The Castle in the Forest: A Novel (Paperback)

Norman Mailer once said that moderation would be the last virtue he would master and it was with that in mind that I took the opportunity, several years ago, to ask him what seems, in retrospect, like a silly question: had he mastered moderation? Had he mellowed? In my own defense, it was hard to imagine how he couldn’t have. He was in his late seventies then; he walked with two canes; he was arthritic, hard of hearing, and having trouble seeing. His lecture, in front of a large respectful crowd at a Montreal synagogue, was a bit convoluted and hard to follow. But when he answered questions from the audience, he was his more familiar combative, engaging, full-of-himself self. As for my question, his reply was an optimistic no: “I really hope that I haven’t become too moderate. It works for some people. But if I became moderate I’d be as dull as an old piece of cheese. I hope I can keep my anger alive.”
In my experience, writers are more likely to tell the truth in their work than in casual conversation, but if I didn’t believe Mailer then, I do now. The Castle in the Forest, Mailer’s first novel in a decade, is an impudent, ambitious, and often bewildering book. In other words, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a man who once referred to himself as “an absolute egomaniac.” It is Mailer chasing what he has been chasing from the very start-from the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948-greatness. The Castle in the Forest is, among other things, just one more manifestation of Mailer’s White Whale.
There has always been a strain among male American writers-from Herman Melville to Jonathan Franzen-toward the grandiose. However, most don’t advertise the fact. One constant in Mailer’s remarkable and often remarkably uneven career has been his willingness not just to go for broke but to announce it. He said once that “if a writer is really good enough and bold enough” then he will inevitably “write himself out onto the end of a limb that the world will saw off.”
Well, the sound you hear, accompanying the publication of Mailer’s new novel, just may be that limb cracking at long last.
Of course, Mailer, who’s eighty-four and has some 36 books to his credit, can hardly be surprised if he’s headed for a fall. He has gone looking for trouble before. He has tested literary forms in nonfiction novels like Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song, and messed with icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jesus. He has raised trash-talking to a literary art: dismissing his betters (after his third novel The Deer Park was published in 1955, Mailer famously wrote Hemingway a letter, essentially daring Papa not to reply; Hemingway didn’t), his contemporaries (Mailer’s occasionally televised fights with Gore Vidal are legendary), and his latest rivals (of Franzen’s The Corrections, Mailer, in an extraordinary case of the pot not recognizing the kettle, said, “the greatest joy to lift from the spine of the book is the author’s vanity at how talented he is”). He stabbed one of his six wives, ran for mayor of New York, helped get a murderer out of jail, who then went on to kill again, and has ranted about everything from Vietnam to condoms (he won’t use them and won’t recommend them).
He has always been obsessed with evil, too, and has dedicated very long books to the likes of Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald. But in The Castle in the Forest Mailer raises the bar and the risk-factor by setting his sights on the early days of one of history’s most enduring and perhaps least understood villains, Adolf Hitler. There have been books written and movies made about the young Hitler before, but the twist here-twisted might be a better word-is that a significant portion of Mailer’s novel focuses on the time before Hitler was born. It’s a kind of a portrait of a megalomaniac as a gleam in his father’s eye.
Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father, has a perpetual gleam. Egotistical, an insatiable womaniser, he is, in many ways, a typical Mailer protagonist: insufferable but curiously compelling. With Alois, Mailer is at his most uncompromising and his best: every crude impulse, Alois’s lust, envy, greed, ambition, blasphemousness, is described in detail. He is without redeeming features, and yet Mailer forces us, often against our will, to sympathise with Alois. It’s an unpleasant but unexpectedly insightful experience. We know that if Alois had not been the way he was, then Hitler might not have been either. And we know the consequences of this hypothetical. We know all this, yet we can’t quite bring ourselves to blame Alois for what even he could never have foreseen.
Mailer’s portrait of Hitler’s doting mother, Klara, isn’t as complex. But then neither is Klara. She is a simple woman, who is, despite her better instincts, attracted to the much older Alois. There are lots of reasons for her to avoid him, not the least of which is that they are, most likely, father and daughter. That they don’t know this, or perhaps don’t care to know it, is an indication of the perverse nature of the world Mailer is describing here.
It is a marriage made in hell, and the fate of its progeny is of unending interest to Mailer’s narrator, who turns out to be a demon. When we first meet Dieter or D.T., he’s preparing to slip out of his human form-he’s an S.S. officer serving under Heinrich Himmler just as the Second World War is ending-and reveal that he is, in reality, a minor bureaucrat in hell, working for Satan, called the Maestro in the novel. Dieter’s assignment has been the Hitlers, and he takes us back to the mid-19th century to share his inside information on how Adolf Hitler came to be Adolf Hitler. Early on, Dieter says:

I am ready to speak of the obsession that revolved around Adolf Hitler. Yet what brings more of a dark cloud to one’s mood than living with a question that will not return an answer . . . Where is the German who does not try to understand him? Yet where can you find one who is content with the answer?
I must surprise you. I do not have this particular trial. I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him . . . I know him top to bottom. To borrow from the Americans, given their rough grasp of vulgarity, I am prepared to say: “Yes. I know him from asshole to appetite.”

