Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User:CCross

2020-10-04T15:08:26Z

CCross:

'''Hi'''.

My name is '''Caleb Cross'''.

I’m a cinematographer / DP and photographer in Georgia. I have a passion for visuals, film, photography and travel. My creative work is produced under my brand name of “nevercross” through social media accounts such as Instagram (''nevercross'') and YouTube (''Nevercross Productions'') which range from photography projects to short films.

My passion for film and photography started back in 2015 when I took a high school photography class at Westfield high school. Since then, I have used visuals as a creative outlet through photography and film. I retook the high school photography class as a teacher’s assistant to encourage and help fellow students discover their passion for the visual arts. After graduating high school with high honors and Middle Georgia State University with a Bachelor of Arts, I have continued to follow my passion and interest in photography and film.

User:CCross

2020-09-30T03:54:12Z

CCross:

'''Hi!'''

'''Caleb Cross''' is a Middle Georgia State University and "Writing for Digital Media" course student. He is pursuing a degree in the Bachelor of Arts as a Media and Communication Major. He has been writing within college for many years but this is his first time writing within an encyclopedia or index fashion.

User:CCross

2020-09-30T03:42:07Z

CCross: Created page with "Hi! My name is Caleb Cross. I am a "Writing for Digital Media" student. I have been writing within college for many years but this is my first time writing within an encyclop..."

Hi!

My name is Caleb Cross. I am a "Writing for Digital Media" student. I have been writing within college for many years but this is my first time writing within an encyclopedia or index fashion.

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer

2020-09-29T00:46:59Z

CCross: Added links and some in-text quote citations

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{{Byline|last=Bernstein|first=Mashey|abstract=In the past year or so, as a result of the publication of ''[[The Castle in the Forest]]'', Mailer has tackled his “Jewish question” in a way that brings him, if not back to the “nice” Jewish boy image he eschewed many years ago, at least to an acknowledgement of that past in a way that embraces it with new warmth and understanding. Mailer’s ideology, as an American writer and social commentator, stems from both the intellectual ideas of Judaism and how these ideas make themselves manifest in our daily lives.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08bern|}}

{{dc|dc=I|n the past year or so}} as a result of the publication of '' The Castle in the Forest '', {{NM}} has tackled his “Jewish question” in a way that brings him if not back to the “nice” Jewish boy image he eschewed many years ago at least to an acknowledgement of that past in a way that embraces it with new warmth and understanding. Not that he ever really denied his Jewish past. Even though Mailer has never been considered a major figure in the canon of American-Jewish writers or as concerned about purely Jewish issues as his contemporaries [[w:Saul Bellow|Bellow]], [[w:Bernard Malamud|Malamud]], or [[w:Philip Roth|Philip Roth]], he has never disavowed his religious affiliations. Nearly all his central characters claim some sort of Jewish parentage or ancestry, from Rojack to Harlot and, of course, Jesus. On the personal level, when several years ago I was stranded in New York on Passover and had nowhere to go for the seder, I called up Norman and asked if I could conduct one in his house. He readily agreed, admitting it would be his first seder in fifty years! During the seder, at which [[John Buffalo Mailer|John Buffalo]], his youngest, recited the four questions, it was delightful to watch Norman explain the Hebrew alphabet to John and read some of the Hebrew script.

Mailer encapsulates his own attitude to Judaism very succinctly in an interview he gave earlier in 2007 with Nermeen Shaikh and published in ''Nextbook''. When she asked, “what role has your being Jewish played in your being a writer, ”Mailer replies emphatically,“ an ''enormous'' role.” He picks two aspects of the Jewish experience that influenced him, the sense of history that makes it “impossible to take anything for granted” and also the Jewish mind: “We’re here to do all sorts of outrageous thinking, if you will ... certainly incisive thinking. If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it’s that they developed the mind more than other people did.” Not surprisingly, Mailer continues in the interview to bemoan the loss of this ability owing to what he terms “cheap religious patriotism.”

None of these ideas surprises me, nor will they any reader of Mailer’s work, as they have always been part of the core of his philosophy. Mailer’s ideology, as an American writer and social commentator, stems from both the intellectual ideas of Judaism and how these ideas make themselves manifest in our daily lives. I doubt that any of us would deny that Mailer is a writer who is concerned with the spiritual nature of humankind, a writer who at the end of the last millennium can seek to bring the story of Jesus Christ to life and at the beginning of the new millennium can write with perfect seriousness about the role of the Devil in the creation of one of the greatest monsters in Western history. But his writings on the battle of Good and Evil have nothing in common with the rantings of a Hal Lindsey or with other apocalyptic and generally Christian fables. Mailer’s ideology derives essentially from a Jewish approach to life.

Just as fights between the God and Devil belong to an earlier time frame, Mailer’s Jewishness similarly echoes a more ancient time when religion was seen in a purer form. Mailer’s Jewish identity emerges not so much from obedience to the Law, the letter of the Torah, but from the spiritual underpinnings—the implications and intent of those laws— that go to the core of Judaism. There are three basic ideas in Judaism that play a prominent role in his ''oeuvre'': 1. The concept of mitzvah; 2. the emphasis on the here and now; and 3. the prophet’s role in society. These themes are as prominent, in one form or another, in his last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', as they were in his first, ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]''.

''Mitzvah'' is usually interpreted or translated as “commandment,” as in thou shalt or shalt not do x. In colloquial Hebrew as in Yiddish, to do a mitzvah is to do a good deed or a favor, but Mailer’s notion of mitzvah finds a clear expression in the writings of the philosopher [[w:Abraham Joshua Heschel|Abraham Joshua Heschel]] who sees mitzvah as a holy action, a deed that reveals and transforms a person:

<blockquote>In every act we perform we assume that the world is meaningful. Life would come to naught if we acted as if there were no ultimate meaning.... Jewish observance ... consists of acts performed by the body in a clearly defined and tangible manner ... of the right intentions and of putting the right intention into action. Both the body and soul must participate in carrying out a ritual, a law, an imperative, a mitzvah.{{sfn|Heschel|1956|p=307}}</blockquote>

This is an idea expressed in almost identical terms by Mailer in his seminal essay, “[[The White Negro]],” where the “impulse to action” expresses the need to live with the demands of life and not succumb to the void:

<blockquote>[A] life...directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=341}}</blockquote>

By committing an action, the “hipster,” as Mailer called his heroes in those days, activates his whole being, not just his intellect or his physical being, but also his spirit and his soul. Action creates. It is a means of survival, for through action, instinctive and intuitive, he defines himself from within. As Mailer said in the essay “Minorities,” one of his most important statements on his Jewish identity, he becomes an “artistic nerve” reacting and sensitive to his being. This notion of meaningful action motivates nearly all of Mailer’s heroes from Sergeant Croft in ''Naked'', to Rojack in ''American Dream'' and even one could argue to Jesus in '' Gospel ''. Action is “holy,” a method for defining one’s soul and not “secular” aimed at achieving material results in the external world. In the '' Pirkei Avoth '', a collection of sayings by the Rabbis in the Talmud, Rabbi Ben Azzai notes “that one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah and a sin will lead to another” {{sfn|Siddur|1984|p=544}} One grows in strength as one performs holy deeds just as sinful deeds sap the soul. Stephen Rojack can only fight with Barney Oswald Kelly after he has put himself through lesser acts of bravery and self-discovery

The acts that best serve as the conduit for this development are those that depend on a connection with other people. Sexual intercourse and violence depend most on the “healthy” communion with the reality of other beings. I know that these ideas have been a source of glee or misunderstanding for critics of Mailer and here is not the place to explore these notions, though I have to say that in my reading the use of the terms '' sex '' and '' violence '' is more metaphoric than literal. He does not, for example, advocate murder as a way of life —the tragedy of the Jack Abbott episode brings this home— but Mailer, taking a page from another misunderstood Jew, Wilhelm Reich, instead suggests that any action that goes against the norms of society is by implication “violent,” and any action that seeks to open communication with the reality of another is “sexual.” Because of this theory, he denounces any social phenomenon that denies a man the means “to purge his violence” and hence prevent his soul from “... being ... frozen with implacable self- hatred for his cowardice” {{sfn|AFM|p=347}}

Mailer extends this notion of mitzvah, of meaningful action, to his concerns about the spiritual value of humankind in a corrupt and fallen world. In the face of a threat against the integrity of the self, individuals cannot shirk their responsibility to discover their own set of values. Only by this discovery can they reclaim themselves from the surrounding chaos. Mailer’s concerns are totally spiritual: Humankind, he believes, is God’s agent, fighting His battles. Human activity becomes a symbolic drama where, as Charles Feidelson notes in his text '' Symbolism and American Literature '', “every passage of life, enmeshed in the vast context of God’s plan, possesses a delegated meaning” {{sfn| Feidelson|1953|p=79}} Richard Poirier in his book on Mailer states it best, “[Mailer] is dependent on a past which is essentially mythic and he prefers to think of himself as someone living within the perils of time while knowing he is the carrier of life which is not wholly his own to waste” {{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=105}} This is a very unchristian approach to life. In this scenario, there is no Jesus to save one, no afterlife that will reward one. Since Jesus cannot call on Jesus to save himself, ironically Jesus in Mailer’s world is the ultimate (Jewish) hero. His Jesus is full of doubt, not quite sure of his role, questioning his sayings and more importantly his actions. Mailer pointed out the genesis of his creative theory in '' The Spooky Art '':

<blockquote> I decided my character had to be more of a man than a god, an existential man, dominated by the huge cloud that he is the Son of God. Jesus, as the protagonist, doesn’t feel worthy, but he is ready nonetheless to do his best every step of the way. Not in command of every situation, but will do his best. And he does have his startling successes.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=87}}</blockquote>

Every action, then, that individuals perform has a significance that detracts or adds to the sum of all meaning, ordering chaos, inventing form, and flowing into the flux of Time, every action, individually realized and existentially self- defining is a dance over the hot coals of life. No scene in '' Gospel '' brings this out more than Jesus’s encounter with the Devil, the most admired section of the novel. In this section, the naïve Jesus tackles a being of infinite seductiveness, power, and wit. (Like Milton, Mailer finds himself giving some of the best lines to the Devil, which may be why he returned to this character for his last novel.) The Devil uses every trick in the book from the physical to the spiritual, from hallucinations to lying to undermine Jesus, but the Son is up to the task and if anything, by fighting the Devil he discovers his own powers and destiny.

<blockquote> If I could increase in my powers ... perhaps the world of men might multiply in virtue with me. So I had begun to believe in my Father .... I had been tested, had proved loyal, and now my tongue began to feel clean.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=57}}</blockquote>

While Jesus knows who his father is, he still has to learn who he is and make the connection between the two so that God’s plans can be fulfilled.

<blockquote> I was obliged to wonder. Why had the Lord left me alone with Satan? Was it to scourge me of an excess of piety? Before long I would learn that there might be truth in this. There was work to do, and it could not be accomplished on one’s knees.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=57}}</blockquote>

In a way we are all children of God, as Mailer noted in the aforementioned interview:

<blockquote> God wants to do more and gave us free will precisely because we’re God’s children .... I see God as a creative artist ... but not all powerful. And not all-good. And so, as an artist, God wants us to go further than God went. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}}</blockquote>

Human beings therefore have lives that are not theirs to waste, as Cherry explains in '' An American Dream '':

<blockquote> I always end up with something like the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well .... I believe God is just doing His best to learn from what happens to some of us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=197}}</blockquote>

Mailer, though, gives an interesting spin on this essentially Jewish idea. In his telling, God moves from being all- powerful and an artist par excellence to ironically a sort of conservative economist, harvesting his energies in a way that would make the most ardent environmentalist happy. Again, in the '' Nextbook '' interview, he expounds on this long -held credo:

<blockquote> The world is much too fraught with peril and much too important a creation, to have it as a stage play where we do what we do, work at how we work, and if we please God, we go to heaven, if we displease we go to hell. Very wasteful, totally uneconomic. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}}</blockquote>

I am reminded of that wonderful discussion in '' [[Tough Guys Don’t Dance]] '' about the way that God plays the odds in a football game:

<blockquote> “Because footballs ... take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That’s good enough. If [God] wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He’d have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That’s not economical. He’s got too many other things to work at.”{{sfn|Abraham|1984|p=160}}</blockquote>

Mailer liked this idea so much, he repeated it virtually verbatim in '' [[Harlot’s Ghost]] ''!

The third aspect of Mailer’s work that owes a debt to his Jewish heritage might be the most obvious one: The idea of the Jew as “prophet” or “social commentator.” In '' [[The Naked and the Dead]] '', Joey Goldstein’s grandfather, speaking of the people of Israel, refers to an idea posited by Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, an eleventh-century Spanish Jewish mystic: Israel “is the heart of all nations ... the heart is also the conscience” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=247}}. If you will forgive the Jewish chauvinism, one that I am sure Mailer does not subscribe to either, the Kuzari lays down a template for how the Jew must behave and the implications of that role:

<blockquote> The Jew is the heart because he [sic] is endowed ... with the most perfect soul and the loftiest intellect which it is possible for a human to possess and ... [w]ith ... an immanence enabling him to enter into a communication with God.{{sfn| Heinemann|1969|p=144}}</blockquote>

The Jew is therefore endowed with the “spirit of continual prophecy.” In such a state the Jew is of the people, yet in a state of awareness that raises the Jew above the rest. Mailer secularizes this concept when he writes in “Minorities”: “Minority groups are the artistic nerves of a republic and, like any phenomenon which has to do with art, they are profoundly divided. They are both themselves and the mirror of their culture as it reacts upon them” {{sfn| Mailer|1974|p=626}} This notion helps to explain Mailer’s concern not only with God’s power and destiny as manifested by humankind on Earth, but also connects with his concerns about the nature of modern society. He is a witness to individuals’ being deprived of their potential for beauty and art and, like the watchman of the night, feels impelled to call out his warning. Nearly fifty years ago, he had seen “authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century” {{sfn|AFM|p=94}} and he has trumpeted his horror at every opportunity to make a “revolution in the consciousness of our time” {{sfn|AFM|p=17}} But as the Good Book says, “the prophet is never heard in his own city,” and it must be cold comfort to the prophet to see us back at this point again after brief bursts of light shining on us.

Mailer’s prophetic tendencies have been considered unruly and intemperate but what prophet has not been considered that way, from Isaiah, who stormed into the royal palace, to Jeremiah, who was thrown into jail, to Jesus, who ended up crucified? As Heschel puts it,

<blockquote> The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails.{{sfn|Abraham|1956|p=6}}</blockquote>

Not without validity, Judaism, or at least the left wing branch of it, remains synonymous with prophecy, as Will Herberg in '' Judaism and Modern Man '' points out: Jewish tradition “is one continuous story of the witness of faith against those who hold power ... in every case it is the man [sic] ... of faith challenging the inordinate pretensions of official society”{{sfn|Herberg|1951|p=185}}

Bernard Sherman in '' The Invention of the Jew '' applies the term '' prophecy '' to writers who share this response to the problems of modern humankind —Mailer among them:

<blockquote> Each found that the distinctively Jewish element was the demand— very often in fervid, prophetic, even mystical terms— that man [sic] fulfill his highest possibilities, that he achieves a Messianic release in a world in which mind and justice were triumphant. The locus of this spirit of social compassion is the prophetic vision of Isaiah ''{{sfn|Sherman|1969|p=16}}</blockquote>

It is a connection well known, and as Nathan Glazer in '' American Judaism '' points out: “the Jewish religious tradition probably does dispose Jews ... towards liberalism and radicalism” {{sfn|Glazer |1957|p=139}} Mailer emerges from this Jewish tradition, the strong left- wing liberal side, which while eschewing ritual, rabbis took to heart its strong social concerns. Sherman also notes this attraction of Jews to the most “prophetic” of all -isms, Marxism. One recalls Mailer’s own involvement with Wallace’s Progressive Party and his detailed study of Marxism in his second novel, '' [[Barbary Shore]] ''. Similarly, these prophetic concerns predominate in his novels, '' [[The Deer Park]] '', which has as its backdrop, Hollywood, the HUAC, and the Korean War; '' An American Dream '', a panoramic study of a garden gone to seed; and '' [[Why Are We in Vietnam?]] '', a study of a schizophrenic nation, to mention but a few instances.

