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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-02T22:23:16Z

HCooper: punctuation error

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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.” They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard:“The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}{{efn|“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}} }} It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}}{{efn|“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} }} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} }}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We would answer both, surely. The economic and social ''angst'' of the 1930s—considerable on any metric—cannot easily be divorced from one person’s psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective, self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17}} This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''dues absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
proper authorial distance in their narratives.

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:

{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.31 That
the warning is timely but needs to be balanced by an awareness of a proper authorial distance. There is always a complex relationship between author and work. The three authors used different narrative strategies, but their ''Sitz Im Leben'', I would argue, were similar. The crucial part of that life situation was simply being human. As great artists, they understood what human nature involved. They knew how to show humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.

For instance, only one of their works was set on a hot plain under Kilimanjaro, but all three were set in “a landscape of human mortality.” If part of our angst arises from our individual psyche, part comes from the awareness—indeed the dread—of both our human freedom and our mortality. Surely, Kierkegaard and Sartre have taught us that existential perspective, and Ben Stoltzfus has reminded us of the links between Sartre and Hemingway.32 So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it
into art.

How then should we interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an integral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hemingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point,
{{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid personality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an inheritance that at last, he could not bear. {{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }}

I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author {{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}}, but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” {{sfn|Appel|1972|P=456}}.{{efn|Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is HH’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our attempts to communicate. “‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once (p.). It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm” {{sfn|Appel|1972|456}} }}

Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”{{sfn|Appel|1972|p=456}}. Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity.

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:HCooper

2021-03-01T18:13:34Z

HCooper: professional bio

== Hannah Cooper ==
I am a senior student attending Middle Georgia State University and majoring in New Media and Communications. I am new to editing for Project Mailer, and continuously learning more about the site. Editing for digital media is a skillset that I plan to continue with and advance with throughout my career both academically and professionally.

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T14:54:19Z

HCooper: correcting mistakes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17}} This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
proper authorial distance in their narratives.

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:

{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.31 That
the warning is timely but needs to be balanced by an awareness of a proper authorial distance. There is always a complex relationship between author and work. The three authors used different narrative strategies, but their ''Sitz Im Leben'', I would argue, were similar. The crucial part of that life situation was simply being human. As great artists, they understood what human nature involved. They knew how to show humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.

For instance, only one of their works was set on a hot plain under Kilimanjaro, but all three were set in “a landscape of human mortality.” If part of our angst arises from our individual psyche, part comes from the awareness—indeed the dread—of both our human freedom and our mortality. Surely, Kierkegaard and Sartre have taught us that existential perspective, and Ben Stoltzfus has reminded us of the links between Sartre and Hemingway.32 So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it
into art.

How then should we interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an integral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hemingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point,
{{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid personality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an inheritance that at last, he could not bear. {{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }}

I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author {{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}}, but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” {{sfn|Appel|1972|P=456}}.{{efn|Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is HH’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our attempts to communicate. “‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once (p.). It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm” {{sfn|Appel|1972|456}} }}

Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”{{sfn|Appel|1972|p=456}}. Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity.

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon

2021-03-01T14:52:16Z

HCooper: corrected spacing and removed unnecessary punctuation

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{{byline|last=Sipiora|first=Phillip|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13sip|note=[[J. Michael Lennon]] is the author or editor of several books, including ''A Double Life'', the authorized biography of Norman {{NM}} (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Lennon was a founder of The [[Norman Mailer Society]] and has served as President of the Society for most of its existence. His deep, long-term friendship with Mailer has inspired a number of works by Lennon and he is currently co-editing, with [[Susan Mailer]] and [[Jerry Lucas]], Norman Mailer’s ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]'', a reflective, introspective journal focusing on Mailer’s marijuana experience, written in 1954–1955. Lennon is also writing a memoir, “Getting on the Bus: Mailer’s Last Years in Provincetown,” which chronicles his experiences with Norman Mailer.}}

'''Phillip Sipiora''': I would like to begin by thanking you, Mike, for meeting
with me and talking about the state of Mailer Studies, which is obviously a
critical issue, and not just for Mailer, but of course for all authors, societies
and significant writers. So, let me begin by starting with a small question.
You knew Norman Mailer for nearly four decades and you served as founding president of the Norman Mailer Society. I’m not aware of anyone alive
who knows more about Norman Mailer as friend, major literary figure, and
public intellectual. What is your most powerful and lasting memory of him?

'''J. Michael Lennon''': It’s not an easy question. I have so many memories of
Norman. But one of the things that has always impressed me about him,
right to the very end, is ''work ethic''. Norman was always devoted to the literary arts, which took a toll on other relationships. Yet it was it was something
that drove him. For example, when he entered the hospital for his last round
of operations and treatments, he brought with him a half dozen books on
Adolf Hitler. I was just stunned by that! I thought, oh, my God, when is he
going to give it a break? No, he just didn’t give up.

As a writer, he was devoted to the notion that the novel was the art form
that had the greatest capacity for understanding society and human psychology. He believed the novel made the world more understandable, made
it a better place to live in.

The other issue that comes to mind is his identity as an insider/outsider.
Norman knew a lot of famous people, of course, including Muhammad Ali,
Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John Lennon, and practically every one of his
major contemporaries in the United States: Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Robert
Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs—
Bill Styron, Henry Miller, Lillian Hellman, Bill Kennedy, George Plimpton,
Diana Trilling, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates,
Philip Roth, and James Jones (his dearest friend), and Don DeLillo (with
whom he had a special kinship), and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, with
whom he had off-and-on friendships with—I could name more.

He also knew many major writers around the world, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Romain Gary, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and
Günter Grass. But he never really wanted to be a conspicuous part of the literary establishment. He wanted to maintain a modicum of distance from it
so that he could criticize it; he was resolute about not losing his independent perspective, and so he backed out of many activities. However, he was
president of PEN for a couple of years, and yes, that is certainly the establishment. But he got out of there after only two years. He called it his “church
work.” With Norman there was always the sense of “I want to be an outsider. I do not want to be trammeled by my affiliations with any literary, political or what-have-you establishment to the extent that it will dampen my independence, or constrict my perspective.” Norman felt that one must be there to speak to one’s time on the planet. He was also exceptionally devoted to his family and his friends; there had to be at least fifty people who thought of themselves as “Norman Mailer’s best friend.” He had a kind of openness, candor, and generosity of spirit with his friends and his family, a personal magnetism.

'''PS''': Do you feel that this duality of insider and outsider hurt him at times?
Did it accelerate tensions or create conflicts that perhaps someone with a
more stable identity of either insider or outsider might not encounter?

'''JML''': Oh, I think that there were definitely losses that came from him jumping back and forth across that fence. But, overall, I think that it was a plus.
It enabled him to maintain his singular critical perspective. For example,
giving up two years of his life leading PEN meant he wasn’t writing much
during that time, and he had regrets about that. But once he was in it, he
stuck to his commitment, including organizing and hosting the International PEN conference, and rewriting the bylaws of the organization. Gay
Talese told me that Norman came in and organized numerous committees,
and this required rewriting the bylaws. They were needed, so Norman just
sat down and personally re-wrote them. Gay Talese could not believe it. Well,
that was Norman; he threw himself right into things.

He lost a lot of time, however, doing things like that. Another example
was running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin. He gave away a big
chunk of time in 1969 on that campaign He said that, if elected, he would
give up writing. I think he must have had his fingers crossed when he said
that. All of these forays, including filmmaking, cost him a great deal of lost
time and he had regrets. But, on the other hand, there was a part of him that
rebelled against the grind of writing six hours a day, six days a week, and felt
the need to get out in the world and get roughed up. Right to the end he was
seeking new experience, which he once called “the church of one’s acquired
knowledge.”