Dieter also has inside information on hell and spends a lot of time in The Castle in the Forest detailing office politics in the underworld. There is, for example, the institutionalised habit of referring to God as the Dummkoff. As well, there are procedures to follow. Things are tough all over and hell is no exception. Satan is surprisingly frugal. But then, as Dieter points out, he doesn’t have God’s big budget to work with. Even with a candidate as promising as Hitler, caution is urged. “When it comes to turning a child into a client, we follow a reliable rule. We move slowly,” Dieter explains. “While an incestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities . . . still we move slowly.”
So, it turns out, does Mailer. At one point, Dieter advises readers to skip ahead 47 pages (he leaves Alois, Klara, and Adolf to oversee the downfall of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II.) This is Mailer trying to be playful, but playfulness has never been one of his strengths. The joke backfires. The section is, indeed, a pointless digression. (Dieter’s digressions often seem more mischievous than meaningful. I also would have preferred to see him as an actor in the novel rather than a disembodied and mostly intrusive presence.)
Pace is one problem in The Castle in the Forest; tone is another. You can spoof Nazi history (listen to Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler and Germany”), but it had better be an all-out spoof. Mailer tries instead to mix burlesque with a serious examination of evil. The result can be off-putting. The Hitler family comes off looking a little too whimsical, a Teutonic version of the Addams Family-happy-go-lucky, harmless denizens of the dark side.
Still, there are genuinely chilling moments. Because Mailer is so determined to go places it’s hard to imagine other authors going-into subjects like incest and excrement; into the head and heart of history’s most determined psychopath, for that matter-his imaginative speculations on how Hitler was a product of both nature and nurture has a surprising and disturbing authenticity. We get, at times, a little too close for comfort.
The foreshadowing in the novel is also disturbing. For example, Alois becomes a beekeeper and describes to his attentive son how bees practice a kind of instinctive eugenics-how easily, the cripples in the hive are made to perish. The lesson, we realise, is sinking in. There’s also a scene near the end of the novel when Adolf, insanely jealous, plots his younger, more loved brother’s death. And then there are moments like the one when Adolf is flattered by a weird mentor, who tells his protégé: “‘Adolf this will be your century . . . I know it. You will do wonderful things in time to come.’”
Nevertheless, in the end, Mailer’s white whale-the complicated nature of evil-eludes him. Of course, it’s inevitable that it would. Mailer is smart enough and has been around long enough to know that better than anyone. In a recent consideration of Mailer’s career, published in the New York Times, critic Lee Siegel talked about one of Mailer’s novels as “a head-butt against eternity.” In fact, all his books are. They are all examples of a writer whose reach inevitably exceeds his grasp. How could it not? But at a time when novelists keep ducking under historical cover or when, as Siegel says, we are “drowning in the literature of the commonplace,” Mailer should be celebrated precisely for his grand and, yes, grandiose schemes. The Castle in the Forest is the latest “head-butt” then; it’s also proof that Mailer not only hasn’t changed, but that he’s not planning to any time soon.
Joel Yanofsky (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Starred Review. Mailer did Jesus in The Gospel According to the Son; now he plumbs the psyche of history's most demonic figure in this chilling fictional chronicle of Hitler's boyhood. Mailer tells the story through the eyes of Dieter, a devil tasked by Satan (usually called the Maestro) with fostering Hitler's nascent evil, but in this study of a dysfunctional 19th-century middle-class Austrian household, the real presiding spirit is Freud. Young Adolph (often called Adi) is the offspring of an incestuous marriage between a coarse, domineering civil servant and a lasciviously indulgent mom. The boy duly develops an obsession with feces, a fascination with power, a grandiose self-image and a sexually charged yen for mass slaughter (the sight of gassed or burning beehives thrills him). Dieter frets over Hitler's ego-formation while marveling at the future dictator's burning gaze, his ability to sway weak minds and the instinctive führerprinzip that emerges when he plays war with neighborhood boys—talents furthered by Central Europe's ambient romantic nationalism. Mailer's view of evil embraces religions and metaphysics, but it's rooted in the squalid soil of toilet-training travails and perverted sexual urges. The novel sometimes feels like a psychoanalytic version of The Screwtape Letters, but Mailer arrives at a somber, compelling portrait of a monstrous soul. (Jan. 23)
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