The role of prophet is one that Mailer has often portrayed himself as playing: “He has been a poor prophet of the Sixties but it was not a century for prophets.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=141}} (The prophets were not “nice Jewish boys” either.) Every novel, every piece of fiction, essay, or work of reportage of Mailer’s has a touchstone quality about it, showing us where we are at a particular moment in time. Even more so, it has led to some of his most beautiful writing:

{{quote|Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power .... Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=316-317}} }}

Reading this quotation, I am reminded of Mailer’s comment on Henry Miller: “a writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1976|p=191}} I think it is an apt appraisal of Mailer’s ''own'' contribution to our nation’s literature and consciousness.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |author= |date=1984 |title=Complete Art Scroll Siddur |url= |location=New York |publisher=Mesorah |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Glazer |first=Nathan |date=1957 | title=American Judaism |editor-last= Boorstein |editor-first=Daniel J. |location=Chicago |publisher=U of Chicago P |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |editor-last=Heinemann |editor-first=Isaak |date=1969| title=Three Jewish Philosopher |url= |location=New York |publisher=Atheneum |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Herberg |first=Will |date=1951 |title=Judaism and Modern Man |url= |location=New York |publisher=Farrar, Straus & Young |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Heschel |first=Abraham Joshua |date=1956 |title=God in Search of Man |url= |location=New York |publisher=Jewish Publication Society of America |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Heschel |first=Abraham Joshua |authormask=1 |date=1969 |title=The Prophets |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harper and Row |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Mysel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |date=2003| title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |url= |location= |publisher=New York: Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965|title=An American Dream |url= |location= |publisher= NewYork: Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1968|title=The Armies of the Night |url= |location= |publisher= New York: NAL |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1976|title=Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller |url= |location=New York |publisher=Grove |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1997|title=The Gospel According to the Son |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehar |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1971|title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1963|title=The Presidential Papers |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |editor-last=Chapman |editor-first=Abraham |date=1974 |chapter=Tenth Presidential Paper—Minorities |title=Jewish American Literature: An Anthology |url= |location=New York |publisher=New American Library |pages=626–637 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1984|title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Shaikh |first=Nermeen |title=Interview with Norman Mailer |url= |journal=Nextbook Reader |volume=4 |issue=Spring |date=2007 |page=6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Sherman|first=Bernard|date=1969 |title=The Invention of the Jew: Jewish-American Education Novels (1916–1964) |url= |location=Cranbury, NJ |publisher=Thomas Yoselof |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer, The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”

2020-09-29T00:31:27Z

CCross: Added links and fixed bullet point list

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{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}

{{dc|dc=T|he post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''[[An American Dream]]''}} (1965) features
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.

There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?

This Maileresque literary fallout was conceived before Mailer’s flash, five-day visit to Alaska in April 1965. Imagine a literary mind experiencing such a one-man, in-house American culture shock from hot sandy Nevada to the 49th state the size of Texas, California and Montana combined, including three million lakes. And a coastline double the size of all the Lower 48 states. Alaska also boasts of its one glacier—the size of Holland—and its outdoor adventures with animals far outnumbering humans, a mere 300,000 plus, the population of a single mid-sized Lower 48 city. Alaska, indeed, is a huge hunk of wild Americana.

Mailer, Brooklyn bred, literary celebrity, seasoned traveler, and existential doer, was interviewed in London about his Alaska Odyssey two weeks after his Arctic visit. Mailer said: “There are one or two places a man can visit
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of
those places for me.”

I had yet to ask Mailer, “Where’s the other place?” I had my opportunities. I might have been the first to ask because I witnessed Mailer’s Day Two
in Anchorage, and his three-day ''finale'' in Fairbanks. There, at the State University of Alaska, I was an assistant professor in the English Department,
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.

Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.

''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug
1964] of ''An American Dream'') had sponsored a college road show, “Symposium for Writers,” a panel that included Mailer, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and others. During its Iowa City stopover, and after the panel
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.

I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.

The next morning Ed had news. He and Mailer had hit it off. After verbal sparring and some marijuana, Mailer was exposed to what he later, smilingly, called: “Skelling’s formidable breeziness,” and at its inception, instant
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.

Ed graduated from Iowa and stationed himself in a lively English Department at Fairbanks, about 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle. I had remained
in Iowa City to finish up my last year in the doctorate program when, suddenly, I received this message: “Come north, Good Buddy, and share in my
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:

“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”

Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”

Those in the Mailer inner circle then, as always, said, “No one tells Norman Mailer what to do.” I got the Iowa City jitters. How formidable could
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.

What an operatic happening it was when two former Massachusetts high school friends reunited in Alaska, Ed Skellings and Mike Gravel. How fortuitous. Gravel, a liberal Democrat, was the Speaker of the Alaskan Lower House and, except for the governor, was the most powerful politician in Alaska. Gravel was on the lookout for likely staffers and bumped into (supposedly) two word-rich academics. Immediately, Mike, Ed, and I became friends.

Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early
snowy spring.”

How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”

(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There
was the earlier [1963] ''[[The Presidential Papers]]''. ''Esquire'' [November 1964] published ''In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention''; then the celebrated ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' [1968], culminating in the 1969 Mailer-Breslin ticket in the Democrat Primary for the New York City Mayoralty.)

When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:

* He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;

* He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);

* He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.

All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Mailer-esque “Catch-22.” These
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.

How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel “connection”?

Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor
William Egan wrote to him:

<blockquote>I am sure that your visit to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks as a lecturer during the 1965 Festival of Arts will benefit the University and the State. May I invite you to be my guest for a day in Juneau prior to your appearance in Fairbanks? We look forward to your stay with us.</blockquote>

In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.

Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”

I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had
greeted Mailer at the Juneau Airport and that Mailer was escorted on a comprehensive tour of the capital, climaxed with more than polite applause when the state’s guest of honor appeared at a joint session of both Houses of
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale
included Mailer attending a meeting of the Democrat Party Caucus (a non-member was usually considered unimportant) which, undoubtedly, made Mailer feel like a real politician.

The happy endings of those three stipulations continued on into that evening at the governor’s home, where Mr. and Mrs. Egan hosted an unpretentious dinner, which Mailer described as “pleasant.” House Speaker Gravel did not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.

Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las
Vegas.”

Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.

Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In
mid-afternoon, we rushed to an Anchorage TV station for a scheduled videotaping of a Mailer-Gravel-Skellings-Kaufmann panel discussion for a statewide audience. The next stop was a media-inspired Mailer farewell.

Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door
reception or “Come Meet Controversial Norman Mailer.” The most civilized segment of the Alaskan populace was about to press the flesh with America’s most reputed belligerent literary celebrity, off and on the page. I was the official host. I was positioned at the entrance to greet the friendly and the curious. They glared and spoke the same tongue.

“Where’s that tough guy?”

“Where’s that wife-knifer?”

Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.

By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black
nightclub?

I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging “I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”

His partner was a woman much taller and more rubbery. As for her partner, was he boxing or dancing? Mailer, the music notwithstanding, was doing a crouch; his feet doing gymnasium shuffles; his arms extended at eye-level, and his ungloved fists jabbing (rat-a-tat-tat) the air. I said to myself: “Norman Mailer, the worst dancer in this room, if he stayed on that dance floor long enough would invent a New American Dance.” The rest of the night was a blur.

Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers
(Mailer, Bischel, a hitchhiker, Skellings, and Kaufmann) were picked up for a private and direct flight into the heart of interior Alaska and what remained of the American Frontier. Barney Gottstein, another Anchorage tycoon and Gravel friend, provided his private Beechcraft Baron and a pilot.

Mailer’s fact-finding quest turned more existential and mystical in Fairbanks. Gone was picturesque and politicized Juneau and would-be urbanized Anchorage. Fairbanks was an oxymoronic microcosm, a “Wilderness City.”

Imagine brand-new real estate next to log cabins, swank motels (two) next to Eskimo strip-joints, a musk ox farm next to a state university, and, the civic eyesore—a mammoth suburban junkyard. And those downtown streets, frequented in summer by overfed tourists and, in winter, by underfed dog packs. A Fairbanks illustrated “city directory” could have been a best seller. Mailer, in three mere days, could not experience all this aberrant Americana. However, he sensed it.

On the April 4 arrival, Mother Nature had her own welcome mat. Mailer got off Barney Gottstein’s plane and stepped onto snow, compact winter permanent, snow. Spring in Fairbanks happens when the ice-locked Chena and Tanana rivers break and the skies above Creamer Field darken with southern birds. Mailer also experienced more culture shock. That’s what usually happens when a newcomer first breathes in Fairbanks’s super-clean air. Mailer remarked about enhanced visibility. He was ecstatic. “I can’t even breathe in Brooklyn,” he said.

With renewed lungs, eyes, and an aired-out brain, Mailer introduced himself to this wilderness city. He was a quick study and I surmised that he was initially on the prowl for more data and lore concerning minorities, priming himself for the main event—the Ellison Debate.

Mailer’s Alaskan fascination also included Fairbanks’s more mundane aspects. It was Alaska’s second-largest city (population about 35,000), called the “Chicago of Alaska,” being the goods-and-services supply hub for the vast upper two-thirds of the entire state. Fairbanks was also the Interior’s media and military capital. Of all fifty states, during our Vietnam controversy, Alaska sported the highest “hawkish” mind-set because the Vietnam War was viewed as a pursuit of common sense. Win or leave. Fairbanks also served as the entertainment center for soldiers and civilians alike. From outlying Interior bases, military personnel would converge on Alaska’s “Sin City,” joining up with local hedonists, losing themselves in the too-good-to-be-true Wild West.

Clearly, this city was ripe for a Norman Mailer visit. Mailer led the way with a flexible agenda: (1) literary work and play plus good booze and conviviality; (2) Big speech and debate; (3) A farewell bash.

Activities were carefully planned and time was devoted to the Alaskan Writer’s Workshop. Mailer visited the campus and spent hours counseling and critiquing student writers with wisdom and wit.

Mailer’s prime focus was minorities, yet Fairbanks had no black unrest, no black precincts, nary a black presence, except at Wainwright and Eielson. The city’s only sizeable black presence was military, not residential.

Fairbanks may strike some visitors as alien or weird, but not newcomer Mailer, who seemed instantly homegrown. Tommy’s Elbow Room, a stellar downtown pleasure center, famed for its giant live fireplace and its livelier cocktails and music, where artsy revelers congregated, was ideal turf for an inquisitive and philosophical writer. Mailer was at his best. It was the same for his encore at the International Hotel & Bar, which offered a galaxy of foreign brews, a lure for the connoisseur suds-tippler.

Alcohol use in Fairbanks was a way of life, like eating and breathing—a daily ritual. Mailer, drink in hand, heard “timber” instead of “cheers.” A local legend, Big Bill King, lavish spender, had spoken to the patrons of the bar. Everyone within earshot received, gratis, a refill. Yelling “timber” meant buying the house. Mailer, along with a newly arrived drink, pressed the flesh with the Mysterious Spender. (No one knew “Big Bill’s” money source or motivation.) Mailer was then introduced to barroom poker-dice, a throwback to pre-statehood gambling. Almost every place that sold liquor over the bar offered the buyer a choice of payment: cash or poker-dice with the barkeep— essentially double-or-nothing. Mailer must have concluded that drinking in Alaska was an art and, like politics, the art of the possible. Mailer remained, drink after drink, the existential visitor, welcoming the unpredictable.

The main event of Mailer’s visit to Alaska was the debate with Ellison. Ironically, no real or formal debate ensued. The term “debate” was mere advertisement for the University of Alaska’s Spring Festival of Arts. Instead of a boxing ring, two celebrity authors shared the same podium. The joint topic for these prominent writers was billed as “Conflicts in Culture.” Yet there was minimal conflict. Ellison, as expected, remained the gentlemanly
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.

I was there and I introduced Mailer.

Mailer and Ellison each spoke for about thirty minutes, followed by moderate rebuttals, subsequently followed by a question and answer session. Mailer became author-prophet. In his Arctic odyssey, he had discovered a medicine for a cancerous “other” America. He had arrived with existential minorities on his mind and in search of a possible cultural template. Tonight, Mailer had come to predict and to warn: “In the future, Alaska could become the very best or the very worst of states.” After my introduction, I heard Mailer say: “God’s attic holds the message.” And then he made the following statements:

<blockquote>All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.
{{* * *}}
The extraordinary aspect of the Alaskan psyche is that the future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.
{{* * *}}
You could become the psychic leader of America, revitalizing all the dead circuits and dead fuses. It is a responsibility Alaskans should face up to.</blockquote>

Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his “[[The White Negro]],” and racial strife in that “other” America:

<blockquote>A minority group is caught between two basic conflicts of culture. This conflict has meaning and takes substance only within the minority group, of course, and perhaps you could say that one culture exists within the other culture, creating the conflict.
{{* * *}}
I am a one-man minority group. I have to contend with two opposing forces, two cultures. In a minority group we have a life psychology built upon two rocks sometimes dangerously far apart.
{{* * *}}
We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.
{{* * *}}
To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.
{{* * *}}
When you’re within a minority group, your ego is always on edge—always on an elevator going up or down. When you walk along the street the people you meet and see, depending on who they are, cause your ego to rise or fall and splinter in different ways. It’s up and down all the time, and never stable.
{{* * *}}
According to this notion, everyone in Alaska can be said to be a member of a minority group. This state has more of a divided sense of itself than any state I’ve ever been in. Alaskans have sort of a vast, group inferiority complex, feeling themselves backward and behind the cultural development of other states. Yet, at the same time Alaskans are intensely proud. There are people willing to die for this state.
{{* * *}}
And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote>

Mailer deftly linked the Two Americas and Alaska’s “divided sense” to similar split- personality situations in rural Lower 48 towns: “In one sense, you feel inferior, and think of yourselves as hicks. You feel a lack of security as inferiors to the big-city sophisticates. Yet, in the other sense, you feel yourself as the “best goddam-people-in-America.” Such was the crux or soul of the Mailer message. I could well imagine the Alaskan psyches a-buzz with becoming either the “very best” or the “very worst.” As for Mailer, there was but one “final adventure.”

Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Mailer-esque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anti-climatic. All the “right sorts” appeared: Our mayor (a one-time barber), other community notables, and university people, president included. Even the radical faculty from outlying Dogpatch dropped in.

Expectations were in the air. Ellison, as ever low-keyed and dapper, kept spellbinding his fans. The other guest of honor—as usual, stage center, Irish glint, American drink, pleasantly besieged by well-wishers, and sounding Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown gone native. The bash seemed destined for a peaceable, perhaps merry conclusion.

Earlier, before the bash, there was a commotion outside, an iota of Anchorage violence Mother Nature flashed on cue. Aurora borealis swirled above snow—not too slippery, just right—for fisticuffs. The scene was set for a bout of city wilderness-violence.

Mailer, upon arrival was accosted by an uninvited, downtown attorney, a reputed drunk (once drunk, he became belligerent to everybody). I was left outdoors to defuse this altercation and get Mailer inside, safely into the welcoming arena. What ensued was serio-comedy at the very least. Two mock pugilists were doing a crouch-and-shuffle (shades of an Anchorage dance floor). The inebriated attorney was the aggressor, mouthing words worthy of a roughhouse saloon. Mailer, barely tipsy, responded with alternate growls and purrs, uncharacteristically tentative, hit-or-stop.

What was I to do? I was an impromptu referee for a phantom fight but, each time I tried to be a third party, Mailer shot me a “get lost” look. For one long twenty minutes these two Arctic sluggers kept it peaceful with their shadow-boxing, body-talking. Mailer then said “Some other time.” The attorney said, “No, now, now!”

A drunk is a drunk but Mailer is barely tipsy. Was this encounter just another chapter of the Mailer/Hemingway code—grace under pressure? Drunkenness, however, proved decisive. The attorney slipped and fell, Mailer helped him to his feet, and the attorney said: “O.K. Some other time. Tomorrow, 10 a.m. sharp. At downtown’s Stan’s Cafe.”

Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer inside.

In the midst of a busy farewell morning, Mailer took time out to show up at Stan’s Cafe at 10 a.m. sharp, and waited a full twenty minutes. The attorney was a no-show, probably asleep and finally sober. At 10:20 a.m. sharp, no one could read Norman Mailer’s mind. I did not witness this. Norman told me this later on. I can only add—who else but Norman Mailer, under the same circumstances, would have showed up at Stan’s Cafe?

I now turn to afterthoughts about our 49th State and its 1965 essence. Any mere five-day visit can be but only a glimpse of Alaska in its challenges and expectations. In Mailer’s sensibility, Alaska meant unpredictable plus extraordinary, equaling ''existential''. But even a worldly wise Mailer, in five days, could only sample and speculate. Mailer, concluded, for example, that Alaska had the “best air” in America, and this was true most of the time.

Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.

Mailer had never experienced any of this, and it was America’s worst air. Yet Mailer hinted, during the debate, of such adverse local color as ice fog: “You’re not like other states. You don’t have the same psychological security that the other states have. You’re up here alone and cut off from the rest of your identity and because of this you have to learn to live without security.” With such insight into the exceptional nature of Alaska, Mailer had acutely sensed what Alaskans call Storm Fear—or what Mailer might have called “Existential Mother Nature.”

Nature in Alaska could be picturesque, mellow, sublime, or just plain deadly. Bush pilots, highly skilled and familiar with jagged mountain wind patterns, sometimes just disappeared. Fairbanks’s finest pilot, Don Jonz, my neighbor and friend took off on a highly publicized political junket, with special passenger Louisiana’s Congressman Boggs plus some Alaskan politicians and the plane disappeared. Machine and passengers remain unaccounted for to this day. Mailer was astounded on seeing so many privately owned aircraft, parked in long rows. Alaskans call such planes Alaskan taxicabs.

Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.

As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and
gone.

What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.

What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high spot—and perhaps also was Mailer’s. This experience was truly an epiphany. It occurred above Mount McKinley, at 20,300 feet the highest point in
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.

It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to
bypass, but to say hello to the Big One: Mount Denali. A “hello” from Norman Mailer meant “buzzing the mountain’s top.” When Mailer asked that
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to
Alaska’s guest of honor.

Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the
left sat Skellings, behind him, Mailer; and on the right, across from Skellings, I sat and, behind me, sat Tom Bischel, the millionaire hitchhiker. My vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”

Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting
nothing less than an epiphany.

For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.

During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s
next novel, ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.

There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.

Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”

Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his
five-day Alaskan visit.

There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer
scholars.

