The anality of evil

Norman Mailer
THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST
480pp. Little, Brown. £17.99.
978 0 316 86133 5
US: Random House. $27.95.
978 0 394 53649 1

In his preface to Music for Chameleons (1980), Truman Capote recalled that Norman Mailer had initially criticized his concept of the “nonfiction novel” as a “failure of the imagination”. Of course, it is typical of Mailer that he then went on to embrace this apparently unsuccessful medium for much of his career, culminating in Oswald’s Tale (1995), a forensic treatment of the killer of President Kennedy, which represented Mailer’s most successful sustained piece of writing for nearly fifty years. His recent, more traditionally novelistic efforts have also relied on a close connection to the real world, from Harlot’s Ghost (1991) to The Gospel According to the Son (1997), which gave us his versions of the CIA and Christ respectively. In fact, we may consider that Mailer is attracted to the mingling and mangling of life and fiction (what Nabokov called an “insult to both art and truth”) precisely because it can be so tellingly unsatisfying. After all, “it is impossible”, he has said, “to talk of a great artist without speaking of failure”. And in The Castle in the Forest we are continually reminded that Mailer and failure are never more than a half-rhyme apart.

Certainly, the idea behind this novel suggests hubris on the part of its creator: an account of the young life of Adolf Hitler, narrated by a devil charged with developing him into a “client”, which is to say one “hell of a monster”. But instead of “the cosmic drama of an ongoing conflict between Satan and the Lord” – the frankly frightening prospect of Mailer doing Milton – what we get is a bravely domestic account of the “small events and minor adventures of the Hitler family”. The simple premiss is that Hitler was an “incestuary”, the product of inbreeding in the Austrian backwoods. Mailer has extended the plausible hypothesis that Hitler’s father, Alois, shared a grandfather with Hitler’s mother, Klara, and postulated that Alois was also Klara’s father following a moment of “apocalyptic intercourse”. If it is unclear how this can all be made to relate directly to Hitler’s subsequent career, it does offer justification for what becomes an exhaustive investigation into that otherwise mundane product of the Austrian lower-middle class.

Such an approach represents, in theory, a neat reversal of Tolstoy’s remark that “Ivan Ilyich’s life was most ordinary, and therefore most terrible”; one way of understanding the terrible adulthood of Hitler might be through those aspects of the world that contributed to his ordinary life as a child. It is also a means of grounding a novel that relies on the supernatural for its narrative framework. Indeed, as its title hints, The Castle in the Forest might be categorized as a “nonfiction fairy tale”: a typically brash piece of Maileresque genre-bending, combining the story of a childhood with the form of a childhood story.

Regrettably, some of the flicker of intellectual excitement caused by such a novel concept is extinguished by the novel itself. The problems begin with the narrator, who, from his Melvillean opening (“you may call me D.T.”), unnecessarily intrudes into the narrative at regular intervals: “to bring, therefore, a first explanation of the sinuosities, salients, dead ends, and recesses of our war, I am obliged to offer an outline of the forces we look to exert now on human society”. In contrast, say, with the “diabolical ventriloquism” of C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters (1942) – that sustained performance of ironic malice – Mailer only offers the devilish equivalent of a middle manager, full of humdrum humanity, as if determined to make paranormal creation as unexceptional as possible. So, D. T. is constantly concerned with fussing over his words (“be it said”; “be it understood”; “so to speak”) and musing over his metafictional status: “if it be asked once again how I can be aware of such a reaction when Alois is, after all, not my client, I will reiterate that on occasions we can enter the thoughts of humans who are closely related to one of our charges”.

This intended wordiness can have damaging consequences for the quality of the prose. Mailer once said that his style resided in the “tensile strength of the sentence”; The Castle in the Forest, alas, feels artificially bulked-out with writing that has been merely lengthened not strengthened over the course of its composition. Take these examples of inelegant variation, which appear in adjoining paragraphs: “the sound of wailing was still in their ears, a cacophony of whimpering, howling, bawling, blubbering, sorrowing and lamentation”; and “so many were sick in heart, sick in soul, sick in stomach, slime clinging to their spirit, lost in the vortex of a dream”. At such moments, the finished novel feels like an accidental palimpsest of all of its previous drafts, in which rejected phrases have reasserted themselves in the text like stubborn stains.

Mailer is also fond of euphemism, a technique that itself represents the substitution of length for strength. Sex is “traffic with the vulva”, “carnal ore”, “a nice wet surprise”, “a priapic gift”; Alois’s restless penis is variously “the Hound”, “a proud bulge ready to speak for itself”, “an upsurge in the happy region below his navel” and a “happy, blood-filled organ”. This is perhaps inevitable given the novel’s lingering preoccupation with penetration, or that “ham-handed naturalness of the most agreeable work of all – that hard-breathing, feverish meat-heavy run up the hills of physical joy”. Such regularly ham-fisted attempts to capture carnality are testament to the author’s desire to grab hold of the material reality within the “lodes of perversity to be found in the human flesh”. They form a series of indigestible, “meat-heavy” sketches on the subject: from “the meats, body slaps and fats of the occasion” to the “wonderful array of meats and juices – such a panoply of flesh in miniature – this offering of archways and caverns and lips”.

