Mailer Explores Hitler's Devils, Testicle

Norman K. Mailer ’43 is and always has been a controversial writer. And it’s hard to think of an historical figure more synonymous with the word “controversial” than Adolf Hitler. So when Mailer publishes his first novel in a decade, and it takes as its subject the deeds of Hitler, one expects a certain amount of controversy; but when the pre-release press for “The Castle in the Forest” focused almost exclusively on Mailer’s decision to include a bibliography, it was a sign that something was wrong.

As it turns out, there are many “somethings” wrong with the novel: a frequently dull plot supported by flaccid prose, an inability to fully comprehend or adequately portray its complex and weighty subject, an overriding sense of banality posing as profundity, and a philosophical heart that is as intellectually dissatisfying as it is morally troubling. Of course, it also contains intermittent hints of brilliance, but they come in all the wrong places and dissipate all too quickly.

Mailer’s narrator, who at first claims to be an SS agent but quickly reveals himself to be a mid-level demon (literally), promises to “uproot many a conventional belief.” The first such belief, it seems, is that a novel about Hitler should be engrossing and disturbing, viscerally appealing, and morally horrifying from the beginning.

Instead, Mailer opens the novel in a mode that borders on the farcical, with his narrator focusing on such topics as incest and monorchidism (speaketh the Oxford English Dictionary: “The condition of having only one testis, or only one descended testis”). Thanks, Norm!

It’s a mildly amusing and halfway-clever diversion in a book full of them. Did you know that a young Adolf Hitler had his “pip-squeak of an anus kept as immaculate as an opal, small and glistening?” Or that evil people have an unavoidable problem with body odor? Or that bees can explain many of the most difficult aspects of human existence?

Somewhere between the endless chapters on the life of bees and the endless obsession with the scatological and the priapic is one of the most sinister and compelling men of the twentieth century. But he remains an enigma, both to the reader and to the author exploring him—an author who seems more interested in the allegorical constructs he creates to describe human behavior than the behavior they’re meant to illuminate.

Unable to penetrate Hitler’s depths, Mailer pulls back, focusing instead on his devil-narrator and the Hitler family and ending the novel shortly after Adolf reaches adolescence.

So the story goes something like this: a hellspawn is assigned to the Hitler family and follows an ambitious young man named Alois from his incestuous beginnings as a peasant to his rise in the civil government (complete with plenty of less-than-kosher sex) to his incestuous third marriage, which produced several children, including Adolf (known here as “Adi”). As the family—of which each member, with the notable exception of Adolf, is portrayed with remarkable clarity and complexity—works and grows, the strong-headed eldest son rebels, the motherly sister matures, and young Adi lives a relatively normal life only occasionally punctuated by hints of his menace. Oh, and they raise a lot of bees.

How did this result in one of the most evil men in history? I still don’t know, because Mailer’s answer is that it didn’t—it didn’t even matter.

As the narrator explains, there are three kingdoms in the cosmos: the divine, the satanic, and the human. And while the third one presumably has some sort of influence, it seems to be rather insignificant, especially when Satan decides to make you evil nine months before your birth. “Even as the Angel Gabriel served Jehovah on a momentous night in Nazareth, so too was I there with the Evil One at [Hitler’s] conception,” the narrator says.

Throughout the book, Adolf does not become evil as a result of his choices or his environment; he is born evil and further shaped by the devil-narrator, who carefully sends him “dream-etchings” and minor commands. But what Mailer—who once championed the cause of existentialism and wrote forcefully on the need to “act, and act dangerously”—does not seem to understand is that by transferring agency away from Hitler, he has also transferred away responsibility.

Are we to respond to ten million deaths by shaking our fists at the Devil? If Hitler was damned to be Hitler, are criminals damned to behave criminally? Was Saddam damned to be Saddam? Are we damned to be in Iraq?

It is not even necessary to look this far outside the book; the moral shortcomings of shifting the blame to demonic forces are readily apparent within it. Perhaps attempting to take a jab at President Bush’s policy on homosexuality, Mailer’s narrator reveals that he “took a hand in the jury’s deliberations” at the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. But rather than condemning Wilde’s unjust imprisonment, the result of Mailer’s comment is to excuse it—turning an act of persecution and intolerance into an unavoidable supernatural intervention into human affairs.

The novel does contain some wonderfully rendered scenes near the end, as when Adolf reacts to the burning of his father’s beloved bee colony by “laughing as much as he was weeping, not certain whether this was a terrible event or another glorious act of incineration.” But such potency is dampened by the numbing chapters that surrounds it.

Of course, it is possible that these shortcomings are there for a reason. Perhaps Mailer remains twice-removed from his subject because the human mind cannot comprehend the evil of Hitler. Perhaps there is a correspondence between the minor transgressions of a boy and the major evils of a monster. Perhaps in the face of such inexplicable evil, one can only laugh.

Perhaps. But these are easy non-answers to difficult questions, and one would expect more from Mailer. At the very least, the courage to confront those questions directly.

—Staff writer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu.