Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST” by Norman Mailer (first published 2007)
Dear Normie,
You don’t mind my calling you Normie, do you? Your mum - sorry, mom – and your dad called you Nachem Malech Mailer and that sounds a perfectly good name to me, but you had to Anglicise it as Norman Kingsley Mailer and I’m damned if I understand why. Did you want to fit in with the crowd? I think you did, didn’t you? I mean you were always trying to join the hipsters or trying to be a boxer or a gangster or showing how you could consort with crims (and glamourise them) and telling women to get back into the kitchen as if you were trying to prove something. It always sounded to me very like that mummy’s boy Ernest Hemingway trying to be all macho by shooting animals and catching big fish. Normie the tough guy? Nah – it never quite worked, and a lot of the real hipsters (especially black jazz musicians) saw you as a bit of a clown.
Anyway, Normie, how’s it going in the land of the dead? I don’t really believe you’re going to read any of this because you kicked the bucket in 2007 when you were 84, and frankly I like the fact that you’re dead. I’m just being realistic here, not vindictive. If you were still around, you’d probably try to punch me out, the way you did with a number of people, or maybe you’d stab me and almost kill me the way you did with your second wife. Speaking of wives, you went through six of them, not to mention a horde of casuals and groupies. I’m told that you were basically good to your nine children, so good for you; but a guy who burns through so many women is clearly lacking in real intimacy, love, commitment or respect. Oops! I’ve used words that reveal me as a square, right? But I’m still right to see you as a guy who thought love began and ended with an orgasm and that was it.
God, how fragile you were – how ready you were to take offence and wanted to bash people! The funny thing is, I was sometimes on your side when it came to such fracas. Yes, Gore Vidal was an irritating, smug member of the WASP ascendancy, and he richly deserved to be taken down. Part of me wishes you’d head-butted or punched him harder. But then you were really falling for the smug guy’s trap, weren’t you? Snide Vidal wanted to rile you up so that you would lose your temper and he could play the innocent victim. It’s an old scenario easily played against short fuses. Better to treat such provocateurs with silent contempt.
By this stage, Normie, readers of this blog will be losing their patience with me. Haven’t I just thrown a whole lot of ad hominem at you without getting on to your work? Okay, here’s your crime sheet. When I was in my twenties, in the 1970s, I read The Naked and the Dead and thought it was terrific. I mean a war story up there with The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front and a few others. I still see the importance of your closing word – “Hotdog!” - which sums up a lot about American culture. But guess what? That was probably the best thing you wrote and you were only 25. Later, also in the 1970s, I was alert enough to current affairs to read your political commentaries The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and they seemed important at the time. But your “new journalism”, your “creative non-fiction” quickly became a big fat ego trip when you pushed yourself forward as the main character in your reportage. You didn’t write so much about important current affairs as you did about how you felt, and what you wanted other people to think. Your supposed interest in the world’s big problems was just a platform to advertise yourself. As for your critiques of feminism – okay, there was a lot to criticise in feminism as there is in any movement; but your way of dealing with it was blunt, boorish and often downright stupid. The Prisoner of Sex indeed!
Worse than all this, though, you succumbed to the dreaded American disease of literary elephantiasis. You made your books BIGGER and LONGER as if you were trying to fill up an empty prairie - that horrible delusion that if it’s BIG and LONG it must be an important book. I don’t need to be told there are many great and canonical novels that run to many hundreds of pages (Clarissa if you can stand it; War and Peace; Moby Dick; A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the last of which I admit to not having read). So trying to show your chops and join the immortals, you produced Harlot’s Ghost (1300 pages), Ancient Evenings (unreadable, but relatively modest at 700 pages) and The Executioner’s Song (1050 pages in the copy that sits on my shelf). Okay. Calm down. I know you won a Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song, and Joan Didion and others liked it; but I also know enough about critics and book awards to know that their judgements are not definitive.
So there you see, Normie baby, is my overview of your literary career – a potentially good writer who got lost in opinionated brawls, verbal thuggery and grandiosity. But I’m nothing if not forgiving and when I get the chance I do occasionally look out for books by you which I have not read.
And so at last we arrive at our destination. Some months back, I happened to be passing through the small city of Whanganui (alright – you’ve never heard of it - it’s in New Zealand) and I noticed there was a large sale of second-hand books going on in a community hall. I plunged in and bought three or four books for peanuts. One of them was The Castle in the Forest (silly title which you only half-explain in your coda) - your very last novel published the year you died. I bought it and have finally got around to reading it.
Normie, it did not impress me.
Very well, you wanted to write a trilogy about the whole personal life of Adolf Hitler, but you produced only this (by your standards) relatively modest first volume of 467 pages covering the boy Adolf, his ancestry, his babyhood, childhood and adolescence up to the age of about 18. Like poor old Frank Norris, you never completed your trilogy.
