Norman Mailer (1923–2007)
"interviewer
Much of the interviewer’s art is concerned with the question of motive. What made you write this? What caused you to marry her? How did you come to be involved in that particular action? Why did you do it? And it strikes me that your new novel, The Castle in the Forest, is likewise shrouded in the question of motive, the overarching one being what made young Adolph Hitler
into a personification of evil? The family incest? The example of the bees? The severity of his father’s beatings?
mailer
None of that. None of the above.
interviewer
Hold on. You mean it doesn’t matter? But to what extent was the question of motive your motive for writing the book?
mailer
Oh, my motive is separate from whatever motives I gave Hitler. I hate it when writers give psychological explanations that pretend to answer questions and don’t.
interviewer
Nevertheless you chose to put these things in the book.
mailer
Well, they are contributing factors. But my notion of the book from the beginning was to have a devil narrating it. There’s a long riff in the novel about how the average intelligent intellectual today finds it hard enough to believe in God, let alone the devil. And my feeling is that there’s no better explanation for Hitler than that he was inspired by the devil, as Jesus Christ was inspired by God. If people will believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God then I don’t see why you can’t see that Hitler is the offspring of the devil. It’s the simplest explanation. There’s no other.
interviewer
Do you stand with Milton and with Paradise Lost in the understanding that the devil sometimes has the best lines?
mailer
Oh yeah, more than the best lines. I really do believe that there’s a closeknit war between God and the devil that goes on in all our affairs. People hate the thought today, because we live in a technological time where human beings are sick and tired of the heritage of the Middle Ages, a time when we all crawled on our bellies and prayed to God and sobbed and said, Oh, God, please pay attention to me. Oh, God, please save me. Oh, Devil, stay away. Well, we’ve had the Enlightenment since then. We’ve had Voltaire. We’ve had several centuries in which to forge our vanity as human beings, and now we are a third force. There’s God at one end, the devil at the other, and there we are occupying this huge center. And half of us alive don’t believe in God
or the devil.
interviewer
Do you believe in God?
mailer
Oh, of course I do. But I don’t mean I believe in God as a lawgiver, as the Jehovah. I think that was a power grab by priests way back then, a power grab implicit in the notion that if you can get people afraid of a powerful force who will punish them if they don’t do the right thing, then the agents of that force wield huge power. And so there’s no such thing as a priesthood that doesn’t believe in God as all-powerful and all-punishing. But I don’t believe in that at
all. I believe in God as the creator. My notion of God is that God created us, and that like all creators God is not in command of the situation. God is the best that he or she can do under very difficult circumstances.
interviewer
So is this an existential God?
mailer
Absolutely. Doesn’t know how it’s going to turn out, doesn’t know whether he or she is going to succeed or fail. Has a war with the devil. This God is a local god, if you will. And there are local gods all over the universe. All with different notions of existence. And some of them are at war with each other and some of them are so far apart they don’t have to worry about it. But if we’re going to go with rank speculations, absolutely errant speculations, illegal speculations, I’d say that the devil was probably sent here as a counterforce to God. In other words, there were higher forces in the universe that didn’t like this upstart God who had a vision of humanity.
interviewer
A large number of Americans today hold the notion that God and the devil are at work in their daily lives. I think they are. Not in a controlling sense—I don’t believe that the devil seizes you and you’re gone forever. But can you say that you’ve never had a fuck where you didn’t feel evil for a little while?
interviewer
A little angelic, maybe.
mailer
No. A little evil. And I think that’s the answer.
interviewer
In The Castle in the Forest, I wonder if you aren’t mystifying the process by suggesting that Hitler could only be as he was because the devil was present at the moment of his conception. That would be my argument with the book: a novelist can’t ignore the capacity of human beings to create terror in the confines of their own minds, in the structure of their own lives.
