The Mailer Review/Volume 7, 2013/The Complications of Norman Mailer: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon: Difference between revisions

'''Lennon''': The first time that he wrote ''The Castle in the Forest'', he called it ''The City of God''. This was back in the early 1950s, and he only wrote a few pages of it. He began it at the end of WWII with the opening of the concentration camps. Mailer’s novel, the 2007 version, retains some of that in the epilogue, the conversation between D.T. and an American captain with a gun. He wanted that scene at the concentration camp. As he did his research for Castle, he found that there was less research done on Hitler’s childhood, much less than on the war. He felt that this part of Hitler’s life was relatively untouched, and he preferred focusing on Hitler’s youth and coming to power. He also wanted to write about Hitler’s relationship with his niece, the woman he had a love affair with and who died mysteriously. He had many ideas about how he was going to finish it. He was going to make it three volumes, he was going to make it five volumes, but that’s typical of him. His plans rarely turned out the way he thought they would. He never laid down a scheme and stuck to it. I do know that he was thinking very seriously about shifting a lot of the action of the next volume to Russia, and writing about Rasputin. He said he was a bit tired of Hitler, and more interested in Rasputin. I think if he had lived, there was a very good chance volume two would have dealt with the whole European situation, including the rise of Hitler, from the vantage point of Moscow, Rasputin, and the Tsar and Tsarina.