Mailer's Crime and Punishment
Joan Didion, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, wrote: "I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in 'The Executioner's Song,' is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature." So rarely that, Cormac McCarthy apart, we have not heard it as eloquently since. Norman Mailer's masterpiece tells of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, a psychopathic killer whose wish to be executed was granted by the State of Utah on 17 January 1977 in the form of a firing squad.
"When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn't quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and, then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down, as if to say, 'That did it, gentlemen.' ...The blood started to flow through the black shirt and came out onto the white pants and started to drop onto the floor between Gary's legs, and the smell of the gunpowder was everywhere."
This is America's Crime and Punishment. This is Mailer channelling Hemingway. The writing is taut and unadorned, and the book is totally compelling. Mailer called The Executioner's Song a "true-life novel" and it became a genuine contender for the crown held by Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood". But it is a flawed masterpiece because it makes the terrible liberal error of coming down firmly on the side of "understanding" a murderer who shot two innocent men and left widows and orphans in his wake.
After Gilmore, Mailer turned his attention to Jack "Henry" Abbott, another violent convict. Enthralled by Abbot's prison letters, Mailer helped to have them published, in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast. In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as "an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge." Freed from prison, the artist Abbott arrived in New York, became the toast of the hip crowd and in the early hours of 18 July 1981 fatally stabbed Richard Adan, a 22-year-old waiter. Ironically, the very next morning, the Sunday edition of the New York Times carried a review of In the Belly of the Beast in which Terrence Des Pres expressed gratitude to Norman Mailer. "We must be grateful to him for getting these letters into publishing form and, a job more difficult, for helping to get Abbott out on parole."
Mailer testified on Abbott's behalf at the resulting murder trial and actress Susan Sarandon, who also attended, became an admirer of the killer. In fact, when shortly after the trial Sarandon gave birth to a baby boy, she and the father, actor Tim Robbins, named him "Jack Henry". It was a shameful episode and one that revealed all that was worst in Mailer and his clique. Gary Gilmore, like Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's great novel, did not express regret for his deeds. Neither did Abbott. It was very late in the day when Norman Mailer expressed his regrets for his errors.
That said, he was great and the tributes keep pouring in. Here's an excellent obituary in The Economist, and Christopher Hitchens noted, "Mailer was a libertarian and a foe of any system or mind-set that involved the censorious (feminism) or the overweening and the grandiose (imperialism/communism)." The old contrarian would have loved that.