As a novelist, he was an ethnographer and studied the ethos of a society,
the main currents and obscure corners of its identity. That was something
that he never stopped doing. He felt the need to out there, get immersed,
and get roughed up, and then he’d jump over the fence, hide away and write.
If you look at all the places where he lived, you see that New York City was
always his primary residence. But he also had Provincetown, Vermont, New
Hampshire, Stockbridge, and Bucks County, country places to which he
could retreat when New York was driving him crazy with all the demands for
him to appear on talk shows and go to social events. At a certain point he would get sick of that scene and had to get away to get some work done. The insider-outsider identity was something that he cultivated. When he
was living in Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, with his fifth wife, Carol
Stevens, he would get bored and say, “I have to go to New York City. I need
some action.” Consequently, he moved fairly regularly between New York
City and quieter, bucolic places, where he could write in peace. For a writer
of his sensibilities and ambition, this alternation was a wise strategy.

'''PS''': The past few years have surely been pivotal for Mailer Studies. After the
publication of ''A Double Life'', you and your wife, Donna Pedro, returned to
''Works and Days'', a groundbreaking resource that not only chronicled what
Mailer said and did from the beginning of his creative life, but also cataloged commentary on him and his work, as well as his numerous appearances. You published the first edition in 2000 (Sligo Press) and then, in 2018,
you, Donna and Jerry Lucas brought out an expanded, revised edition. But
let me go back in time. How did you become acquainted with Norman?

'''JML''': At first, it was an epistolary relationship. In December 1970, I wrote to
him after he appeared on ''The Dick Cavett Show'' where he had his infamous
encounter with Gore Vidal and also interacted with Janet Flanner (and
Cavett, of course). I wrote him a long letter about the show, and about the
ideas in the dissertation that I was then writing, and right away I received a
long letter back. I was very surprised that he answered me so quickly. That
led to a series of letters with him before I actually met him in the flesh in October 1972 (parenthetically, the same month he first met Larry Schiller), when he was on a speaking tour during the McGovern-Nixon campaign. He
was speaking at Western Illinois University, and I was teaching at the University of Illinois, Springfield, about 100 miles away, so I took my Mailer seminar up there to hear him speak. I met him, and he remembered our correspondence. After he spoke, we spent the whole evening at a bar talking and closed the bar down about 1:30 in the morning. That meeting established our relationship. In the summers after that, when my wife and my family would go back to New England, we would visit him either in Maine
or in Provincetown. This went on for many years until finally in 1997 we
bought a condo in Provincetown So, our relationship began in a scholarly
way, with my writing about Vidal and Cavett, and about my ideas about the shift in his writing to what we now call creative nonfiction. Over time, it
grew into a personal relationship, a friendship.

'''PS''': How did your scholarly interest and then your personal relationship
with Norman evolve into archival work, which you have been known for
over many decades?

'''JML''': Well, I’d never thought of myself as an archivist. I never knew much
about what it entailed. But I found myself, even before I met Norman, collecting virtually every reference to him that I ran across. At first, I bought all
the scholarly books and essays in journals that I could find. But then, it dawned on me that a lot of the most interesting things he was saying were spoken in public forums, and in interviews and profiles, a lot of it spontaneous, candid, and playful. His 1963 ''Paris Review'' interview with Steve Marcus is still crucial for understanding how he became the kind of writer he was. He said much in that interview that still resonates, his comments about E.M. Forster and the architecture of the novel, for example.

I began to realize that these public utterances were just as important to
understanding Norman’s work as the analyses of his work in professional
journals. I realized that if you wanted to understand Mailer, you had to hear
him, see him up close, and observe his public speaking off the cuff, where he
revealed himself in a way that was quite profound. And so I began collecting all those resources, which came at the same time I developed a friendship with his then-authorized biographer, Robert Lucid, a University of
Pennsylvania professor. I began helping Bob collect manuscripts and materials that were piling up in Mailer’s study, his basement, and in his mother’s
house.

Donna and I would go down to New York with our station wagon, fill it
up with manuscripts, and take them over to the storage vault in New York
City. We did that for a long time, beginning in the late 1970s. That storage facility, a big steel locker, was about four feet high and ten feet long, and it was
completely packed. When we didn’t know what to do with all those manuscripts, galleys, letters, research materials, I suggested that we leave the primary resources in storage, and I’d take all of the secondary materials, the
reviews and interviews and magazines containing pieces on him, quite a pile.
The primary materials were obviously the most important, including manuscripts that had not been published, marked up galleys, and things like that. And Norman’s letters! Boxes of them containing every incoming letter of
any consequence he’d received from the time he was at Harvard, and carbons
of all his outgoing letters. We left the correspondence and all of primary
manuscripts and I took everything else, which was a substantial trove. For
example, Mailer regularly spoke at colleges and universities, and many other
symposia and conferences. He would speak on a campus and then the college newspaper would write a story on it, usually with pertinent quotations.
They would mail a copy to him and he would throw it in a pile and it would
wind up the archive. Initially, I took all of those materials in order to make
room, but, really, I wanted to examine, preserve, and mine this material as
well. In effect, we solved two problems. We began to collect records of the
public presence of Norman Mailer from local magazines and newspapers
around the country, and we also created new space for his ever-burgeoning
primary collection. So, little by little, I became an archivist.

As I collected, I began to categorize things and organize them chronologically and thematically, putting documents into archival boxes. I was basically
feeling my way and creating my own referential system. But I didn’t know
what I was doing. As an aside, I would note that most PhD programs in that
era offered little in the way of archival instruction. All I knew is that I didn’t
want to discard these resources, and I wanted to use them in my writing. The
first journal article on Mailer I published, back in 1977, in ''Modern Fiction Studies'', was a survey and analysis of his presence in popular media. Along the
way I learned, by hook or by crook about archival and bibliographic methods. The first book that I did with Mailer grew out of his archive, a 1982 book called
''Pieces and Pontifications'', which I first suggested to Norman in 1977. It took
five years to put it together, and my part was selecting and editing 20 interviews with him, which was a great experience. Perhaps, I thought, we should
also include, in addition to the 20, excerpts from a number of minor interviews in a kind of montage. I argued for doing that for a while, and Norman
gave it some thought. We finally threw it out the window.

But then Norman decided to add a dozen essays that he had written over
the previous decade. He came up with a number of titles, one of which I remember: “After the White Negro.” But after he read the entire manuscript he
supplied the final title, which I’ve always thought to be wickedly clever. In1982, ''Pieces and Pontifications'' became my first book, and that propelled me
into me collecting materials of all sorts: invitations to publication parties,
sample dust jackets for his books (Mailer designed many of these), audio interviews, and videos of television appearances, reprints of various essays
and stories in obscure publications, promo materials from his publishers,
etc., etc. This was really the beginning of ''Works and Days'', which grew as a
manuscript through the 1980s and 1990s. Donna and I completed it during
my sabbatical in 1998, and it was published in 2000. Norman liked it, having forgotten so much, and contributed a short preface.

I’m an archivist, but not because when I was a young man I said, “I’m going to grow up to be an archivist.” I just fell into it, and then I found that it was a suit of clothes that fit me pretty well.