mailer
You can argue that. Hitler is, however, one of a kind: there’s no explanation for him. Stalin was a monster of a comprehensible sort. We can read Stalin’s biography, we can study the Bolshevik movement, we can study the conditions in Russia, we can study the hideous aftermath of the Russian Revolution. We can add Stalin up bit by bit, piece by piece, and understand
him in human terms. He may have been one of the most evil human beings that ever lived, but he was a human being. You don’t need to bring in the devil to explain Stalin. But Hitler is different. Hitler is not a strong man the way Stalin was. He’s almost weak. He is inexplicable, unless you buy the idea that he was the devil’s choice for reasons that go very deep into German nature. And I would go further than that. I’m now anticipating the next book that I’m going to write. Who knows if I’ll be around long enough to write it, but if I can, Hitler will emerge as the devil’s choice. By the end of The Castle, he’s one of tens of hundreds of candidates that the devil has seeded all over humanity as possible monsters. The devil, like God, gives a command for many things, but history is not wholly predictable. God and the devil are warring with one another. Humans are warring against them and among themselves. And the devil does not try to create one Hitler the way God created one Jesus. He’s a pragmatist, so he creates hundreds and thousands of potential Hitlers, and this is the one that came through. Why? Because of the extraordinary conditions in Germany, which were not present when Hitler was conceived, and that’s what the next book will get into. How this crappy kid ends up being this powerhouse.
interviewer
We’re living in a world increasingly defined by people who believe that the other party is the force of evil.
mailer
Yeah.
interviewer
We live with these terms. The Axis of Evil. The Great Satan. The Evil Empire.
mailer
The brunt of my effort is to make certain that all the bread is buttered equally. Is there evil in America? Yes. Is there evil in Islam? Yes. Is one side more evil than the other? Who knows. We’re both immensely evil, we’re both immensely good. It’s part of our religious beliefs that we are mixtures, profound mixtures. Atheists say they are perfectly happy not believing in God. But they can’t be happy philosophically, because they have no answer to the question of how we got here. It’s very hard to describe the complexities of human nature having emerged ex nihilo. If you have God as a creator doing the best that he or she can do there’s a perfect explanation for why we’re here. We’re God’s creation, and God has great respect for us, the way a father, a
good father, has respect for children because the father wants the children to be more interesting than himself. And ditto for the mother. And in that sense we are, you might say, the avant-garde for God. The notion of heaven as Club Med or hell as an overheated boiler room makes no sense to me.
interviewer
You believe in reincarnation. So what are you coming back as, Norman?
mailer
Well, I’m waiting, right? I’m in the waiting room. And finally my name is called. I go in and there’s a monitoring angel who says, Mr. Mailer, we’re very glad to meet you. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival. Let me tell you the good news, absolutely good news, is you’ve been passed for reincarnation. I say, Oh thank you, yes, I really didn’t want to go into eternal peace. And the monitoring angel says, Well, between us, it isn’t really necessarily eternal peace. It can be a little hectic. But nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that you’ve been passed for reincarnation. Let me see, before I look and see what we’ve got you down for, we always ask people, What would you like to be in your next life? And I say, Well, I think I’d like to be a black athlete. I don’t care where you put me, I’ll take my chances, but yes, that’s what I want to be, a black athlete. And the monitoring angel says, Listen, Mailer, we’re so oversubscribed in that department. Everybody wants to be a black athlete in their next life. I don’t know now . . . I can’t begin to... let me see what we’ve got you booked for. So he opens the big book, looks, and says, Well, we’ve got you down for a cockroach. But here’s the good news: you’ll be the fastest
cockroach on the block.
interviewer
Not bad.
mailer
Reincarnation is the best evidence of God’s sense of wit and judgment. God, I repeat, is not a lawgiver. He is a creator, and creators have judgment.
interviewer
Was it Gary Gilmore’s belief in reincarnation that initially attracted you to him?
mailer
Oh yeah. But the thought has been with me for years. In 1954, when I was a very proud atheist, very proud, very sure of myself, very sure that God had to be dispensed with, I went out to visit James Jones in Illinois. He started talking about reincarnation. Now, Jones was one of the most practical novelists I’ve ever met, real Midwestern. He was absolutely solid in his sense of the real and the given and how you dealt with it. His pleasure in life was how you dealt precisely with the difficulties of reality. He was a great believer in the real, and yet he believed in reincarnation. I said to him, I’m sure you don’t believe in that stuff do you? He said, Hell yes I do! It’s the only thing that makes sense. So I had to live with that remark for the next ten years before it finally moved over to my head.
interviewer
Do you have violent dreams?
mailer
No, I don’t. I put those dreams into the work."
The Paris Review, IN MEMORIAM.
posted by Luís Miguel Dias domingo, novembro 11, 2007
