Monster house

EVER since folklorist Lewis Spence published his “Occult Causes of the Present War” in 1940, historians have noted the Nazi hierarchy’s loony dependence on runes, mysticism, esoteric rituals, worship of the war god Odin and even Satanism. High officials in the party justified eugenics and genocide with crackpot theories such as “theozoology,” which maintained that interstellar deities electrically sired the so-called Aryan people while ethnically inferior races were the progeny of humans who had consorted with apes.

Adolf Hitler, who claimed that a paranormal voice had warned him to flee a crowded foxhole in World War I just before a shell exploded in it, credited his healing from the blindness caused by mustard gas with his awakening to his gifts as one of the Illuminati. And he counted among his associates the inner circle of the Thule Society, a group that sought a magical energy called Vril that could transform initiates into supermen. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS, considered himself the reincarnation of the 10th century Germanic king Heinrich the Fowler, employed a full-time astrologer and co-founded the Ahnenerbe Society to study the Aryan race’s mythical roots.

Readers of even a few of Norman Mailer’s 35 books will not be surprised that he found the evil and weirdness of Adolf Hitler irresistible as a topic for his 36th. Mailer is, after all, the most metaphysical of America’s major novelists, author of a book of essays titled “Existential Errands” and another, on writing, called “The Spooky Art.” His fictional protagonists have included a psychopathic ex-congressman “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death,” whose actions are governed by the phases of the moon (“An American Dream”), and a mystical jive-talking soldier on an Alaskan bear hunt who proclaims himself “up tight with the essential animal insanity of things” (“Why Are We in Vietnam?”).

“The Castle in the Forest” is narrated by an SS officer named Dieter, “a member of a matchless Intelligence group ... directly under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler.” Sent in 1938 to the Waldviertel region of Austria, north of the Danube, to investigate the possibility that Hitler’s paternal grandmother was impregnated by a Jew, Dieter is relieved to find that “there was no Jew in the Fuhrer’s bloodstream,” that “his father and mother were uncle and niece by blood” and that Alois, Hitler’s father, may have even sired his third wife, Klara Poelzl, Hitler’s mother. The findings please Himmler too, for Hitler’s status as a “First-Degree Incestuary” explained the “rare intensification” of character that had produced his unique properties of “Genius and Will.”

Recounting the history of Alois Hitler’s rise through the ranks of the Austrian Finance Ministry as a customs official, Dieter also notes with some pleasure that the odious Alois repeatedly conquered “the loosely defended bastions of the cooks and chambermaids” of the hostels he lived in: “There were days when he made love to each of the three women he could look upon as regulars. In the morning, full of the bounty of sleep, he would take care of his wife [Anna Glassl], and in the afternoon when Anna Glassl was napping and his off-duty time coincided with an hour when the chambermaid washed their floors, he usually enjoyed the coquetry of her hips as she, down on her hands and knees, swung a wet cloth from side to side -- truth, he rarely saw her face at such times. And in the evening after Anna Glassl had gone to sleep, there was Fanni.”

When Anna Glassl, who is the first of Alois’ wives, finds out that Fanni Matzelberger is two months pregnant with her husband’s child, she separates from him and soon afterward dies, possibly a suicide. Alois then marries Fanni, and soon Alois Jr. is born and then a daughter, Angela. With Fanni weakened by the pregnancies and the first stages of tuberculosis, Uncle Alois hires his niece (and possibly daughter), Klara Poelzl, as a nursemaid and cleaning woman and falls again into the habit of seducing the help. Though Klara feels “as if her finest impulses were now bringing her nearer to the Evil One,” she consents to marry Uncle Alois after illness takes Fanni’s life.

Dieter then lets down his guard and reveals that he is a demon and was with them, an unholy presence, when Alois’ third child was conceived: “Even as the Angel Gabriel served Jehovah on a momentous night in Nazareth, so too was I there with the Evil One at this conception on this July night nine months and ten days before Adolf Hitler would be born on April 20, 1889. Yes, I was there, an officer of rank in the finest Intelligence service that has ever existed.”

What he means is that he is “an instrument ... of the Evil One” and merely inhabits “a real SS officer’s body.”

“I recognize, however, that these remarks can hardly be accessible to the majority of my readers,” he admits. “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil. They have even less readiness to accept the cosmic drama of an ongoing conflict between Satan and the Lord. The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment. The existence of God may still be acceptable to a minority of intellectuals, but not the belief that there is an opposed entity equal to God or nearly so.” Dieter, as demon, refers to Satan as the Maestro, scorns the angels as Cudgels, and ridicules the Almighty as D.K. (for the German Dummkopf).

Ever since “The Naked and the Dead,” some form of the Manichaean view that the forces of good and evil are warring for control of humanity has been present in Mailer’s writing. In Adolf Hitler’s childhood, he has the crucible for testing that theme in its exaggerated form of Satanic guidance. And he explores that reverse theology with a wit and sang-froid reminiscent of C.S. Lewis in “The Screwtape Letters.”

In the Arthurian romance of T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” a foundling nicknamed the Wart lives in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage and is educated in the woods by the magician and seer Merlyn. In “The Castle in the Forest,” the scatological, spoiled, willful “Adi” is schooled in tyranny by his father, who never held him, who fetched his sons with the same whistle he used for calling their hound and who in retirement seemed to care more for his ill-tended farm and beehives than for his children or his wife.

“When it comes to turning a child into a client, we follow a reliable rule,” says the Evil One’s minion. “We move slowly. While an incestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities, particularly when the event has been fortified by our presence at conception, and we have, therefore, every reason to expect exceptional potentiality to be present for us, still we wait, we observe.”

We too observe the young Adi, as he looks “with solemn interest at the whimpering dog” while his father whips it, or field-marshals his playmates in schoolyard battles, or practices speechifying with loud orations to the trees -- or, afflicted with measles, kisses his little brother Edmund, so that the younger boy dies.

A great deal of this historical material is plausible. Mailer has demonstrated wonderfully in “The Executioner’s Song” and the Russian sections of “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery” that he is capable of first-rate, even groundbreaking research, and he is a master prose stylist whose verve and eccentric points of view are never uninteresting. But on the whole, though intriguing, this is an odd book -- a sort of narrative parade, in which one event simply follows another without the heightened trajectory that we expect of a novel. Ending “The Castle in the Forest” as he does, with Hitler still a teenager, Mailer seems only to have prepared the material, not to have fully examined it. The Hitler of infamy -- the Hitler whose evil is more fully considered in some of the 100-plus entries in Mailer’s “Bibliography” -- has not yet come into being.

Mailer concluded his 1,310-page novel “Harlot’s Ghost” with a “To Be Continued.” As fascinating and deft as “The Castle in the Forest” is, it seems, at nearly 500 pages, only to have tilled the ground. Perhaps the harvest of this novelist’s great talent and imagination will come in a necessary sequel. *