"Before beginning my workday, which is in the afternoon because I sleep late, I find myself preparing for my writing by putting myself into a kind of trance. It helps that the kids are grown, the phone can be turned off, the computer hasn't yet taken over my life, and I can still find a voice. Just now Elvis told me, "I was an oak, now I'm a willow, and I can bend ..." I glanced above the CD player and saw the lyrics to "A Lover's Concerto," by the Toys, consisting of June Montiero, Barbara Parritt, and Barbara Harris, and this song goes way back to a time in Galveston in the Sixties when I began to feel the pull of the world outside of medicine and began to heed that call, a syncopated rhapsody of love. Because it has been true at various times, I have a list beside the lyrics of "A Lover's Concerto," a list of others to whom I owe both a debut and a debt, and they are John Denver, Julie Andrews, Shirley Jones, Whitney Houston, Judy Collins, Anne Murray, Selena, Paul Simon, Celine Deon, Don McLean, Judy Kahn, Vanessa Williams and a few hundred others, unlisted. I soar with the "Colors of the Wind." I have MS and have had it over 30 years and it is manifest as bladder problems and muscular weakness and pain. During the day it is the bladder problems; at night it is the pain. So it is day now and I just made a race to the bathroom: got there in time! My thoughts are about the relative merits of jockey shorts versus boxer shorts. With boxer shorts it is easier to fetch it and that is good. But with the jockey shorts, in case I have an accident, they absorb a lot and usually keep me having to change trousers. Choices, choices! A man, Mr. Hull, came to our Key Club meeting in high school and gave a speech. I decided to remember his theme that day for the rest of my life, and what he said was, "Be courteous to all and intimate to a few." I sure hope Mr. Hull won't turn over in his grave that I have more often been intimate to all and courteous to a few, because I am a writer. I took my MFA from the Mean Fast Abyss, and race from it continuously. So I decided that instead of going to what I am working on now, a story of my decade in medicine so many years ago, that I would review Mailer's book. Elsewhere I've said that I love the man, and I think it is nice that in the "Chicago Manual of Style" it says that you speak of what a writer says in present tense even should h/she have died. Mailer says a lot of things. I met Robert B. Parker and came to love the man. We had a short correspondence before Bob (Joan called him "Ace," but only Joan) became too famous to keep up with his correspondence. Still, I quote a sentence from one of his letters to me: "Writers in general, and Mailer in particular, say a lot of bullshit." Caveat swallowed. But in this book Mailer takes a huge risk in getting inside the head of the boy who became Adolf Hitler. In my novel, "Two Hands Full of Sunshine," I do discuss Hitler, and one of the points I make is that he was not mad. (In the sense of crazy.) To say that Hitler was mad, and I quote from my book, "solves everything without getting at anything." But that he was not mad puts more of a burden on those who try to explain him. Reading Mailer's "The Castle in the Forest: A Novel," one doesn't have to enjoy every scatological reference, and there are many. One instead marvels at his use of the language, at the way the sentences curl and trickle and coax and yelp, all of it just so, like something that was always there and Mailer merely revealed it. Of course I am not through with the book. I'm at the top of page 175. In the back of the book, where I frequently write my own index, I have made these notes: 1) p 74, "The early death of an exceptional child can demoralize a family." 2) p. 93, "DK stands for Dummkoff. E.O. = Evil One. 3) 98, "inter faeces ..." I will add that I do not always need to read an entire book at a time. I love Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," but know that when I return to it I won't read it all. It is sufficient to revel at the style, at his great gifts as a writer demonstrating what is possible, and I go to it the way an amateur sneaks up to look through a knothole at the professionals. And that is true of Mailer in many of his books, including this one, and if it wasn't his last book, it was one of the last, and yet his style is strong and compelling and all of the other things that a writer should try for. In my own case, I'm looking at becoming 71 this summer and when I turned 70 last year, it was as though an internal switch went off in my body, a kind of a final countdown that I am participating in. If my arithmetic is accurate, Mailer was 84 when he published "Castle." I have followed his work for years and years and have never seen him in better form than in this book about Adolf Hitler's youth. One thing I started doing a few years ago because of brain atrophy and the prickles of bad memory was to make word lists. I fold a piece of blank typing paper, cut it in two, do this for a stack of pages at a time, stapel at upper left, and keep these around at the several different places where I live in this house. If I have an idea, ideas being capricious, I jot it down. But the most ardent effort I make is in the evenings, reading, and I select interesting words, steal them, if you will. Some of the words I copied last night nclude "obscene," "stunted" "aroma," "quiescent," "compendious," and "camouflage." And perhaps twenty others. This AM, while Elvis was speaking to me about not having a "Wooden Heart," I copied down "implausible," from the Austin American-Statesman, "painstaking" and "spaghetti" from the Dear Abby column I always read before looking at the TV lineup tonight, and I also see "sot," as in besotted, from Mailer, and I use these word lists rather like an artist holding a palette and selecting colors, and so I am ready for the day to begin."
—
John (5 out of 5 stars)