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June 2007

Oh, the Devils He Knows

In this exclusive Moment interview Norman Mailer talks to Ron Rosenbaum about his latest novel, The Castle in the Forest.

Norman Mailer, renowned essayist, journalist and novelist, is arguably America’s most versatile living writer. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he began his 60-year career at age 25 with The Naked and the Dead and has produced fiction and non-fiction at an extraordinary rate until recently. A founder of The Village Voice, he was perhaps the most intrepid in marrying the novel’s narrative form with reportorial precision, while infusing the account with the imagination and energy of a novel. His 1968 book, The Armies of the Night, describing his experiences in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, was the remarkable result of such crossbreeding and is widely considered to be the finest example of the genre. In 1969 the work received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Mailer was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner’s Song, in the fiction category.

Often something of a maverick writer, Mailer, 84, once again breaks new ground in his latest work, The Castle in the Forest. With this book, his 12th novel and the first in a decade, he plumbs one of the devil’s greatest coups—the cosmic placement of Adolf Hitler on Earth.

He recreates der Fuehrer’s earliest years in a detailed portrait that includes everything from Hitler’s toilet training to the boy’s increasingly cruel disposition. Indeed, the book’s narrator is one of Satan’s factotums, who, by inhabiting the body of a Nazi SS officer, relays the sights and sounds of Hitler’s world—a Freudian milieu of incest and abuse overseen by God, man and the devil himself.

If any American writer is on familiar terms with the devil, it’s Mailer. As early as 1965 he speculated on the devil’s interest in the lives of powerful men in the novel, An American Dream. “God and the devil are very attentive to people at the summit,” he wrote then. “They bid for favors and exact revenge.”

Running alongside his interest in demonic forces is Mailer’s fascination with Hitler. As he told NPR’s Jacki Lyden in a recent interview, it’s been a life-long obsession. “You can’t be Jewish without thinking a great deal about Hitler all the time,” he said.

Mailer says his inspiration for The Castle didn’t come into “high focus” until 1998, when he read Ron Rosenbaum’s work, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, in which Rosenbaum examines post-war theories seeking to explain the origin and nature of Hitler’s evil. “I was immensely stimulated by the book,” Mailer told Lyden. To be sure, readers will find Mailer’s view of Hitler’s relationship to God and the devil both exceptional and unexpected.

Ron Rosenbaum: You were a kid during Hitler’s rise to power. Do you recall any childhood stories about him? Any early memories?
Norman Mailer: I had a good many because my mother talked about him often. She was not a well-educated woman, but she was quite intelligent and very instinctive, and from the word go she said ‘This man is a monster. He’s going to kill all the Jews.’ But I was nine years old. I was hearing that in 1932. It was like she knew it in her head, in advance. Well, she wasn’t the only Jew who knew that.

RR: When were you first aware of the magnitude of the Holocaust?
NM: I’m not sure I can pinpoint the date. I do remember that when the war ended and there was all that film of the concentration camps, and photographs in all the newspapers, and pictures of Germans brought by American soldiers to look at the concentration camps, and the Germans being profoundly shocked, and Americans being shocked. I remember my feeling at the time was ‘What’s the big surprise?’ So many people have known this for years.

But to answer your question more specifically, I think the real awareness came at the end of the war. Up to that point, I think many Americans may have thought, ‘Well, it’s propaganda.’ I don’t think it even rose to the level of muttering, but there might have been a certain amount of cynicism about the real existence of the horrors. And so when the horrors became manifest, and then could hardly be ignored, there was a great shock in America, which I think we’re still reacting to.

I remember writing at the time that one began to feel that one’s death might be meaningless. Why is it that if one’s death is meaningless, that’s so much more hideous than if one’s death is meaningful, since at that time, being an atheist, my whole feeling was when you’re dead, you’re dead.

