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march / april 2007:
The devil’s advocate?
Norman Mailer channels Satan and Hitler’s childhood in his controversial new novel. We sit down with the legendary writer to ask what the hell he was thinking.
By E.B. Solomont
About halfway through a novel depicting Adolf Hitler’s childhood by Norman Mailer, the narrator cautions readers against drawing hasty conclusions about the future Fuhrer based on his youthful episodes. In a scene during which young Adolf’s father fumigates his bee farm, the narrator, an SS guard identified as Dieter, says: “Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later.”
That is to say, there is no simple explanation for Hitler, no prescription for understanding both his evil and his madness. And yet, Mailer’s narrative on the early days of “Adi,” as Hitler is known in The Castle in the Forest, tempts the reader — and Mailer, it seems — with such ruminations.
“I believe that, yes, Satan was present one way or another at the conception of Adolf Hitler,” Mailer said recently, discussing a scene to that very effect. He carefully distinguishes between wicked and evil in a postulation of his subject, noting that being evil relies on an individual’s intent to do harm. “In a funny way, I think Hitler goes beyond our notion of human evil…. [Joseph] Stalin was a human monster. I think Hitler was more evil than a human monster,” he says.
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It was mid-January, blustery and freezing in New York City, when Mailer’s publisher assembled five reporters at a time to interview the storied author, billing the gatherings as mini press conferences. It turns out Mailer prefers group discussions, he says, as the group files into a sunny room overlooking midtown.
Mailer is seated at the head of a long table, his palms resting lightly on the veneer in anticipation of our questions. A dark shirt and fleece vest make his windblown hair appear whiter; his piercing blue eyes brighter. In the group setting, no one wastes time asking him their most pressing questions about his writing, the notion of good vs. evil, and America’s political agenda.
Of the latter, he says, “If I had fantasies once about the State of the Union address I’d give, I certainly don’t have them now,” the one-time New York City mayoral candidate says. He immediately launches into a sharp criticism of President Bush’s attempt to build democracy in Iraq. “Bless the boy, bless the boy,” he says. “And you may quote me on that, because he’s the only president we’ve had who’s still a boy.”
If Mailer speaks with the authority of an elder statesman, that is because in certain ways he is one. Born in 1923 to a Jewish family in New Jersey, Mailer spent his childhood in Brooklyn and went on to Harvard University and later the U.S. Army, where he served overseas during World War II. In 1948, he published The Naked and the Dead, the first of more than 30 works that have earned him two Pulitzer Prizes (The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song) and a National Book award (The Armies of the Night).
But more than anything else, Mailer is known for his controversial spirit. A founder of the Village Voice newspaper, he owns up to being arrested several times in his life (“The first night in the bullpen is something,” he remarks), once during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. In 1960, Mailer notoriously stabbed his second wife with a penknife at a party. In 1997, she published a memoir about their relationship.
Mailer currently lives in Provincetown, Mass., where he wrote his first novel in more than ten years. The Castle in the Forest focuses on Hitler, one of the two most important men of the twentieth century, he recently told The Washington Post. The other man was Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1997 novel, The Gospel According to the Son.
In his latest work, Mailer’s narrator, Dieter is a low-level devil employed by Satan to monitor young Adolf’s life, and to intervene on Satan’s behalf when necessary. Unsurprisingly, the plot gives legs to notions of sin, pride, and evil.
Mailer considers himself a “religious” person — although in the next breath he rejects the word religious. “I believe in God, not the way fundamentalists do,” he says. “I think some halfway talented writers gave us the Old Testament and some mediocre writers gave us the New Testament. But in any event, God had very little to do with either of those books. God is a creator, not a law-giver, is the way I see it.”
By contrast, one of Mailer’s main characters — Adolf’s father, Alois — rejects God and religion almost completely. He is governed by his own sense of pride, so much so that he refuses to go to church for another son’s funeral because he is afraid he will cry in public. According to Mailer, Alois’ pride sustains him — sometimes nourishing him, shoring up feelings of self-worth.
In his own life, Mailer acknowledges pride’s heavy hand. “I’ve had to live with unseemly pride, yes,” he reflects with little apparent embarrassment. Of aging, Mailer says he alternately feels wistful and bemused, but notes, “There’s a nice cool when you get older. I think without it, old age would be a misery. Your fingertips are numb, your toes are numb, your knees hurt, all that stuff.” Underneath the table, Mailer is wearing knee-high UGG boots.
In reflecting on his writing process as an older writer, Mailer compares himself to an aging quarterback who uses wisdom, savvy, and pace to get the most out of a day. “The secondary confidence becomes almost sophisticated so you really know how to get the work out, and that’s part of the fun of it, being a pro,” he says.
Mailer is certainly a pro — and one who says he has few regrets. “I don’t regret intensely,” he says, causing several sets of eyebrows to stand up. “You know, I don’t knock myself out that I never laid Marilyn Monroe,” he says, noting that a Barnes and Noble accidentally billed him as her husband for an upcoming appearance.
He said he envisions thousands of people lining up to see him because of the retailer’s mistake. “They’re going to be so disappointed,” he says with a chuckle.
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