As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the
Vegas exit. Keep the surreal desert phone booth. But before he dials, imagine that he knows what his fictional cousin now knows—that wilderness cities may come and go, but there’s always authentic wilderness up north in the
Brooks Range.

Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless
when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello
and press the flesh with God.

===Three Postscripts===
# Soon after Mailer’s departure, Anne Barry, his former office assistant (now freelancing for ''Esquire'') was assigned to cover Alaska. Mailer phoned Skellings and me and said: “Show Anne around.” This we did, showing her all the high spots, some still alive with the Mailer scent. Anne Barry was enthralled with Alaska. She, surprisingly, said that she might decide to permanently live up here. She never did nor did Mailer ever come back for a follow-up visit.
# ''Time'' magazine, shortly thereafter, decided to do a special Mailer front cover issue. A ''Time'' staff writer was to assigned to wine and dine Skellings and me. We provided photo-ops, interviews, and local color comments. We were ecstatic. (Imagine being in such a prestigious American magazine.) ''Time'' then soon reported that the Mailer cover issue was put on hold. Much later, I was told that Mailer refused all cooperation and ''Time'' subsequently killed the project.
# House Speaker Mike Gravel went on to serve two terms (1969–1981) as Alaska’s Senator. Most recently (2008) Gravel was a Democratic Party candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

=== Citations ===
{{Reflist}}

=== Work Cited ===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |pages=9 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}
[[Category:V.2 2008]]
[[Category:Articles]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/A New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost

2020-09-29T00:17:01Z

CCross: Added some links

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/A New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost''}}
{{Working}}
{{MR02}}
{{Byline|last=Anshen|first=David|abstract=A reading of ''[[Harlot’s Ghost]]'' in relation to {{NM}}’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War. The novel resists making overt judgments on events. The novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.||url=https://prmlr.us/mr08ansh}}

{{quote|width=50%|“The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} }}

{{quote|“Please do not understand me too quickly.”|author=Norman Mailer|source=quoting [[w:Andre Gide|Andre Gide]] in the epigraph to ''[[The Deer Park]]''.}}

{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer was one of the most ambitious writers}} of our time. He had enormous faith in the power of writing to influence and change society and to alter the quality of human life. Despite the controversies that swirled around his public figure, he should be more recognized for the scope of his efforts to use his writing to transform America. With bravado, courage, and a bit of recklessness, he has repeatedly proclaimed his ''personal'' ambition to place himself, as a writer, in the company of literary giants and thereby remedy what he believes are America’s literary deficiencies, while also promising that he is about to write a novel that will create the “revolution in consciousness”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} which he believes is necessary to rejuvenate a stagnant America,{{efn|See again {{harvtxt|Mailer|1959}} as well as essays in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1966}} and {{harvtxt|Mailer|1982}}. This point recurs throughout his writing.}} through writing the “great American novel” which will “tell the truth of our times.” Undoubtedly, however, this effort has been fraught with difficulties; as [[w:Carl Rollyson|Carl Rollyson]] explains in his biography of Mailer: “In the forty years since ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'' Mailer has been searching for a way to write the great panoramic American novel. . . . America had seemed too complex for any single novelist—no matter how mature—to take on.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=359}} His last, sustained effort to reveal America through a work of fiction is the long historical novel about the CIA, ''Harlot’s Ghost''. However, this novel has been overlooked as the culmination of Mailer’s project of a fictional representation of America and therefore largely ignored as the important work of politically engaged fiction that I believe it is.{{efn|One of the many critics who argue this way is {{harvtxt|Nielson|1997}}, who sums up her conclusion about Mailer’s politics based on ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and ''[[Oswald’s Tale]]'' by stating, “What an examination of the persistent presence of Kennedy in their writings tends to suggest is that, for all Mailer’s non-conformism, his oeuvre serves to ultimately uphold the defining myths of the society which he describes, while that of Vidal works to undermine them.”{{sfn|Nielson|1997|p=23}} While her analysis of the episodes featuring [[William Kennedy|Kennedy]] in Mailer’s work and [[w:Gore Vidal|Vidal]]’s is persuasive in showing that Mailer’s writings on Kennedy are more positive than Vidal’s, this doesn’t justify, in my opinion, the broad conclusions she draws. On the other hand, the major critic who has treated ''Harlot’s Ghost'' as a whole, John {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|1995}} argues persuasively that Mailer’s novel debunks the “myth of the American Adam.” This “myth” described by R.W.B. Lewis (and others) concerns alleged American “innocence” which Whalen-Bridge convincingly demonstrates is undermined by the novel. Whalen-Bridge is the major scholar that has written in detail on ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and draws the conclusion that “His [Mailer’s DA] fictional interpretation of American intelligence work does more than any other work of literature to help readers gain access to ‘the imagination of the state.{{' "}} Unfortunately, few others have recognized the critical features of the novel. See also {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|1998}}. Others who don’t believe the novel is critical of the CIA include {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995}} who, in his biography states categorically that the novel “doesn’t set out be, then, a critique of the CIA”{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=131}} and {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999}}.}} This is undoubtedly because the novel presents a strange puzzle; both its content and form need careful consideration before its significance can be understood.

My essay offers a reading of the novel in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the [[w:Cold War|Cold War]], while offering an explanation for the unorthodox formal features. In contrast to most critics who have written on the novel, I believe that ''Harlot’s Ghost'' presents a fierce indictment of America during the Cold War and after, which is intensified by the unconventional form.{{efn|I would place this novel alongside masterpieces of Cold War literature such as [[w:Robert Coover|Coover]], [[w:E. L. Doctorow|Doctorow]] and [[w:Don Delillo|Delillo]] below. All of these novels challenge the conventions of traditional literary realism and present radical formal structures.}} Indeed, I hope to show that the novel’s importance and significance, the truth it tells about American society, lies in what might appear its utter failure, both as a novel and a judgment on the history and politics, namely the way the novel fails to cohere as a novel. The novel refuses overt judgments on the events narrated. Paradoxical as it may seem, I will argue that the ''failure'' of traditional novelistic form and resolution creates a dialectic between reader and text allowing important revelations about American society to emerge which make the novel a success in telling the “truth of our times.” The truths revealed are precisely that the issues of the novel, which concern the meaning of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and its challenges, are not over and that instead of “the end of history” (to use [[w:Francis Fukiyama|Francis Fukiyama]]’s famous phrase) we are still plunged into unresolved history. Therefore, the novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.

===A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma===
The relative neglect of the novel is easily understandable. After 1,168 pages, Norman Mailer terminates ''Harlot’s Ghost'' with a promise. He writes in bold capital letters at the end of the novel “TO BE CONTINUED.”{{efn|This isn’t the very end of the ''Harlot’s Ghost''. Mailer writes an “Author’s Note” which offers a defense of the novel’s claim for “verisimilitude” to historical reality and a list of nonfiction works about the CIA that informed the novel. This is followed by a list of CIA acronyms and individuals. This is an interesting and unconventional ending to a fictional spy novel. See {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|pp=1169–1187}}}} There has been no sequel. To make matters worse, none of the conflicts of the novel, whether personal or political, are resolved, leaving readers to wonder about the fate of Harry Hubbard, the central character, and the other characters in the novel. This has obviously frustrated many readers. Given that Hubbard is a CIA agent caught in highly charged, real episodes in the history of the Cold War, and considering Mailer’s career-long ambition to tell the “truth of our times,” more information is expected. The novel ends with Hubbard in Moscow, after years of service to the CIA, looking for his godfather and career mentor, known as Harlot, who may have faked death and defected to the Soviets. In the last sentence of the novel, Hubbard poses a question: “Could I be ready to find my godfather and ask him, along with everything else I would ask: ‘Whom?’ In the immortal words of [[w:Vladimir Ilich Lenin|Vladimir Ilich Lenin]], ‘Whom? Whom does all this benefit?{{' "}}{{efn|It is doubtful that Lenin ever said this. Although presented as a quotation it is, as far as I can ascertain—at best—a paraphrase. It sounds a little like the title of Lenin’s famous book that also presents a question, ''What is to be Done?'' It also seems similar to the question Kevin Costner, playing Jim Garrison, in Oliver Stone’s ''JFK'' asks about the Kennedy assassination—who benefits from this? See {{harvtxt|Lenin|1977}}.}} It is puzzling that this question, so starkly posed, has not received an answer in the sequel promised at the end of the novel.

Mailer sets up grandiose expectations for the sequel by the incomplete ending and the final questions of the novel. The information left open concerns the fictional life of Harry Hubbard but also implies a verdict on the politics of America in the Cold War. To explain the events of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' means to reveal history since Hubbard is conveniently placed in the midst of major episodes in the Cold War due to his role in the CIA as an “agent” trying to influence developments. It is only at the end that Hubbard and readers realize the degree to which there is uncertainty as to what exactly has happened and why. In effect, the novel has set up a mystery without providing answers. However, to provide the meaning of the political events so starkly, in the form of answers to a question (“Whom does all this benefit?”), which will supposedly be answered when Harlot is located, is difficult to imagine given the deep level of political truths involved. Can any person, no matter how well placed, really be imagined who can answer ultimate truths about the meaning of the Cold War? In my view, it is to Mailer’s credit that he challenges himself to find a way to imaginatively create persuasive answers and meaning to the most important political issues of our times. Yet, it is further to his credit that, whether consciously or not, he has shown the honesty to abandon a simple approach to a career-long objective which could only be achieved, I will argue, at the cost of intellectual, political, and literary triviality. In effect, Mailer turns away from a dream that, if achieved, would situate him as part of a literary tradition that includes authors he admires most: [[w:Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]], [[w:Leo Tolstory|Tolstoy]], and [[w:Émile Zola|Zola]], who also strove to tell the truth of their times. However, to invent a character revealing the meaning behind historical events brings to mind the superficiality of conspiracy theories, one form of historical fiction that seems to be growing in popularity (sometimes interestingly in literature but tragically in public discourse).{{efn|Conspiracy theories have been taken by several critics as the hallmark of postmodern historical representation. See {{harvtxt|Jameson|1991}}, and {{harvtxt|McHale|1992}}, among others.}} On the other hand, [[w:Bertolt Brecht|Bertolt Brecht]]’s goal for writers that they should “render reality to men in a form they can master”{{sfn|Adorno|1978|p=81}}{{efn| This phrase comes from Brecht’s polemic around the ''nature'' of realism with [[w:Georg Lukács|Georg Lukács]] “Against Lukács” in {{harvtxt|Adorno|1978|p=81}}.}} seems the prerequisite for any politically useful fiction and sets up relevant criteria for evaluating ''Harlot’s Ghost''. Therefore, Mailer’s unwillingness or inability to write an ending or sequel to ''Harlot’s Ghost'' will be considered in light of such Brechtian goals. This paper will show that the novel’s lack of resolution is best understood not as a personal failure, or as symptomatic of the impossibility of political writing at the present time, but rather represents a new and valuable strategy in Mailer’s efforts to present unpleasant realities of American society. It should be noted, in passing, that my argument is not based on Mailer’s conscious ''intention'', which cannot be definitively ascertained, but rather on the logic of the novel in relation to its historical and political subject matter and Mailer’s stated objectives. These objectives are derived from Mailer’s career-long writings, interviews and public pronouncements and, in my view, form a clear and definable worldview and approach to human existence and human freedom.

With a few notable exceptions, this novel hasn’t fared well among critics and readers because it has been taken as conservative and sympathetic to the CIA, and because of its lack of an ending. These reactions need to be reconsidered. The novel is not a flattering portrait of the CIA, as we shall see, despite the tendency of some commentators to conflate the politics of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' with that of its narrator and protagonist, Harry Hubbard who, at least initially, views the CIA as a noble organization.{{efn|Mary Dearborn in her recent biography of Norman Mailer takes this view of the work. She writes, “To Hubbard, America is a country that ‘had God’s sanction’ and he is privileged and honored to serve it” and concludes from her reading of the novel that “Norman’s admiration for the CIA, and his approval of what he takes to be its patrician ways, is obvious in Harlot’s Ghost.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=409}} This seems to me to miss the ambiguity and tension that drive the novel and represents a too simplistic conflation of the framework of the protagonist with the logic of the novel.}} ''Harlot’s Ghost'' presents a damning vision of contemporary American society that fits into an alternative canon of politically engaged, Cold War literature that find traditional modes of representation inadequate for conditions of late capitalism. The novel’s lack of closure, although frustrating to many readers, reflects an unwillingness to artificially resolve the real historical conditions and conflicts depicted in the novel—even if this is a ''post-facto'' explanation. This refusal of premature closure represents a new politics of form for Mailer. To understand the novel’s lack of ending, we need to consider the subtle and unexpected affinities between Mailer’s performance and the Brechtian concepts of how political art should function as elaborated by [[w:Walter Benjamin|Walter Benjamin]].{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Brecht|2001}}, “The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater.”}} The novel’s lack of closure is best understood by considering it in light of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, influenced by Brecht, “The Author as Producer.”{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Benjamin|1998|pp=85–105}}. I wish to make it clear that I am not suggesting that Mailer was influenced by this essay directly but rather that it helps us understand the functioning and logic of the structure of the novel. While Mailer never cites Benjamin or Brecht, in relation to this novel or in any of his writings (that I know of), his explanation for the structure of the novel, quoted towards the end of this essay

echoes their approach.}} Benjamin confronts the question that has haunted Mailer for years—namely, how can authors effectively and meaningfully use their writing to expand creativity and human freedom{{sfn|Benjamin|1998|pp=85–105}} in the face of the depersonalizing effects of modern capitalism. It is often the case that the politics of a work of fiction is reduced to its explicit political content but Benjamin, in contrast, makes the claim, still radical in current circumstances, that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense,”{{sfn|Benjamin|1998|p=86}} inextricably linking political content to form. Therefore, by Benjamin’s criteria the politics of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' do not reside in what it overtly tells us about the politics of the CIA, but rather through a more complex dialectic between the novel’s form and content. The justification for Benjamin’s assertion lies in his description of a situation in which, “we are in the midst of a vast process in which literary forms are being melted down, a process in which many of the contrasts in terms of which we have been accustomed to think may lose their relevance,”{{sfn|Benjamin|1998|p=87}} which is more true in the contemporary media and information explosion that accompanies late capitalism than when Benjamin wrote. Mailer’s incomplete novel can be taken as coherent if, despite the belief that we live in a post-ideological era where the struggle between capitalism and its challenges are over, the issues at the heart of the Cold War remain unresolved, leaving a final word impossible.

===The Portrait of a Young Man—Hubbard and Mailer===
There is a strange ambiguity within ''Harlot’s Ghost'' concerning the novel’s subject matter. The novel is about real historical events yet it also serves as a ''[[w:Bildüngsroman|Bildüngsroman]]'' (as Hubbard himself describes the work){{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=109}} under the veneer of the spy genre. ''Harlot’s Ghost'' certainly disappoints readers who expect the traditional features of spy novels, since all of the experiences described are left profoundly opaque and there are no heroic resolutions à la [[w:Ian Fleming|Ian Fleming]]. Perhaps the closest literary comparison would be [[w:Joseph Conrad|Conrad]]’s ''[[w:The Secret Agent|The Secret Agent]]'' since both novels are filled with bureaucratic machinations, unsavory characters, and a vision of society in terminal crisis, although Mailer never provides even the limited cognitive satisfaction of Conrad’s highly ambiguous work. In ''The Secret Agent'', readers are at least provided with enough details to understand the motivations of the characters and the events of the novel. ''Harlot’s Ghost'' features an almost complete, radical indeterminacy, where it is not just the characters that don’t know the meaning of the events but also the readers and perhaps even the author himself. This situation is justified by understanding the real subject matter of the novel.

Critics who have written about the novel have generally taken it as a simple novel about the CIA, and have failed to notice its allegorical features and the way the novel operates.{{efn|A notable exception, as mentioned above, is John Whalen-Bridge.}} On the literal level, the novel treats historical events from the Cold War and espionage. On a deeper level, the novel concerns issues central to Mailer, namely the possibility of creativity, freedom, and the cost of success in American society. Mailer’s intellectual framework, based on the valorization of courage and existential integrity as the road to self-expansion, is tested in this novel through characters who strive to succeed in influencing history.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|1965}} and the episodes of rock climbing in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991}}.}} Further, as is often true of Mailer’s writing, questions of individuality and freedom intersect with the status of ''writing'' and being a ''writer''. The status of writing is explicitly at stake since the novel is formed by a series of incomplete narratives with missing information from the protagonist Hubbard, who at one point explains, “I clung to my writings as if they were body organs.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=102}} Hubbard feels that if he can narrate the events he will have gained knowledge and provided absolute truths; however, since his narrative if fragmentary, filled with gaps, and incomplete, he cannot fulfill either goal.

