Norman Mailer interview

His 35 books and more than 300 interviews litter the past 60 years like milestones in the formulation of America's literary life. Incendiary, ground breaking, exhilarating and, sometimes, quite awful, his work is nothing if not controversial. His latest - an obsessive portrait of the young Hitler - is set to unleash a fairly typical fire-storm of protest. Norman Mailer can hardly wait ...

Norman Mailer says people are 'going to have a shit fit' over his new novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolph Hitler, narrated by a devil, inhabiting the body of an SS officer, Dieter. 'At a given point,' he says, 'you snicker to yourself and you say, "Oh, they're going to be livid."' The writer seems unfazed by this inevitability. 'It's impossible not to identify to some small degree with the protagonist [Hitler], so the book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews. They won't like it. The right wing will hate it. God not all-powerful? Not all-loving? I expect there'll be considerable resistance,' he goes on with glee. 'And a lot of radicals are not going to like it, because most radicals believe that to talk about God and the Devil is retrogressive.' Add up the Jews, the fundamentalists, the radicals and what he calls 'the Acumenarians', an especially low form of critical life in Mailer's world, and he's just about to alienate most of America. So why does he do it?

That's a question people have been asking about Norman Mailer for more than half a century. Probably, we are still as far as ever from an answer. But in the process of a prolonged and often raucous public self-examination, Mailer has become a contemporary figure of myth, a great American icon who is venerated and reviled but impossible to ignore. Indeed, so complex has Mailer's legend become that even now there are at least three obstacles to elucidating this protean survivor from the lost world of Forties America.
First, there's the man himself. How many Norman Mailers can you interview? Let's see. There's the wild narrator; the 'psychic outlaw'; the 'generous but very spoiled boy'; and the 'criminal egomaniac'. Turn to a ziggurat of Mailer volumes, approximately 35 titles, and you find the author of several classics of mid- to late-20th-century American prose: The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song. And some of the worst, too: Of Women and their Elegance, Tough Guys Don't Dance and The Gospel According to the Son. Coming on to the ever-present question of sex (leaving aside the mistresses and girlfriends), there's also Mailer, the husband of Bea, Adele, Jeanne, Beverly, Carol and Norris (four wives before he was 40; number two notoriously stabbed with a penknife), the alimony slave and the father of eight, or possibly nine, children. Finally, there's the doting grandfather of 10 grandchildren, to whom he has dedicated The Castle in the Forest.

Who else might you want to question? Other potential Mailers include the producer-director of three of American cinema's most bizarre films (Beyond the Law, Wild 90 and Maidstone); the amateur boxer who sparred with Ryan O'Neal; the starry political commentator who took tea with Jackie and JFK; the mayoral candidate for New York City (1969); the dazzling Harvard graduate; the Second World War veteran and, before that, in the beginning, the middle-class Jew from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. His friend and one-time publisher, Jason Epstein, talks affectionately of 'good Norman' and 'bad Norman', the good and the bad co-existing heroically and unquenchably over nearly six decades of literary life on a scale unknown in Britain and rare in America, too. In the words of the New York novelist and critic James Atlas, 'Norman Mailer is one of the great originals that our chaotic culture throws off from time to time.'

Good or bad, he doesn't want to be pinned down. The Naked and the Dead bore an epigraph from Andre Gide, 'Do not understand me too quickly', and there's also the smoke screen of his many aliases: 'Aquarius'; 'Mailer' and/or 'Norman'; 'Kid Integrity' and 'General Marijuana' of the Village Voice, the paper he co-founded in 1955; 'the Reporter' of the Sixties magazine journalism; 'PW' (for 'prizewinner' or possibly 'prisoner of wedlock'), or 'the Acolyte' in The Prisoner of Sex, his Seventies scrap with the women's movement. This, notoriously, he described as destined to be 'fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in manneqin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn'.

And here's the second difficulty in any evaluation of the man Epstein dubs 'America's Byron'. Not only has he lived all these lives and written all these books, he's talked with incandescent brilliance about his life and work to anyone who'll listen. In the English language alone, he's conducted so many interviews (more than 300) that the best of them are actually published in book form (Conversations with Norman Mailer). And he's still at it. As The Castle in the Forest approaches simultaneous publication in Britain and America, he is meeting the press yet again, talking, and laughing, and charming, and then talking some more.

If he wasn't such an enthralling conversationalist, you'd call the man a world champion narcissist. But he'll always beat you to that punch. As he wrote in his Esquire interview with Madonna in 1994: 'There is nothing comparable to living with a phenomenon when the phenomenon is you and you observe yourself with a cool intelligence, your own, and yet are trapped in the cruellest pit of the narcissist - you not only are more interested in yourself than anyone else alive, but suffer from the likely suspicion that this might be justified. You could be more interesting than anyone you've encountered.'