'''PS''': Well understood. Speaking of archival evolution, the entire world seems
to be becoming become digitized. And the electronic reconfiguration of
Mailer resources has surely become a central part of contemporary Mailer
Studies. Can you comment in general about this evolving and complex configuration of scholarly and popular access, digital access, and how it relates
to making Mailer’s life and work more accessible, not only for scholars but
also for interested readers?

'''JML''': Yes, we are clearly part of the revolution. I think that Jerry Lucas has
proved to be a superb digital humanist, steering the ship with the work he’s
done for ''Project Mailer'', which is one of the main activities of the Mailer Society. Jerry knows much more about digital technology than anyone I know, and it has been a pleasure collaborating with him. A critical aspect of digitized Mailer is access, which is easy as the software is programmed to remember your previous searches. In earlier times we all had to go to libraries, locate microfilm copies, and read them on blurry screens. I well remember, when writing my master’s thesis, reading old microfilms of the ''New Republic'', ''Dial'', ''Vanity Fair'', and the ''New Yorker'', dating back to the 1920s.

It was very laborious and difficult, but now digitization has made the process much easier. ''Works and Days'' is now available in a digital as well as a print format and
I like the fact that there are both. Having the book right next to me on the
shelf, I can find what I need much more quickly than I can by going online,
but if I’m doing deep searches, for example, word searches, I can’t use the
book. But it is going to be a long time before the digital world catches up
with all of Mailer’s public appearances. Jerry and I have discussed putting all
my archive online, about 1500 items.

Much has been lost because many college magazines and newspapers have never been digitized. There is always going to be a print component
until, sometime in the distant future, ''everything'' is formatted digitally. People contact me all the time for copies of obscure profiles and interviews with
Mailer. Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me where Mailer
said this or that, or where did something appear. I often respond by saying,
“Have you looked at ''Works and Days''? Have you looked at Jerry Lucas’s index
to ''Works and Days''? Have you looked at the date that your item appeared, and
then checked contemporaneous items in Works and Days to see if they are
pertinent?”

Mailer would often hold a press conference and there would be
a half dozen newspaper and wire service reporters there, and they would all
write a different story. So if you read one of these stories, you ought to read
the other ones because if you put them all together you’ll get a much richer
sense of what he really said. For example, his news conference when ''Harlot’s
Ghost'' came out. And the one for ''Ancient Evenings''. You can’t get it all just by
reading the New York Times story. You need to read the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'', and the ''Minneapolis Star'' and all the pieces by the other reporters who
were in the room. I’m regularly steering people to ''Project Mailer'', where they
can access these things. In the old days, I would copy and email articles to
people. I still do that.

Jerry Lucas is doing magnificent things in ''Project Mailer'', which he
founded, that I couldn’t even dream of, especially digitizing all of Works and
Days, and posting other resources like all of the Prefaces, Forwards, and Introductions that Mailer wrote for about twenty-five books by other writers.
Many of them appeared in obscure books, in some cases going back to the
1960s, and were out of print. Justin Bozung has been posting podcasts related
to Mailer, another valuable resource.

The Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraska is another exemplary website. I grew up in American Renaissance studies and taught
Whitman for years. The Whitman Archive is magnificent; you can access,
for example, the contemporary reviews of ''Leaves of Grass''. Whitman’s different editions came out over a forty-year period. Every new edition was reviewed and now you can read the reviews. The same thing is being done
with Emerson at the New York Public Library. I don’t know if they’re doing
the same thing with Hemingway.

'''PS''': Yes, Hemingway Studies are digitized. You bring back some wonderful
archival memories. When I was a young graduate student, I recall spending days looking at microfiche records. I referred to those days as my “fishing
time.” What you say, Mike, about the digitizing of Mailer Studies is striking.
As you know, I have worked with Jerry Lucas for a long time.

'''JML''': I know, you were his mentor. Jerry is exemplary and his knowledge of
the digital world is phenomenal. And he continues to evolve unabated. He’s
constantly working on things that are new.

'''PS''': I certainly join you on that and I continue to turn to Jerry for technical
advice related to all kinds of research activities and electronic teaching strategies. Some things never change.
My next question relates to the importance of the establishment of the
Mailer Library at Wilkes. When was it chartered, why is it particularly important, and what will it hold?

'''JML''': In about 2005, Norman became affiliated with Wilkes University in a
formal way. He became chairperson of the advisory committee for the new
MFA program in Creative Writing. In the decade before that, I began donating first editions of his books and various magazines and memorabilia to
Wilkes. In 2005, Norman said that we could display all of his major awards,
including his Pulitzer Prize, his National Book Award, the Emerson Medal
from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as all of his other
medals, awards, and honorary degrees. Everything was enshrined in a room
called the Mailer Room, which is in the E. S. Farley Library at Wilkes University. The centerpiece of the room is his former dining room table, a huge,
bevelled glass and wrought iron table.

'''PS''': A very impressive, eclectic donation.

'''JML''': When Norris and Norman donated the table, and his awards and
memorabilia, we arranged for a truck to pick it up. There are now photos
on the wall, glass cases with all his awards, and bookcases that contain virtually every major critical book about him and every one of his works.
And most of them are signed and inscribed to the library. That was the
start.

When Mailer died, Norris donated all of his library to the Norman Mailer
Center, which had been established by Larry Schiller. Larry’s hope was to establish Norman’s library, of approximately 7,000 volumes, at a university where they would take good care of it. For years Larry tried to find a good home and he struck out. Harvard didn’t want it. The Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where Mailer’s papers are located, didn’t want it. Finally, Bonnie Culver, the director of the Maslow MFA Program, and I worked with the Farley library at Wilkes, where we already had a foothold, and they were
very interested. All of Mailer’s library will eventually be there; three quarters of it is already there. About four or five thousand volumes have been transported, waiting to be catalogued. Larry also packed up Norman’s study in Provincetown, including his desk, chair, lamp, pencils, pens, and various paraphernalia, as well as all the books, dictionaries, and thesauruses that surrounded him in his third-floor study in Provincetown. Bonnie organized the moving of these items from where they were stored in Massachusetts, got them trucked to Wilkes. Donna and I were there for a day helping. His study has now been re-established in a room in the Farley, one approximately the same size as Norman’s study in Provincetown. When you walk in you see the bookcases, the books, the desk, and photos on the wall, including the green Bellevue sign, which was Norman’s reminder of the 17 days that he spent in Bellevue Hospital in 1960 after stabbing Adele, his second wife. The Wilkes collection is a great adjunct to what is archived at the Harry Ransom Center, but it can never exceed it, because Texas has all the manuscripts. Wilkes, however, has the complete Mailer library, which one might say represents the contents of his mind.

The Texas archive does include Mailer’s research volumes and papers for
several of his books, a few hundred books. Mailer also had about 1500 books
in a writing room he had in another building in Brooklyn, all of which will
eventually be located at Wilkes. The only life portrait ever been painted of
Norman is now also in the Farley collection. It was painted by a fine Cape
Cod artist, Nancy Ellen Craig, when Norman sat for her in the late 1960s. It
is very large, four feet by four feet, approximately. Mailer’s daughter Danielle
and her husband Peter McEachern bought and then donated the painting.
I recently received papers associated with Mailer’s house in Brooklyn, ownership papers, remodeling papers, permission forms from the zoning boards,
and documentation to allow them to sell the house. These also came from
Danielle and Peter, and are going to Wilkes. So not only will we have his
study from Provincetown, but we will also have documents related to his
Brooklyn residence, which accumulated over the half-century he lived at 142
Columbia Heights.

'''PS''': That is quite a chunk of authorial history. In relation to the archival work that you have already mentioned, there is the forthcoming publication of his ''Lipton’s Journal'', written in 1954–55 and edited by you and Jerry Lucas, and Susan Mailer. What can you tell us about the gravity of ''Lipton’s Journal''?

'''JML''': The manuscript is in the Ransom Center.I have the carbon copy, which
Mailer gave me years ago. Lipton’s is a 110,000-word marijuana journal. He wrote it over a four-month period from the end of 1954 to the beginning of 1955. It is a pivotal piece of work, yet it was never edited or published. He just
wrote it and put it away. It became the clearinghouse for his mind in that period, and a stalking horse for ''The White Negro''. It also anticipates many of
the ideas in his columns in The ''Village Voice'', the newspaper that he cofounded in 1955. Most important, it is the last remaining major piece of
Mailer writing that has not been published (there are two very brief excerpts
from it that appeared in small magazines back in the 1970s and 1980s). Susan
Mailer, Norman’s eldest child, a practicing psychoanalyst, became very interested in it, because it is, among other things, Norman’s self-analysis. Once
she read it, she recognized its importance. She and I then began editing it,
eliminating considerable repetition, adding clarifying notes, to turn it into
a readable document. As written, it is quite difficult to read. The repetitions
and abbreviations are maddening. There are about 600 numbered entries,
but they are mis-numbered and disordered. Susan and I did a preliminary
edit and cut it down by approximately forty percent.

Jerry Lucas is now going through the manuscript, editing it as needed.
He will be a co-editor with Susan and me when it is ready for publication.
Accompanying it will be Mailer’s contemporaneous correspondence with
psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, who Mailer sent copies of many of the journal’s entries for comment. Some of Mailer’s letters to Linder, who was a close
friend, have been published in my edition of Mailer’s letters, but not all.
Donna located Lindner’s daughter, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst,
and Susan got in touch with her and obtained permission to publish her father’s letters to Norman. They will be in an appendix to the journal manuscript.

'''PS''': It’s great to hear that you are winding up the ''Lipton’s Journal''. When do you anticipate publication?

'''JML''': I’m not sure. Much of that will be up to Jerry and his editing, after
which Susan and I will go over it one more time. It has been held up a little
because Susan was immersed in completing her memoir, ''In Another Place: My Life with and without My Father, Norman Mailer''. We would like to publish Lipton’s in Mailer’s centenary year, 2023.

'''PS''': After a long, long time, the Library of America finally began publishing Norman Mailer. Why is this development so important for his stature in the future?

'''JML''': It is recognition that Mailer is a canonical author. It is a recognition
that his work is going to be kept in print and available in scholarly editions
for the foreseeable future. The Library of America, which was founded in
the 1970s, publishes only a small number of books. In fact, only about three
hundred and twenty-five books, all told. Early on, they published only long deceased authors. However, over the past ten years or so, they changed that
policy. Now, Updike, Roth, Sontag, and Didion volumes have come out, all
Mailer contemporaries. The first two Mailer volumes, published in 2018,
contain four of his books from the 1960s, and about 35 of his essays from
that decade. The question now is whether to go forward into the 1970s or go
back to his earlier work, like ''The Naked and the Dead''. We are having discussions on the schedule, although no conclusions have yet been reached.

I think that there is merit in publishing a volume in 2023, and ''The Naked
and the Dead'' strikes me as perhaps the best choice, especially if we can include supplementary materials by Mailer that bear on the novel. By that I
mean two prefaces that he wrote for later editions of the novel, and some of
the unpublished letters that he wrote during the war. When he was in The Philippines, he wrote numerous letters home to his first wife, Beatrice. I included about ten of them in ''Selected Letters of Norman Mailer'', but there are
many more. They are important because they were essentially planning documents for ''The Naked and the Dead''.

Mailer wrote about four hundred letters during this time and it will not
be difficult to find twenty good ones that could accompany a new edition of
''The Naked and the Dead''. My wife and I are going through all those old letters right now, reading copies of the original letters, which have to be transcribed. I had not looked at them for over ten years, and was astounded at
how good they are. Norman had some wonderful insights about his wartime experiences, his reading, his plans for ''The Naked and the Dead'', and his time
in occupied Japan. He also talks about his family, reading ''The Razor’s Edge''
by Somerset Maugham, ''The Decline of the West'' by Oswald Spengler, Thomas
Mann and others. Norman was a voracious reader, as you know.

'''PS''': Yes indeed. It is surely so critical to keep Mailer’s work and memory alive
as authors, even major writers, seem to come and go. Melville, as I recall,
was not resurrected until the 1920s and F. Scott Fitzgerald was brought back
to life by Malcolm Cowley as a result of his work on ''Tender is the Night''.
There was also resurrection for Kate Chopin a half-century ago.

'''JML''': Yes. It was a slow, slow process for Melville. The Library of America
does a fabulous job. They have a wonderful format and they meticulously
check to make sure that their editions are carefully researched. Textual errors
are noted, Library of America and the volumes include a life chronology.
Lately, they started including introductions, which they did not in earlier
years. It is possible that there would be a new introduction to ''The Naked
and the Dead''. Furthermore, they include notes. They do a beautiful textual
job, and they have this wonderful Smythe binding, a sewn binding. The Norman Mailer Society made a contribution to underwrite the first two volumes, for which I am very grateful.

'''PS''': Serving the primary mission of the Society

'''JML''': Yes, certainly

'''PS''': Let me ask you about Maggie McKinley’s forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume on Mailer. Can you tell us a little about your contribution?

'''JML''': Sure. Maggie’s volume will be an important reconsideration of Mailer.
I believe she has over contributors. I know that you’ve done the chapter
on Mailer as a literary and film critic. She asked me if I would write on Norman Mailer and John F. Kennedy and I was happy to agree. I was surprised
at how many places Kennedy shows up that I had forgotten. In my essay, I
try to survey all of the major depictions of Kennedy in Mailer’s writing, approximately a dozen.

I looked for the pattern of how his view of Kennedy evolved. His admiration for Kennedy went up and down a little at the beginning, but in the early 1960s, it was always strong. He had a rich, complex view of JFK, and was intrigued by the question of how his Hollywood leading-man appearance affected his political chances. I don’t think that there is any other historical figure that Mailer wrote about as often, and with greater penetration, than Kennedy. He wrote about him, beginning in 1960, and continuing right up
through ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and even later. Oliver Stone made a movie,
''JFK'', which Mailer reviewed in a long essay in which he revisited all his earlier ideas about Kennedy. And then, of course, he is a key figure in ''Oswald’s
Tale''. Another key text is ''An American Dream'', where he has an off-stage role.
Kennedy is also in ''Cannibals and Christians''. In fact, he is in all of Mailer’s political books, and two of his novels. Mailer identified with Kennedy to a certain extent; they also had much in common. They were both of the same
generation—World War Two vets—and they were both fascinated with
American politics. Mailer is also the first major writer who wrote about JFK,
back in 1960, in a major essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”

'''PS''': I find Norman’s review of ''JFK'' to be quite interesting and Mailer only
wrote two film reviews, the other one examining, in full unexpurgated rigor,
Bernardo Bertolucci’s ''Last Tango in Paris''. So, reviewing ''JFK'' is obviously of
paramount significance, which I discuss in my Cambridge essay that examines Mailer’s criticism. You also mentioned Susan Mailer’s recent memoir
''In Another Place'', in which she addresses her relationship with her father.
Can you talk about the significance of her book?