Mailer’s treatment of the dangers and conditions of life in the CIA gives a clue to the novel’s real subject matter, which is broader than just the military and information gathering features of the Cold War. The Cold War and espionage serve as parts of a greater whole, as metonymic representations of the nature of life in America. This explains the fact that we find few episodes of physical danger in Mailer’s CIA. Instead, the difficulty of CIA work seems to parallel the struggles of any individual striving for success inside a large, faceless bureaucracy and an impersonal society. Harry Hubbard describes himself at the beginning of the novel when he reviews his entire career, as a once-promising CIA operative, who is reduced to hack status. He has failed in every major project and has been reduced to the object of amusement by his colleagues who whisper about his failed potential. Indeed, all the agents in the novel, whether fictional or based on real CIA agents, are obsessed with the most American of ambitions: career advancement. Courage, skill, and grace (key values for Mailer) are generally tested in the shark-infested waters of “the Company,” not by evil madmen intent on taking over the world, but by common features of life in capitalist America, including the struggle for career advancement. The dangers to America are what America is becoming. This theme is familiar in Mailer’s work and has been accurately summarized by [[w:Harold Bloom|Harold Bloom]] as conditions of, “[A]n America where he [Mailer] sees our bodies and spirits as becoming increasingly artificial, even ‘plastic.{{' "}}{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=40}} In other words, authentic experience and meaningful action is constantly threatened by standardizing features and mediocrity prevalent in the CIA (“the Company” extraordinaire).

An indicative example of life in the CIA and its “dangers” face Hubbard on his first assignment. He is placed in a records room known as the “Snake Pit” and ordered to provide information and files on an individual known only by a code acronym. He cannot locate the data since it has either been removed or lost. Since he is under orders by a superior officer overseas to provide this information, which cannot be located, his mission becomes to conceal his own identity as an incompetent data clerk. He is able to do this with the help of his mentor and Godfather, Harlot, who has the power to change Harry’s own code name acronym. Eventually, he gets placed overseas and finds himself in West Germany, serving under Bill Harvey (the real CIA station head at that time) who gives him the assignment of locating the real identity of the incompetent data clerk who, it turns out, failed to locate information for Harvey. Hubbard’s mission becomes investigating and reporting on the real identity of an incompetent clerk who turns out to be Hubbard himself (shades of Oedipus).

Hubbard manages to conceal his identity despite close dealings with Harvey. However, he never finds out the significance of his original inability to locate the data requested. Perhaps the original missing information would have provided Harvey with information about a double agent, reporting to the East Germans about the secret construction of a tunnel, which would have aided the West in spiriting information and people across the [[w:Iron Curtain|Iron Curtain]]. In other words, Hubbard’s failure might have been of real importance in the Cold War. This distinguishes life in the CIA from other agencies or bureaus of government or business, since the CIA is, to a very large degree, in the business of directly intervening in history through the achievement of accurate information or “intelligence.” Hubbard makes clear that he is attracted to the CIA precisely because, as he explains in his CIA personal history statement, “''I have been brought up to face ultimates'',”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=182}} which reflects the belief that the CIA is the road to truth and effective action. However, truth is never so easy. Harlot argues to Hubbard that the successful completion of the tunnel would have been a disaster because it would have provided ''too much'' information about the real state of affairs in the Soviet bloc (a weak level of military preparedness and a series of bankrupt economies), which would threaten CIA funding. Harlot prefers disinformation to accurate information because it justifies future government expenditures. Did he set up Hubbard? Another possibility readers are forced to consider is that Harlot himself is a double agent and therefore subverts the tunnel to aid the Soviets. Readers, like Hubbard, never know for sure.

When Hubbard moves on to operations in Uruguay to fight communist influence, he receives a secret message from a high-ranking KGB official that there is a high-ranking double agent and he shouldn’t trust anyone—particularly the Soviet Division of the CIA. When Hubbard is debriefed; that is, interrogated by the Soviet Division, he decides not to report this part of the message. His evasion sets in motion a prolonged series of questions: it seems suspicious to the Soviet Division, experts on how the [[w:KGB|KGB]] works, that a KGB agent would become a double agent for the US by fingering double agents against the US without specifying who they are. And, of course, the KGB does act exactly as expected to act, but Harry, not knowing how the KGB is supposed to act, puts himself in jeopardy. If his omission is revealed, Hubbard will appear as a double agent himself, but with the help of Harlot he is able to get out of the jam. Harlot himself offers the theory that if Hubbard mentioned the Soviet Division, it would be taken, by the Soviet Division, as evidence that Harlot and Harry were intent on destroying the Soviet Division.

This picture of CIA activities would be ridiculous if it didn’t present a convincing picture of institutional logic. All of these gaps in knowledge are typical of the novel. Indeed, they present a consistent picture of inherent, systematic obstacles to effective activity. As Hubbard puts it, “As an Agency officer, I . . . encountered my fair share of plots . . . but I was rarely able to see them whole.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=109-110}} This conflicts with the “existential” quest for courage, freedom and effective action since for an individual to freely choose his or her behavior, they must be able to understand their situation with a certain degree of accuracy. What prevents success in ''Harlot’s Ghost'' is not lack of courage or unwillingness to face unpleasant truths, but rather the daily functioning of compartmentalized, fragmented, and isolated individuals pursuing their own local interests. Knowledge and effective action are revealed as impossible on a micro-level, despite the traditional claim that competing interests in a market system result in maximum efficiency, fair results, and the common good. Truth, if it exists at all in this fictional world of espionage, can only be imagined as a whole picture looked at from the outside of the multiple bureaus and interests. However, if we take these episodes as suggestive of American society more broadly with its logic of privatization and the market system, we are given a critical picture of how the divergent interests that operate within American capitalist society serve to frustrate the interests of the whole. The ultimate logic of capitalism and the market (where each individual pursues individual interests) are revealed as leading to incoherence and flawed results. American society is in crisis, unable to function effectively in the Cold War because so-called intelligence gathering can never effectively provide more than limited and partial information, and truth is contingent upon pragmatic considerations.

The major characters and their problems also function more narrowly. The CIA agents, determined to influence history, are all would-be authors; they are not just writers-in-general, but the characters often articulate ideas similar to Mailer himself.{{efn|Mailer makes explicit his connection with his characters in the “Authors Note” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' when he says that, “I wrote this book with the part of my mind that had lived in the CIA for forty years,”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1169}} going on to say that he might have joined the CIA provided he had a “different political bent.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1170}} On at least one other occasion, he explicitly compared the life of writers, and his, with CIA agents. In an interview quoted by Glenday, he explains, “I have an umbilical connection to ''Harlot’s Ghost'' because I’ve been obsessed with questions of identity my whole life” explaining that the changes in his status as a writer have been comparable to “spies and actors who take on roles that are not their own.”{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=134}} }} On the most general level, they are all ambitious and determined, but are left in a precarious status in terms of their ultimate contribution to history (like Mailer).

The novel opens with Hubbard reading over his memoirs. He opines that under other circumstances he might have settled as a writer (just as Mailer states in the “Author’s note” that under other circumstances he might have been a CIA agent, which reveals similarities between the two “spooky arts”) but he wonders if anyone will ever read his document. We flash back to his early life where, notably, there are many common features between the tradecraft of writing and espionage. Hubbard learns that espionage is an art. He finds out that “codes” express and determine the life of an agent. Codes change an individual’s name, and Hubbard expresses the view that “the change of name itself ought to be enough to alter one’s character”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=196}} and that “even as shifting one’s cryptonym called forth a new potentiality for oneself, so there was a shiver of metamorphosis in this alteration of appearance.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=197}} Developing a code name is taken as the construction of a personality, one of the primary tasks of writers and CIA agents alike. Being an effective agent is almost directly compared to the kinds of imagination and creativity required for producing powerful literature. For example, Hubbard describes his early training:

<blockquote>
We were assigned a specific color for each number...

[n]ext, we were asked to visualize a wall, a table, a lamp. If the first three digits of the telephone number were 586, we were to picture a red wall behind a gray table on which was sitting an orange lamp. For the succeeding four numbers, we might visualize a woman in a purple jacket, green skirt, and yellow shoes sitting on an orange chair. That was our mental notation for 4216. By such means, 586-4216 had been converted into a picture with seven colored objects.... I became so proficient at these equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=197-198}}</blockquote>

Espionage is the art of metaphor. Representation allows transformation, the alteration of “appearances” and signifiers creating powerful new meanings. This is what agents learn in their CIA schooling, according to Mailer. They don’t just master symbols, metaphors, codes, and figures of speech; they also master influence over others. This is Harlot’s specialty, what he trains agents in, and he stresses that influencing individuals through the art of espionage is linked with the struggle to influence history. This is made particularly clear when “counter-espionage,” or developing double agents, is taught by Harlot and practiced by Hubbard in Uruguay. Hubbard describes feeling a loyalty to his “creation” Chevi Fuertes, a leftist won over to the CIA who eventually defects to Cuba after the [[w:Bay of Pigs Invasion|Bay of Pigs]] fails to create effective characters or characters misunderstood by critics. Through these and other episodes in the CIA, we see that Hubbard’s grand ambitions parallel Mailer’s, and interestingly, generally lead to failure.

It is not just Harry that can be seen as embodying elements of Mailer’s worldview. Kittredge, a woman agent married to both Harry and Harlot at different times in the novel, is a career psychologist and theorist for the CIA, and she also articulates a theory of personality that shares much in common with Mailer’s views. (Mailer’s worldview is frequently given voice in almost all of his novels since ''[[An American Dream]]''.) Her explanations of human behavior are direct articulations of Mailer’s theories of the human personality, to the degree that her theories seems straight out of Mailer’s essays on [[w:Henry Miller|Henry Miller]], collected in the anthology ''[[Genius and Lust]]'', or even Mailer’s last collection of reflections, ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation''.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|1976}}.}} She articulates, in great detail, Mailer’s oft-stated theory of the dual nature of the human personality and the concept of the “Alpha and Omega” of the psyche; the two-sided, male-female, divided nature of the human personality. She explains that when one acts in a destructive or ineffective manner, this should be understood as the inability to reconcile two sides of an individual’s personality. Although she has had a successful career as the CIA’s in-house psychologist and philosopher, she has a problem: her career is failing. In fact, it is an interesting fact that despite her championing of Mailer’s views, she is in despair. It is a sign of Mailer’s own self-critical ability to question his own perspective that characters fail and flounder despite articulating views close to Mailer’s. She writes:

<blockquote>
Harry, for the last five years, I have carried this burden of woe, doubt, misery, and burgeoning frustration...

Harry, life has always treated me as a darling, and for much too long. If my mother merely adored me my father more than made up for it.... My brain was so fertile that I could have gone off to a desert island and been deliriously happy with myself. The only pains I knew were the ferocious congestions attendant on new ideas.{{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=556-557}}</blockquote>

Mailer has described feeling as if he were the literary darling of critics after his early success with ''The Naked and The Dead'', which was extravagantly praised, but followed by harshly treated subsequent novels, ''[[The Deer Park]]'' and ''[[Barbary Shore]]''. Clearly, Mailer knew what it felt like to have incredibly “fertile” periods of creativity accompanied by frustration. Mailer has shown a repeated willingness to air publicly the frustrations of being a writer in his writing. Kittredge ends her despair, as Mailer so often has, by resolving to “find a way to renew oneself.”

Despite her articulation of Mailer’s theories, she, like all the characters, is unable ultimately to account for her sense of failure, and the theory fails. What makes this reading important about ''Harlot’s Ghost'' is that the novel functions as a testing ground for Mailer’s ideology, yet reveals the possibility of deconstructing that ideology. Mailer has stressed, in his essays and fiction, his conviction that courage and will determine success and that we must be “existentially” responsible for the conditions of our life. Bravery and honesty must be summoned and maintained and then we will be successful, Mailer claims. Mailer’s conviction is represented in ''An American Dream'' when Stephen Rojack walks around an apartment building balcony ledge, staving off the attempt of a devil-like character to push him off. After this act, Rojack, achieves inner peace and the novel resolves (unpersuasively, in my view).

The problem of failure, therefore, is a problem in Mailer’s worldview. This may explain the persistence of the supernatural in Mailer’s writings with the frequent presence of powerful forces, pressures, and “ghosts” that serve to constrict or destroy. The pseudo-metaphoric struggle between the individual spirit and supernatural forces (in all their murky strangeness and mystery) is central in almost all of Mailer’s writing. These “ghosts” seem to serve the function of calling upon individuals to achieve inner courage and strength, and also, to explain the failure of these values. What must be noticed is that all the agents in ''Harlot’s Ghost'' seem headed toward failure, precisely because of intangible conditions that cannot be dealt with or understood—then the novel’s abrupt ending leaves their lives and history suspended, with Kittredge either speaking to Harlot or his ghost. Why doesn’t the novel resolve this? It is as if Mailer stands at the abyss of a logic he will not face, namely that courage and spiritual development cannot provide success in the face of the impersonal forces of American society, and turns away out of fear and frustration. But this turning away is actually supreme honesty for Mailer’s project since it reveals the true unresolved state of American society.

In Mailer’s writing, dualism has not been enough to explain away the prevalent dread of failure. He has repeatedly supplemented his dualist explanation with “ghosts” and references to the battle between God and the Devil. What are these strange powers that move and slip in all realms of Mailer’s literary life? The unknowable and the supernatural in ''Harlot’s Ghost'' is manifest in the character of Harlot himself. Harlot is the God-like figure of the novel as Hubbard explains, “Harlot [is] a manifest of the Lord,”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=75}} or when he believes Harlot is dead Hubbard poses the question, “What would you do if you received incontrovertible news that the Lord had died?”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=45}} However literally we take this, it is clear by the end of the novel that Harlot’s status as a character who will reveal the mysteries of the novel is made problematic by his uncertain status as either dead, alive, or a ghost. History as an absolute truth is blocked by the structure of American society in ways so effectively represented in this novel, yet history itself is experienced as an inexplicable failure by Mailer’s characters. They fail to effectively intervene in history, most clearly in their efforts to defeat the Cuban revolution. This explains the mysteries around Harlot and his “ghost”; how else to explain heroic efforts that fail, if you believe, like Harry Hubbard that “love [is] a reward [for courage]. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity or loss, had succeeded in stirring the
power of creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=54}} Harlot, is amongst all else, the rival for Kittredge’s affections, whom she seems to be talking with toward the end of the novel’s chronology. Mailer himself states in ''On God'', “my own experience tells me that the degree one is brave, one finds more love than when one is cowardly.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=29}} The mysterious and ghostly is precisely the failure of ambition, of courage and the American dream (if you work hard and persevere, you succeed—if you fail it is your own fault). Mailer, like his characters, is caught in this duality: he subscribes to the American dream, yet realizes his own experience doesn’t correspond to it. This requires mysticism to sustain the dream. If you are worthy, the “powers of creation” will be stirred, but if you fail the same powers will block you.

There is one other “author” who functions with a formal similarity to Mailer in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', namely Harlot. He is the master spy that is expected to tell the truth and reveal all in the sequel. He has been the guiding influence on events, the person Hubbard describes as his own personal “master in the only spiritual art that American men and boys respect—machismo” who “gave life courses in grace under pressure.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=17}} He is the author of the ideology of courage that Hubbard develops. Of course, it must be stressed that Harlot tests his willingness to face absolutes, to push beyond the limits, and he fails during a rock climbing accident which reduces him to a wheelchair and literal and symbolic impotence (Kittredge leaves him after the accident and marries Hubbard), killing their son, and damaging his career. This suggests the limitations of Harlot’s framework and, by extension, Mailer’s.

Harlot, however, remains the author of the various plots that drive the novel. In this sense, he is again like Mailer. He is expected to answer the questions that have been left unanswered and provide historical truth. Harlot is the godfather to Hubbard, the god-like figure who would be in a position to tell the truth and rise above the fray of conflicting interests and perspectives, but he is left fundamentally unknowable as a character.

===The Novelist as the God that Fails and the Novel as Disinformation===
Close to the end of the novel, Hubbard has some disconcerting thoughts. In a conversation with Bill Harvey (a fictional character based on the real CIA station chief) suspicion is cast upon the loyalty of Hugh Montague, a.k.a. Harlot, who has been the primary influence over Harry’s career. Could Harlot, one of the most powerful leaders of the CIA, actually be a Soviet agent? This would make Harlot the complete opposite of everything he appears to be and would call into question all the values and ideology that Harry Hubbard assumes. In addition, since Harlot explains all of his efforts in [[w:Manichaeism|Manichean]] terms of serving God against the Devil (echoes of Mailer), and ''if'' Harlot is a Soviet agent, then the absolute values assumed throughout the novel, and taught by Harlot, either collapse into nihilism and become self-serving or reverse their position: God representing democracy and capitalism is really evil and the Devil of Communism is really good. This has become a possibility that Harry’s experience with the CIA, particularly his truly disastrous efforts to overthrow the Cuban revolution and assassinate Fidel Castro, makes him inclined to consider seriously if the God of Capitalism is really the God or the Devil. How the entire novel is to be understood rests upon what side, if any, Harlot really serves.

