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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The
Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Evil Normal
Mailer’s The
Castle in the Forest is either a brilliant novel or an arrogant spoof. When
reading it, there were times I found it perfect, and many other times when I
thought it was lousy. In the novel, Mailer presents Adolf Hitler’s childhood,
using a minor devil as the narrator. The narrator’s voice, adds to the
frustration of reading the novel. More often than not, the language smacks of
something that could only have been conjured in hell. One would assume that
Mailer intended to choose the writing style he did. Perhaps a second reading
would lead to less frustration. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 2 in Book
II, “Adolf’s Father,” pp. 24-28: To fulfill such a
promise, I must now expand this memoir and commence a family history much as
if I were a conventional novelist of the old school. I will enter the thoughts
of Johann Nepomuk, as well as many of the insights of his illegitimate son,
Alois Hitler, and I will also include the feelings of Alois’ three wives and
his children. We are finished,
however, with Maria Anna Schickigruber. That unhappy mother perished in 1847
at the age of fifty-two, ten years after the birth of Alois. The cause was
termed “phthisis on account of dropsy of the chest,” a galloping consumption
she contracted after sleeping in the cattle trough through her last two
winters. The collateral cause was rage. Toward the end, she thought often of
how healthy she had been at the age of nineteen, her body quick, her singing
voice praised for its beauty when she had been the soloist of the parish
choir in Döllersheim. But now, having suffered under the curse of three
decades of lost anticipations, she was full of the added fury that Georg had
brought to their occasional couplings. He, like many a drunk before him, succeeded,
however, in outliving everyone’s assumption that his death would come early.
After her demise, he actually kept going for ten more years. Drink had been
not only his nemesis but his dear medicine, and, only at the last, his
executioner. He went in a day. They called it apoplexy. Having never bothered
to visit Nepomuk or Alois, he was not missed, but by then, Alois was twenty
and working in For that matter,
Alois had not suffered unduly when his mother was lost. Spital, where he
lived with Johann Nepomuk and the wife and three daughters of the Hiedler
family, was a long walk from Strones, and he had come close to forgetting
Maria Anna. He was happy with his new family. In the beginning, Nepomuk’s
‘daughters, Johanna, Walpurga, and Josefa, then twelve, ten, and eight, were
delighted to have a five-year-old brother, and took him gladly into their
bedroom. Since Spital was a full-sized village rather than a hamlet, a
separation between prosperous and poor had begun to appear. A farmer could
even be considered well-off—at least in his own town. There were a few such
in Spital, Johann Nepomuk being the first. The wife, Eva, kept a good home.
She was also most practical. If she had a suspicion that Nepomuk might
actually be more than an uncle to the boy, she could not, on the other hand,
forget the disappointment in his eyes each time she gave birth to a girl. It
was probably better for all concerned to have a boy in the house. Yes, she
was practical. And Alois was
loved! By his father, by the girls, even by Eva. He was good-looking, and
like his own mother, he could sing. As he grew older, he also demonstrated
that he was ready to work in the fields. For a time, Johann Nepomuk even
contemplated leaving the farm to him, but the boy was restless. He might not
always be there to take care of whatever unforeseen obstacle, large or small,
might settle upon the daily work. In contrast, Johann Nepomuk had so much
love for his labors that on the best of days he felt as if he could hear the
murmurs of the earth. While he was not at ease with the long silences that
hovered over the end of afternoon, a spell would often enter his dreams by
evening. The sum of his fields, his sheds, his beasts, and his barn became a
creature equal to a demanding woman, cavernous, haunting, smelly, greedy,
needy, ever extracting more from him. He would awake in full recognition that
he could never leave the farm to Alois—Alois was the child of the woman in
the dream. So he gave up the notion. He had to. Such a gift would enrage his
wife. She wanted a good future for her daughters, and the farm might not
provide more than two respectable dowries. Over the years, new
problems presented themselves concerning these dowries. For the first
marriage, the oldest daughter, Johanna, was given only a pinched share of the
land. But she had, after all, chosen to marry a poor man, a hardworking but
unlucky farmer named Poelzl. When it came to the dowry for the second
daughter, Walpurga, who was already twenty-one, Nepomuk was obliged to be
more generous. The putative bridegroom, Josef Romeder, was a strong fellow
from a prosperous farm in Ober-Windhag, the next village, and negotiations
over the size of Walpurga’s dowry were stiff. In the end, Nepomuk deeded over
the richest portion of his land. That left only a modest tract for the third
daughter, Josefa, who was sickly and spinsterish. As for Eva and himself, he
kept a fine small lodging in an orchard at the border of what was now
Romeder’s property. But the small house in the orchard was enough. He was
ready to retire. Given the length and heat of the negotiations over the dowry,
the ceremony to transfer the lands proved as much of an event as the wedding
that had just taken place. Nepomuk led his new
son-in-law around the property, boundary line by boundary line, and stopped
before every marker that established a separation between his fields and the
land of the next farmer. Nepomuk would say, “And if on any day you gather
fruit from this man’s orchard, even the fallen fruit, may you labor under a
black sky.” After which he would give Josef Romeder a clout to the head. At each
of those eight separate jogs along the boundary line, he repeated the act.
