyper-intelligent, always unmistakably his.

One can imagine the shock, then, of reading even the first few sentences of The Executioner’s Song: “Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. She climbed to the top and the limb with the good apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down. They were scared.”

There and throughout the book the prose is flat, unvarnished, plainspoken. The words on the page sound like the people the book depicts—shoemakers, mechanics, motel managers of Provo, Utah. Mailer has sublimated his own style, and his own ideas, to the story, and a fair argument could be made that this sublimation, rather than the mad stylistic tap-dancing of, say, The Naked and the Dead, is the greater feat. Nowhere do we hear Norman Mailer’s thoughts about Gary Gilmore, or Nicole Barrett, or capital punishment, or the West. Surely his point of view comes through, obliquely, by what he chooses to include in the book, and what he doesn’t. But we’re left with the story, unimpeded, uncommented-upon, and the story, here, is plenty, the details so exacting, so revealing, that every section of the book—it’s told in small, isolated chunks, like ice floes detached and self-sufficient—is its own small, perfect, and revelatory prose-poem.

“I know you,” Gilmore says the first time he meets Nicole. He doesn’t mean they’ve met before; they haven’t. They meet by chance at a friend’s house, and immediately he says that to her: “I know you.” And he means he knows that she, like him, is incomplete, wayward, prone to terrible mistakes. They talk late into the night. He asks her, “Hey, there’s a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.” And so begins one of the most convincing love stories in all of American literature.

He quickly moves in with Nicole and her daughters, and we have the sense—and certainly new readers will—that the two are destined for each other. That they will be forever entwined, even if their love is full of chaos and rupture. Nicole senses danger early on, and looks for an exit. She hedges her bets with her ex-husband, among other lovers. And just as quickly and capriciously as the romance began, it ends. At least for a while.

Did Gilmore kill because his heart was broken? Here the book gives us choices. We are not led to one conclusion, as would happen if the story were told by a lesser author. No, instead we’re given the full messy range of pathologies. Gary was born bad. Or he was born fine, then was abused and twisted into an ugly shape. Or he was born fine, then twisted, then imprisoned, and then was given one last chance at redemption. He flirted briefly with decency but couldn’t hack a life within boundaries of propriety. At the first obstacle, he went off the rails. Or maybe he was destined to kill and be killed.

Every time there is a place for Mailer to tell us the answer, to distill what we know down to a manageable conclusion, he gives us more raw, exasperating reality and a void where an easy conclusion would be expected. When the cops, prosecutors, and judges enter the picture, we expect, and perhaps even want them to be crooked, bloodthirsty, unforgiving. But they’re frustratingly decent and morally complex, and anything but monolithic. When the media enters the book, they, too, are not the cartoonish, sensationalizing ghouls we’re given to expect. They have nuanced motives and act in damnable human ways.

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.

I met a killer a few months ago. We were both dressed in tuxedos. This was at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards, and I was handing an award to Wilbert Rideau, who confessed to two murders committed in the heat of a robbery when he was 19. During his 44 years in prison, he became a prolific writer, a jailhouse journalist who exposed inhumane conditions at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. He was released in 2006, and his memoir, the book for which he was getting the prize in Dayton, In the Place of Justice, tells his story, from being a confused kid caught in a bank robbery gone bad, to a man who had fully taken responsibility for his crimes and who had improved himself and contributed mightily to the betterment of thousands of lives.

Before the ceremony, I shook Rideau’s hand, and we talked about Baton Rouge—where he’s from—and about New Orleans and the weather in Dayton. His face is heavily lined, his eyes small and bright and wary, and his accent a deep Louisiana drawl. Even months later, writing these words, I am torn about my experience standing and talking with Rideau. And I can only think that the chiaroscuro sense of right and wrong that was instilled in me, that was reinforced by the simplistic moralizing of our news and entertainment, had convinced me that a person who kills is no longer a person. It would have been far easier, for everyone, if Rideau had been erased after he committed his crimes. He did a terrible thing, and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight. Off the planet. Gone.

But what if they live on? Wilbert Rideau lived on. He told the world of life in prison, and told the world of the circumstances of his crimes and his rehabilitation. He became a productive human being when he was once, briefly, a force of destruction.

And though we erased him, shot him, and cremated him, Gary Gilmore lives on in this book, and we learn from his life. What do we learn? Maybe we learn that America is a uniquely violent and unforgiving place, a perpetual West where the landscape—an existential nothingness bordered by glorious unattainable mountains—both mocks the individual and inspires him toward desperate acts. Maybe we learn that Gary Gilmore was fully human, but not fully equipped to live among us; that we’re essentially a decent people, wanting contentment and prosperity for all, seeking harmony so tenaciously that we need to kill those who threaten it. Maybe it’s not what we learn that’s crucial, but the questions we’re left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers? The Executioner’s Song doesn’t answer these questions, but it comes as close to solving the enigma of America as any other work of art we have.