Giving the devil his due

There was a time when Norman Mailer used to talk about the Big Book. It prowled the interviews he gave in the 1950s like a white whale, blasting into view and then disappearing back into the darkness, where it would lurk until the next publication date. With each decade and new book, from An American Dream to The Executioner’s Song, it seemed as if Mailer might still drag his promised catch to shore. Though Joan Didion concludes that Mailer finally got his big fish—four times, in fact—the lion remains unconvinced. And approaching his 84th birthday, America’s most pugilistic novelist is beginning to say he may not get it.

“I may have made announcements 50 years ago of the kind of book I was going to write,” says Mailer at his home in Provincetown, Mass., a fishing village turned weekend retreat at Cape Cod’s tip. “But I’m not going to stick to those predictions.”

What’s unusual is Mailer is making this pronouncement on the eve of the release of his latest book, his 36th, The Castle in the Forest, an audacious novel that tells the story of Hitler’s first 17 years through the eyes of D.T., an assistant of the devil himself.

“I am very confident in this book,” Mailer says, as if to reassure he’s not passing off a lemon. “I really feel good about it.” It’s just that he may not find himself shoulder to shoulder with Tolstoy at the end of the day.

It will not be for lack of trying, though. Mailer has worked on the book long enough to lose track of when he started exactly. During the writing, he completed a mountain of research (evident in the book’s bibliography) and traveled to Austria, which at his age is not easy. In recent years his knees have gone out, and he now walks with the aid of two canes.

“There was one early review that was essentially favorable, but it irritated the hell out of me,” says Mailer, revealing his old feistiness. “Let’s say it irritated the shit out of me. Because the reviewer said in some long-winded way, ‘Of course Mailer is just rewriting Freud.'”

Mailer believes the world is run by a threesome—God, man and the devil—and that Hitler was the devil’s response to Jesus Christ. The most vivid scene of The Castle in the Forest involves Hitler’s bawdy, raucous, incestuous conception, with the devil inserting himself into young Adolf’s soul at the moment of his parents’ climax.

“Look, I thought back on my life and there were some fucks that were just evil,” Mailer says, flashing a wicked grin. As provocative as this sounds, Mailer says he is not being facetious. “We can understand Joseph Stalin in a way,” he says. “One of the things about Stalin is that he was one of the very toughest men in Russia. Hitler was not that tough. It was as if odd gifts were given to him at extraordinary moments.”

Mailer says such gifts only could have come from the devil, who he believes works all the time. Hitler, in Mailer’s view, was a high point of the devil’s handiwork, something he says his mother knew in Brooklyn long before Hitler marched on Poland. “My mother was very affected by Hitler,” he says. “When I was 9 years old, she knew already, long before the statesmen did, that Hitler was a disaster and a monster. That he was probably going to kill half the Jews, if not all of them.”

Growing up with the idea of Hitler, fascinated by him, Mailer long has thought he would write this book. But first he had to get to The Gospel According to the Son, which told Christ’s story in his own words. The idea came to him in a Paris hotel room. Mailer couldn’t sleep, so he picked up the Bible.

“I thought, ‘This is such a funny book.’ It’s got sentences that are worthy of Shakespeare, but most of it was dreadful. Then I thought, ‘There are 100 writers in the world who could do a better job. And I’m one of them.’ “

Mailer wrote the book and got slaughtered for it. Today, even he admits, “I felt I didn’t quite bring it off. I felt like I was making a reach for the material.”

With Hitler, though, Mailer says he did not feel this barrier. For starters, spending time with a very bad man was not a problem, as he learned from writing about Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. “You know your characters don’t need to be there to make you happy with how wonderful they are and how warmhearted they are and how human they are,” he says. “You can write about a monster, and so far as you enjoy writing, enjoy the work.”

“There is very little known about Hitler’s childhood,” Mailer says. “He concealed much of it, to the best of his best ability.” So he ad-libbed, speculating about his parents’ incestuous relationship to a degree that outstrips history.

He also invents a libidinous beekeeper and, most interesting, invests a good deal of the book’s energy into bringing to life Hitler’s father, Alois, who emerges as a grabbing, greedy, sexually ravenous customs official.

Long ago, Mailer might have felt some apprehension with this project, knowing the kind of reviews it would spark. Now, he says he doesn’t care. “One of the advantages of getting old is you really don’t give a fuck anymore. What are they going to do, come and kill me? Fine, make a martyr of me! Make me immortal!”

The days when the picadors of book reviewers would bring out Mailer’s rage seem to be gone, but there is one thing that can inspire his old fury: the Iraq War. Mailer’s outrage over it boiled over into several blog posts he wrote for Arianna Huffington’s Web log, The Huffington Post. “The huge shock I felt when that war started was the willful blindness of people who were intelligent enough to know what they were getting into,” he says, his gravely voice rising a register. “And the idiocy of the people who didn’t know what they were getting into, like our God-fearing president.”

Mailer says there might be a lesson here for Americans, one not far off from the bailiwick of this book. “My feeling now is all countries can potentially become monstrous nations, and I think the last few years here, it’s not as if we became a monstrous nation. But for the first time in Americans’ lives, the possibility is so.”

In other words, the devil is not entirely responsible for Hitler’s or any other politician’s rise to power. Conditions made it possible, too, and so the vigilance of governments is key.

“Given the hideous conditions in Germany after the first World War, not only the shame and humiliation of losing that war in an extraordinary thoroughgoing way,” Mailer says, rattling off the social context of Hitler’s rise. “Given all that, all the conditions were there for a monster to take over the country.”

And yet, to say that political conditions alone created Hitler, to Mailer, is not enough. “I’m not here to guarantee it. But I’m saying we won’t understand this unless we go back to the notion that maybe God and the devil do exist!”