Such heaped loads of perversity not only allow Mailer to show us how unembarrassed (and therefore embarrassing) he can be, but also represent a too straightforward means of fleshing out his fictional world. The author is guilty of a facile Freudianism, in which sex is used as a shorthand for real life itself: “breasts, penis, anus; powerful stuff; integral”, as the boxing promoter Don King says in The Fight (1975). This is also true of the constant references to the “excretory dramas” of young Hitler, which again focus on the tangible aspects of his existence: the “monumental turd . . . dark, doughty, and as forbidding as a primeval club”, etc. Mailer would probably argue that there is some benefit in the fact that the narrator “engages caca itself” in this manner: it reduces the “monster” of history to the common denominator of a physical process; it gives us the anality of evil, as it were. And it may, rather subversively, make us conscious of the “guts and smear” of the man who went on to create what the author has termed the “worldwide sewer of the concentration camps”.

Mailer’s failure comes, then, not necessarily in being potty-mouthed, but being so relentlessly po-faced about it; we cannot take this writing as seriously as it takes itself. For the novel to capture the flawed humanity of its characters, it arguably needs the most human sense of all: a sense of humour. We see that Norman Mailer is – despite his best intentions – no Henry Miller, who was able to recognize the essential ridiculousness of physical acts at the same time as their materiality.

The seriousness of the narrator as he enumerates the Hitler family’s urges and oozings is, we feel, exactly that of the author himself. We come to regret the constant use of exclamation, for example, which pockmarks the narration (as it does Mailer’s non-fiction writing): “let this bastard remain a bastard!”; “too bad!”; “at what length he went on!”, and so on. Exclamation marks are – of course – visible reminders of a writer’s unfunniness, like miniature distress flares sent up to reveal a helplessness in the face of its own humourlessness.

They form part of the novel’s overall sacrifice of stylishness for substantiality. Whereas Mailer once proclaimed that “style is character”, his notes for the bibliography here reveal an axiomatic shift to “character is sequence”. This swerve is exactly captured in the plot of The Castle in the Forest, which seeks to rely on the studious development of his well-researched characters: Alois Hitler moving from priapic civil servant to brooding, discontented pensioner; Klara Hitler, from impressionable niece to rather magnificent matriarch; young “Adi” from war-gaming infant to awkward teenager. But while Hitler’s mother and father are convincingly imagined in this way, it is the formative child who remains hidden from the reader. Some influences on the future man are swiftly described, but to little purpose: the sign of a swastika on the doorway to his school; the local blacksmith who lectures on the need for a “will of iron”; and (most ridiculously) his sexual arousal over a man’s “small mustache, fixed to his upper lip just below his nostrils, a dark little daub of a mustache”.

There is also extended reference to his father’s bees, which – as Shakespeare noted – “teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom”. To Hitler they teach the lesson of “no charity whatsoever. You will not find one bee in any hive who is too weak to work”; and, inevitably, he learns that when the bees are no longer profitable, you gas them. At this point, the narrator leaps in: “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”. Herein lies another problem at the heart of the novel: either it should be a forthright attempt at truly understanding Hitler, or the author might as well have picked an entirely different group of Austrians to describe. In Oswald’s Tale, Mailer made clear that “to understand a person is to comprehend his reasons for action”. The Castle in the Forest is no “Hitler’s Tale”: we never really learn why he became the man he did. Building up a sequence of events, we learn, is not the equivalent of creating a convincing character.

However, such frustrations are thankfully tempered by moments of enjoyment: The Castle in the Forest is normal Mailer in that respect. First, there is perverse pleasure in his moments of dependable excess, both in the over-physical descriptions or musings on the nature of the soul (his well-known trait of “psyche-babble”). As an example, here is Mailer’s definition of satanic conversion: “the psychic abyss of a would-be suicide . . . transmogrified into promontories of ego”. Or of patriotism: “the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification!” (his exclamation).

More seriously, the novel can show occasions of admirable restraint. Take the skilful use of a metaphorical technique borrowed from traditional folk tales, as a means of making the supernatural seem real. We might call it the super-natural simile, which is clunkily convincing: “he could be as mean as a winter wind”; “as unhappy by now as a crow with a broken wing”; “her guilt in the morning was as heavy as a waterlogged tree”. We see Mailer at his best when he balances the physical and psychical in single acts of successful description, at which point his style becomes his strength, if only for a time: “he had no wish to be entangled for the best part of an hour with endearments that sat on his skin like spiderwebs”; “he laid himself open to the soaring voice of each pain, as rich in amplitude as a choral group. In truth, he was exhibiting the saintliness of a sinner”.

Mailer, as a writer, has that dual aspect of saintly sinner himself. The Castle in the Forest is a typically quixotic attempt to give the world a humanized Hitler, as told by a non-human narrator. It is a book that no other writer of Mailer’s stature would have dared to attempt, and we must give credit for the bravery of its conception. It fits Emerson’s definition of heroism as being “scornful of being scorned”: Norman Mailer is undoubtedly heroic in the Emersonian sense; this latest work shows that it will always be, one feels, the heroism of a heroic failure.

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Stephen Abell is a freelance writer living in London.