IN CONVERSATION . . .With Norman Mailer

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Daniel Asa Rose spoke with Norman Mailer at his home in Provincetown, Mass.

In your new book, "The Castle in the Forest," the relationship between young Adi (Adolf Hitler) and his father is very fraught -- more moving than I expected it to be.

I've been thinking about how many of my books have that recurring theme. My relationship with my father was very interesting. Not hostile, but never near. I couldn't reach him. He was an exceptionally complex man. He was very proud of me after "The Naked and the Dead," which he must have read 10 times.

Did he understand it?

Oh yeah.

So you were able to communicate on that very deep level?

Yeah, he didn't go in for long speeches, but he would look at me and say, "This is good."

You demonize Hitler here, quite literally -- the demon narrator is there at the conception. Aren't you thereby letting mankind off the hook?

It seems to me there have been two exceptional births in human history: Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Hitler is the devil's answer to Jesus Christ.

You like making large statements, don't you?

Drives wives crazy.

I can only imagine.

I make them for the sheer joy of making them.

When you read younger novelists today, are you impatient that they don't seek to go larger?

I don't read them, which I think is one of the reasons they're not particularly in love with me.

Are you impatient with some of your contemporaries, then, for not contending with the larger questions?

Look, for better or for worse, I have that kind of mind. They have [theirs]. I used to be very competitive. By now I'm sick of it, in the sense that it has no meaning. Either one of us will last, or 10 of us, who knows. History can wipe all of us out.

I wasn't expecting to hear such mellowness from you.

It's not mellowness, it's shared amusement. After competing with someone who used to be a rival, in the end we have a shared conversation. I respect Roth. I respect Updike, DeLillo, Vonnegut. I could name 10 of them. They're all good writers.

J.D. Salinger?

Salinger I'm pissed off at, because he had such a glimpse into America when he was young, and he didn't use it.

Any theory as to why he went silent?

No theory worth airing.

At your age [soon to be 84], are you more prudent not to air a theory if it's half-baked?

I've gone off half-cocked so many times in my youth that, yes, now I'm a little older.

So how do you finally measure up on the wisdom scale?

I'd probably give myself a very good mark.

Care to offer a numerical grade?

(chuckling) No. That would not be wise.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews for New York magazine and the New York Observer.