'''JML''': Yes, it is a very important book because it is the first memoir by one of
Norman’s children. Susan, the oldest, knew him longer than any of the other
eight. She was born in Hollywood in 1949 when he was living there with Jean
Malaquais, writing scripts for Sam Goldwyn. Susan’s memories go way back.
She saw her father in a range of contexts because he visited her often in Mexico, and he visited her later in Chile, where she eventually married and lived.
I should add that it is not just a story of Norman Mailer—it is also a story of
her own life, which has been bifurcated. Half of Susan’s life was and is spent
in South America and half of it in New York City. She lived with her father
when she was a student at Barnard in the 1960s, and took part in his mayoral
campaign. Susan worked on the memoir for a long time, over four or five
years. Its genesis began with her memorial tribute delivered at Carnegie Hall,
published in 2008 in ''The Mailer Review''. Susan continued to write a piece here, a piece there, and she finally decided that she wanted to write a book about her life. She had never written a memoir before, so, it was quite a learning experience for her. She recently gave the keynote address at Wilkes University’s MFA graduation ceremony in January 2020 and talked about what she had to learn in order to become a memoirist. She has done a superb job and her book has received excellent reviews. There was a recent profile article about her in ''The London Times'' and her book has been written about in ''The Wall Street Journal''. I am very happy to have had a finger in Susan’s book, encouraging her, and helping with some factual references.

Susan’s book now joins all of the other important family memoirs about
Norman, including Adele Mailer’s memoir, ''The Last Party'', which came out
in 1997. Norris Mailer’s memoir, ''A Ticket to the Circus'', came out just before
she died in 2010. John Buffalo Mailer has written about his father in various
essays, and he also co-edited a book with his father, a book of interviews
titled ''The Big Empty'', which was published in 2006.

'''PS''': I found In Another Place to be an impressive, exceptionally insightful
memoir and I enjoyed reading it very much. Bonnie Culver (Wilkes University) has written a play, ''NORRIS'', which portrays Norris Church Mailer,
Norman’s sixth wife to whom he was married for over three decades, as I
recall. What does this play tell us—and not just about Norman, but also
Norris?

'''JML''': After Norman died in 2007, Norris Mailer took his place on the advisory board of the Wilkes Maslow Family graduate program in creative writing. She funded a scholarship and became close with people at the university.
Bonnie developed a strong friendship with Norris. After reading Norris’s
memoir, Bonnie was very taken with it. Bonnie came up with the idea of a
one woman play, using ''A Ticket to the Circus'' as the underlying structure.
Norris thought that this was a great idea and then, sadly, she died, but Bonnie stayed with the project. Two versions of it have been presented at the annual conferences of the Mailer Society. The script has gone through many
revisions, and Bonnie has received considerable feedback from members of
the Society, from the Mailer family. ''Norris'' is going to be performing at a playhouse in Santa Monica and Anne Archer will play Norris. Anne is the right
age, a tall redhead, and likes the script very much. So everything looks very
promising and it appears that the opening of the play will take place in Santa Monica. Bonnie is a professional playwright, as you know, and her work has
appeared off-Broadway as well in other venues around the country. I believe
that Bonnie recently wrote a review of Susan Mailer’s book, right?

'''PS''': Yes, a quite detailed, probing treatment.

'''JML''': I should add something else that is clearly germane to Mailer Studies.
''The Mailer Review'' has become the hub of the wheel for all Mailer activities
and studies. Thanks to you and your team for reviewing every book with
any bearing on Mailer’s life and work, and also publishing such a range of
fine essays on virtually every aspect of his work, and unpublished Mailer
stories and essays, interviews and much more. Each issue you publish contains a detailed annual bibliography on works by and about Mailer that keeps
readers in touch with what is going on within and beyond the scholarly
world. Shannon Zinck, the bibliographer for the ''Review'', does a superb job
locating all kinds of materials, stuff I never knew existed. She is an exemplary
bibliographer. There is no question that ''The Mailer Review'' has become an
indispensable journal for anyone interested in Mailer Studies. I have all volumes right next to me on my desk and hardly a day goes that I am not looking up something in the journal. Congratulations, Mr. Editor, for your
perseverance over more than a decade of work. It has really born a lot of
fruit.

'''PS''': Thank you, Mike, for your kind words. The ''Review'' would not exist if
not for your indefatigable support from the very beginning. We have not
published an issue that has not been energized—and improved—by your
critical eye and your excellent suggestions for topics, articles, historical projects, contributors, and so forth. The current volume is number 13, (bringing us to roughly 6,000 pages over 13 years), and we strive to do our best. As you know, we have faced many challenges over time, like all scholarly journals. We are an all-volunteer staff and we certainly make mistakes, mostly my
errata, but we try to devote ourselves to produce an eclectic periodical that
is an ongoing record of relevant developments in all things Mailer. We also
include a range of other kinds of writing, including a section each issue of
high qualitive, creative writing We are very fortunate to have been able to
publish work from well-established poets and fiction writers, who contribute
significantly, we believe, to the overall quality and character of our journal.
I would like to wind up our conversation with two questions. One more general, one more narrow. If you would gaze into your crystal ball, what do you see as the future of Mailer Studies? Are there things that jump out at you as being part of strategic evolving trends or new areas of focus?

'''JML''': Yes, there are a few things. First, I think that there are strategic resources
in the archives that have not yet been sufficiently explored. We have talked
about ''Lipton’s Journal'', but there are other items that have not been examined
in detail. There are also many letters in the archive that no one has ever read.
There are approximately 50,000letters in the archives, but only 700 letters
were published in my edition. These letters reveal Mailer’s thinking on his art
and his personal relationships. Further, the archives contain all of the hard
drives and floppy disks that belonged to his longtime assistant, Judith
McNally, who worked for Norman for thirty years. These resources require
advanced technical skills and equipment in order to retrieve a range of texts
from long ago. My understanding is that these resources are now available.
We can finally access the information that Judith had stored. Everything that
Mailer ever wrote was on paper from the late 70s on passed through her
hands—and she had copies of everything. Judith was a real pack rat.

If I had the energy, I would go to Austin right now and start reading as
much of it as I could. I know that Nicole DePolo is very interested in researching these areas. Nicole is a member of the Mailer Board and she is
quite interested because she wants to follow up her earlier work on Mailer’s
''Ancient Evenings'', which was the topic of her dissertation. Judith, by the way,
was one of Norman’s researchers for ''Ancient Evenings''.

'''PS''': Nicole wrote her dissertation working with Christopher Ricks, as I recall.

'''JML''': Yes, Christopher Ricks at Boston University. Nicole and John Buffalo
have expressed interest in creating a kind of a graphic novel on parts of ''Ancient Evenings'' and the work that Judith did on ''Ancient Evenings'' would surely
be very important. I should also note again that the Farley Library at Wilkes
has Mailer’s library for scholars to review and attempt to derive a sense of the
contents of his mind. The Farley’s archivist, Suzanna Calev, is doing a terrific
job organizing the library and other materials.

There are some other projects that are in the works as well. Ron Fried has
written a play based on John Mailer’s ''The Big Empty'', The name of the play
is ''The Two Mailers''. ''The Big Empty'' is comprised of a series of conversations
between Norman and John in 2003 and 2004, when Mailer was in his early eighties. I have been told that the play is projected to open on Broadway
with F. Murray Abraham playing Norman Mailer. Julian Schlossberg, a film
and theatre producer, will launch the production.

