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PARTISAN REVIEW
that you can only feel about someone you know very well. I don't
want
to
falsify the issue, or sentimentalize it. Gilmore was fond of
saying that he was a very bad guy, and he was in a lot of ways. He
had a lot of very bad, dull habits. He had a terrible temper, he was
unspeakably selfish, and he had absolutely no desire
to
see other
people's needs unless he chose to. He was terribly private, even
secretive, and everything had to be done his way, or he wouldn't
play. Yet, to be fair-I think it's fair-one could speak of Gilmore as
having a quality that was almost saintly. He was certainly capable of
rising far above the situation he was in and looking at it with the
kind of extraordinary detachment very few people have. Since it
involved his own death, I think he was doubly remarkable that way. I
say saintly, but, of course, such powers are also Satanic. It's possible
he was a very evil man. So by the end of the book we know him well,
even intimately, but his moral personality beneath the man we
know is considerably more saintly or malevolent than I can pretend
to tell you.
J
A:
That suggests something else I wanted to get at. The narrative
method that you 've adopted here, as far as I know, is entirely new to
you. It's one of extremely detached and impersonal documentation
of every last detail that seems pertinent to the case. And you go on
with this documentation to very great lengths because the manu–
script runs to more than 1600 pages and it gives me the impression of
being a sort of immense prose photograph. Now, I wonder, is this
method meant to express the meaning that the Gilmore case came to
have for you finally? In other words, does the huge quantity, the
sheer mass of this material and your close documentation of it-are
these somehow essential elements in creating the quality of the story
that you had
to
tell?
NM:
I'd say I made a literary decision
to
do the book this way . I was
starting with a story about a man who,
to
a certain degree, is a
talented artist, has been in jail all his adult life, comes out, meets a
beautiful girl, and has a passionate love affair that almost works,
then is very unsuccessful. They break up. It's so intolerable to him
that a week later he murders two men on two successive nights. Once
he's back in jail, he and the girl fall in love again. It is then he comes
to the conclusion that it's hopeless to stay alive in such an incarcer–
ated existence and so they must commit suicide together. Indeed they
make a serious attempt to commit suicide, and failing, are separated
forever except for their more or less profound belief in reincarnation
which he finally takes with him to his death. Now I thought these
