In 1988 I was struggling with alcohol and substance abuse.\u00a0 I doubt I would write two letters like these now, as I near my tenth anniversary of sobriety, but from a literary standpoint it\u2019s certain I should exhume some of the anger that follows and put it on paper.<\/p>\n
May 10, 1988<\/p>\n
Dear Norman,<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve thought about how I should write this letter and after some ambivalence I\u2019ve decided to begin not with pyrotechnics but a simple statement: the manuscript underneath this missive is a historical novel about Hitler that will have lasting international appeal.<\/p>\n
My approach (to this oft-written about man) is unique.\u00a0 The book is comprised of first-person accounts of people and events linked in chronological order.\u00a0 So, instead of historians rather routinely noting that so and so did this and that on such and such a date, we have, for example, Hitler\u2019s mother telling what it was like to bathe and examine her special surviving youngster\u2019s scrotum, followed by Hitler\u2019s loving opinions of these and other procedures.\u00a0 Hitler\u2019s father expresses himself about conjugal concerns and paternal practices.\u00a0 Later, a variety of new characters are introduced, or, rather, introduce themselves.\u00a0 Dietrich Eckart is a bloated, blustery and eloquent springboard for something he\u2019ll never see.\u00a0 Goering relates his passion about everything: about drilling opponents in the sky, prior to taking over for the riddled Red Baron, about his beautiful sweet pale dying Carin, about morphine and his newfound Fuehrer.\u00a0 Goebbels says he\u2019s especially brilliant and sensitive and hot club-footed horny.\u00a0 Mimi Reiter tells what it\u2019s like to date the young Hitler, and she makes it clear he\u2019s a very unusual guy.\u00a0 Geli Raubaul says it was thrilling to be the Fuehrer\u2019s special girl, and half-niece, at least for a couple of years.\u00a0 And Eva Braun\u2026 Eva Braun candidly tells her story.\u00a0 Everyone is candid.\u00a0 In fact in this form they are all involuntarily forthcoming.\u00a0 They have no choice.\u00a0 The unconscious is unlocked and etched on paper and frailties and machinations are exposed even as characters try to hide facts and justify actions.\u00a0 Anyone who briefly succeeds in not revealing himself will inevitably be exposed by someone else.\u00a0 The stories and feelings are here evoked as if by relentless infusions of sodium pentothal.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot more.\u00a0 So here it is: Hitler Here.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n This book is currently complete up to early 1938, and will proceed until April thirtieth, 1945.\u00a0 Already I can see that Eva Braun will write the final chapter.\u00a0 I have studied Hitler and the Nazis most of my life and I began this book about four-and-a-half years ago, just after turning thirty-one.\u00a0 I am of course beholden to a number of historians, psycho-historians, psychiatrists and biographers in forming a vision of Hitler and his time.\u00a0 My book will have an acknowledgment in front, crediting such seminal contributors as Dr. Walter C. Langer, Robert G. L. Wait, Bradley Smith, Richard Hanser, max Gallo, William Shirer, Joachim Fest and John Toland.\u00a0 At the end of Hitler Here<\/em> there will be a bibliography comprising two-hundred titles or so.<\/p>\n Whether you\u2019re amused or bemused at this point, it is surely time to tell you why and what: I am writing because every time I ask myself who out there might appreciate this book, the same name echoes: Norman Mailer.\u00a0 Norman Mailer might see and understand what I have done.\u00a0 I did not want to make my first overture to someone \u2013 an editor for example \u2013 who to me is a stranger.<\/p>\n If you care to, I\u2019d appreciate it if you would proffer this manuscript to your publisher, or anyone else appropriate.\u00a0 As I indicated, from my current vantage point in the wilderness, I don\u2019t know who that would be.\u00a0 I only know people respond to my work and I\u2019m concerned about potential barriers that might exist in publishing bureaucracies.<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n Tom Clark<\/p>\n * * * *<\/p>\n May 16, 1988<\/p>\n Dear Norman,<\/p>\n I felt I should write a clerical letter, a good clear nice polite letter of introduction and inquiry, a letter explaining the basics in businesslike fashion.\u00a0 And since the letter dated May tenth was, at least by my standard, a paradigm of restraint, I am now compelled to write something more candid.\u00a0 Perhaps I shouldn\u2019t be so direct.\u00a0 I might be better served by reticence, or at least a disingenuous attempt at diplomacy.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t seem fair, though.