NORMAN MAILER
177
elements of tragic love were so operative for the modern temper that
they're almost unbelievable, unless you nail down every detail. Let's
put it this way: it's as if there's a wind blowing so fierce and you're
dealing with so large a tarpaulin, that unless you tack down every
square foot of it, it's going
to
whip all over the place. Besides, I also
felt that if I wrote it in my own style, the style that we're lately used
to, no one would believe the book for a minute. They would say,
"Oh, there's Mailer taking this very average, ordinary, dull punk
killer and inflating him." They would have said I was working away
on my bicycle pump. So, I thought, no, I'll stay out of the book
entirely, I won't use anything that doesn't come from interviews or
documents.
f
A:
Of course, if you had been much more Maileresque, you would
have ended up writing a different kind of book.
NM:
Maileresque is your word, not mine.
fA:
OK, it's my word, but you don't show in this book any of the
characteristics associated with your past writing. Because the style is
a great departure from what you normally write-it's very simple,
unadorned, unmetaphorical. Also you never once make use of one of
your favorite dramatic devices, and that is
to
extrapolate from the
experience being described to some kind of large generalizing
statement about the implications of the experience. For example, in
The Armies of the Night,
you start out, at one point, with a physical
description of the marshals who try to keep order during the
Pentagon march, and you go from that
to
a meditation on the small
towns of middle America-the barely controlled fury, the pent-up
rage of the people who come out of that experience-the smz..ll town.
And that leads you
to
very large questions of mystery, dread, finally
Christianity in opposition to technology-it's all a marvelous and
complex network of associations and references. Now this you
scrupulously avoid in this book. You don't allow yourself any of
these flights at all. Is that because you thought that the story of
Gilmore in itself, narrated at great length, without any speculation
or editorializing, would convey its own message, that it is itself a sort
of metaphorical, or if you like, a metaphysical generalization about
the nature of evil?
NM:
No, I felt something else. The more I worked, the more I began
to
feel I didn't have the right to generalize on the material. In the past,
of course, I always have. I usually had more in me to say than proper
material with which
to
express it, so that it was natural
to
overflow
into essays. But, at this point in my life, I thought, well, the people