John Buffalo is also working on a TV script based on ''A Double Life'', which
he hopes to turn into a multi-season bio-pic series. He has been writing
scripts based on the biography. So there are several spinoff projects that are
out there, manifestations of Mailer’s life, his work, and how he has touched
so many people during the course of his life. Now we are starting to see the
fruits of these interactions. There is an analogue in what happened in Hemingway studies after he died. Hemingway’s children, siblings, and friends
began generating out books, movies, and memoirs about Hemingway and
his family. And that process continues with books coming out, including
one written by his grandson.

'''PS''': Yes, John Hemingway’s, ''A Strange Tribe'', which I was honored to review
for the ''St. Petersburg Times''. It is a superb memoir, recounting the trials and
tribulations of a very complex multigenerational “tribe.” John has spoken
to our graduate students at USF and he is a particularly engaging person,
infectious with his knowledge, wit, and an acute sense of perspective.

'''JML''': I think that the same thing is happening with Mailer. I should also
mention how valuable your omnibus collection of Mailer’s essays is becoming for scholars and critics (Mind of an Outlaw, Random House, 2013).
It is a great resource.

'''PS''': Thanks, Mike. Yes, Outlaw came out concurrently with your biography.

'''JML''': Random House is publishing more of his books in paperback. Mailer’s
presence is clearly not diminishing. It is expanding—both in the scholarly
world, in popular culture, and in the creative world of memoirs and profiles. So much is going on, including the forthcoming Cambridge collection,
which is especially timely because it includes thirty-five different perspectives
on Mailer’s work and Mailer the man. I should also mention your project,
in the ''Review'', of launching a series focused on Mailer and other significant
writers which, I believe, includes Bob Begiebing’s essay on Mailer and Jung.

'''PS''':Yes, the current issue launches this series and includes Begiebing’s work on
Mailer and Ellis, as well as Ray Vince’s fulsome, comparative article on Mailer,
Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Future pairings may include Mailer and Conrad, and we are thinking about Mailer and Roth, Mailer and Didion, Mailer and
Science Fiction, and so on. We will not run out of topics, to be sure, and we are
looking into reaching back in time, perhaps before the Nineteenth Century if
Mailer scholars find topics and connections worth exploring.

'''JML''': Yes, and there is Mailer and Whitman, Mailer and Melville, Mailer and
Henry Miller, and Mailer, and Mary McCarthy. I’ve been reading her lately
and the similarities in their outlooks, their passions, are quite remarkable. I
read an early draft of Begiebing’s essay and it is a wonderful patch of writing.

'''PS''': Thank you, Mike. I have saved my best question for last.

'''JML''': Good.

'''PS''': What does the future hold for you?

'''JML''': Well, I guess that as far as Mailer studies are concerned, the first thing
will be to get back to work on Lipton’s with Susan and Jerry, and continue to
collaborate with him on ''Project Mailer''. Another project is my memoir about
Mailer’s last days, which will examine some of the things that I have mentioned in this interview: how I first became involved with Mailer, how I became connected to Bob Lucid, and how I served as a kind of apprentice
archivist. And, of course, how I finally took over the job of becoming Mailer’s
biographer. My memoir will be based in part on the notes that I made during his last years in Provincetown, his “table talk.” I have about twenty-five
thousand words written, but I have only just started to work on developing
them. It is going to be a long project, but it is something I have wanted to do
for a long time.

'''PS''': Thank you, Mike, for an inspiring and deep reaching conversation. You
have always been a most accessible, collegial encyclopedia of all things Mailer.
And I’m so pleased that nothing has changed.

'''JML''': Thanks, Phil. I appreciate it. It is always good to talk to you about Norman. I really appreciate the chance to address your pertinent questions.

'''PS''': All fine, Mike. You discussed many things that our readers were not
aware of but have a natural interest in and it is important for them to come
out. I am very pleased by that.

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon}}
[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman

2021-03-01T14:46:19Z

HCooper: removed two "C's" that were unnecessary

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/'''Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as ''Bildungsroman''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Quote box|title=''In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer''|By [[Susan Mailer]] Northampton House Press, 2019 316 pages Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1937997977 (USD $27.95)|align=right|width=25%}}
{{byline |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |url=http://prmlr.us/mr13nak}}

{{cquote|The first requisite for the use of a theory is proper conditions for ''observation.'' The most important of these is psycho-analysis of the observer to ensure that he [or she] has reduced to a minimum his [or her] own inner tensions and resistances which otherwise obstruct his [or her] view of facts by making correlation by conscious and unconscious impossible.{{sfn|Bion|2005|p=86}}}}

===I===

{{Start|The first line of Susan Mailer’s memoir}} ''In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer'' reads, “MY EARLIEST MEMORY IS IN MY BELLY.”{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=3}} This concise, aptly capitalized, one-line paragraph brings together memory and belly. This association casts a psychosomatic light on the author’s entire memoir, in which the enigma of the psychosomatic phenomena prevails. The exceptional coherence and intelligibility of the line owes much to author’s eleven years of being in psychanalysis, psychoanalytic training at Psychanalytic Institute in Santiago, Chile, and finally her experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst.

Accordingly, I would state this single one-line sentence gives birth to a theoretically open-ended and probing ensemble of arrangements of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters as the author’s memoir. From my perspective, in due course this extraordinary initial sentence will make manifest the capacity of growing and intuitively recreating narrative of vestiges of remembrance of things past. Then at a certain point in the narrative, lo and behold, it offers the reader formidable dialectical syntheses of the emotional and intuitive on the one hand and the theoretical and conceptual on the other.

Susan Mailer rightly foresees that her initial one-line paragraph’s brevity and acuity compel the reader to respond to it by a sort of penetrating ''explication de text'' (textual clarification), as the French Formalist literary criticism refers to it. In this case, a textual clarification is even more germane because she has a psychoanalytic background. From her specialized viewpoint, the paragraph legitimately demands a psychoanalytic textual explication. Thus, in an understated, succinct, and yet plurisignificant line, the author produces her own concise textual clarification. She discloses the first essential element at the heart of her memoir and leaves the rest to interpretive reader response activities. All the same, after the reader absorbs the hidden import of the sparse first line, more pivotal, informative details burst forth. The author writes:

{{quote|While I was growing up, I loved to look at our family albums. Among the many photos was a small square, black and white image of me, at not quite two years old, with my mother. Every time I saw it, I got a fluttering, butterflies-in my-belly sensation which made me turn the page as fast as I could. Sometimes, I’d even skip that page, anxiously trying to avoid the butterfly effect.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=3}} }}

The above paragraph makes available to the reader a particular diagnosis of various psychological, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the narrative of entire life. Without any undue drama, she deftly makes statements of foundational import of a specific picture, or better, a snapshot taken when she was an infant. This snapshot uncannily snatches, records, and integrates infantile experiences of attachment and abandonment, union and separation, and eventually unavoidable and dreadful anxiety. Yet, mysteriously, for me it consists of what one might call a psychological situation report.

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Perhaps in this case, one might say thousands of words, because of its mnemonic overtones and connotations in a long memoir. This picture simultaneously evokes an early traumatic event and its attendant psychosomatic lived experiences as visceral emotional responses—persisting ones at that. The author chooses the noun “belly” and “memory” intentionally and adroitly. The reference anticipates and receives an immediate comprehension and empathetic reader responses.