Johann Nepomuk was full of the kind of woe that hangs like a deadweight on
one’s back. He was not mourning the transfer of his farm so much as the
absence of Alois. His dear adopted son, Alois, was not there because Johann
Nepomuk had banished him three years earlier, when the boy was thirteen and
Walpurga eighteen. He had discovered them in the hayloft of his barn, and it
caused him to think of the other barn where he had gone to the straw with
Maria Anna on the afternoon that Alois had been conceived. A memory of the
glory of this act of love with Maria Anna Schicldgruber had never left him.
He had had only two women in his life and Maria was the second, and not at
all a village wench to him, coarse grained and ass-bare in the hay, but a
Madonna lit by sunlight, an image he had earlier acquired by way of the
stainçd-glass window of the church in Spital. This image never failed to
enlarge his estimate of the volume of his sin. He was living in sacrilege,
that he knew, and yet he would not relinquish the image of Maria Anna’s face
in the stained-glass window. It was reason enough not to go to confession too
often, and when he did, he would invent other sins for the booth, large ones.
One time, he even confessed to coition with the farm mare, a deed he had
never attempted—one does not make love to a large horse for too little!—and
the priest in return asked how many times he had committed this sin. “Only
once, Father.” “When was that? How
long ago?” “Months, months I
think.” “And how do you
feel now when you work with the animal? Are there similar urges?” “No, never. I am
ashamed for myself.” The priest was
middle-aged and had little to learn about the peasantry, so he could sense that
Nepomuk was lying. Nonetheless, his preference was that the account be true
because bestial sodomy, while as mortal a sin as adultery or incest, was to
his mind less grievous. It would, after all, produce no offspring. He
proceeded, therefore, to exercise his office without further questioning. “You have degraded
yourself as a child of God,” he told Nepomuk, “you have committed a serious
sin of lust. You have injured an innocent animal. For your penance I give you
five hundred Our Fathers and five hundred Hail Marys.” That was identical
to a penance the priest had given earlier that morning to a schoolboy who had
treated himself to an underhanded spit-in-the-palm masturbation in class (a
most stealthy act!) and then rubbed his spit and semen on the hair of the boy
in from of him, a small boy. Johann Nepomuk
contented himself afterward by confessing to the same priest upon occasion
that he still had lewd thoughts concerning the mare but was careful to do
nothing about it. That took care of confession, but the continuing absence of
Alois caused Johann Nepomuk Hiedler to live in an agony of love. He had wept
like a biblical father and torn his shirt when he found his son and daughter
in the straw. He knew that he had just lost the boy. The brightest light of
nearly every one of his days, that lively young face, would have to leave. To
the shock of the other women in the family, Alois was sent away that night to
a neighbor’s house and in the morning was put on a coach to Nepomuk did not
tell Eva, but then, he did not have to, because Walpurga, at her father’s
insistence, was kept at home for the next three years. The young woman’s
marriage with Romeder, empty of courtship, had to be arranged. Yet Eva, while
as alert to the chastity of her daughters as a drill sergeant studying the
precision of his platoon on dress parade, would still nag Nepomuk to allow
Walpurga to walk on Sunday with a girlfriend. “No,” Nepomuk would
say. “The two of them will wander into the woods. Then boys will follow
them.” On the day he
stalked the boundary line with Romeder, he was burdened each time he struck
his daughter’s new husband. What an injustice he was doing to his new
son-in-law. Ergo, he hit him harder. A marriage was being founded on a lie.
Therefore, no trespasses should be made on the land of the neighbor. That
would be a sacrilege against the earth. How Nepomuk mourned the absence of
his son! The
Castle in the Forest presents the formation of evil with mastery. Perhaps
I should not have expected heavenly prose. Hitler’s evil arose in the context
of his childhood, and all his future mania may well be traced to those
formative years. Mailer’s take on that period may well be the most creative
ever written. Patient readers may find it brilliant. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Castle in the Forest.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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