Harry remembers a conversation with Harlot about God and Evolution. Evolution threatens the theory of divine creation. In response, Harlot proposes the theory that God tricks man by setting up false appearances for God’s protection to secure his function. Evolution explains things, but is a “cover story” designed by God to confuse man. Harlot reasons: “ ‘You can say the universe is a splendidly-worked up system of disinformation calculated to make us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1281}} This disconcerts Harry considerably since ''he'' is Harlot’s creation. Has the entire Cold War, or at least his part of it, been a massive disinformation campaign? If so, has Hubbard been serving good (God) or the (Devil), and do these values reside in capitalism or communism, or some third way? Also, the discourse of deception should make readers of this novel suspicious since it suggests the novel itself might be a complex piece of trickery, precisely what the incomplete ending of the novel also suggests. If we go back to an early Mailer interview, “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator” in ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'', we find Mailer talking about God in terms of the future of the novel and creativity more broadly. In this interview, Mailer disarmingly jumps from conceptions of God, to conceptions of individual freedom, to the place of the writer in history. In an interesting way, these levels of concern shift and alter into a common concern. He explains his conception of God as “divided, not-all powerful; He exists as a warring element” and claims “we are a part—perhaps the most important part—of His great expression.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=380}} Mailer makes humans into characters in God’s great novel. In both cases, language such as “God,” “His great expression” and “creation” directly connects God and the universe with the novelist and his novel. In the interview Mailer goes on to make explicit this connection by stressing the implications of his Gnostic brand of theology:

<blockquote>
It [God as the source of expression] opens the possibility that the novel, along with many other art forms may be growing into something larger rather than something smaller, and the sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=380}}</blockquote>

The divine and mystical power of God allows new reservoirs of creative energy for aesthetic expression. If, however, we compare Harlot’s statement with Mailer’s earlier claims above, we detect an important shift. In both conceptions God is divided and warring, like a writer struggling to create works that are true to personal vision but facing critical rejection. However, Harlot’s theology is based on a God that is a losing force and that does not trust his audience. God needs to produce disinformation or his rule will be threatened by his creations. I suggest that Mailer’s theology, and Harlot’s, helps us understand how to read ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and probe beneath appearances. Harlot, who plots Hubbard’s fate and orchestrated history, manipulates because, like God, he needs to face the conditions of things becoming “smaller” and “less important.” Therefore, what is at stake in this novel is precisely the possibility of the novel, in general, as a creative form which can reveal understanding about history and society (which has always been Mailer’s stated objectives), or novels reduced to a minor expressive form. Mailer’s youthful optimism and confident rebellion against shrinkage of human and expressive potential seem lost: as God, Harlot and the novel are in danger of being revealed as weak frauds. If Harlot, who plays God with his Godson Harry, not to mention the CIA as a whole with its missions and history, is really part of an elaborate hoax, then the novel itself, by extension, threatens to be revealed as inadequate to represent history. However, perhaps Mailer’s strategy is similar to what he projected onto a threatened God; the grand novel that resolves history is disinformation. The lapse in this novel’s ending becomes full of implications for novel writing at large. Perhaps just this deception is necessary since the novel is not expanding and growing larger in our world of the television and the Internet but needs to be fought for in new ways.

To pursue this idea further, it is necessary to return to a scene early in the novel,(but late in Harry’s life) before he decides to travel to Russia, when the news has come that Harlot is dead. Harry, after deceiving Kittredge with an affair, and before she explains she will leave him for someone else, comes upon Kittredge talking to Harlot. Since Harlot is thought to be dead, this is quite strange. She is either delusional, talking to his ghost, or talking to the real Harlot. However, Harry can never know or obtain answers, short of finding Harlot, and the entire meaning of all that will come (or has come depending on the chronology taken in terms of Harry’s life or the narrative structure of the novel) revolves around this ghost. Is it real or not? The implications fundamentally shape the meaning of the entire novel and Harry’s relation with history. If Harlot is dead, then there can be no answers to motivations, loyalties, and the meaning of historical actions. The only meaning Harlot can retain in the “death of God” scenario is as a figure in the personal memories of Kittredge and Harry. Further, Kittredge’s talking with Harlot is madness, a delusion that truth can be revealed through communication. Harlot’s death is the end of the dream of making sense of history and of the novel’s mysteries. If Harlot is alive, on the other hand, then meaning can be made of his historical interventions (he can be asked for the truth in Moscow) and of history proper. If so, however, then his ghostly visage is illusory, a deception and fraud and the personal relations between Kittredge and Harlot become thoroughly subjective and unreliable. Take your choice, Harlot can seemingly only function as truth on the personal level or on the political level—but not both.

To make sense of this ending, it is useful to return to Walter Benjamin. In his essay on authors in capitalism, he claims that the true revolution that writers can affect is one in terms of “technique”:

<blockquote>
Before I ask: what is a work’s position ''vis-à-vis'' the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position ''within'' them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary ''technique''.{{sfn|Benjamin|1998|p=87}}</blockquote>

This emphasis on “technique” is further explained by the claim that a progressive “technique” is defined as a type of writing which “will be better, the more consumers it brings in contact with the production process—in short, the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators.”{{sfn|Benjamin|1998|p=98}}

This framework of Benjamin’s sheds new light on what can be made of the apparent failure of the novel to resolve. Mailer himself has given two explanations. At the time of the novel’s publication, Mailer promised to complete the work after some time went by, but recently has stated that he won’t revisit the novel because technology has dehumanized espionage. This doesn’t seem persuasive to me because the novel’s scope is not contemporary espionage but historical episodes revealed through the voice of a fictional spy positioned to discover truth. Interestingly, in an earlier interview for BBC, Mailer defends the form of the novel in a way that directly echoes Benjamin’s concept of a transformation in technique, which transforms authors into producers. He says:

<blockquote>
The reader having been given the end and the beginning will conceive of that ‘middle’; they know that the middle takes place in Vietnam, and Watergate, and that the love affair between Harry Hubbard and Kittredge ... was consummated in that ‘middle’ and they will think about it, and in their own mind—if they like the book—they’ll come to the point where they conceive of that middle novel. Now, if I come along and write it in the next few years, they’ll then be able to check their version of the novel against mine.{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=135}}</blockquote>

From the vantage point of “telling” the “truth of our times,” and on the level of crafting an explicit plot resolution, the novel fails. The position of the author is in decline—at least in terms of the author as the “hero” who reveals history. Could the novel be taken as an elaborate hoax? Mailer, himself, at some level, recognizes that there is no novelistic resolution to the level of questions he poses. Even though Mailer planned to write a sequel, the results remain: the incomplete novel becomes a radical formal experiment and gesture of making the readers into the “authors” of the sequel. Mailer stresses the value of readers who “conceive” the ending. Given that the ending revolves around the nature of the Cold War and the value of the relative sides, making the readers interpret the future “ending” means placing the readers as judges of history. Perhaps Mailer’s attachment to radical individualism and existential courage is shown inadequate in the face of “ghosts”; that is, the collective, overpowering force of history that cannot be revealed by an “author” because they are beyond the purview of an individual. On the other hand, out of this failure, meaningful truth is produced and revealed, precisely out of abandoning the position of the author who tells all. Any answers given by Mailer to the questions at the end of the novel would ring hollow since they would force him to stand for or against the U.S. role in the Cold War by making Harlot a hero or villain. True, the reader cannot end this novel with the sense of completion or satisfaction traditional novels provide. Instead, we are left to become the writers and producers—speculating and arguing about how the novel that wasn’t written should end. We may consider whether the public media-driven faith in the God-like claims about capitalism and so-called democracy, which are supposedly outside of time and history and beyond challenge are an elaborate hoax. Harlot may be alive or dead, and like a possible “God” and “Devil” we cannot know, but we are put in the writer’s place free from the authority of any divine will. It would be ironic if Mailer, who, like his fictional CIA agents, has spent a career attempting to write the great novel, decided not to, precisely so that by turning away from this project and refusing a sequel, he forces us to rethink our relationship to novels and history. This is where his great contribution can reside.

===Back to the Future===
There is one other way that the novel offers knowledge about history. The novel was written before the end of the Cold War. Since this point, we, the readers of history, have been told the story that we are at the “end of history” where the great dualistic struggle between capitalism (as represented by America) and communism (represented by the Soviet bloc) is over, goodness has won, and the era of peace and prosperity is awaiting.{{efn|The most famous version of this comes from {{harvtxt|Fukiyama|1998}}. He has since basically abandoned his thesis and now warns of the dangers to civilization by “radical Islamist” forces.}} This suggests that the truth of the Cold War was revealed and it can be seen clearly what was at stake—the benefits of liberal democracy or the necessarily evil nature of communism or any attempt to challenge the market system. In a sense, history seemed to provide the answer to the question of Mailer’s novel. A sense of euphoria and moral certitude swept over the victors of the Cold War as they proclaimed with religious ferocity the advent of the American Century and the “new world order.” However, quickly this resolution of the plot dissolved. From the vantage point of distance, the choice God or the Devil, the Soviet Union or America, victory or defeat seems a strange piece of “disinformation.” Despite America’s victory, like Norman Mailer’s unfinished novel, all of the dangers and possibilities, the ambiguities and contradictions, seem still unresolved. Mailer turns out to be prescient; the novel is not over. There still has been no way to end, for good or bad, the plot twists and surprises, the unexplained betrayals and crimes of recent history. Any answers to history that seemed written by the end of the Cold War turn out to be incomplete and faulty, ideological and short-sighted as capitalist America continues to engender conflict and confusion, dangers and resistance. The truth of these events will not be given to us by some expert with words. We are still left to create the story that will tell the truth of our times, but it won’t be written on paper.

===Notes===
{{Notelist}}

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Adorno |first=Teodor |date=1978 |title=Aesthetics and Politics |url= |location=New York |publisher=Verso |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Benjamin |first=Walter |translator-last1=Bostock |translator-first1=Anna |chapter=The Author as Producer |date=1998 |title=Understanding Brecht |url= |location=New York |publisher=Verso |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= |first= |editor1-last=Bloom |editor1-first= Harold |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer: Modern Critical Views |url= |location=New York |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= |first= |editor1-last=Bloom |editor1-first= Harold |editor-mask=1 |date=2003 |chapter=Norman in Egypt |title=Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer |url= |location=Philadelphia |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Brecht |first=Bertolt |translator-last1=Willet |translator-first1=John |date=2001 |title=Brecht on Theater: the Development of an Aesthetic. |url= |location=New York |publisher=Hill and Wang |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Coover |first=Robert |date=1977 |title=The Public Burning |url= |location=New York |publisher=Grove Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary |date=1999 |title=Mailer a Biography |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=DeLillo |first=Don |date=1997 |title=Underworld |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon and Shuster |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doctorow |first=E. |date=1996 |title=The Book of Daniel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Plume Penguin Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fukiyama |first=Francis |date=1998 |title=The End of History and the Last Man |url= |location=New York |publisher=Avon Books |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=St. Martin's Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jameson |first=Fredric |date=1991 |title=Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism |url= |location=Durham |publisher=Duke UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lenin |first=V. |date=1977 |title=Selected Works in 3 Volumes |url= |location=Moscow |publisher=International Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location= |publisher=Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1976 |title=Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller |url= |location=New York |publisher=Grove |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982 |title=Pieces and Pontifications |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=McHale |first=Brian |date=1992 |title=Constructing Postmodernism |url= |location=London and New York |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Nielson |first=Heather |title=Jack's Ghost: Reappearances of John Kennedy in the work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=American Studies International |volume=35 |issue=3 |date=1997 |pages=23-41 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Paragon House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |title=The Myth of American Adam in Late Mailer |url= |journal=Connotations |volume=5 |issue=2-3 |date=1995 |pages=304-321 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |author-mask=1 |date=1998 |title=Fiction and the American Self |url= |location=Urbana |publisher=University of Illinois P |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost, A}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address

2020-09-28T23:52:46Z

CCross: Changed position of one in-text quote citation

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{{Byline|last=Broer|first=Lawrence R.|abstract=No two contemporary writers have looked harder or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman {{NM}} and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08broe}}

{{dc|dc=N|o two contemporary writers have looked harder}} or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than [[Norman Mailer]] and [[w:Kurt Vonnegut|Kurt Vonnegut]]. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a “canary bird in the coal mine”—one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present.{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=238}} In books Mailer might call existential errands, like ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'', ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', ''[[Of a Fire on the Moon]]'', and ''[[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]'', Mailer’s particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time.

Canary birds notwithstanding, of course, Mailer and Vonnegut have been as painfully conscious of the fundamental absurdities of their age as any of their contemporaries: the stockpiling of doomsday weapons to keep the world safe, the brutalities of World Wars, the quest for God through material acquisitions and technological advance, uncritical patriotism—the list goes on. Both see the atrocities of the death camps and those that followed Auschwitz as symbolizing the spiritual devastation of our age. In his essay “[[The White Negro]],” Mailer describes the Holocaust as a mirror to the human condition that “blinded anyone who looked into it.” “Probably,” Mailer says, "We will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge . . . that we might . . . be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by ''[[w:Deus ex machina|deus ex machina]]'' in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} In an address at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut said, “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to ''Popular Mechanics'' magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=161}} Vonnegut acknowledges that in the wake of Hiroshima and the death camps, faith in human improvement has not come easily, pointing out that he and his fellow canary-bird artists chirped and chirped and keeled over in protest of the war in Vietnam, but it made no difference whatsoever. “Nobody cared.” But, he says, “I continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=239}} That’s what our minds were designed to do.

In their latest analyses of America’s ills, Mailer’s ''[[Why Are We at War?]]'' (2003) and Vonnegut’s ''[[w:A Man Without a Country|A Man Without a Country]]'' (2005), Mailer and Vonnegut reaffirm their love of democracy and the U.S. Constitution as civilization’s best hopes for a more orderly and saner world. As always, both labor hard on behalf of a society, as Vonnegut writes, “dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal and should not starve.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=11}} “It so happens,” Vonnegut says, “that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed clouds. It is the law. It is the U.S. Constitution.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98}} He praises his two favorite spokesmen for democratic freedoms, [[w:Carl Sandburg|Carl Sandburg]] and [[w:Eugene Victor Debs|Eugene Victor Debs]]: “I would have been tongue-tied,” he says, “in the presence of such national treasures.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=13}} He encourages us all to read Tocqueville’s ''[[w:Democracy in America|Democracy in America]]'' as the best book ever written on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in American democracy. Vonnegut asks, “Want a taste of that great book?” Tocqueville says, “and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. Okay?”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=8}} Mailer hails democracy as God’s most noble and beautiful experiment, but always “in peril,”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=16}} an existential venture whose delicacy makes it dangerously vulnerable, a “state of grace” attained only by those ready to suffer and even to perish for its freedoms.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=71}} We’ll see later how at the end of ''Why Are We at War?'' this forewarning takes a complex and troubling turn.

But, for the moment, troubling enough is Mailer’s admonition that (“[freedom] has to be kept alive every day of our existence”), because we can all “be swallowed by our miseries . . . become weary, give up.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=100,16-17}} The note of futility present in the reference to “giving up” runs throughout ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'', a foreboding, deeply personal sense on the part of both writers that because of the tragic events of 9/11 and what Mailer calls the inestimable “spiritual wreckage”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=23}} that has followed, the state of the union is in terrible and perhaps irremediable trouble. “The notion,” Mailer reports, “that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} “Nobody,” he says, “ever said . . . that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=103}} The problem is, he adds, that “[t]he people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} Vonnegut feels that his own personal democratic dream of a community with kindness, fairness, mercy, and mutual respect at its core has been so betrayed by the forces of selfishness and greed that he is now, as his title suggests, a man without a country. "I myself,” he says "feel that our country, for whose constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it was. What has happened is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98-99}} which “disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by the Constitution, which is to say The House and Senate and the Supreme Court.” Vonnegut observes that “our daily news sources, newspapers and TV are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=103}} Mailer decries the same lack of courage and will on the part of the liberal media and prominent liberal senators.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=65}}

Like Mailer, Vonnegut also despairs that “I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes or not . . . I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=70-71}} What he says is probably making him “unfunny” now for the rest of his life is that he knows that “there is not a chance in hell” of America becoming the humane and reasonable place of which so many of his generation used to dream.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=71-72}}

Quoting a remark by [[w:John le Carré|John le Carré]] that “America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but [that] this is the worst I can remember.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=43}} Mailer suggests that too many shocks and too many disappointments have caused him and Vonnegut to conclude that this time there may be no solution to democracy’s ills, that America has embarked on a course of madness Mailer calls “an international cancer we cannot cure.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=29}} “Here’s the truth,” Vonnegut says, “We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one. So there goes the Junior Prom.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=45}} Vonnegut concludes, “Like my distant betters, Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=130}} He proposes that the planet’s epitaph should read: “The Good Earth—We could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=122}} The question I eventually try to answer in this paper is whether such despair has not tipped for the worse that delicate balance between optimism and pessimism in these shamans who have for so long not only critiqued our missteps but also shaped us a more benign and creative future and, if it has, whether such a diminution of faith in democracy’s viability has compromised their determination to serve as healers and agents of change at a time when our morale is lowest and we need them most.