\u00a0 Since I\u2019ve been forthcoming about the howls of a thousand long dead now living souls, I should be consistent and say what I really feel.\u00a0 I should say that sometimes I am gut sick with humiliated concern that some bureaucrat, some group of bureaucrats, a group of semi-literate nerds with protruding guts and no guts and no talent and minds bound tight by the straps of their inherent mediocrity, will tell me there is no place for Hitler Here<\/em>.<\/strong><\/em> I\u2019m concerned they will say there have been a hundred thousand books written about Hitler and what makes you think and besides we don\u2019t like the style and\u2026<\/p>\n I\u2019m trying to promise myself I won\u2019t let them say more.\u00a0 I\u2019m hoping I won\u2019t.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I will.\u00a0 At that point it is my forum.\u00a0 At that point it is my turn to say: fuck you bureaucrat.\u00a0 Fuck your fast-ass sit on the sidelines your whole life cipher-self.\u00a0 Fuck you with your face now crushed.<\/p>\n But perhaps this is only a paranoid historical remembrance.\u00a0 I in fact have no experience at all with book editors.\u00a0 My only experience has been with newspaper editors.\u00a0 The feelings described above concern only them.\u00a0 I emphasize that.\u00a0 I hope book editors are different.\u00a0 They must be or books would read like the see-Spot- run robot-writing in metro sections across the land.\u00a0 Book editors can\u2019t be looking for that.\u00a0 I\u2019m willing to trust them and I here stress that during the long (perhaps two-thirds complete) course of writing this book I have made many changes, then made a hundred more.\u00a0 It would be absurd to contend a shrewd editor could not also find places to refine.\u00a0 I am as dedicated to this book as anyone to any book and all I seek is someone with the keys to the printing presses who will cooperate\u2026<\/p>\n I must make sure I write full-time.\u00a0 When I am not writing there are reasons and they hurt a lot in the morning, not only in the head and the stomach, but sometimes the lungs.\u00a0 When my head and stomach hurt, I don\u2019t write.\u00a0 I play the stock market.\u00a0 When my lungs hurt my judgment is for several days slaughtered, relative to the norms of prudent investing, and I do things unforgivably stupid for an essentially unemployable guy who lucked out a few years ago by inheriting a modest but nice portfolio from a late father who was himself unemployable.\u00a0 He knew it, and was cautious.\u00a0 At first, rescued in my early thirties from revolving part-time labors in warehouses and construction sites and offices, I was cautious, and successful.\u00a0 I vowed I\u2019d be careful and not risk principal and thereby not risk a resumption of truck loading or trying to sell five hundred words for twenty bucks to bureaucrats.<\/p>\n I have many times urged myself not to pilfer my portfolio or creative prime with any more aggressive and time-consuming forays into the computerized schizophrenia of speculation.\u00a0 This morning I was whipsawed by that esteemed purveyor of power in your region, Long Island Lighting.\u00a0 Did I really take a heavily margined bite at that one?\u00a0 I\u2019ve still got enough left to finish this book, if I quit speculating.\u00a0 I think I can quit playing the market because I have to.\u00a0 I want to.\u00a0 Reading mounds \u2013 piles \u2013 of financial reports and publications is even worse for the soul than the petrified prose of a newspaper editor.\u00a0 I swear.\u00a0 It is worse.\u00a0 But I am always reinvigorated when I shove the financials and pick up what I was born to.\u00a0 Even if the bull had not turned into a ravening bear I would have scolded myself for occasionally digressing from my commitment to writing.\u00a0 You see, I just reread \u201cA Speech at Berkeley on Viet Nam Day\u201d, and I know what I should be doing.<\/p>\n <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n Tom Clark<\/p>\n * * * *<\/p>\n Editorial note: I sent these letters along with the manuscript to Norman Mailer in care of his publisher at the time. This year, when Mailer\u2019s novel about Hitler\u2019s youth was published, I wrote a much shorter note inside the cover of the third edition of Hitler Here, <\/em>signed it, and sent it to the ailing author, who was using two canes to walk.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if the letters or the book were ever forwarded to him.<\/p>\n Tom Clark<\/p>\n November 16, 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1988 I was struggling with alcohol and substance abuse.\u00a0 I doubt I would write two letters like these now, as I near my tenth anniversary of sobriety, but from a literary standpoint it\u2019s certain I should exhume some of the anger that follows and put it on paper. May 10, 1988 Dear Norman, I\u2019ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[208,129],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n