To put it somewhat differently, this visceral retention of a psychic trauma becomes a stress-inducing psychosomatic problem for Susan Mailer. The ordeal affects her belly with distressing sensations. As we know, in demotic language, belly is a plurisinificant word. It implies guts, stomach, bowels, viscera, inner recesses, core, and depths—just to mention a few references. Viewed as a whole, that accumulation of significations has a claim on its own ontology, metaphysics and psychosomatics as the Ur seat of mind-body associations and sensations.

One can be certain that the author is acutely aware of the symbolic and metaphoric implications of “belly” as a substantive, which her father Norman Mailer also recognized as noteworthy and wrote about at some length in his essay “The Metaphysics of the Belly.” So belly incorporates a well-integrated ''corpus'' of intuitive, instinctual, and primal matters. Consequently, every time the author looks at this snapshot of herself with her mother, it induces anew the psychosomatic butterfly sensations in her belly.

Hence, the reader fully recognizes the seriousness of this specific picture, which serves as ''aides-mémoires'' (recollection aids) in the narrative of remembrances that ensue. This ordinary snapshot in plain black and white is a visually simple and plain photographic image. Just the same, it documents an event in its precise immediate fleeting spacetime dimensions. For the author, however, it would prove to be an intricate traumatic moment in her ultrasensitive infantile stage of life. This moment holds its own prominent psycho-ontological implications in and by extension her memoir. Only partially repressed and tangentially brushing against her unconscious, the harsh experience of abandonment registers itself in her psyche as an ineradicable separation as early sorrow.

By capturing a fleeting troublesome moment in her life as an infant, the snapshot marks the original site of the author’s generalized lifelong apprehension of human reality—in the triple significations of the substantive as anxiety, grasping, and latent realization. Her affective response to the snapshot experience leaves her with an irreducible quotient of unease in her early relationship with her mother, Bea (Beatrice Silverman) and inevitably with her father. She writes, “What had my mother been thinking when she left me for three months with my [paternal] Grandma Fanny? Why hadn’t my father prevented her departure, or at least mine?”{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=228}} Consequently, all such questions initiate intuitive generative narratives of their own, which the author deftly develops them into her exceedingly readable memoir of learning experiences. The German language uses the term ''Bildungsroman'' for such a narrative of a person’s overall educational lived experiences.

Another consequential snapshot juxtaposes itself on the troublesome one that I have already discussed. This one proceeds the other on the same page and shows the author as an infant with her Grandma Fanny{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=6}} It appears on the same page and precedes the one associated with the author’s distressing memory, both in the memoir and in its spacetime actuality. In contrast to the other snapshot, this discloses a moment of veritable happiness in the eighteen-month-old Susan’s life.

The two radically divergent snapshots sketch out the author’s primal discovery of happiness as wellbeing in attachment, proximity and its antithesis as the problematics of abandonment and separation. Subsequently, her memoir unfolds as a dialectical series of syntheses between disappointments and fulfilments, separations and attachments. From this dialectical perspective, I would propose to take a closer analytical look still at these two originary opposing snapshots. Juxtaposed, I find that these antithetical snapshots put in motion the author’s intriguing voyage of self-discovery as a constellation of intentional, subjective-objective lived experiences. Her analysis later makes this journey amply conscious. This internal-external voyage contributes veritable insights to the author’s memoir. It provides her and the reader with sensitivities required for appreciation of radical changes and challenges, which a gutsy life of adventures necessitate.

As I have already indicated, the first snapshot discloses a glimpse of the author’s surrogate mother and primary care-giver, her Grandma Fanny, Norman Mailer’s mother. She impresses the reader as a caring substitute mother holding her granddaughter with a captivated smile. She affectionately holds Susan aloft in her arms without restricting her in anyway. Susan also seems to be equally in a kind of infantile bliss. She appears to be nearly a natural part of her grandmother’s body. Fanny has that primordial luminous maternal smile on her face, naturally exuding love, care, and concern. Thus, the snapshot impresses the reader that Fanny’s body as a substitute mother personifies the body of the mother of infancy in total attunement. Her body is replete with the primeval role Freudian psychoanalysis assigns to it as the enraptured and enrapturing center of the infant’s extraordinary universe.

One can say that Fanny’s body mediates between Susan and the surrounding world they both inhabit, whole and entire. She does so through recreation of unconscious intimations of transcendent consciousness as subjectivity whose object will cover all modes of future human relationships. It is so since the body of the mother of infancy is not merely another body among others. From the moment of conception on, there is an ineradicable oneness between the infant and the biological mother of infancy, whose traces outlast life’s vicissitudes. Yet under certain disruptive circumstances, the infant also possesses a natural flexibility to transfer this original corporeal and affective emotion to a surrogate mother or father.

A bright ambient familial light permeates this snapshot of infant Susan Mailer and her “Grandma,” where all appears idyllic and ideal, a transitory moment in the “Land of Milk and Honey,” the Abrahamic, “Promised Land.” Their image hints at an early narrative of veritable prenatal and infantile union, demarcating a safe and stress free psychosocial zone of human oneness—a good place to be even for an evanescent moment of a clicking of the camera’s shutter. Accordingly, everything in this image conspires to communicate to the reader-viewer a profound experience of childhood euphoria. The snapshot fully depicts an early but profound affective learning experience of attachment, bonding, and union. I would also suggest that is what the author also intends the snapshot will communicate to do reader. It does so, properly and well.

Thus, for infant Susan her Grandma Fanny’s body as substitute mother of infancy characterizes the embodiment of primal lifelong desire for unifying and fulfilling affective negotiations with others and the environing world. I would suggest that Fanny is the first educator in her granddaughter’s lifetime patterns of affective, spiritual, and even political and professional education. I will go even as far as saying that her relationship with her Grandma Fanny offers her a vibrant model of love of learning from lived experience. Love of experiential knowledge or epistemophilia emerges from intimate infantile discovery of the mother’s body. In my opinion, such love of knowledge precedes sexual awareness and later joins with it as other corporeal discoveries. As such, I would say that it gains an authentic place in the author’s ''Weltanschauung'', a worldview with all of its unending epistemological and heuristic intimations. In due course, the mnemonic associations of her grandmother literally holding Susan on her bosom on a bright sunny summer day serves as a psychological working model for the author who unconditionally loves each of her two daughters and son. Her embodied childhood memories preserved by a snapshot serve as the avatar of all that is meaningful, unifying, and cheering in her memoir.

Later on the same day, however, the second snapshot offers a glimpse of Susan with her biological mother, Bea. She has just arrived to take Susan to live with her in Mexico, where she lives since her divorce from Norman Mailer. At the time, she lives with her Mexican companion and later husband Salvador Sanchez (AKA Chavo). With the passage of time, as mentioned earlier, this snapshot becomes psychosomatically problematic for the author and causes her the “butterfly effect” in her belly, which she describes so effectively in the seminal first paragraph of her memoir.

To the reader’s inquisitive eye, what emanates from the photographic image is noticeably a split-second of bewilderment for the infant Susan. The snapshot records for years to come a moment of awkwardness between mother and her infant daughter after three months of separation. Their get-together is unwieldy at best and veritably confusing. Both mother and child give the impression of being ill at ease with one another. It is nearly imperceptible, which makes it at once troubling and signifying.

Unlike the first image, in this second snapshot of the day Susan’s cheerful smile is gone. She seems to impart a twinge of infantile incomprehension and confusion, gently pushing her mother away. Bea also appears to be maladroit in managing to hold her daughter in her arms. She lacks the kind of attachment, affection, and intimacy Fanny exhibits so naturally and joyously in the preceding snapshot. The photo records a piercing moment of infantile separation and loss. The butterfly sensations Susan later experiences by looking at this picture are the psychosomatic results.

