NORMAN MAILER
175
measuring everything by its economic potentialities. That is depress–
mg.
John W. Aldridge:
So you thought of Gilmore at least initially as a
commercial property?
NM:
Well, as I said, yes, I think of commercial possibilities. But,
obviously, it's important not to take a book on just because it
promises money. You can go down the tubes very quickly by that
route. After all, it's bad enough that one's working as a
semi–
commercial writer. Once you're
wholly
commercial, once you take
on a job merely because it'll pay the bills, and you have no interest in
what you're doing, you're in terrible trouble. So if something
appeals to you and also promises money, that gives it charisma.
Gilmore, ergo, was a marvelously appealing character to me. By that,
I don't mean he was someone I necessarily would have wanted to be
close friends with ... he appealed to me because he embodied many
of the themes I've been living with all my life long before I even
thought of doing a book on him. I knew just by what I read about
him in the newspapers that I could write a 20,OOO-word essay on the
man with no trouble, and have a lot to say. Before I wrote a thing
about him I felt here's a perfect example of what I've been talking
about all my life-we have profound choices to make in life, and one
of them may be the deep and terrible choice most of us avoid between
dying now and "saving one's soul" -or at the least, safeguarding
one's soul-in order, conceivably, to be reincarnated. Maybe there is
such a thing as living out a life too long, and having the soul expire
before the body. And here's Gilmore with his profound belief in
karma, wishing to die, declaring he wants to save his soul. I thought,
here, finally, is the perfect character for me. So I was excited about
the book.
JA:
Did you feel you understood him thoroughly by the time you were
finished with the writing?
NM:
No, I felt I didn't understand him at all. I knew him by then better
than I knew a lot of my relatives and friends, but I didn't understand
him. It's analogous to the way you can be married to a woman for ten
years and know her very well, know exactly what she's going to say,
what she's going to do, what's going to make her happy, what's
going to get her drunk, yet, fundamentally, you may not know
whether she's good or evil. You don't perceive the source of her, if
you will , of her
moral
inspiration. Does she worship the same gods
you do, or are they alien? That's what you don't get near. So I was
left at the end of the book with a sense of ambiguity about Gilmore