For Mailer, the phantasmagoric events of 9/11 bear comparison to the nightmare of [[w:Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|Hiroshima]] and the death camps, if not in magnitude, in terms of the equivalent shock to the American psyche and shattering of our national identity, creating spiritual wounds of infinite proportions, fragmenting Americans inwardly and dividing them against one another and against the world. “9/11,” Mailer says, “is one of those events that will never fade out of our history, for it was not only a cataclysmic disaster but a symbol, gargantuan and mysterious, of we know not what, an obsession that will return through decades to come.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=4}} The visual impact of the planes striking the twin towers and the hellish devastation at [[w:Ground zero|Ground Zero]] raises for Mailer the specter of Yeats’s rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, or is it Washington? Where we are now, Mailer feels, is the world Yeats was describing: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere / (talk about propensity) The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The momentous question, Mailer says, is who exactly was the “beast”? Were we not who we thought we were? To be capable of wrongdoing would be un-American, but how could anyone hate us so much, the bastions of justice and liberty for all, so as to be ready to immolate themselves to destroy us? Now, says Mailer, there was still less chance that Americans would come to understand the contradictions that had always split the good Christian psyche—the half that saw itself as charitable and the other half that was ruthlessly competitive—“Jesus and Evel Knievel . . . in one psyche.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=46}} This war, Mailer says, could prove worse than any we have yet experienced because “we will never know just what we are fighting for.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=81-82}} Muslim and Christian fundamentalism seemed mirror reflections. Whatever good these religions might possess, Mailer argues, “[their] present exercise, in the world seems to be a study in military power and greed.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=27}} “We are speaking,” he says, “of a war then between two essentially . . . inauthentic theologies. . .. A vast conflict of powers is at the core, and the motives of both sides do not bear close examination. At bottom, the potential for ill is so great that we can wonder if we will get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large, long before a final conflagration.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=82}} Mailer concludes that “[t]he wars we have known until this era, no matter how horrible, could offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not attracted to negotiation.” Only victory is acceptable,{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=66}} and people who were ready to kill themselves for their beliefs were also ready to destroy the world.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} For Mailer, the randomness of terrorism augurs a deeply personal spiritual wound, the prospect of life as ultimately meaningless. “Nightmares,” he says, “tell us that life is absurd, unreasonable, unjust, warped, [and] crazy.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} If life could be erased so suddenly and gratuitously by such a pointless death, then our ability to find meaning in our lives is lost. The prospect of an absurd death is still more terrifying for Mailer than Vonnegut. For Vonnegut, death is the end to what is primarily an absurd existence to begin with—an existence only made purposeful by the humanity of our actions. For Mailer, however, who professes to believe in reincarnation in a “next existence” where was there to be the “comprehension of our death” that would provide the logical spiritual connection between this life and the next that “we have worked to obtain.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=20}}

For Vonnegut, Bernard Shaw’s bemused observation that some alien planet must be using the earth for its insane asylum has become a disturbingly literal explanation of the insanity of our post-9/11 world.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=121}} Vonnegut sees America—its government, its corporations, and, perhaps most unsettling, its media—run by psychopathic personalities he calls “PPs,” persons “without consciences, without senses of pity or shame,” who “have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and made it their own.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=88-89}} “To say somebody is a PP,” Vonnegut explains, “is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=99}} Apropos of Mailer’s assertion that Evil means having “a pretty good idea of the irreparable damage you’re going to do and then proceed to do it,”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=22}} Vonnegut explains that PPs are “fully aware of how much suffering their actions will inflict on others but do not care. They cannot care. . .. An American PP at the head of a corporation, for example, could enrich himself by ruining his employees and investors and still feel pure as the driven snow. A PP, should he attain a post near the top of our federal government, might feel that taking the country into an endless war with casualties in the millions was simply something decisive to do today.”{{sfn|Hoppe|2005}} “Unlike normal people,” Vonnegut says, “PPs are never filled with doubts for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. . .. Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes to the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club . . . and kiss my ass.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2003}} Faced with the daunting prospect that his country was now headed by C— students from Yale whom Vonnegut calls “boisterous guessers,” “haters of information”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} who knew no history or geography and, worse, who were “pitiless war-lovers”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=87}} with appallingly powerful weaponry, Vonnegut declares: “I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=40}} “Do you know why Bush is so pissed off at Arabs?” Vonnegut asks. “They brought us Algebra.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=77}}

Vonnegut’s diagnosis of our leaders as pathological personalities coincides perfectly with Doctor Mailer’s description of the warped skills Republicans seemed to possess for dirty legal fighting, that which Mailer and Vonnegut both view as accounting for, as Vonnegut puts it, the “shamelessly rigged election in Florida which disenfranchised thousands of African Americans.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} Such “Republicans,” Mailer says, “[were] descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s house or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclosure on Monday.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=44}} Mailer explains, “The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are [so] immense.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=45}}

The following paradigm reminds me of an old Greek proverb passed to me by a retired federal judge in Tarpon Springs, Florida, that “the fish always rots from the head.” Mailer and Vonnegut show that the insanity of greed and cruelty at the top is part of an all-inclusive national sickness, what Mailer calls a “cognitive stew,” composed of a corrupt Corporate America, aggressive Christian militants Mailer calls “flag conservatives,” and a military Mailer says is, of course, composed of crazier than average people.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=52-53}} We know of course that Mailer and Vonnegut have never been fans of Corporate America, whose “polyglot oligarchs,” as Vonnegut calls them, are our new ruling class,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=51}} and whose dehumanizing technologies and impersonal “electronic communities”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=61}} are, in Mailer’s words, our only real culture, a culture with tyrannical people in the seats of power, run for the wealthy with the poor getting less and less, and a culture that had succeeded only in making the world a more dangerous and uglier place to live. “There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor,”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=48}} Mailer says, “only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=49}} And now we were exporting our “crud,” this “all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=49}} all over the globe, reason enough, Mailer reasons, for the world of Islam, into whose own culture we had encroached, to hate us so. While Mailer clearly loathes terrorism, he falls just short of endorsing Islamic culture as a civilization superior to ours. Those who understand his cosmic view of a primitivistic God and a technological Devil struggling for possession of the soul of mankind cannot mistake where his sympathies lie when he writes, “I’ll go so far as to say that this is a war between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a century [or more] ago. . .. [T]he purpose of human beings on earth is not to obtain more and more technological power but to refine our souls.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=28}}

Mailer sees that the same advertising mendacity and manipulative marketing strategies that frame the CEO scandals—and which he and Vonnegut feel now own the television industry—explain [[w:George W. Bush|George W. Bush’s]] capacity for “absolute lying” and his power over the “flag conservatives.” Bush, Mailer says, knew never to speak to his political base in specifics but in mottos and platitudes, sprinkled with “an incomparably holy touch of mendacity.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=88}} Bush knew they loved words like “evil,” which the President would use like a “button” or a “narcotic.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=51}} Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Keep them thinking in generalities. “September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=55}} Even, by the way, as I was writing this, Bush was in the news admonishing Muslims for exploiting religion for political purposes and for pursuing evil in the name of God.

The unifying dream of these “congenitally defective human beings,” as Vonnegut calls them{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=100}}—the mega corporations, the flag conservatives, the military, and the Bushites—and what is in Mailer’s view the “ever- denied subtext beneath the Iraqi project” was their long deferred desire for world domination.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Their purpose was, and the Hitleresque parallels were plain to see, to have a huge military presence in the Middle East as a stepping-stone to taking over the rest of the world.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=5}} The administration would seize the opportunity for global empire afforded by the fall of the Soviet Union, even if it meant becoming the “ ‘American imperialists’ that our enemies always claimed we were.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=59}} Never mind that using violence to impose our will on others would encourage fascism at home, and that we no longer had an honest democratic product to transport abroad. The Bushites would rationalize their aggression as the best solution to terrorism at home, and the exportation of American democracy as the only hope for world peace through their police-keeping mission around the globe. If such moral certainty supported Mailer’s contention that culturally and emotionally Americans were growing ever more arrogant and vain. George W. Bush’s answer, when asked what if America’s imposing its will winds up alienating the whole world in the process, was, “That’s okay with me. We are American.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=73}}

In the view of Mailer and Vonnegut, the more likely explanation for occupying Iraq—among a host of more subtle and speculative reasons, a reaffirmation of American machismo is my personal favorite—was that we were there less to oppose tyranny than to guarantee a chokehold on Saudi Arabia and the world’s oil resources below the sands of the Persian Gulf. A World Empire would satisfy the avarice of Corporate America by safeguarding those “great and quickly acquired gains” of the obscenely wealthy upper class to which Bush catered.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} “In the 1930s,” Mailer says, “you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} “[I]t can also be,” he asks, “that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the Nineties [had] created an all but irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to Empire? . . . Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he’s doing for the future of [the] Empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?"{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} This war, adds Vonnegut, “made billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush."{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=100}}

And of course, Mailer says, once we became a twentieth-century embodiment of the Old Roman Empire, fascism at home was a foregone conclusion. That totalitarian state against which he and Vonnegut had so long warned would quickly be a ''fait accompli''. “Homeland Security,” Mailer says, “has put the machinery in place.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} Reminding us that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts us absolutely,” Vonnegut views our leaders as “power drunk” chimpanzees{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=71-72}} with “an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries,” and assuring a stronger police presence at home that Mailer calls a “species of most powerful censor over civilian life.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=153}}

What, then, does such a dire message about the precarious if not moribund state of our union bode for the ability of Mailer and Vonnegut to continue serving as healers and providers of spiritual direction when their own spiritual wound—their deepening pessimism, I mean—appears so grave? As we’ve seen, their prognosis for a national cure is not cheery. “There’s just too much anger here,” Mailer says, “ . . . too much shock, too much identity crisis.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} He argues that to protect against fascism, we must hold freedom to be more important than security and thus learn to live with anxiety—a “tolerable level to terror.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=107}} Yet, the people who are running the country, he believes, “simply do not have the character or wisdom to fight for the concept of freedom if we suffer horrors . . . not if we suffer dirty bombs, terrorist attacks on a huge scale, virulent diseases.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105-106}} Nevertheless, Mailer continues to affirm the existential principle that has informed his work from first to last—that at any time life can come together again and mankind can be regenerated. Mailer grants that 9/11 was clearly a day on which the Devil won a great battle, but sees the greater struggle between God and Satan for dominion over the earth and mankind’s embattled soul as undetermined.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=111}} “There are pro-democratic forces in America,” he says, “that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} On a more personal level, he asks, how he can hate a country that has given him the opportunities he’s had, “the extraordinary freedom to be able to think the way I think” and not be hauled off in chains.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=109}}

Mailer’s hopes rest mainly in prospects for a political turnaround in the 2008 election. In a recent essay entitled, “Empire Building: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan,” Mailer proposes that what must happen is that candidates be found with sufficient zeal to convince the flag conservatives that “these much-derided liberals live much more closely than the Republicans in the real spirit of Jesus. Whether they believe every word of Scripture or not, it is still these liberals rather than the Republicans who worry about the fate of the poor, the afflicted, the needy, and the disturbed. . .. They are more ready to save the forests, refresh the air of the cities and clean up the rivers.”{{sfn|Mailer|2005}} Such sentiments are of course Vonnegutian to the core. If Vonnegut’s reckoning of America’s future at this point is notably darker than Mailer’s, Vonnegut’s heroes are still Abraham Lincoln, Eugene V. Debs, and Jesus Christ, and Vonnegut still touts the message of mercy and pity in the Sermon on the Mount as the world’s best hope for moral reform. He praises librarians all over the country for resisting the “anti-democratic bullies” who tried to remove books from their shelves.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=102}} And however demoralized, he continued to speak out against the war in rallies and countless interviews. On his own personal note, he says that “no matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, and our media . . . may become, the music will still be wonderful.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=66}} He still finds creativity, practicing a work of art, as rewarding in itself, however sparse the audience.

On the one hand, it is clear to me that ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' read more funereally than as prescriptions for a better world. Equally clear is that neither writer believes they had the power now either personally or artistically to repair or elevate the American soul, so vast, complex, and divided. “Let’s not have a false notion of our possibilities,” Mailer says. “We’re not noble enough to fulfill that scheme. Let’s live at the level we’re at.” Those are words said in an earlier interview about the country,{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} but they apply dolefully for the role of shaman. So why with such scant reason to cheer was it not depression or remorse I heard in the canary bird’s diminished voice but something curiously buoyant and relieved, as if the shaman had been freed from some great burden? Why, for instance, would Vonnegut speak not of personal hopelessness, but of a process of becoming—an existential condition to which Mailer would readily relate? Vonnegut declares, “I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing . . . I’m simply becoming.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=130}} Why would Mailer declare almost unequivocally that he was not unhappy, a discouraged shaman, yes, but not an unhappy man? I found the answer in Mailer’s self-interview called “Mailer on Mailer.” He explains, “I’ve always felt that my relationship to America is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I’m charmed by it. I’m repelled by it. It’s a marriage that has gone on for at least the fifty years of my writing life. And in the course of that marriage what’s happened is the marriage has gotten worse. It is not what it used to be."{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} Mailer was a man without a country, too, at least the country he had loved, and ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' are divorce proclamations. One thinks of Fitzgerald and his protagonist Dick Diver, men who must separate from hopelessly schizophrenic women to save their own sanity. If I am not taking the affirmation of ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' too far, this severing from what D. H. Lawrence called the “bitch goddess success,” whose seductive wiles are power and material lusts, constitutes not only self-preservation, lest the healer become the patient, but an act of personal and artistic renewal. This is the classic resolution of identity in turmoil that rescues Stephen Dedalus at the end of ''[[w:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]''. Repudiating a country whose ideals had been grotesquely betrayed by cultural [[w:Philistinism|philistinism]], degraded religion, and wholly corrupt politics, Stephen achieves the necessary independence and self-possession to fulfill his destiny as artist. “So be it,” Stephen says, “Welcome, O Life!” As for Mailer and Vonnegut, who knows what new thinking or new art might come from such self-possession and rededication to the muse within? Wasn’t this what Vonnegut meant at the end of ''[[w:Fates Worse Than Death|Fates Worse Than Death]]'' when he says, “Hopelessness is the mother of Originality.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1991|p=237}} “As you grow older,” Mailer says, “you have other things in your life besides your country. I have my family and I have my work.”{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} If his country is not as great or noble as he had hoped it is, it allowed him the freedom to think and write as he wished. If, as for Vonnnegut, that greatest of all human dreams were already behind him, it would be enough to serve as witness, if not to change the world—to meditate upon the perversities and wonders of his times.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book ||last=Broer |first=Lawrence R. |date=1994 |chapter=Images of the Shaman in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut |title=Dionysus in Literature |url= |location=Bowling Green, KY |publisher=Bowling Green State UP |editor-last=Rieger |editor-first=Branimir M. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.alternet.org/story/14919/ |title=Vonnegut at 80 |last= Hoppe|first= David |date= October 2005 |website= AlterNet 2|publisher= |access-date= February 24, 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Joyce|first= James|date= 1916|title= Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. |url= |location= New York|publisher= Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 23 January 2005|title= Empire Building: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan|url= |work= The Sunday Times|location= London|access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman |authormask=1 |chapter= The White Negro|url= |title= Advertisements for Myself|date= 1959|pages=337-358 |publisher= Putnam |location= New York|access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman |authormask=1 |date= 2003|title= Why Are We at War?|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media|title= Norman Mailer: Mailer on Mailer.|date= 2000|series= American Masters Series|medium= Windstar DVD|publisher= PBS| ref={{sfnref|American Masters|2000}} }}
* {{cite book |last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt|date= 1991|title= Fates Worse Than Death|url= |location= New York|publisher= Berkley Books |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://inthesetimes.com/article/kurt-vonnegut-vs-the |title= Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@: Interview with Joel Bleifuss|last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt |authormask=1 |date= 27 January 2003|website= In These Times|publisher= |access-date= February 24, 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt |authormask=1 |date= 2005|title= A Man without a Country|url= |location= New York|publisher= Seven Stories Press|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vonnegut |first=Kurt |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dell |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:JSheppard/sandbox

2020-09-28T23:42:48Z

CCross: Fixed some Typos and Grammar Mistakes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR02}}
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|abstract=Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman {{NM}}’s life and work. Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with ''[[The Presidential Papers]]'' in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for ''Esquire''. Not only does this piece prefigure and announce the new mode of Mailer’s nonfiction writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, notably ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', it is the key to his fascination with boxing.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08leed}}
{{dc|dc=B|oxing has provided a significant moral paradigm}} throughout much of Norman Mailer’s life and work. In his seminal essay entitled “Death” in ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963), Mailer uses the first [[w:Sonny Liston|Sonny Liston]]/[[w:Floyd Patterson|Floyd Patterson]] championship bout as a point of departure from which to develop a profound series of perceptions about the American national temperament, particularly that of blacks. In ''[[King of the Hill]]'' (1971) and more strikingly in ''[[The Fight]]'' (1975) he deals nominally with a specific championship bout, but goes beyond journalism to find certain normative precepts in the sport. But there is another level on which boxing informs and conditions Mailer’s vision: In his fiction, most notably ''[[An American Dream]]'' (1965) and ''[[Tough Guys Don’t Dance]]'' (1984), boxing experiences help define the protagonists. Stephen Richards Rojack and Tim Madden respectively find “the reward of the ring”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=16}} applicable to their existential quests for self. Ultimately, Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful account of [[w:Benny Paret|Benny Paret]]’s death in the ring at the hands of [[w:Emile Griffith|Emile Griffith]] to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to [[w:Muhammad Ali|Muhammad Ali]]’s career to his 1988 article on [[w:Mike Tyson|Mike Tyson]], “Fury, Fear, Philosophy,” Mailer has found in this arena of ritualized violence a rich source of perception about the human condition. In fact, in his 1993 essay in ''Esquire'', “The Best Move Lies Next to the Worst”, he deals with his own boxing experiences at the Gramercy Gym with [[w:José Torres|José Torres]], [[w:Ryan O’Neal|Ryan O’Neal]] and others. The title of the piece comes from the comparison of boxing to chess.{{sfn|Mailer|1998|pp=1045–1052}}

I believe it’s best to confront the central issue here at the outset. Mailer has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation. As he muses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during his personal crises of the early 1960s, {{quote|The review in Time of Deaths for the Ladies# put iron into my heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the enemy was more alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend, and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave you, a glimpse of something like almighty prose.{{sfn|“Existential Errands”|1960|p=204}}}}

Very well, then: Mailer unabashedly uses violent confrontation as a touchstone for his vision of life and art. He has persistently perceived himself as embattled. But witness the artistic regeneration, the prolific and truly significant output that resulted as a direct consequence of this attitude. Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with ''The Presidential Papers'' in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for Esquire. Not only does this piece prefigure and announce the new mode of Mailer’s nonfiction writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, notably ''The Armies of the Night'', it is the key to his fascination with boxing.