===II===
Years later in analysis, despondent about not finding her place in life as the daughter of a well-known writer, Susan confesses, “At times, I’d despaired; thinking I would never find my niche, never excel in anything,” and she goes on to reflect:

{{quote|Then there were my parents’ multiple marriages and divorces. For more than two decades my father had left one wife, only to quickly to have another appear. Not to mention the nine siblings, all born in rapid succession after I was six years old. I barely had time to get used to one new stepmother and baby before another arrived on the scene.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=227}} }}

. . .

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Bion |first=Wilfred W. R. |date=2005 |title=Leaning From Experience |location=London |publisher=H. Karnak (Books)|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Susan |date=2019 |title=In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer |publisher=Northampton House Press |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

User talk:HCooper

2021-03-01T02:21:57Z

HCooper: /* citations */ new section

==Article==
Hey, there. Please [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles|follow the directions for remediating articles]]. I deleted two files you uploaded as they cannot be on this site. I also see that you tried to begin your article, but you cannot just copy and paste the whole thing to the mainspace and be done. You should take it a step at a time. I moved your article from the mainspace to your sandbox for editing. I suggest posting a paragraph at a time to the article to insure accuracy. Let me know if you have any questions or need any help. I started the article page correctly for you. —[[User:Jules Carry|Jules Carry]] ([[User talk:Jules Carry|talk]]) 07:20, 4 February 2021 (EST)

I see you've been working on your article—great job. Be sure you fix paragraphs as you add them even in your sandbox; this will save you time later. Also, while it's not as important in the sandbox, may sure you are giving a summary of your changes and clicking "Minor edit" when it is. Keep working! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:36, 20 February 2021 (EST)

== Reversions ==

Hello, I had to revert 10 edits to your article because of the errors. Please be sure you eliminate these errors ''before'' you save. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:20, 23 February 2021 (EST)

== Typos ==

Good work on a tough article. You '''must''' write a summary each time you save an edit. Your recent edits are full of typos, especially in relation to notes and footnotes. Please see how these are done correctly earlier in your article and be sure to fix them. This is a crucial part of the project. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:56, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== citations ==

I believe I have incorrectly input some citations and could really use help fixing the issues.

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T02:18:18Z

HCooper: adding in citations and correcting grammatical errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
proper authorial distance in their narratives.

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:

{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.31 That
the warning is timely but needs to be balanced by an awareness of a proper authorial distance. There is always a complex relationship between author and work. The three authors used different narrative strategies, but their ''Sitz Im Leben'', I would argue, were similar. The crucial part of that life situation was simply being human. As great artists, they understood what human nature involved. They knew how to show humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.

For instance, only one of their works was set on a hot plain under Kilimanjaro, but all three were set in “a landscape of human mortality.” If part of our angst arises from our individual psyche, part comes from the awareness—indeed the dread—of both our human freedom and our mortality. Surely, Kierkegaard and Sartre have taught us that existential perspective, and Ben Stoltzfus has reminded us of the links between Sartre and Hemingway.32 So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it
into art.

How then should we int
===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T02:09:43Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
proper authorial distance in their narratives.

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:

{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.
31
===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T02:08:25Z

HCooper: correcting previous errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===

These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
proper authorial distance in their narratives.

In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:

{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms,
exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but
which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its
facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he
writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes,
Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in
the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress
that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}

Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.
31
===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T02:00:32Z

HCooper: title added

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic au- tobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Ad- vertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his per- sonality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his sec- ond and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}.Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack- Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:
{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen- year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of  as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have lim- ited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phe- nomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an ex- ample of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to partici- pate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.{{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===
===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T01:57:29Z

HCooper: unknown source=Hoffman

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
from established conventions and ideological complications.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}
. . .
{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt against conventional society. It is very different from past liter- ary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both from established conventions and ideological complications. Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure re- bellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|p=12}} }}
In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic au- tobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Ad- vertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his per- sonality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his sec- ond and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}.Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack- Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:
{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen- year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of  as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have lim- ited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phe- nomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an ex- ample of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to partici- pate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.{{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:42:49Z

HCooper: editing some more body paragraphs and correcting errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.29 As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself ” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”

Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:34:23Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote| I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:33:08Z

HCooper: add in line breaks

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote|I celebrate myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 
I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass 
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:31:45Z

HCooper: attempt to place poem correctly

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,

{{quote|I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:27:49Z

HCooper: grammatical and numerical changes

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26

There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} 27 Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). 28 The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.

The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:07:21Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-03-01T00:06:27Z

HCooper: edited a lengthy paragraph to incorporate citations and correct grammar

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' 23: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sf|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.24 Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.25 Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}26
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T21:14:25Z

HCooper: italics, citation, punctuation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== '''MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959)''' ===
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective,self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17]] This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''deus absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.

We have seen that Hilary
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T21:08:02Z

HCooper: heading and italics

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.22 To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.

=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T21:05:22Z

HCooper: citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.

So, despite d

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T21:02:53Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T21:01:20Z

HCooper: another edit with citations and grammatical error corrections

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.

So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.21 Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
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* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
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* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
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* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:51:41Z

HCooper: /* Notes */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:50:53Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}
# In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) with Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than Death in the Afternoon, and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.
# Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”[4]

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:49:20Z

HCooper: /* Notes */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}
# In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) with Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than Death in the Afternoon, and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.
# Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”[4]

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
*
# 1{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
*
# 2{{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
*
# 3{{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:48:32Z

HCooper: /* Notes */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}
# In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) with Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than Death in the Afternoon, and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
*
# 1{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
*
# 2{{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
*
# 3{{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:47:24Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
*
# 1{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
*
# 2{{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
*
# 3{{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:46:21Z

HCooper: attempt to change letters to numbers as in the written document

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
*
# 1
{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
*
# 2
{{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
*
# 3
{{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:44:22Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:43:25Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sgn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T20:42:14Z

HCooper: inserted citations, corrected punctuation and italics errors

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly
blocked from the 1980s onward.20 As we have said, there was plenty of angst
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sgn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}}

Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}

It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fit

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:34:52Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary.{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:34:14Z

HCooper: insert of quote

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,

{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary.{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}}

. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:26:32Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}}. The article continues,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:24:47Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}}. Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}}. The article continues,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:21:31Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}{{efn|“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}} }} It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}}{{efn|“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} }} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}}. Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}}. The article continues,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:19:30Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}{{efn|“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}} }} It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}}{{efn|“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} }} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”. At the very least, there was “a shared landscape” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}}. Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}}. The article continues,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself

2021-02-28T17:16:27Z

HCooper:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__
{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}

{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}

{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.

To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.

===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.

{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.

{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}

In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}

The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.

The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year.

How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,

{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}

Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.

So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.”They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.

In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.

What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.

Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}

What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard: ”The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.

How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.

{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}

At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal
mistake.

Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.

Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,

{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}

So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,

{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}

=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,

{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}

This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.

So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?

Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:

{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.

We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}{{efn|“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}} }} It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}}{{efn|“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} }} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?

I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,

{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}

Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing, and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}

It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:

{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}

Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.

{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}

This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:

{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}

In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.

In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.

It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”

===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—
considerable on any metric—can not easily be divorced from one person’s
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.

On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}}. At the very least, there was “a shared landscape” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}}. Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.19

What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}}. The article continues,
. . .

===Notes===
{{notelist}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]