The Executioner's Song

"Yes. I have to say I read this book probably 25 years ago. I’m getting old. But it has stayed with me. I would love to reread it now and see how my views may have changed, but I remember reading it and being struck particularly by the style. I think Mailer’s personality or his ego can overwhelm his work but in this book he seemed constrained, in a good way, by the material. There’s almost a minimalist quality to his writing. He also had help from [the film director and screenwriter] Lawrence Schiller with a lot of the reporting material. That gave him a ballast of non-fiction and, in a way, I remember Mailer just getting out of the way in this story. It had an intimacy to it in terms of the detail. It also clearly dealt with issues surrounding the death penalty in the United States at the time. If I remember correctly, there had been, for a while, a moral shift away from the use of, and public support for, the death penalty. And that was followed by a spate in which the death penalty became much more used in the United States. So, the book dealt with some of those themes. And it dealt with character. It’s interesting—when I look back—to see which things have stayed with me. The character portrait stayed. The book is rooted in character. It obviously deals with Gary Gilmore who committed a couple of brutal murders. I remember feeling like it got very close to him—which is very tricky to do in non-fiction; Mailer had such great access to all the participants—and thus could reveal the complexities of human character. That’s something else you’re looking for when you’re writing about crime. It’s not just about one-dimensional individuals, who fit into neat categories of good or evil. I don’t remember Mailer ascribing a simple motivation to him either. He allowed the possibilities of, you know, ‘was he born bad?’ ‘Did culture make him bad?’ ‘Why couldn’t he reform himself?’ But he didn’t try to reduce anything. I think sometimes it can be very reductive when we write about people who commit crimes. And I think Mailer allowed different possibilities, different motivations, and let the reader weigh the different elements. In understanding human motivations for crime, we tend to be far too reductive. Well, I think the subject gets to the most fundamental question of how do you punish somebody who commits the ultimate sin of murder. And it raises questions about vengeance and how do you repair a society after a violent crime. In the name of moral purpose or punishment, do you, in turn, put someone to death? In the US, in the old days when they would mark up the autopsy, they would often refer to it as “death by homicide” even if it was state-sanctioned. So, it raises all those important moral questions. “In the name of moral purpose or punishment, do you, in turn, put someone to death?” It also raises a lot of questions about the judicial system, certainly in the case that I wrote about – of Cameron Todd Willingham. It raised the prospect that the judicial system can make mistakes that lead to an innocent man being executed. So, it raised still other ethical questions. Now in the case of Gilmore there was no question about his guilt, but with Cameron Todd Willingham—who was accused of committing arson which killed his children in his house—the case it turned out was just shoddy from start to finish. The notion that he set the fire was based on junk science that has now been discredited. There is overwhelming evidence that the state put to death an innocent man, when it executed Willingham on February 17, in 2004. So, again, this is the kind of true crime story that has enormous stakes: It is about how in the process of trying to address what was assumed to be a crime, the state apparently committed one. The case holds up a light to the problems with our judicial system. Yes, I saw there was something in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend about one of the convicts, one of two protagonists in In Cold Blood . He committed the murder and had a memoir—never published—in which he suggested it might have been a contract hit. I can’t quite tell how much credibility to give that. But, yes, In Cold Blood is interesting. I actually reread it not that long ago and it remains, just as a piece of writing, astonishing. From a sentence level, it’s a beautifully written work. But there is something that makes me slightly uneasy about it: its relationship to the truth. I’m just never quite confident of where I am in terms of the truth, and so since we are discussing true crime… I didn’t want to include it. Capote called it a novel but then he always insisted that every word was true. In a way, if he’d just been more clear about what was true and what was fiction, I would have a much easier relationship with the book. He’s kind of trying to have it both ways and just not being open about it. If he had novelised certain parts of the story and been open about it then you could read the work in that context, process the material accordingly. But, especially when you deal with serious crimes, I think you do have certain moral boundaries and there are certain burdens that come with the work. In some ways, of all non-fiction writing, when you write about crimes, the moral burden is highest because you are dealing with real victims and often traumatic events—especially when there are killings involved. There are amazing parts of In Cold Blood . Capote really did spend time with the people. He reported and had a deep sense of the characters, which is one of the things you’re really after in true crime. As a writer, you want to interview the people involved and have a real sense of them: they’re complex, they’re three-dimensional. But there are just moments with Capote where I’m just a little uneasy. I think the part that stood out to me came early on, when he’s in the mind or the consciousness of at least one of the victims and you’re like ‘Woah. He’s actually in their heads.’ If he’d just been more honest and said it’s rooted in non-fiction but is fictionalised in places. It’s a question of transparency. It would be interesting for me to read The Executioner’s Song because Mailer called that a novel. But I don’t recall having that kind of uneasiness. I wonder if, if I reread it now that I’m older, and with a closer eye, I would feel differently."