Executioner’s Song remains the same
On January 10, white supremacist Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the murder of nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S. C., during Bible study in June 2015. The 22- year- old Roof had confessed to the murders and was convicted of 33 federal charges in December. With his sentencing, Roof became the first American to receive the death penalty for a federal hate crime.
It’s a capital punishment milestone, and one that takes place alongside the anniversary of a similar milestone: forty years ago this week, Gary Gilmore, with his famous last words “let’s do it,” became the first man executed in the United States in more than a decade.
Gilmore’s actions following his conviction resulted in a media frenzy. Gilmore fired his lawyers and refused to appeal his sentence. In fact, over the three months following his trial, Gilmore repeatedly fought for his right to be executed as quickly as possible, even as family members, his former lawyers, the ACLU and others sought legal means to keep him alive.
Among the media drawn to Utah by the ongoing legal wrangling was Lawrence Schiller, a photojournalist and filmmaker who gained exclusive access to Gilmore. Several months after Gilmore’s execution, Schiller enlisted Norman Mailer to work on what became The Executioner’s Song, which would win the Pulitzer Prize and be shortlisted for the National Book Award. A cultural phenomenon as much as a book, the bestseller became the sort of dog- eared paperback that seemed to be on every bookshelf in the 1980s.
As well-regarded as it was upon its publication in 1979, The Executioner’s Song is even more impressive today, a modern American classic and a unique portrait not just of a man, not just of a series of events, but, in critical ways, of the country itself.
Despite t housands of hours of interviews, The Executioner’s Song has – like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – always been referred to as a novel ( its Pulitzer came in the fiction category). Rather than embracing journalistic conventions, Mailer approached the source material as a novelist, creating a voice for the book that steps beyond even the boundaries of the New Journalism he helped create.
The voice of The Executioner’s Song will be famil- iar to anyone who has spent time in the American West, a flat, matter- of- fact tone that is neither coy nor reserved but somehow just enough – as if to say more would be wasteful, wrong. Rooted in the land itself, the culture and the witnesses and interviewees in whose words the story will be largely told, this voice serves as an entry into Gilmore’s world.
Having been imprisoned for more than twenty of his thirty-five years (for charges including armed robbery and assault), Gilmore was paroled in April, 1976 with the assistance of his cousin Brenda, and moved to Provo, Utah, where he attempted to re- enter society, first working with his uncle at his shoe repair shop, and later for an insulation company. But he soon gravitated back toward criminal activity, shoplifting beer, stealing guns and attempting to sell them.
He also became involved with 1 9- year- old Nicole Baker, a widow and divorcee with two small children. It was a heady, violent relationship, and it was shortly after Nicole ended it that Gilmore robbed and killed two men, a gas station attendant and a hotel clerk. His cousin Brenda assisted the police in capturing Gilmore, who stood trial for the second murder. The trial took two days.
The story would likely have become l i ttle more than historical footnote – a batch of headlines and a grim anniversary – were it not for Mailer. Rather than focusing on the crimes, The Executioner’s Song follows the last nine months of Gilmore’s life from his release to his execution with an almost excruciating amount of detail, and without any petty moralizing or easy explanations. The image of Gilmore that emerges is awash in contradictions: he was a cold-blooded killer and kind to children. He was a shameless romantic and a cynical manipulator ( the passages in which he urges Nicole into a suicide pact following his conviction are chilling). He was the violent product of a violent system and stubbornly resistant to help in breaking that cycle.
The great strength of The Executioner’s Song comes not from i ts j ournalistic depth or Mailer’s clear- eyed telling of Gilmore’s story, but with the willingness to leave the reader with an open question. In fact, for all the pages of moral questioning and legal manoeuvrings, The Executioner’s Song revolves around a single existential question: why do we do what we do? Whether it is Gilmore’s crimes, Nicole’s suicide attempt ( despite her children), even Schiller’s craven pursuit of Gilmore’s story, the question is the same: why do we do what we do?
It is a question that echoes into the present, into another cold January morning – a question we, as individuals, as a culture, cannot escape. It will linger long after Dylann Roof’s execution: the white supremacist reportedly had second thoughts about his planned murder, having spent an hour praying with the parishioners. In the end, though, he went through with the attack.
Why do we do what we do?
It’s a question that cannot be answered, only confronted.
A UNIQUE PORTRAIT NOT JUST OF A MAN … BUT, IN CRITICAL WAYS, OF THE COUNTRY