Yet even then I was thinking, ‘No, no, no, there’s a big difference in how you die.’ And if your death is meaningless, if you died in an atomic holocaust, and were just wiped off the face of the earth, unremarked, unburied, unnoticed, that was somehow different than having a reasonable death, which might come logically at the end, not only from old age, but from one’s vicissitudes. That’s interesting to me. Death is important, and when death is without meaning, it’s dangerous.

RR: You said earlier, ‘At that time’ you were an atheist. How would you characterize yourself now?
NM: Well, I believe in an existential God, a God who is not all-powerful and not a law giver but a creative artist. In other words I believe that we’re God’s creation and God is as existential as we are, just doing the best that he or she can do. These have been my religious beliefs for the last several decades.

RR: Would you say that the Holocaust in some way gave death a—
NM: I think it made it spiritually meaningless and dangerous, yes. When I said death is dangerous, I meant spiritually dangerous. I didn’t even know what I meant by that at the time. Now I’d have more of an idea, but I think when you say spiritually dangerous, what you mean is you don’t know whether you’re endangering your soul, so to speak, or ignoring it, or that it isn’t a matter of moment for your soul. In other words you really don’t have any sense at all of where you might be and where you are going.

RR: Does being part of a collective mass murder in some way give death a meaning that it might not ordinarily have?
NM: No, the reverse. If you’re the victim of mass slaughter then your death is relatively meaningless. In other words it doesn’t come out of your efforts, it comes out of others. If you die, and when you die, and you’ve got, let’s say, gout and a bad back and arthritis, and wretched digestion and this and that, you can say to yourself, ‘Well, I had too much pleasure when I was young,’ and there can be a certain reason to it, which, even though you may be full of pain, makes your death more meaningful than if somebody just comes in and blasts your head off, or you’re poisoned in a gas chamber.

RR: Let’s turn to the Hitler book and your decision to leave behind the C.I.A. and Harlot’s Ghost [Mailer’s 1991 novel about the Central Intelligence Agency]. You’ve created a world in which Hitler interacts with agents of the devil.
NM: Well, I’m moving to a higher level of intelligence agency, yes. (Laughs) No, really, as I was writing the book—I didn’t start with that in mind [the world of devils conjured up in the new novel]—I was thinking it really does function like an intelligence agency. You have to understand that when you’re doing fiction the reward you have to count on is that at a certain point the work becomes real to you, the characters become as real as close relatives. And you get caught up in what you decided is their reality, so that while I was writing the book it wasn’t as if I was saying to myself, ‘Oh well, this is all just a fictional construct.’ No, no, no. The notion that there’s a diabolical underground that functions in everything, became most real to me, not in a paranoid sense—in other words I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night saying ‘Oh my God, the devils are approaching.’ It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like I became fascinated with the idea that “What if there is this diabolical structure like an intelligence agency?’, and I began to enjoy it and work with it. And I said to myself, in a funny way this is the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost. I never did write the continuation of the C.I.A., but all right, this is supra C.I.A.

RR: I see, in other words, the devils in The Castle in the Forest are analogous—
NM: Well not only to C.I.A., but K.G.B.

RR:—undercover diabolic intelligence agents of some sort.
NM: Well, they’re working in the same way. They’re looking to get all the information they can on what they call their clients, and relay that back to the headquarters, so to speak, to Satan. And in turn they are also trying to create various capers and mischiefs that would be effective for their cause.

RR: Forgive me for my curiosity, but what was it about my book in particular [Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil] that piqued your curiosity about him?
NM: The main thing was that you went into such mentally careful inquiries and divagations and you questioned every single thing that came your way, so I became fascinated with the various reactions of these people [you spoke with]. At the end of it the strongest feeling I had was that none of them have an explanation, and therefore there’s still no explaining Hitler. And I’ve been thinking for some time that the only explanation that would make sense would be supra-rational, that there’s no rational explanation of Hitler. The more one studies his life, the more difficult it is to put together a notion that he makes sense in any way. You take even a writer as good and thorough and highly developed as Joachim Fest, even he virtually says ‘there’s no explaining this.’ He doesn’t say we’ve got to believe in gods or devils, but he hints at it.