The first Patterson/Liston fight provides Mailer an opportunity to embark on a series of sophisticated statements on boxing and the national disposition. But the center of the piece, as the title suggests, is the brutal killing of Benny Paret in the ring by Emile Griffith. Let us deal with the most hideous aspects of boxing first. Unlike most bouts, this one was fueled by an intense hatred between the fighters. Here is Mailer’s description of the climax:

{{quote|In the twelfth, Griffith caught him. Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.... I had never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times. Over the referee’s face came a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its way through him, and then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away. It was the act of a brave man. Griffith was uncontrollable. His trainer leaped into the ring, his manager, his cut man, there were four people holding Griffith, but he was off on an orgy, he had left the Garden, he was back on a hoodlum’s street. If he had been able to break loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped Paret to the floor and whaled on him there. And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. {{sfn|“Death”|1960|p=244-245}}}}

This event was not, of course, taken lightly by the public: “There was shock in the land.... There were editorials, gloomy forecasts that the Game was dead. The managers and the prizefighters got together. Gently, in thick, depressed hypocrisies, they tried to defend their sport”. {{sfn|"Death"|1960|p=245}} Mailer goes on to delve into that species of blood religion to which fight people adhere and the kind of mystery it has lent to the works of such writers as D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. And what of Mailer’s own response?

{{quote|Something in boxing was spoiled.... I loved it with freedom no longer. It was more like somebody in your family was fighting now.And the feeling one had for a big fight was no longer clear of terror in its excitement. There was awe in the suspense. {{sfn||1960|p=247-248}}}}

Professional boxing, then, presents difficult moral problems to Mailer as well as to any humane person. This does not, I submit, obviate its significance in Mailer’s work as a test of courage. I would suggest that it is in the exercise of disciplined skill, resourcefulness, stoicism, the force of will in the face of risk, that the human spirit is capable of reaching its peak expression. Another case in point is King of the Hill, a modest little book originally published as a long article in Life magazine ~with photographs by Frank Sinatra!, dealing with Muhammad Ali’s hard-fought defeat at the hands of Joe Frazier after his three year enforced layoff from boxing. As in “Death,” the opponents assume symbolic, almost mythic proportions. Central to this is Mailer’s pervasive Manichean vision of the cosmos, even down to Ali’s twin poodles named “Angel” and “Demon.” But the conclusion is most significant to Mailer’s last work: {{quote|Yet Ali got up, Ali came sliding through the last two minutes and thirty-five seconds of this heathen holocaust in some last exercise of the will, some iron fundament of the ego not to be knocked out, and it was then as if the spirit of Harlem finally spoke and came to rescue and the ghosts of the dead in Vietnam, something held him up before arm-weary triumphant near crazy Frazier who had just hit him the hardest punch ever thrown in his life and they went down to the last few seconds of a great fight, Ali still standing and Frazier had won. The world was talking instantly of a rematch. For Ali had shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true. He was a man. He could bear moral and physical torture and he could stand. If he could beat Frazier in the rematch we would have at last a national hero who was a hero of the world as well. {{sfn|“King”|1960|p=92-92}}}}

Ali ''was'' a national hero, for his moral and physical courage. His heroism had fascinated Mailer for years. In a short piece, “An Appreciation of Cassius Clay,” he wrote: {{quote|I don’t want to get started writing about Muhammad Ali, because I could go on for a book.{{sfn|“Errands”|1960|p=264}}}} He went on to condemn Ali’s exclusion from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War and concluded:{{quote|Therefore we are all deprived of an intimate spectacle which was taking place in public—the forging of a professional artist of extraordinary dimensions.. he was bringing a revolution to the theory of boxing.{{sfn|“Errands”|1960|p=264}}}} When I asked him,“.. now that it’s pretty well documented that Ali has been damaged by boxing, do you love the sport as much as you did?” Mailer responded, {{quote|Well, I don’t think I love it as much as I used to. One reason is because he’s out of it. {{sfn|“Leeds”|1960|p=1}}}}

All of this of course points directly to Mailer’s most significant work on boxing, ''The Fight''. Suffice it to say that Mailer’s obsessive preoccupation with existentialism and Manichean polarities, his newly found fascination with African mysticism and the concept of ''N’golo'' (or force), his vision of Muhammad Ali as an artist and hero, finds their serendipitous confluence here. As in virtually all of his work after 1968, Mailer treats a factual situation, and the people involved, in terms of highly subjective and fascinating digressions.
Thus, in addition to an in-depth account of the fight and the circumstances preceding and following it, the reader is offered observations on African religion and politics, allusions to Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, and George Plimpton, and further candid insights into Mailer himself: {{quote|the status of his projected big novel, his compulsion to walk parapets, his hatred of jogging. Most amusing, however, is the self-deprecating anecdote in which Mailer, returning late at night along a jungle path on which he had been doing road work with Ali, hears a lion roar. He proceeds through a series of serio-comic reactions, culminating in the fantasy that he is about to be eaten by “Hemingway’s lion” waiting all these years for a fit substitute, and the final recognition that the lion he hears is probably caged in the city’s zoo. {{sfn|“”|1960|p=91-92}}}} This announces, I believe, an attractive new modesty in Mailer. Such modesty pervades “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst,” in which mailer recounts his adventures and misadventures in boxing in a consistently self-deprecating manner. Boxing with José Torres is described thus: {{quote|He was impossible to hit and that was an. interesting experience you felt as if you were sharing the ring with a puma... Over ten years of boxing with José Torres I was able to catch him with a good right-hand lead twice, and the first occasion was an event. He ran around the ring with his arms high in triumph, crying out, “He hit me with a right—he hit me with a right!” unconscionably proud that day of his pupil.{{sfn|“Time”|1960|p=1048}}}}

The story, in a mildly oversimplified form, has circulated for years that Mailer gave Torres writing lessons in return for boxing lessons. Actually, Mailer first began to learn boxing under the tutelage of the father of Adele Morales, his second wife. In the “Sixth Advertisement for Myself,” Mailer states:

{{quote|I was doing some boxing now. My father-in-law had been a professional; he was always putting on the gloves with me... I was in nice shape, and my senses were alert. {{sfn|“Advertisements”|1960|p=331}}}}

Most interesting in the later collaboration are the parallels that Torres and Mailer found between the two occupations. When asked if there is a difference in the discipline required for writing and boxing ~in an interview with Jessica Blue and Legs McNeil for Details!, Torres responded, “No fucking difference” {{sfn|“Details”|1960|p=86}}. But earlier in the same interview, he tells of how Mailer {{quote|“told me that writing was about truth... He knew that boxing was the opposite. It’s about cheating and deceiving and lying, and he said that it’s a very hard transition... You’re cheating the other guy by feinting with a left and cheating with a jab”. {{sfn|“Details”|1960|p=85}}}}

Another regular at the Gramercy Gym in the 1980s was Sal Cetrano, who is mentioned ~though not by name! in “The Best Move.” In a hitherto unpublished interview with J. Michael Lennon (dated May 24, 2007), Cetrano disarmingly recounts a series of anecdotes regarding his experiences
with Mailer, Torres, and Ryan O’Neal.

Cetrano first met Mailer by accident on Broadway in 1980, and the first thing they talked about was the Paret/Griffith fight. Subsequently, Cetrano wrote Mailer a letter which was reciprocated by a postcard that simply said, “Be at the Gramercy Gym at 10:30 AM Saturday.” Sal had been in the Golden Gloves as a kid, but he“weighed about 145 pounds and everyone seemed bigger.” His solution to this problem, since “I had been a distance runner as a kid,” was to keep opponents at arm’s length. Of the relationship between
Mailer and Torres, he describes it as one of “power to power: Norman was a king of literature; Jose a king of boxing.” When asked by Michael Lennon of the parallels between Mailer as a boxer and as writer, Cetrano responds ~with deprecating laughter as risking a cliché! that he’s “existential” in both: “He does things to their fullest.” Although Norman had a “wonderful teacher in Jose,” he’s not a fast boxer.“He wades
in and clubs you to death.” This suggestion of Mailer’s legendary fearlessness will echo for anyone who knows his life and work, in every act or stunt as well as every piece of prose.

Since Mailer’s death on November 10, 2007, there has (not surprisingly) been an outpouring of retrospective summaries and evaluations of his life and career in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, virtually all mass media. Equally unsurprising is the fact that Mailer has been almost universally portrayed as a fighter for everything he believed in, and more precisely, in many cases as a boxer. For example, in an article in ''The New York Observer'' (Nov. 19, 2007, 8) Leon Neyfakh tells the story of how Mailer acquired the original David Levine illustration of Mailer “as a boxer, his... body in a crouch and his gloves at his face.” Mailer had just published “Some Children of the Goddess” in ''Esquire'' (July 1963, rpt. ''Cannibals and Christians'', 1966) in which he took on his major novelistic contemporaries and rivals and was photographed posed in the corner of a boxing ring. Neyfakh goes on to recount how Mailer took the cardboard-mounted illustration to show Jose Torres, who teased Mailer’s vanity by idly bending it almost to the breaking point. Apparently, by remaining silent (if not unperturbed) Mailer passed the Torres modesty requirement.

It is, in fact, almost impossible to enumerate the many retrospectives appearing immediately after Mailer’s death which either pictured him in a boxing contest: with gloves on or actually in a ring. Many others referred pointedly to his predilection for fisticuffs both in and out of the ring. Thus, it is clear that boxing has always been and will always be associated with the Mailer legend. ''Sports Illustrated'' titled Kostya Kennedy’s tribute, “The Pugilist at Rest.”

'''Violence in Personal Confrontation Outside the Ring'''

What I further consider significant here is Mailer’s fictive vision of fighting. Violence in personal confrontations outside the ring, both in heterosexual relationships and between male adversaries, is central to Mailer’s fiction. Christian Messenger, in a related article, makes some interesting points, but I think it’s a critical commonplace to trot out Mailer’s 1959 story, “The Time of Her Time,” as the beginning of all this. As early as ''A Transit to Narcissus'' (1978), Mailer was already concerned with the smoldering violence between sexual partners, alluding to “the most terrible themes of my own life: the nearness of violence to creation, and the whiff of murder just beyond every embrace of love”. (Introduction x)

And the darkest side of this vision is disturbingly revealed in ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), when Mailer writes with horror of federal Marshall and American soldiers brutally beating young women during the night after the 1967 march on the Pentagon: Such men, he suggests, “may never have another opportunity like this—to beat a woman without having to make
love to her”. (304)

It’s true that in “The Time of Her Time,” Sergius O’Shaugnessy, just back from Mexico after the end of ''The Deer Park'' (1955), does throw Denise Gondelman “a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen round fight” (“Time” in ''Advertisements ''501). Sergius has been a boxer in the Air Force, and in bed he and Denise are “like two club fighters” ~490!. But it is she who gets in the last literal punch: “I might have known she would have a natural punch. My jaw felt it for half an hour after she was gone...” (494–495). And in the story’s last line, he muses that “Like a real killer, she did not look back, and was out the door before I could rise to tell her that she was a hero fit for me” (503). This is, therefore, a battle of equals, which prefigures embryonic-ally the growth toward the graceful, loving equality of the central Rojack/Cherry passage in ''An American Dream.''

The extended fighting metaphor reaches its peak in An American Dream. Stephen Rojack is an amateur boxer, and clearly the central bout of the novel is the vitriolic and deadly scene in the opening chapter when, in a surprisingly even match, he fights and kills his powerful, witch-like wife,Deborah. But I must point out yet again that Rojack does not, as Kate Millet suggests, “get away with murder” ~Sexual Politics 15!. Instead, this scene, with its pervasive parallel imagery of combat and sex is part of a cohesive and symmetrical pattern of symbolism which unifies the novel tonally, structurally and thematically. After a series of mutual insults and the escalating fury of an intense physical struggle, Rojack strangles Deborah:

{{quote|Spasms began to open in me, and my mind cried out then, “Hold back! you’re going too far, hold back!” I could feel a series of orders whip like tracers of light from my head to my arm, I was ready to obey. I was trying to stop, but pulse packed behind pulse in a pressure up to thunderhead; some blackbiled lust, some desire to go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me. {{sfn||1960|p=35-36}}}}

This inflammatory scene introduces a more significant bout: that of Rojack with himself, in the heroic struggle to purge his own moral weakness and set out on that terrifying journey into the labyrinthine recesses of the self, on the existential quest for the true identity that lies at his core. This quest is punctuated by successively more frightening confrontations: first the scene of hellish fornication with the “Nazi” maid, Ruta, which establishes the allegorical nature of Rojack’s pilgrimage to salvation in an infernal world of Manichaean choices; then with Ike “Romeo” Romalozzo, a brutal and corrupt ex-boxer; and with police Lieutenant Roberts, who is described after Rojack outwits him as a crooked wrestler who hadn’t known it was his night to lose.

Penultimately, he faces ShagoMartin, who in a scene of intimate violence redolent of sexual connection ~“I got a whiff of his odor ... a smell of full nearness, as if we’d been in bed for an hour.” (Dream 182) teaches Rojack something about nobility and forgiveness and passes on to him the phallic power ~as epitomized in Shago’s totemic umbrella! necessary for his climactic confrontation with Barney Oswald Kelly.
Insofar as each of these characters has allegorical as well as literal value in the novel, Rojack’s struggles with them may be seen as confrontations with the worst aspects of himself, which he must overcome and purge. On a larger scale, his progress is a peculiarly American one, a repudiation of the false American dream of meretricious corruption and an embracing of a new, true American Dream of authenticity of self. Rojack comes to represent what was best in the American character after WWII, what was shamelessly corrupted, and what Mailer suggests may be redeemed by courage, discipline, and a commitment to selfless heterosexual love. And he does this with the aid of representatives of marginalized groups: Shago and Cherry. ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is a lesser novel: a pale reflection, a distant echo of the masterful An American Dream. But a few points are worth touching on. Again, Tim Madden has been an amateur boxer in his youth. He does fight and defeat Spider Nissen and Stoodie, the badness twins, with the aid of “Stunts,” his dog, who dies with Spider’s knife in his heart. But despite initial, ambiguous appearances, Tim does not hurt, does not kill women, or kill anyone for that matter. But Patty Lareine, his wife, does kill Jessica Pond. In fact, two women are murderers: Madeleine Falco also shoots her husband, the corrupt Chief of Police Alvin Regency. Significantly, Tim Madden refuses the tempting suggestion of Patty Lareine that he kill her then husband, Meeks Wardley Hilby III, and by the novel’s end is capable of compassionate tenderness toward the suicidal, homosexual Wardley. Further, Tim establishes an almost friendly relationship with Patty’s hostile, dangerous black lover, Bolo Green ~a.k.a. “Mr. Black”!. Most important, like Rojack at the conclusion of An American Dream, Tim is shown to fight his true battle with himself and his own fears and weaknesses.

