The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (review)

148 Western American Literature Morrow’s basic contention, elaborated in the final chapter, is that Harte was “a practical critic” who “understood the value of well-crafted form and appreciated the power of an audience’s expectations.” He “learned to stay clear of literary theory and concentrate on a close reading of literature” and on “evaluating a piece of literature on its own merits.” In his method­ ology, then, “Harte was a precursor of the New Criticism.” Morrow notes the seeming contradiction between what Harte the critic advocated and what Harte the writer was sometimes producing, especially in later years when the writer was “trapped by a rapidly diminishing suc­ cess and a rapidly increasing overhead.” Throughout a long career “Harte the critic demanded realism in all writing,” Morrow points out. “That our concept of realism has shifted away from Harte’s should not obscure the fact that in a genteel age of over-upholstered prose, . . . Harte championed a precise and penetrating realism, joining Howells and James in pioneering the way for a new fiction.” Though the last chapter discusses Harte’s “allegiance to the literary theories of such British realists as George Henry Lewes, George Meredith, and David Masson,” the final emphasis is not on Harte’s realism, but on his importance as a transitional figure caught between Realism and Romanti­ cism. Credit is also given Harte for literary counsel provided other writers, for the accuracy of his critical estimates of his contemporaries, and for his “deep and lasting concern for the establishment and promotion of w'hat he believed to be quality literature.” HENRY HAHN, Modesto, California The Executioner’s Song. By Norman Mailer. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. 1056 pages, $16.95.) Norman Mailer’s “true life novel” The Executioner’s Song begins on a richly symbolic note: 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. The apple trees were their grandmother’s best crop and it was forbid­ den to climb in the orchard. She helped him drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would notice. The story which Mailer tells in his massive new work concerns the final months of the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, the man whose execution on January 17, 1977, ended a decade-long moratorium on capital Reviews 149 punishment in America. At another level, however, Mailer allows Gilmore to represent the psychopathic extreme of unbridled individualism. Our native American mythology — from the time of Emerson on — has apotheo­ sized the isolated hero as an Adamic innocent free of external constraints. The greatest danger to confront such a figure is the brute force of a Levia­ than-like social structure. Against this structure one can prove his manhood only through courageous acts of defiance. Perhaps no writer in our time has been more committed to this myth of solipsistic heroism than has Norman Mailer. Indeed, both his 1958 essay “The White Negro” and his 1964 novel An American Dream (which reads like a compulsive dramatization of “The W'hite Negro”) extol the thera­ peutic value of personalized mayhem. It is surprising, then, to see Gilmore — who was in many ways an embodiment of Mailer’s earlier theories — depicted as anything but a hero. He is complex, enigmatic, troubled, and predatory. However, he is victimized less by society than by his own ob­ sessive inability to live in society. If Mailer’s philosophical stance in this novel seems to represent a depar­ ture from his previous beliefs, he also appears to be striking out in new directions formalistically. As Frank McConnell points out in the New Re­ public, Mailer allows the figure of Gilmore to emerge here in much the same way as Conrad allows that of Lord Jim to emerge — by showing us how he appears in the eyes of others. Also, in The Executioner’s Song, Mailer uses omniscient point of view for the first time since The Naked and the Dead. The characters in this drama — whose impressions were trans­ cribed from tape-recorded interviews — speak in...