Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/23

In the conc. camp novel,^[1] the German doctor could have gone very far, so far that he could talk sincerely of his love for children, even describe the wisdom of his child (note 17 this page), and the Major could finally kill him because the view offered by the German is so horrifying to his complacency that he must destroy the doctor or alter his own life.

Note

↑ Titled “The City of God,” and begun in the early 1950s, it was never completed; only a fragment exists in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, home of the Mailer Archive. Initially, Mailer’s setting was a Soviet concentration camp; he later changed it to a German camp (see No. 469). He finally published the novel, his last, The Castle in the Forest, in 2007.

[1] Titled “The City of God,” and begun in the early 1950s, it was never completed; only a fragment exists in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, home of the Mailer Archive. Initially, Mailer’s setting was a Soviet concentration camp; he later changed it to a German camp (see No. 469). He finally published the novel, his last, The Castle in the Forest, in 2007.

[1]