RR: The big problem is connecting the mundane facts of Hitler’s life and family with the magnitude of the crimes he committed.
NM: Yeah, yeah. You study his childhood and what I ended up with was the notion—and of course this is all fictional—that the devil hadn’t invested in just this single child, maybe the devil had invested in 2,000 people. One thing that God and the devil cannot know in advance is how an individual human will affect history.

RR: Because of free will?
NM: Yes, yes, and therefore God and the devil anticipate history, but they cannot dominate it. They are not superior to it. And if you use that as a premise, then the devil would have had a sense there are crises within European civilization that are so profound, and so potential, that tremendous things are going to happen, and I’m going to need people for that time. And so let’s say there were 2,000 possibilities of those who could become dictators, fuehrers, and Adolf was just one of them. My devil who’s raising him is just one of the devils raising these people.

RR: Did you start off expecting to do this fictional, historical speculation in one book and then find yourself so deeply immersed in the family background that you didn’t get beyond Hitler’s childhood?
NM: No, no, I knew from the beginning I wanted to do just the childhood. In fact, originally I was going to end the book when he was three years old. It was going to be more about his family than about him, mainly because of my age. If I were 50 years old, I think I would have said ‘I’ve got to do it all.’ But I know how long it takes to write a novel, and how much it demands. This is probably my last book, or next to last book. Now I’m hoping to do one more about Hitler and carry it possibly as far as the assumption of power in the 1930s. But I know I can’t do it all, it would take 20 years.

RR: Tell me a little bit about your process of investigating the history. You read my book, what else did you read?
NM: I think I read your book a couple years before I started work and it just stayed with me. It was a book that I enjoyed and long after the details had faded from my mind the feeling of the book remained. And a couple years later I was going to start the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost, and I had it all worked out in my mind that the main protagonist in Harlot, Hugh Montague, was going to become a Jungian. I was absolutely intrigued with the idea of Montague as a Jungian. And out of that—I hadn’t quite made the connection in my mind yet—he was going to travel to Russia as a Jungian, with some mad notion of converting the Soviet Union to Jung. So I would get excited about that and the book in mind was shaping it up. And then just as I was getting ready to start it, this little muse appeared in an apse of the literary church and wiggled her finger at me and said ‘No, no, no, you come with me.’ And off I went and decided to do Hitler in a week. It was weird. I had never had anything like that before.

RR: Really? In a week you sketched the whole thing out?
NM: No, I just made the decision in a week that I was going to write this and I started doing some heavy reading. I must have read for six months before I started writing. I was dipping into some books, and reading some entirely, and the more I read, the more I realized that the place I really had to start was with the childhood, because that was where there were only a few good books. Just three or four really counted, and none of them of course could do more than satisfy a little bit. I thought this is really a proper ground for the novel, because you can come up with an imaginary construct that might be as close to reality as any historian with just a few facts.

RR: With regard to your use of history, one of the things that pleased me was that you refused the temptation of the theory that Hitler had Jewish blood. What was your thinking about that?
NM: It just seemed that on the basis of what I could learn, which I admit was skimpy, that the evidence was not preponderant on that side, but on the other side. Obviously, I’m not an authority on it. No one is. And I could be dead wrong and Hitler could’ve been part Jewish, and that would’ve opened a whole set of other possibilities, but I think I stayed away from it because I felt, in a way, it was too easy. Put it this way—if I was going to make an error I would rather make the error on the side of his not being Jewish, because if you make the error the other way—and it is an error—you’re saying he’s part Jewish and you’re wrong. Look at the kind of bad thinking you’re going to be setting up historically for so many people to follow.

RR: I know. There’s a whole subculture of people who will follow that, some of them anti-Semites, some of them not.
NM: And some of them who are pro-Semites, who just say ‘Oh God, we’re Jewish and we’re responsible, too.’ But the point is it’s explosive without being convincing.

