Jack and Norman by Jerome Loving

Author:Jerome Loving [Loving, Jerome]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Mailer’s inability to fully empathize with Gary Gilmore’s plight is precisely why The Executioner’s Song became his masterpiece. Perhaps the crime was simply too brutal and cold-blooded—shooting to death two helpless men on successive nights. He therefore refrained—really for the first time in his literary life—from putting himself into the picture. He told Abbott that in every other book he had written, he had tried to teach something about the world and its dangers. His identity theme as a secularized American Jew was the potential oppression of the state. We see that in his very first novel, in which the power-hungry Colonel Edward Cummings in The Naked and the Dead is a crypto-fascist, one of those who aspire to rule the roost after World War II. We see it in The Fight, the work that closely precedes The Executioner’s Song, where the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire is nearly upstaged by the oppression of President Mobutu, a dictator who is responsible, among so many other crimes, for the hundreds of corpses beneath the giant stadium in which the fight will take place. It is the Belgian Congo all over again, the one that became the setting for Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1889). It is the same human cauldron stirred by King Leopold II of Belgium in the nineteenth century—recycled into the twentieth. But with the book that followed, Mailer didn’t try to import any of these arguments. If there is an argument against capital punishment in The Executioner’s Song, it is countered by the horror of the crimes Gilmore committed and the hypocrisy of the forces opposed to the death penalty that rally to prevent the execution—the same liberals, Mailer allows Gilmore to say, who support abortion.

* * *

Just as Mailer knew relatively little about prison life, Jack knew little about life outside prison. He was at his literary worst when writing fiction about life in the “free world,” drafts of plays that he sent to Mailer, who had suggested that he try to focus on something other than prison life. But everything Jack knew came from books, written with words that in many cases he didn’t even know how to pronounce or had never heard spoken. Mailer sent him a number of plays as well as other material for study. “The books arrived yesterday,” he told Norman on February 16, 1980—plays by Tennessee Williams, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Sean O’Casey. One of Jack’s attempted dramas was entitled, not surprisingly, “The Hole.” “There were always at least two stages in the hole in any prison,” he had earlier told Mailer, on November 25, 1979. “First, the regular hole for men who can’t be controlled in the main population. The other ‘part’ of the hole is for men who combined with the first quality, cannot be controlled anywhere … The play is about a man, how it is [that] he gets there.” Ultimately,

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