Sitting across from Norman Mailer, whom I’ve known for close to 30 years now, I’m struck by how regal he looks. This is despite the two distinctly different canes resting at his side and that he appears smaller, sitting in his favorite interview chair. The chair has a fanned headrest that gives him this sense of a white rattan halo. Over his shoulder, Provincetown harbor is choppy, the moored boats dancing and bobbing in the afternoon light. He looks older each time I see him, but then we begin talking and that extraordinary mind of his, that can be simultaneously combative, genial, humorous, and never without hypothesis or opinion, clicks in.
LEE: Are there some books that young writers shouldn’t write and some books older writers shouldn’t tackle either?
NM: The answer to that automatically is yes, but don’t ask me to name the books because it depends on the individual. Look, when a young writer tackles a book that is too big for their capacity at that point, it’s not necessarily a total loss. They can lose a lot of time, they can lose a lot of ego, they can really take a bath. But on the other hand, they learn a lot about themselves. So I would rarely discourage somebody from tackling some-thing that’s too big for him-unless I thought he was truly incompetent. But if I thought they had a fighting chance, I’d tend to encourage him. You learn more from defeats than victories, I’ve decided. Victories are wonderful for the ego, but they generally create the next fuckup. Unless you’re a real winner, but if you’re an in and out guy, like most of the people I know-including myself-then victories are dangerous. The ego gets swollen and it’s so hungry for victory and you tend to make mistakes. But in relation to that, books that old guys-I think for an old writer who’s been around and knows what he’s doing, there’s no book I would tell him not to try. Because you don’t know; you never know when you’re going to pop off. So you try.
LEE: Is it harder today to write the so-called “big book,” with all the com-petition for attention?
NM: Again, that question answers itself-absolutely. Much harder. I find that I’m drawn more to writing about the past for just that reason. In the past there weren’t the iPods and TV, and so there is a tendency for the figures to appear a little more clearly.
LEE: All right, let’s get to The Castle in the Forest. At the risk of being called a sycophant, I thought it was one hell of a read.
NM: Well, I’m glad. I’m really glad, because it’s going to get the worst reviews.
LEE: You think so?
NM: Well, not completely. But I’m going to get some.
LEE: I’d like to ask first about the genesis of this novel. Have you been thinking about this for some time?
NM: Yeah, you know what, Mike? I said the other day that I’d been thinking about it since I was nine years old. I don’t mean I was thinking of writing it, but I’ve been immensely aware of Hitler since I was nine for one simple reason: I was born in 1923, so in 1932, before he came into power, my mother, who was not an intellectual, but an intelligent, sensitive woman, full of feeling, and Jewish, of course. And she saw Hitler as a disaster for the Jews from the word go. And she used to suffer over him and when he came into power it made her very upset. So I grew up with the idea of Hitler as someone who was going to kill the Jews-and he succeeded by half. So I think in the background in my mind, all along, I should write about him sooner or later. I was going to do the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost, that I’ve been promising for years, and as I sat down to write it, it was almost as if this whisper came into my brain and said, “No, no, that’s not the book you’re going to do next, it’s this one.” And it was the idea of having the devil tell the story that brought it into focus for me.
LEE: You were lucky to get that whisper early on.
NM: I was getting ready to write a long book called Harlot’s Grave. I had it all figured out, must have spent a half year thinking about it in depth, and it was so funny that about a month before I was ready to begin this other voice came in and said, “No, not here-there.” And of course the idea was to tell it in the voice of the devil that made it possible. It enabled me to write a biography that was a fiction. The book is very accurate so far as you can make it out.
LEE: I want to ask you about some of that too. One of the levels of reading that I found so fascinating, given the subject is the childhood and adolescence of Hitler, is that this book is also very much a family saga.
NM: Yeah, oh yeah. Even if it hadn’t been Hitler, you’d have a novel there.
LEE: Did you feel compelled to couch the metaphysical aspects of the novel with that familial approach?
NM: You know, I sort of work-to put it in its lowest version-I push a pea with my nose. I’m a great believer in organic novels, in that you don’t decide in advance where you’re going. You let the characters point the way. I remember once-this is a coincidence-but it may indicate what I’m trying to say. At one point I was directing a play at Actor’s Studio and Elia Kazan was there, we were sort of friendly, and I said to him, “I don’t know how to tell the actors how to move, that’s where I have the most trouble.” And he said, “You know, Norman, let them decide for you. Actors generally have a better sense of movement than we do.” Of course, he was a great director, and he was being very honest about it. He said, “They’ll often point out the way and if they don’t, then you can step in.” So I did that and it absolutely worked. The play was reasonably well staged as a result. The same way I think is true in a novel, only more so. Let the characters point the way for you. Now here there was something different, which is, of course, I did know the events. They were recorded summarily; there were very few books about the early childhood and they’re sketchy. So it wasn’t as though I was overloaded with facts, which would be true further down the road where there’d be a hundred books for every decade. So, given the fact the devil is telling the story, I could follow the events because the unforeseen would be the devil’s interpretation of what was going on and what he must do. He’s the devil’s assistant, of course, not the devil. And that made it absolutely organic for me because even though I knew where I was going in terms of the narrative, the interpretation now became the part I would not determine in advance. I would let the events and the devil’s interpretation of these events dictate where I’d head next. And it worked. … more>>
11/06/2008...4:16 pm
The Devil in Norman Mailer – An Interview by Mike Lee
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