He knows that these interviews are his Achilles heel. 'If I'm given too many allowances,' he said in 1961, 'I'll do exactly the sort of charming, thin thing that's good at the moment, but doesn't transcribe.' In his prime, his instinct with interviews was to be 'superficial, but quick', and above all, 'diverting'. He is, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, never less than 'intensely pleasurable'. Mailer's obiter dicta range from the observation that 'Hemingway's style affected a whole generation, the way a roomful of men is affected when a beautiful woman walks through - their night is turned for better or for worse' to the infinitely teasing notion that 'the best presidential contest we could have would be between Warren Beatty for the Democrats and Clint Eastwood for the Republicans'.

Mailer has talked on TV, on campuses, in bars, at cocktail parties, on and off the record, with and without cigars and cigarettes. He has been drunk, stoned and sober, endlessly quoted and misquoted. That rapid-fire, streetwise Brooklyn voice, at once urgent and seductive, has ceaselessly supplied what he calls 'the blue netherworld of answers' to 'the black netherworld of questions'. (Not coincidentally, he has also poured the ferrocast cement of interview material into his masterpiece, The Executioner's Song.) Mailer can play interviewers like a saloon-bar pianist. Which brings us to the third, and possibly final, hurdle in the analysis of the man. Answer the conundrum of the 'Who?' and the 'How?' and you still have to overcome the 'Where?'

Depending on the season, you are summoned to his apartment in Brooklyn, or his summer residence on Cape Cod. In a princely ritual, intermediaries and assistants negotiate the arrangements. The audience is granted, the questions entertained and the tumultuous record defended. Away you go with your precious hour of audio tape to compose your portrait. Hierophants of this well-honed genre will know that the view from Mailer's Brooklyn address is a teeming panorama of lower Manhattan: the Staten Island ferry, the thudding helicopters and a dizzying view of Ellis island, that chaotic portal to the American dream his grandparents crossed in the 1890s. As Melvyn Bragg puts it, 'Mailer has welded himself to the contemporary consciousness of his country, and there it is outside his window in all its fantasy, greed and glory: facing him.'

Never mind the fall of the Twin Towers, that view is not quite what it was. Mailer has just slipped into his 85th year, and he's hoarding his dwindling resources. Time, for so long prodigally at his disposal, is no longer his friend. In Auden's words, like 'the rumble of distant thunder at a picnic', there is the approach of that ultimate reckoning. Bellow, Heller, Styron and Miller have already gone. Apart from Vonnegut and Vidal, neither in the best of health, Mailer is the last of the Mohicans.

Like so many great artists in the home stretch, more and more of his working life is devoted to working at home, in Provincetown. Perhaps a secular pilgrimage will unlock a hidden door into the Mailer mysteries. Provincetown has a special place in Mailer's life. He's raised families here, had fights, got arrested, conducted love affairs and, far from the siren song of New York, written millions of words. Provincetown has seen six decades of Norman Mailer.

It's a long drive to the uttermost end of Cape Cod, under grey winter skies. The civilisation of the East Coast falls away as the route unwinds into the elemental bleakness of this strange fish-hook of pine woods, gravel and cranberry bog. After two hours, the highway is just a two-way ribbon running along the crest of scrubby dunes, with the wild ocean to the east, and bleak inland water to the west. Just as you despair of journey's end, there's a final switch in the road and in front of you is a jumble of dirty white clapboard houses, the former whaling town of P-town, as the locals call it.

Provincetown perfectly reflects good and bad Mailer. Tranquil, normal, white and sunwashed, it can present a face as welcome as seaside ice cream. But down the back alleys and twisting streets, it becomes darker, more furtive and provisional, with an out-of-season impermanence. Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos, Kurt Vonnegut and Edmund Wilson, among many others, have all succumbed to the sinister charm of P-town. To the artists, homosexuals, writers and intellectuals who have colonised it for more than a century, it has been, in Mailer's exuberant phrase, 'the Wild West of the East'. In the Sixties, bikers would roar into town on a Saturday night. There were fights and parties on the beach. In the dunes there was drinking, drugs and a lot of marriages broken. According to Mailer, 'At least 10 times a summer you'd see the sun coming up over the flats.'

There's no sun today, just an unearthly twilight and the wind off the winter sea. The address on Commercial Street is perched on the very edge of the Atlantic, gabled, dark and veined with ivy root, like the deserted house in a horror movie. Its solitary red-brick demeanour is further emphasised by the low clapboard dwellings on either side. On the approach to the front door, across shards of shells and sea glass, there's a single yellow lamp glowing behind a downstairs window. Mailer's house certainly feels like a sanctuary for a writer who has devoted his life to wrestling with demons.