RR: Have you come to any gut feeling about the source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism?
NM: No, I’m looking forward to that in the next book. I have the feeling there are clues down the road that I’ll come across, but there is no quick answer, is there? It’s just amazing. The intensity really seems excessive. I don’t want to speculate yet, because I haven’t really—it’s hard to explain, but we are a little bit like detectives, literary detectives. And so we pick up little bits and pieces of evidence here and there, and we’re waiting for a picture to be formed, and until the picture forms, we don’t want to commit. I’m sure there were probably episodes in his adolescence, just simple cases of rejection from Jews, which probably had an awful lot to do with it. By the way, let me ask you a question: Did you have to deal at all with the possibility that Hitler was very homosexual at points of his life?

RR: I addressed that when a book came out about two or three years ago. I wrote an appraisal for Slate and my feeling was that it all came down, again, to an uncorroborated story by someone who changed his testimony two or three times about some incident in a hayloft during World War I, that may or may not have happened.
NM: And then there was Ernst Roehm [commander of the Nazi storm troopers] …

RR: Well, certainly there was Roehm, and certainly there was a cadre of homosexuals within his SA [storm troopers]. I tend to think that there might be something to what [the historian] John Lukacs has to say, and he’s virtually the only one who says, ‘Well, maybe Hitler was just not that interested in sex, or afraid of the embarrassment of a failed heterosexual encounter.’
NM: Yeah, it’s possible but I don’t know. I’m taken with [the homosexual speculation] because it explains a lot about him. I also think that at a certain point he was absolutely without sex, except for whatever he had with what’s her name [Geli Raubal]. I think it’s much harder to understand him if he has no sex life than if he has some that’s reasonably deep and perverse. As a novelist, I obviously lean toward the latter. Put it this way, it opens more possibilities.

RR: Which raises the question—
NM: Of the novel versus history?

RR: Yeah. What is your feeling: That the novel should go as far as it can and conjecture, or how much should it be tethered to reality?
NM: Obviously, there’s a good deal more freedom in the novel. But really, what I think makes a novel great—or very good—is that you create an imaginary construct of reality that may not have any congruence with any actual historical fact. And yet, if the novel is good enough, in the end what is created is a mental reality that is very useful for others to contemplate when they’re reading history. In other words, it’s almost as if this is not the way it happened, but keep this in your mind when you’re reading about what did happen, because it may offer insights that you wouldn’t have just by sticking to the facts.

RR: Why was Nietzsche so prominent in your [novel’s] bibliography?
NM: Oh, he’s a great writer, and one of the ironies of being a great writer like Nietzsche is precisely that you’re so good on the one hand, and on the other hand there’s so much damage you can do. When you get someone like Hitler reading Nietzsche, you’ve got trouble. But Nietzsche is a great writer, and so I devoured him at one point. The trouble is at my age I don’t remember everything too well. (Laughs) In other words it stays in me as a set of attitudes. If you read a good book, it does affect your attitude forever, but what you don’t have is the immediate recall of the intimate details that are fun to talk about.

RR: Has spending all this time writing about Hitler changed your view of evil?
NM: One of the things that is just absolutely fascinating is the kind of things that are going on now in American politics. Compared to the Nazis I don’t think that it’s even a one on a scale of ten. But nonetheless you feel echoes of what they were doing in terms of all the little petty lies, the petty double-crosses, the manipulation of the public. Karl Rove is no Goebbels, and we mustn’t over-exaggerate it. But nonetheless, the kind of techniques that have been used by the Bush administration, in small [dimensions], and I repeat that, in small, do have faint echoes. I’m not calling them Nazis mind you, they’re not Nazis. They’re functioning politicians in a democracy—but what struck me is how much of politics consists of chicanery and mendacity and manipulation and petty distortions. And of course the Nazis were so extraordinarily good at that—much, much better than the Bushies. But nonetheless, the Bushies, and for that matter the Democrats too, have expressed echoes of those old days.