Now here’s my problem Normie. Your novel is fiction based on fact. The fact comes from the copious history books you consulted as listed in your very long bibliography. But the fiction comes from your fertile brain. This means we have many verifiable things and many unverifiable (fictitious) things, which leaves us less enlightened about the boy Hitler than worthwhile non-fiction books have already told us. Yes, there was apparently incest among some of Hitler’s forebears. Yes, Hitler’s father Alois was a pompous and violent brute who liked to see himself as a person of importance because he had been an official in Austria’s Customs service. Yes, Adolf’s elder half-brother Alois Junior got so tired of being beaten up by his father that he ran away and never returned. Yes, Alois’s (third) wife Klara, Adolf’s mother, was probably a close relative of Alois – maybe a cousin – so there’s more incest. Yes, Klara seems to have mollycoddled little Adolf (whom she nicknamed “Adi”). Yes, young Adolf was arrogant, self-centred, lazy in his schoolwork and often called out by his teachers. Yes, Alois often beat up the boy Adolf, and relented a little bit only when Adolf’s other brother Edmund died and left Adolf as Alois’s only (male) heir. Yes, adolescent Hitler did like to play at war games with groups of boys he gathered around him and he tended to be the boss of such games. All this can be found in the work of reliable historians.
But Normie, where do all the sex and scatological scenes come from? From your imagination, amigo. I grant you that some of the Hitler (originally Hiedler) family might have had ropey and peasant ways, and its likely that late 19th – early 20th century rural-and-peasant Austria wasn’t the most hygienic of places. Even so, why do you fixate so much on excrement with your scenes of toddler Adolf shitting on the floor or sofa; or of Adolf’s brother taunting him with a fresh turd; or of Adolf ripping up and crapping on his school diploma? And why do you theorise that Klara worshipped and admired baby Adolf’s anus? And what about adolescent Adolf masturbating regularly, to an image of a terrorist, as he nurtures his one descended testicle? And what of all that stuff about Adolf sucking at his mother’s dugs when he was too old to do so? And how about the scene where you have Klara and Alois rutting in a very perverse way? And then there’s your character Der Alte, who seems to practise sodomy with Alois Junior and violates other people in perverse ways. I assume, Normie, that you were trying to set up an atmosphere of degeneracy and perversity in order to explain how Adolf grew up to be the perverse, genocidal maniac that he became. But I have a counter-thought. Many thousands of people have been mistreated in childhood and become warped and/or criminals as adults; some may even have been the products of incest; but very, very few have become mesmeric speakers and leaders of huge crowds. Hitler’s evil cannot be explained by the nature of his childhood alone. I’m sure you would have elaborated on this in volumes two and three; but as you didn’t get to write them we are stuck with an unsatisfactory explanation.
At which point, Normie, you might protest (or in your case bellow) that you DID provide a theory of evil. After all, you chose to have the whole story of little Adolf narrated by a devil working for Satan (known in this novel as “the Maestro”), who is part of the army eternally fighting against God (known by the devils as DK, meaning “Dummkopf”, because God is seen as stupid for creating the universe so flawed). So there is a Manichean explanation of evil (not that you use this term Normie). You have an eternal battle between Good and Evil, equal in strength and neither fated to definitively win. It’s a diligent devil who grooms the young Adolf. Frankly, I don’t think you really believe this, Normie, because you’re not a religious person and you don’t subscribe to such mythologies. But you are Jewish so you must certainly know the first chapters of Genesis and you know how to read metaphorically. Forget the mythic garden and the snake, but remember the lesson that human beings, thanks to their power of free will, are morally flawed and capable of doing great evil. It’s a more coherent explanation of evil than devils battling angels.
I’ve raised the question so I’ll have to push on. This Jewish matter. It’s amazing that you hardly ever mention antisemitism in the 19th century Austria you depict. Were you saving that issue for the following books you never lived to write? I’ll charitably assume that was going to be the case, but it is a hole in The Castle in the Forest. I’m interested, too, that you break off your narrative to insert 44 pages giving an account of the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. What were you up to here? It seems completely divorced from the boy Hitler. I’ll take a wild guess. Were you going, in later parts of your unfinished trilogy, to discuss how Tsarist Russia was the most ferocious antisemitic country in Europe before Hitler came along? Just a guess, Normie.
And I’ll add another little fiction of yours. Every so often you insert pointers to Adolf’s adulthood. It is an historically verified fact that Alois at one time took to bee keeping, but that is all historians know about it. You, however, have Alois discoursing on bees to little Adolf, saying that the lazy and unproductive bees have to be exterminated as should be the case in any orderly society; and later we have Alois destroying a hive by gassing the bees. Forcing the issue with a pretty obvious case of forewarning, right?
Sorry Normie. Your trilogy might have added up to something, but The Castle in the Forest is so flawed in so many ways that it’s hard to take it seriously. One of your fails… and don’t remind me that it was a bestseller on its first release. But (nice person that I am), I’m not chastising you too much. Fictitious versions of Hitler are fiendishly difficult to carry off. I still think Richard Hughes’s The Fox in the Attic came nearest to the prize, with his portrait of Hitler as the provincial fanatic cursing the decadent city of Berlin. Others, like A.N.Wilson in his Winnie and Wolf, have fallen into comic caricature in which Hitler’s greatest fault is that he farts so much.
Not exactly subtle, Normie, but then neither are you,
Best wishes whether you are in Heaven, Hell or Nowhere – or at least too far away to land a punch.
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