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PARTISAN REVIEW
considerably in debt
to
her for that. Altogether there may have been
as much as 12,000 pages of interviews. At the place where we stopped
counting, there were 6000 pages of transcript and we more than
doubled it after that. Schiller and I often went out together
to
interview, and we must have looked like two detectives on the fat
side, not one but two Continental Cops, side by side. I remembered
we interviewed a woman once, and after we left, were driving along
and suddenly, Schiller, who has a passion for verification, started
pounding the wheel and said, "She's lying, she's goddamn lying! "
Part of figuring out what happened was living with these interviews
long enough to compare them to other interviews until you felt you
could decide what probably did occur in a given situation. Then, of
course, there were also the transcripts of the trial, and press clip–
pings, and a great many psychiatric reports by the various doctors
involved. Oregon State Prison was also a huge help. The Warden,
Hoyt Cupp, had a 200-page summary of Gilmore's prison record
prepared. A lot of material was there that never even got directly into
the book. A lot of marvelous prison stuff from Gilmore's years in
prison that just didn' t get in. There were people who knew him
when he was an adolescent. We had long interviews with them. They
didn't get in for two reasons: one, it would have been another 500
pages, and, also, I hated
to
break the unity of
The Executioner's
Song-those nine months from the time he left jail until he was
executed.
fA:
There were moments, I thought, when you were strongly tempted
to make some kind of comment. For example, where you had this
marvelous interview with the lady who turned out
to
be one of
Nicole's neighbors. In the scene I'm thinking of, she is being
interviewed while her small boy keeps coming in and bothering her
about the peanut butter, and she's telling a story about one of her
husbands who pulled a butcher knife and killed himself right in
front of her. She's telling this horrendous story interrupted from
moment to moment by yells at the kid . . . "Get the hell away from
the peanut butter jar!" And it struck me that this was marvelous
material for some sort of comment about the kind of world that
Gilmore came out of-where the women could be so indifferent to
violence and so concerned with the trivia of the peanut butter jar
without at all seeing the incongruity.
NM:
I was thinking about painting as I worked on this book. That
particular interview was like a found object. You know, it was lifted
almost verbatim from the original transcript.