RR: You believe in a struggle within us, between good and evil?
NM: I really believe that good and evil are present in all of us all the time. I think it’s an ongoing war. It isn’t that I think that good and evil determine everything, and we are just little patsies in the middle, as it was in the Middle Ages, when good and evil determined all, and human beings didn’t dare to raise their noses from the ground. Now, on the contrary, we’re a third force as humans. We have developed immensely since the Middle Ages in our sense of self-importance. We feel we’re tremendously important, which is one of the reasons why I think there’s such a detestation, almost visceral, among intellectuals in talking about God and the devil.

RR: And the detestation you speak of results from—
NM: It diminishes humans, and right now there’s a tendency for humans to take themselves more seriously than ever before.

RR: And your existential theology in a way includes the idea that our behavior affects the fortunes of God and the devil.
NM: Absolutely. It’s a three-way war.

RR: Would you say that Hitler and the Holocaust, in that particular war, was a defeat for God?
NM: I think it was Satan’s great attempt to take over our part of the universe.

RR: In some ways, was it a success?
NM: I don’t know. The damage is there to be measured for a couple centuries to come. It did enormous damage to civilization, there’s no question. The real argument might be, maybe the damage was already implicit. Maybe it was in the seed of civilization, or if not in the seed, it was certainly in its ongoing development. If it hadn’t been Hitler, it might have been in some other hideous form. After all, nuclear warfare was coming. The final measure of the damage done by World War II is still utterly beyond us, I think.

RR: You ask the question of whether the seed might be in civilization. Might the seed also be in human nature?
NM: Of course, human nature and civilization being closely related.

RR: Do you want to respond to the argument that some people have made about your use of devils in the novel, that you’re essentially saying ‘the devil made me [Hitler] do it?’
NM: I really think that’s an example of half-assed intellectuals making snap judgments. What I’m talking about is exactly the opposite. Although the novel wasn’t written as a comedy, there are comic elements in it because the devils work so hard to make small changes in humans. So it isn’t ‘the devil made me do it.’ I’m totally opposed to that notion: the devil swoops in, seizes your soul forever, and off he or she goes with your soul and you never have it again. No, that’s medieval. No, I’m thinking it’s quite the opposite, that there’s an immense work that goes on, step by step, day by day, episode by episode, over decades. The devil doesn’t win a soul overnight. He thinks of them as clients, and for me that’s a good notion for the relationship.

RR: Who’s the client again?
NM: The human who’s chosen is the client and he works on them all the time. The devil is trying to make him do it, but the humans are still very much in the center. I’m also saying that it doesn’t matter how human or how diabolical Hitler is. What are we talking about absolving? The idea of absolving Hitler because he didn’t do it, the devil made him do it, I think is just a contradiction in terms, it’s ridiculous. Suppose Hitler was one-third devil and two-thirds human, or that Hitler was two-thirds devil and one-third human, you’re still dealing with the same entity, who was absolutely evil, whatever or whoever it was.

RR: In a way you’re saying it’s not the devil who made us do it, but we give power to the devil, or we have the power to give power to the devil?
NM: Well, I’m not even sure of that. I think there are so many cases where indeed people would give power to the devil; they beseech the devil, pray to the devil. It’s those spaces where the devil slips in.

RR: Right. I’m not saying that specifically one says ‘I’m going to give power to the devil,’ but by betraying one’s best nature one does just that.
NM: Well, there are all sorts of ways it happens, which is why to me it’s a rich concept. It doesn’t narrow anything. The idea that ‘the devil made me do it’—that’s a particularly narrow concept and has almost nothing to do with reality as I see it.

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil and in 2004 he edited the anthology Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism. His latest book, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups illuminates some of the most controversial debates among Shakespearean scholars today. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He writes a cultural affairs column for Slate.

 

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