Old devil
For half a century, the war between good and evil has scorched the pages of Norman Mailer's work. Is he trying to tell us something?
"THERE ARE ONLY two views that face all the facts," wrote C.S. Lewis with his characteristic lectern-thumping certainty in "Mere Christianity" (1952). "One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism....I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market."
What Lewis, red-faced reactionary and cheerleader for Christ, made of the writings of Norman Mailer -- whose new novel "The Castle in the Forest" is published this week -- is not recorded. It is unlikely, however, that he would have been disposed to judge them "sensible." Nor, one suspects, would the great medievalist have found much that was "manly" in the young Mailer's fascination with jazz, crime, orgasm, and marijuana. ("Swamp-literature!," he might have said.) Nonetheless, could the pipe-smoke of his antimodern prejudice have been waved away for a minute, and a clear reading taken of Mailer's work and views, Lewis -- who suffered from an abrupt intellectual honesty -- would have been forced to admit it: Here, as he himself was the big-hitting Christian writer of his time, was the century's arch-apologist of dualism.
Defined by Lewis as "the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that the universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war," dualism (or Manichaeism) is at the very least a structurally sound answer to the problem of evil. For Mailer, it is also an existential proposition: If the deity is not all-powerful, then he needs our help. One's every action and choice reverberates in the cells of God, weakening or strengthening him.
Here springs the rich, tremulous fraughtness of Mailerian perception, the sense that things could go either way, at any minute. In 1965's "An American Dream" the protagonist Rojack dallies with suicide on a New York balcony ("Come now," says the moon, "now is your moment. What joy in the flight"). Tim Madden in 1984's "Tough Guys Don't Dance," drunk and possessed in Provincetown, attempts an ascent of the Pilgrim Monument. Beneath both these high imperiled places yawns an existential abyss that Camus would have recognized. But only in a Mailer novel are such moments part of the "endless war": skirmishes in the angelic combat zone of the soul.
"The Castle in the Forest" details the miseducation of the young Adolf Hitler at the hands of a hardworking middle-management demon -- a concept not a million miles from Lewis's own "The Screwtape Letters," in which a senior devil writes a series of waspishly insightful communiques to his nephew instructing him in the finer points of soul-stealing.
Mailer's book, as might be expected, is more complete in its account of the bureaucracy of hell, its various levels of authority and responsibility. "While I would not be attached exclusively to Adolf Hitler for some years," the demonic narrator informs us, "he was always in my Overview."
Mailer has been pondering such an organization for years: Already in 1975, in an interview with Partisan Review, he was asking "Why wouldn't God and the Devil have their department of dirty tricks? You know, see them as some sort of sublime extension of the CIA." Around us, watching from the cosmic terraces, rise unseen hierarchies of good and bad spirits, and they always need the latest information.
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It seems to have been assumed, when he first began to talk and write of it in the mid-1950s, that the dualistic vision was a mere conceit or literary fancy of Mailer's, a mental extravagance produced by too much pot, a symptom of hipster derangement, just Norman being Norman; surely he couldn't be serious about this. (The critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt would write dryly in 1971 of Mailer's "Manichean ox-team -- his God and Devil in harness...pulling in opposite directions.")
The assumption was pardonable in that Mailer at the time was rehearsing for a second career as the sharpest journalist in the country, a regular in the best magazines. Nineteen-sixty-three's "The Presidential Papers," '68's "Armies of the Night" and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" -- these are brilliant, ironic feats of nonfiction writing. It stretched the mind excessively to think that this keen-eyed secular man and attender of smart parties, this fine American interpreter who reported so wittily from riots and rocket launches, was operating inside a sort of private theological thunderdome.
But the journalism derived its charge from precisely those concerns that animated the fiction. What does it mean for God, Mailer asked in 1970's "Of a Fire on the Moon," if men land on the lunar surface? Was Richard Nixon, whose 1972 presidential campaign was covered in "St. George and the Godfather," a good man or a bad man? (Here Mailer's celestial dowsing rod failed him: "Smog lies over the heart. Freud is obsolete. To explain Nixon, nothing less than a new theory of personality can suffice.") Then there was "Cancer Gulch": Mailer's catch-all name for the miasma of spiritual defilement that he scented at tedious press conferences, bad sporting events, in the lounges of modern hotels, from the banalities of politicians, etc. It had the ring of Gonzo, but more depth.
As a novelist, dualism affords Mailer instants of unique entry into his characters. Take, for example, what he does with Matthew 21:19, the biblical episode in which the Messiah in passing blasts a fig tree, apparently for the sole crime of being figless: "And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, 'Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward forever.' And presently the fig tree withered away." Scholars have wondered about this: What could Jesus have meant by it? Was he making some higher point about the need to "bear fruit"?
But in "The Gospel According to the Son" Mailer ascribes to the act no complex parabolic intention: For him it is simple peevishness, a moment when mercy ebbs and pique triumphs. "I am the Son of God," reflects Mailer's Jesus ruefully after shriveling the blameless tree, "yet also a man: by a thread does man live without heedless destruction." This is a Jesus whose divinity is jeopardized, who can be captured by wrongness and lowness in a second; paradoxically, Mailer's treatment of the episode has the effect of increasing its symbolic value.
Living this close to wickedness, as it were, the novelist has got to know it rather well. Unlike "The Screwtape Letters," which is essentially a thought experiment, "The Castle in the Forest" is saturated with a very material sense of evil: The moods, textures, auras and above all the smells that announce the entrance of the Devil into earthly affairs. The gas-clouds of sulphur and cigar-smoke that surround the beekeeping activities of the lascivious peasant Der Alte, the unwholesome odor given off by young Adolf himself, his father's sour and beery breath -- all part of the sensorium of devilry. Satan even has a special relationship with soap ("developed by us...to nullify mephitic aromas").
It is no accident that Mailer ripened into his true style as a writer, the prodigy of his middle years, in tandem with the development of his dualistic thinking. The Mailerian voice is itself dualistic (or, when it doesn't work, schizophrenic): The swagger of a dangerous and well-oiled prosecutor somehow mingling with the nude howl of a distressed beatnik. On the surface it proceeds with a certain archness or whimsicality; the hanging clauses, the grand legalisms and rhetorical passives ("Let it be said . . .," "It will be understood . . ."), and the preponderance of sentences beginning with the word "If" (almost Mailer's pet piece of syntax), all suggest something speculative and worked-up, a provisional position that could be reversed or spun away from at any moment.
With its glint of diabolic, self-gratifying cleverness, this is a style peculiarly apt for the narrator of "The Castle": "If we had religious orders in our muster," he smirks, "I might be a Jesuit." But beneath it, experienced almost unconsciously by the reader, is a persistent incantatory rhythm, the pulse of a deeper sincerity: God and the Devil -- duking it out as always.
James Parker writes the Cultural Studies column for Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com. 