Thus, in this novel as in virtually all of Mailer’s work as well as his personal and public life, combat with adversaries is most pivotal as an external manifestation of the true central struggle within oneself against the ignoble, ignominious emotions of cowardice and moral sloth. Courage, personal discipline, stoicism, the leap of faith essential to love, the definition and celebration
of the existential self: these values are not outmoded. They never will be. And what of the man who wrote of these all his life? He is gone now from this sphere, from our limited purview. But his work will be with us forever,and we will remember: He was a fighter.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite magazine |last1=Blue |first1=Jessica |last2=McNeil |first2=Leggs |date=1984 |title=The Maler Side of Mailer |magazine=Details |pages=84–87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Kennedy |first=Kostya |date=November 19, 2007 |title=The Pugilist at Rest |magazine=Sports Illustrated |pages=28–29 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Leeds |first=Barry |date=2008 |title=A Conversation with Norman Mailer |journal=Connecticut Review |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=1–15 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=Leeds, Barry |date=May 24, 2007 |title=A Conversation with Sal Cetrano |trans-title= |medium=Audio Tape |language= |url= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Unpublished |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman |date= 1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location= New York |publisher= Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967 |title=An Appreciation of Cassius Clay |url= |magazine=Partisan Review |issue=Summer |page=264 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night|url= |location= New York |publisher=NAL |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1993 |title=The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst |url=https://classic.esquire.com/article/1993/10/1/no-3-the-best-move-lies-very-close-to-the-worst |magazine=Esquire |pages=60–64, 186 |access-date=2020-09-25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= orman |author-mask=1 |date= 1963 |chapter=Death |title=The Presidential Papers |url= |location= New York |publisher= Putnam |pages=213-267 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* . . .
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:CCross/sandbox

2020-09-23T15:05:17Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_1,_2007/Castle_Mailer|''The Castle in the Forest'']] is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler.To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In [[95.16|''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995)]], he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife, Marina, and her family and friends. Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material, at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From ''none'' of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately ''may'' have caused the murder of Kennedy. “This is,” says Mailer, “after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view. We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development, although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequaled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be ''some'' explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired, would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly, this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization. There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historio-graphically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his [[59.13|''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)]] —but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German, American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo, family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” {{sfn|Burgess|1992|p=293-305}}}} With its model of trans-generational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an inter-generational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to re-balance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitution context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an inter-generational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

{{block indent |1=Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?}}

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

{{block indent |1=By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter? {{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=305}}}}

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said, “because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=129}} But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

{{block indent |1=Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves. So I could appreciate how Klara was full of un-admitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=266}}}}

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi. But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

{{block indent |1=[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most self-sacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=74}}}}

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are skeptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Nazism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|40em}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anna |date=1992 |title=Child Trauma: Issues & Research |url= |location=New York & London |publisher=Garland |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest: A Novel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Hitler: Familienperspektiven |url= |location=Frankfurt |publisher=M. Suhrkamp |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} American ed. {{cite book |author= |date=1976 |title=Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective |url= |location=New York |publisher=Psychohistory Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Uplike |first=John |title=Beck in Czech |url= |journal=J.U. Bech at Bey |volume= |issue= |date=1998 |pages=3-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer

2020-09-23T15:04:14Z

CCross: Fixed some typos and grammar errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR02}}
{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter|abstract=On one level, ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants, the education of their children, their sexual relationships, and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions. The massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development, although in a much different manner. Mailer seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08grun}}
{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest''}} is a special experience for an Austrian. In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, [[w:John Updike|John Updike]] has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman {{NM}} has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, ''Castle'' is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children, their sexual relationships, and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family. It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In [[95.16|''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995)]], he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife, Marina, and her family and friends. Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material, at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From ''none'' of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately ''may'' have caused the murder of Kennedy. “This is,” says Mailer, “after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view. We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development, although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequaled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be ''some'' explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired, would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly, this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization. There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historio-graphically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his [[59.13|''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)]] —but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German, American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo, family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” {{sfn|Burgess|1992|p=293-305}}}} With its model of trans-generational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an inter-generational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to re-balance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitution context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an inter-generational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

{{block indent |1=Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?}}

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

{{block indent |1=By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter? {{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=305}}}}

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said, “because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=129}} But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

{{block indent |1=Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves. So I could appreciate how Klara was full of un-admitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=266}}}}

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi. But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

{{block indent |1=[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most self-sacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=74}}}}

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are skeptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Nazism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anna |date=1992 |title=Child Trauma: Issues & Research |url= |location=New York & London |publisher=Garland |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest: A Novel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Hitler: Familienperspektiven |url= |location=Frankfurt |publisher=M. Suhrkamp |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} American ed. {{cite book |author= |date=1976 |title=Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective |url= |location=New York |publisher=Psychohistory Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Uplike |first=John |title=Beck in Czech |url= |journal=J.U. Bech at Bey |volume= |issue= |date=1998 |pages=3-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer, The}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer

2020-09-16T03:35:01Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR02}}
{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter|abstract=On one level, ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants, the education of their children, their sexual relationships, and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions. The massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development, although in a much different manner. Mailer seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08grun}}
{{start|Norman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest''}} is a special experience for an Austrian. In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.
On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In [[95.16|''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995)]], he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy.“This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development,although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequalled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired,would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly,this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization.There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historiographically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his [[59.13|''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)]] —but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German,American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo,family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” {{sfn|Burgess|1992|p=293-305}}}} With its model of transgenerational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an intergenerational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to rebalance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitutive context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an intergenerational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’smother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

{{block indent |1=Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?}}

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

{{block indent |1=By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter {{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=305}}}}

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said,“because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=129}} But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

{{block indent |1=Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves.So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=266}}}}

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi.But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

{{block indent |1=[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most selfsacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=74}}}}

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are sceptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Naziism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|40em}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anna |date=1992 |title=Child Trauma: Issues & Research |url= |location=New York & London |publisher=Garland |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest: A Novel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Hitler: Familienperspektiven |url= |location=Frankfurt |publisher=M. Suhrkamp |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} American ed. {{cite book |author= |date=1976 |title=Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective |url= |location=New York |publisher=Psychohistory Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Uplike |first=John |title=Beck in Czech |url= |journal=J.U. Bech at Bey |volume= |issue= |date=1998 |pages=3-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

User:CCross/sandbox

2020-09-16T03:33:15Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_1,_2007/Castle_Mailer|''The Castle in the Forest'']] is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler.To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In [[95.16|''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995)]], he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy.“This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development,although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequalled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired,would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly,this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization.There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historiographically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his [[59.13|''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)]] —but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German,American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo,family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” {{sfn|Burgess|1992|p=293-305}}}} With its model of transgenerational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an intergenerational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to rebalance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitutive context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an intergenerational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’smother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

{{block indent |1=Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?}}

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

{{block indent |1=By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter {{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=305}}}}

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said,“because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=129}} But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

{{block indent |1=Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves.So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=266}}}}

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi.But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

{{block indent |1=[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most selfsacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=74}}}}

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are sceptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Naziism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|40em}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anna |date=1992 |title=Child Trauma: Issues & Research |url= |location=New York & London |publisher=Garland |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest: A Novel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1995 |title=Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Hitler: Familienperspektiven |url= |location=Frankfurt |publisher=M. Suhrkamp |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} American ed. {{cite book |author= |date=1976 |title=Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective |url= |location=New York |publisher=Psychohistory Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Uplike |first=John |title=Beck in Czech |url= |journal=J.U. Bech at Bey |volume= |issue= |date=1998 |pages=3-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer

2020-09-08T23:55:30Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants, the education of their children, their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family. It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In ''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995), he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife, Marina, and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy. “This is,” says Mailer, “after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development,although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequalled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired,would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly, this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization.There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historiographically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)—but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German,American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.{{efn|1}} With its model of transgenerational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an intergenerational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to rebalance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitutive context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an intergenerational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’smother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

<blockqoute>Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?</blockqoute>

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

<blockqoute>By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter? (305)</blockqoute>

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said,“because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.” (129) But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

<blockqoute>Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves.So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.(266)</blockqoute>

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi.But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

<blockqoute>[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most selfsacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.(74)</blockqoute>

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are sceptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Naziism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

== Notes ==
I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo,family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” {{sfn|Burgess|1992|p=293–305}}.

==Works Cited==
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anna |date=1992 |title=Child Trauma: Issues & Research |url= |location=New York & London |publisher=Garland |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest: A Novel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective |url= |location=New York |publisher=Psychohistory Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stierlin |first=Helm |date=1976 |title=Hitler: Familienperspektiven |url= |location=Frankfurt |publisher=M. Suhrkamp |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Uplike |first=John |title=Beck in Czech |url= |journal=J.U. Bech at Bey |volume= |issue= |date=1998 |pages=3-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer

2020-09-08T22:32:11Z

CCross: Created page with "{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}}} {{DISPLAYTITLE:The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family:..."

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants, the education of their children, their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family. It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In ''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995), he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy. “This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development,although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequalled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired,would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly, this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization.There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historiographically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)—but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German,American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.1 With its model of transgenerational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an intergenerational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to rebalance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitutive context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an intergenerational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’smother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

<blockqoute>Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?</blockqoute>

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

<blockqoute>By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter? (305)</blockqoute>

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said,“because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.” (129) But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

<blockqoute>Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves.So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.(266)</blockqoute>

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi.But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

<blockqoute>[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most selfsacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.(74)</blockqoute>

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are sceptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Naziism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo,family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” (Burgess,293–305).}}

User:CCross/sandbox

2020-09-03T01:39:11Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler.To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In ''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995), he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy.“This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’ minds, the massive quantity of information ''Castle'' provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historical development,although in a much different manner. The catastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of that death for his culture, but rather the extinction of a whole culture itself, a genocidal horror unequalled in human history. Mailer, by focusing on Hitler’s family and early life, seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on.

One approach to this novel, though tiresome and uninspired,would be to look at the sources Mailer himself has used and listed in his bibliography and investigate where his narrative intervenes in to the Hitler story using the fictional, novelistic mode. Clearly,this is not what this paper can or wants to do, although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategy of fictionalization.There is one major theme of the novel, however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance, namely that of incest.

In the past quarter century, Hitler research has found a consensus regarding the much debated question of the identity of Hitler’s unknown grandfather. The father of Hitler’s father, Alois, was neither the fabled “Jew from Graz,” Frankenberger, nor the later husband of Hitler’s mother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber. Rather, it was, as Mailer has his narrator, devil Dieter, find out—with the help of the “Maestro” himself—the brother of Anna Maria’s husband, Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, in whose house Alois grew up for parts of his life. As Adolf Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl, was in fact a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s daughter Johanna, Alois has married his niece. Whereas this constellation has become historiographically accepted, although it has never been exhaustively proven, Mailer intensifies and expands this incestuous condition by making Alois, Adolf Hitler’s father, the illegitimate father of his later wife, Adolf’s mother Klara, by creating an incestuous affair between Alois and his half-sister Johanna. Alois thereby becomes both Hitler’s father and grandfather.

Thus, compared to the extant historiography, which took long to become convinced of even the now-accepted incest thesis, Mailer’s book introduces a much larger incestuous network which becomes one of the dominant themes in his book. Incest had interested Mailer very early on—witness a famous statement in his ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959)—but it took some fifty years to make it the key moment in one of his novels novel. By having devil-narrator Dieter explain incest as a key to this extraordinary personality and by assigning to Hitler’s family at large so much importance, it seems to me that a look at Castle from a relational angle is called for. In fact, there is a book by a German,American-trained, family therapist, Helm Stierlin, ''Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective'', published in German in 1975 and in English one year later, but it is not included in Mailer’s bibliographical listing and had probably not been consulted by him. This seems consistent because Stierlin’s book does not address incest as relevant to Hitler’s story, even though the model of family therapy out of which it grew is very strongly concerned with incest.

Contextual family theory and therapy, as developed in the United States by the late Ivan Boszormeny-Nagy (a native of Hungary), looks at the world as a network of relationships.1 With its model of transgenerational ledgers or accounting systems that record acts of giving and receiving or care and exploitation among members of a family unit, it provides an intergenerational relational context for understanding human behavior. If an individual does not receive appropriate care and attention by his or her parents, this person then may turn to his or her own child in order to be compensated, at the detriment of the child, of course, who will in turn have to come to terms with this behavior. The child thus assumes the function of his own grandparents; in the language of contextual therapy, he or she is “parentified.” A parentified child is one who lacks the care and attention it deserves and instead is required to extend care, attention, and protection to a needy parent, thus entering a cycle of relational deprivation. In this cycle,one generation borrows resources from the next to rebalance what is missing.

This relational deprivation sets in motion a destructive entitlement. Indeed, the whole world can become the substitutive context for working out destructive entitlement issues in the family of origin. In this way, this model of family therapy also explains the frequent occurrence of similar behavioral patterns in a family.

Incest, especially, has the habit of recurring in the history of a family and it is not surprising that the historically established incestuous relationship between Hitler’s father and mother as uncle and niece has a parallel down the line in the equally historically validated relationship between Hitler himself and his niece Angela Raubal, nick-named “Geli,” which was an important focus of the sequel to ''Castle'' Norman Mailer had been considering.

From the point of view of contextual theory, victimization of family members is rooted in an intergenerational matrix of loyalty. In the case of Hitler, according to Mailer, the explanation might run something like this: Alois is the son of a father who could not nor would not openly recognize his paternity in an illegitimate relationship with another woman, Alois’smother, Anna Maria Schickelgruber, a poor farm girl. Alois later enters into an illegitimate sexual relationship with his half-sister Johanna (doubly illegitimate because Johanna is married to farmer Poelzl and because she is blood relation) and then, on top of it, marries the daughter that comes out of that relationship. In this way, he twice compensates for his lack of recognition by his father and his lacking care, which would normally be provided by a family. Klara, then, is a double victim of incest.

It is characteristic that in the novel, the protagonists never talk openly about the topic of incest. They are aware of its existence—or at least of the possibility of its existence—but they are not willing to disclose that hidden story:

<blockqoute>Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn the many longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of though the had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the fore front. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child.... God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?</blockqoute>

Situations like these, where his “guilt” becomes half-conscious, are rare with Alois, who in my view is one of Norman Mailer’s most formidable protagonists. Having become aware of his own incestuous involvement, he is now looking for them in his own children:

<blockqoute>By morning, he was thinking like a policeman again. When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others. Soon enough, he began to worry about Alois Junior and Angela. Was there something unworthy going on in that quarter? (305)</blockqoute>

This aura of concurrent secrecy, suspicion, and policing—characteristic for families of incest where one is constantly confronted with loss or abandonment—pervades the novel. It destroys any potential trust the members of the family can hold for each other. The beatings Alois inflicts on his sons, in Mailer’s novel possibly transcending the intensity and extent of the biographical sources, are an expression of the father’s frustration with himself and his situation. He is trying to hold back and inhibit in his son what indeed he is at the same time delegating, in the language of contextual family therapy, to his children, especially his sons. No wonder that his children break down as a consequence of these conflicts. His son Alois, Adolf’s half brother, runs away having burned the beehives which are so sacred to his father; Adi rebels by refusing to perform adequately in secondary school. Self-destructive behavior is a signal of major loyalty conflicts; a conflict between self interest and care for others. The characters in this drama are parentified in close relationships and destructively entitled in the “world” which is held captive. ''The Castle in the Forest'' is an apt title, also, from this perspective.

The victim, Klara, Hitler’s mother, in ''Castle'' is similarly, though much more dimly, aware of her origins. Whereas it is suggested that to her, the many versions of anal and oral sexuality Alois subjects her to—at least one of which young Adi is witness to—are evil; it is really the implicit or semiconscious knowledge of the incest condition which makes her so sexually defensive. In an early sexual situation and in a very Mailerian and very un-Austrian line, this connection is made quasi explicit: “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said,“because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.” (129) But it takes devil Dieter to explain the mechanism of this transference in great clarity:

<blockqoute>Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves.So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.(266)</blockqoute>

Having lost three children at a very early age, topped by the future loss of a fourth, Klara is extremely anxious about the well-being of young Adi.But of course the motor of all of her maternal care is her secret guilt and it will, again according to Dieter, result in the opposite:

<blockqoute>[A]nincestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities.... Even the noblest, most selfsacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster.(74)</blockqoute>

This leads us to Dieter, the object of criticism by several reviewers who are sceptical of Mailer’s latest novel and indeed question a mysterious character, although a central agent in the novel. In the German translation of Mailer’s work, the word “client” Dieter uses for those individuals the devils have recruited for their interests, is translated as “Mandant,” metaphorically translating the relationship between devil and customer into a legal context. It seems to me that some American critics have also read the meaning of client in this legal framework. My own reading, however, evokes more the therapeutic context of this word. Dieter is, after all, the one who breaks through the secrecy, who is willing to discontinue the silence; the—as quoted above—“God-given ability [of human beings] to conceal themselves from themselves.”

Whether this is of any help in explaining Mailer’s possibly strangest narrator, a lower-rank renegade devil embodied in an SS officer, is questionable. Especially, it does not explain the devilish input at Adolf Hitler’s birth, unless we take this to be the incestuous legacy itself, which finds its ultimate expression in this mating of father and daughter. But there is a devilish dynamic here, including the approximation of the devil’s work to that of the novelist, which provides new insight into a still largely incomprehensible phenomenon.

Obviously, through his fictional analysis of Hitler’s family, Mailer has not fully explained Hitler’s further development. In the rural regions of Austria, as elsewhere, incest was rampant and thousands of children in similar situations have not become monsters. But Mailer has described a situation that would favor such a development and at the time of its publication, he was,after all, not yet done with Hitler. What he has done in this “high risk” novel as it has been referred to by one critic, is to look at the Hitler phenomenon outside of an explicitly moralistic discourse. This is a relatively new mode in the discussion of Naziism—which, incidentally, does not deny the continued necessity of the moral discussion. That he has achieved this by introducing a devil as a narrator is maybe the most surprising and highly ironic moment of this remarkable novel.

{{efn|I would like to acknowledge the input and help of my friend Margaret Cotroneo,family therapist and Professor of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, for this paper. Some of the concepts discussed here are elaborated on in Margaret Cotroneo and Helene Moriarty, “Intergenerational Family Processes in the Treatment of Incest” (Burgess,293–305).}}

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2020-09-03T00:09:05Z

CCross:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Hitler Family: A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
{{MR02}}{{Byline|last=Grünzweig|first=Walter}}
Norman Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest'' is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the ''Henry Bech'' series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler.To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In ''Oswald’s Tale'' ~1995!, he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy.“This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’minds, the massive quantity of information Castle provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historicaldevelopment,althoughinamuchdifferentmanner.Thecatastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of thatdeathforhisculture,butrathertheextinctionof awholecultureitself, agenocidalhorrorunequalledinhumanhistory.Mailer,byfocusingonHitler’s family and early life,seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on. Oneapproachtothisnovel,thoughtiresomeanduninspired,wouldbeto lookatthesourcesMailerhimselfhasusedandlistedinhisbibliographyand investigatewherehisnarrativeintervenesintotheHitlerstoryusingthefictional,novelistic mode.Clearly,this is not what this paper can or wants to do,although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategyof fictionalization.Thereisonemajorthemeof thenovel,however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance,namely that of incest.

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2020-09-02T23:29:11Z

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''The Hilter Family'': A Relational Approach to Norman Mailer}}
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