The warring elements in the quest for Mailer resolve themselves the moment you cross his threshold. His publicist ushers you into a spacious downstairs parlour with a stunning ocean view. The clutter of his long life is rather Edwardian: tables of framed photographs - Norman with his wives, children and grandchildren; portraits of Norman as a young god; books, magazines and bric-a-brac; rugs, old chairs and candlesticks. The huge picture window gives on to a deck and a rocking chair, facing the grey immensity of the Atlantic. Sitting here in 1620, you could have watched the Pilgrim Fathers making landfall in the New World.

The trim, elfin figure of Mailer himself is in a kind of antechamber to one side, concentrating on self-composure for another photographer. The atmosphere is dim and quasi-religious. Mailer himself is as still and enigmatic as an icon: tiny, white-haired and waxy under the lights. Another surprise: he looks much more Irish than Jewish. When the photo session is over he gets to his feet with difficulty, supported by two canes, and moves to greet me, sadly diminished by arthritis. He's quite deaf, too, and repeats my introduction in some puzzlement.

'Colin?' he queries, using the English pronunciation (his father, Barney, spoke South African English).

Is he, I wonder, conferring a Maileresque alter ego? Will 'Colin' be permitted to ask the questions that 'McCrum' cannot? But no, he's simply a little old man, hard of hearing, making sense of another intrusion into his private life. All at once I realise that the complicated set of questions I have researched in advance will not survive that painful hybrid of mime and raised decibels that dominates the dialogue with the deaf. Anyway, before we get to my questions, he has one of his own, journalist-to-journalist. 'Let me ask you,' he says, 'they sent you over here by plane?'

'Yes.'

'Yeah. Who else are you doing?' (The old pro knows the ways of the international press.)

'Just you.' (I'm trying to articulate my words without, instinctively, raising my voice.) 'I've just come to see you.'

'Wow! I believe you liked the book.'

The truth is that I have been baffled, moved, exasperated and occasionally dismayed by The Castle in the Forest, an obsessive portrait of young Hitler and his brutal, incestuous family. Like much of his work, it contains the best and the worst of his prose in jarring juxtaposition. As Mailer himself writes, it is 'more than a memoir, but privileged as a novel. To specify the genre does not really matter since my largest concern is not literary form, but my fear of the consequences.' Once again, the new book is Exhibit A, a primary clue in the inquiry into the Mailer conundrum.

With Mailer, fiction and autobiography are one. As with any old man, his mind's default position is childhood. 'In 1932,' he remembers, 'my mother knew Hitler was going to be a disaster for the Jews. So Hitler was with me from the time I was nine. I've spent time thinking about him all my life. What was that man made of? I've always been fascinated. He was an order of evil that can't be understood.'

Exhilarating and vertiginous leaps of thought are typical of Mailer's conversation. 'Hitler violated the boundaries of the Enlightenment,' he goes on. 'There is nothing in the wisdom of the Enlightenment that enables you to understand Hitler. He goes beyond all measure.' Suddenly Mailer's Jewishness becomes part of his analysis. 'You know,' he says, 'the real damage Hitler did to the Jews, after killing six million, was to wreck the minds of the survivors. Before Hitler, the Jewish mind was more inquiring and much more elegant.'

Mailer's Jewishness is only one key to his personality, but a vital one. Born on 31 January 1923, young Norman was raised in Brooklyn during the Twenties and Thirties, the first and only son of second-generation Russian Jews. The Mailer side of the family came to the USA via Johannesburg and the Great War. Mailer's father, Barney, 'a bit of an Edwardian', with a South African accent Mailer likes to mimic, trained as an accountant, and fought in the trenches with the South African army. After the Great War he emigrated to the States where he met and married Fanny Schneider in 1922. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born the following year.

The boy grew up surrounded by aunts and nurtured by his mother's love. It was Fanny (Fan) who saved his earliest stories, written at the age of eight, and spoke of him as something special. The devilry was all in the future. In a conventional Jewish Brooklyn childhood, his single moment of rebellion was to quote Spinoza at his Bar Mitzvah. His adolescent drives were absorbed in his writing. He was apparently a brilliant young man. With Europe on the brink of war, he made the almost unimaginable step of going to Harvard, initially to study aeronautical engineering.

'I grew up in this sheltered Jewish environment,' he says. 'There was an immense shift of my young identity in going from Brooklyn to Harvard.' It was, he remembers, an 'incredible shift: of course you don't even know what's going on'. He had jumped six or seven steps up the American class ladder, and found himself temporarily out of his depth. At Harvard, he encountered anti-Semitism for the first time, and, not coincidentally, he collided with his vocation. He had known as early as 17 or 18 that he wanted to be a writer. Now he was subjecting his writing to the scrutiny of classmates and professors.