AT FIRST, IT'S hard to reconcile the stooped man moving down the corridor with the labels long ago pinned to him: misogynist, wife-stabber, pugilist, narcissist, sex-obsessed, literary lion. He puts his two canes aside and lowers himself into a seat. His piercing blue eyes trawl the room. He rests his hands on the table: thick hands, the kind that would hurt in a brawl. He leans back, his barrel chest expands.
'There's an indissoluble layer of phlegm over my vocal chords,' growls Norman Mailer. Every word still seems layered in gravel.
At 83, more than a half-century after The Naked and the Dead catapulted him to fame, he continues his prodigious output. His latest novel, The Castle and the Forest, follows the imagined youth of Hitler: 'Adi' to his parents, a product of incest whose passions are war games and arboreal onanism.
'I made a great deal out of the possibility of incest,' says Mailer. 'People who are 'incestuaries' are either capable of extraordinary deeds or they will be terrible. As the genes are so close, you get a doubling of the possibilities, good or bad. I liked that notion, so I thought I'd go with it.'
Narrated by a former SS man, D.T., who functions like an aide-de-camp to the devil, the novel slowly reveals signs of early evil inculcated in the boy.
The main protagonist, though, is Hitler's father, Alois, an ambitious but poorly educated customs official whose libidinal wanderings contrast with Hitler's dutiful mother, a good-natured soul adored by her son. Mailer confesses that he grew fonder of the father's character as he wrote, but that he 'was fascinated with Hitler's mother, and that a woman, a good woman, could create such a monster'.
What The Castle and the Forest doesn't attempt to address are the social conditions that allowed Hitler's rise to power - the novel ends when Adi is 16. 'The real tests that greet Hitler are still ahead,' he says. 'He's a potential Hitler at that point. He's not a monster. He's a just a very unpleasant, diabolically ridden boy.'