The interview opens with Mailer discussing writing his debut novel The Naked and the Dead in 1946:

In one mood I thought it was terrific, and then in another I’d think, Oh, you don’t know how to write. I wasn’t a stylist in those days — I knew enough about good writing to know that. [Theodore] Dreiser was one of the people I read and I would rally my literary troops by saying to myself, Well, Dreiser doesn’t have much of a style.

There’s such a thing as having too much style. I think the only one who ever got away with it is Proust. He really had a perfect mating of material and style. Usually if you have a great style your material will be more constrained. That applies to Henry James and it applies to Hemingway.

O’Hagan: Do you remember where you were when you heard Hemingway had killed himself?

I was with Jeanne Campbell in Mexico before we got married. I was truly aghast. A certain part of me has never really gotten over it. What he was saying is, Listen all you novelists out there. Get it straight: when you’re a novelist you’re entering on an extremely dangerous psychological journey, and it can blow up in your face.

Did it compromise your sense of his courage?

I hated to think that his death might do that. I came up with a thesis: Hemingway had learnt early in life that the closer he came to daring death the healthier it was for him. And so I had this notion that night after night when he was alone, after he said goodnight to Mary, Hemingway would go to his bedroom and he’d put his thumb on the shotgun trigger and put the barrel in his mouth and squeeze down on the trigger a little bit, and — trembling, shaking — he’d try to see how close he could come without having the thing go off.

On the final night he went too far. That to me made more sense than him just deciding to blow it all to bits. However, it’s nothing but a theory.

It strikes me that your new novel, The Castle in the Forest, is shrouded in the question of motive, the overarching one being what made Hitler into a personification of evil . . . ?

My notion of the book from the beginning was to have a devil narrating it. There’s a long riff about how the average intelligent intellectual today finds it hard enough to believe in God, let alone the Devil. And my feeling is that there’s no better explanation for Hitler than that he was inspired by the Devil, as Jesus Christ was inspired by God. If people will believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, I don’t see why you can’t see that Hitler is the offspring of the Devil. It’s the simplest explanation.

Do you believe in God?

Oh, of course I do. But I don’t mean I believe in God as a lawgiver, as the Jehovah. I think that was a power-grab by priests way back then. But I believe in God as the creator. My notion of God is that God created us, and that like all creators God is not in command of the situation. God is the best that he or she can do under very difficult circumstances.

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