HOWZAT

In The Castle in the Forest, I wonder if you aren’t mystifying the process by suggesting that Hitler could only be as he was because the Devil was present at his conception.

Hitler is one of a kind: there’s no explanation for him. Stalin was a monster of a comprehensible sort. We can read Stalin’s biography, we can study the Bolshevik movement, we can study the conditions in Russia, we can study the hideous aftermath of the Russian Revolution. We can add Stalin up bit by bit, and understand him in human terms. He may have been one of the most evil human beings that ever lived, but he was a human being. You don’t need to bring in the Devil to explain Stalin. But Hitler is different. Hitler is not a strong man the way Stalin was. He’s almost weak. He is inexplicable, unless you buy the idea that he was the Devil’s choice for reasons that go very deep into German nature.

You believe in reincarnation. So what are you coming back as?

Well, I’m waiting, right? I’m in the waiting room. And finally my name is called. I go in and there’s a monitoring angel who says, Mr Mailer, we’re very glad to meet you. The good news is you’ve been passed for reincarnation. I say, Oh thank you, I really didn’t want to go into eternal peace. And the monitoring angel says, Well, between us, it isn’t really necessarily eternal peace. It can be a little hectic. Let me see, before I look and see what we’ve got you down for, we always ask people, What would you like to be in your next life? And I say, Well, I think I’d like to be a black athlete. I don’t care where you put me, I’ll take my chances, but yes, that’s what I want to be, a black athlete.

And the monitoring angel says, Listen, Mailer, we’re so oversubscribed in that department. Everybody wants to be a black athlete in their next life. Let me see what we’ve got you booked for. So he opens the big book, looks, and says, Well, we’ve got you down for a cockroach. But here’s the good news: you’ll be the fastest cockroach on the block.

I want to talk about how a novelist transfigures factual material. Can you say what happens to turn facts into art?

I would say that any history that gets built entirely upon fact is going to be full of error and will be misleading. It’s the human mind that is able to synthesise what the reality might have been. Now, that reality doesn’t have to be the one that took place, it has to be a reality that people can live with in their narrow minds, as the likelihood of how something could take place. Fiction is not tales or legends, or saying stuff that’s not true. Something can be true and still be fiction.

When you’re writing fiction you can lose your novel on a given morning. You can have your protagonist take up a serious act that appeals to you at the moment, and then you have to follow up on that act, and you have to deal with the consequences of that act. And two months later, six months later, horror of horrors, two years later, you wake up and say, I took the wrong turn that day. That happens in the writing of novels, and it’s enough to frighten you to death.

Flaubert felt that one could find the model for Emma Bovary very close to the author. How much of you is there in the grand persons that you’ve taken as your subjects, and would it be possible for you to say, Adolf Hitler, c’est moi?

I was doing [a] story on Warren [Beatty], I went to see Bugsy, which hadn’t been released yet. And the violence in Bugsy was truly apparent. Now Warren Beatty is obviously physically able, he’s a bit of an athlete, but you don’t think of him as violent. And so it was a shock to see how marvellous and convincing a portrait of violence he managed to give.

And I said to him, Aren’t you a little bit concerned that your friends won’t be comfortable around you now? And he said, Oh, no, most of my friends are actors and they understand it. You don’t really need to have more than 5 per cent of a character in yourself to be able to play him. Then he grinned and said, Of course if you have 75 per cent it’s easier.

With Hitler, 5 per cent was all I needed.

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